Broadening the Heart

It is said that reading broadens the mind, and that is good and true. But there are a few special books (probably different ones for each person) that broaden the heart. I have blogged about this on here before, and what I said then still rings true for me: "Few things give me greater delight than the discovery of a new book that makes me think; that makes me see the world and everything in it in a new light."

And it's happened again this week. At our Ministerial Fellowship conference, folk bring books to sell, in aid of the Ministerial Students' Fund. And I picked up Wishful Thinking: a Seeker's ABC by American writer and Christian theologian, Frederick Buechner. I picked it up because American writers and friends whom I respect had quoted him, and I had liked these quotations.

But I wasn't expecting to discover another Ah! Book, one that has the power to fundamentally change how I see the world. And this has. It is an alphabetical listing of short pieces on a wide variety of religious and spiritual topics. Often an entry is just a few sentences. Take the one on Anger, for example, on page 2:

"Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back - in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you."

I read it, and the way that I see the world changes. And that is such a gift. And I am so very grateful.

A Good Read

I am very grateful to my friend Jane for sharing a post by Kester Brewin, which appeared in Huffington Post UK, about reading as a spiritual practice. The paragraph that particularly caught my attention read:

some of my good reads - the bookshelf is horizontal; the photo is not!

"To read widely, and often, is thus to hope to be changed, to still believe that change is possible. It is never, ever a waste of time. Be it an essay or short story or novel or article, a good read never goes unanswered, because a good read opens up a world that requires our attention. That might be the inner world of the self, it might be the domestic world of a family relationship, or it could be the plight of a whole people."

"A good read opens up a world that requires our attention." Yes. I think that this is so true. A good read can change your life, whether it is how you see yourself, how you relate to other people or other living beings, or the rest of creation, or it might galvanise you into action. I have posted before on this blog about "Ah! Books", which fundamentally change your way of thinking. Ship of Thought in March 2012. I wrote then:

"Yet few things give me greater delight than the discovery of a new book that makes me think; that makes me see the world and everything in it in a new light. In his introduction to Mister God, This is Anna, Vernon Sproxton speaks of Ah! Books, "those which induce a fundamental change in the reader's consciousness. They widen his sensibility in such a way that he is able to look upon familiar things as though he is seeing and understanding them for the first time. ... Ah! Books give you sentences which you can roll around in the mind, throw in the air, catch, tease out, analyse. But in whatever way you handle them, they widen your vision. For they are essentially Idea-creating, in the sense that Coleridge meant when he described the Idea as containing future thought - as opposed to the Epigram which encapsulates past thought. Ah! Books give the impression that you are opening a new account, not closing an old one down."

And there are new Ah! Books, new good reads, to be discovered all the time, which makes it such a joyous process. Recent discoveries of mine include Women, Food and God by Geneen Roth, Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott and An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor. And the poetry of Ellen Bass. Each of these books has made my life richer, more complex, and I am grateful.

I hope that the process of change and development will continue indefinitely, as long as there are new good books to read.

The Taste of Words

When I was a student, I had a poster on the wall of my room, which showed a bookworm, eating its way through a pile of books, with the quotation by Francis Bacon: "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested."


 

image: fromsmilerwithlove.com



 

I have always loved that quotation, because it describes so exactly what I do. When I have a new book to read, particularly if it is the latest instalment in a series, I devour it, avid to discover what happens. I sit and read and read and read, and don't stop until I've finished. Then I go back for a more leisurely second reading, savouring the words, rolling them round in the mouth of my mind, and enjoying them more deeply. I know some people who never read a book twice, and I simply cannot understand this. For me, the best books are to be read and enjoyed, over and over, until they become a part of me, "chewed and digested". They are food for thought, and some are food for my soul.

I have only recently noticed that I often think about reading in terms of taste - I will read some words and think that they are delicious. And all the words I used about reading in the previous paragraph are taste-related. Which is odd, since reading is done with the eyes, not the tongue or the teeth. Perhaps it is the internalising process that I go through when I find a book that I love - it becomes a part of me, and that is a fully sensory process, involving sight and taste and even smell (the smell of a new book is one of my favourite smells!) so that the book becomes part of my heart and mind forever.

Food for thought, and food for the soul, that is the taste of words. And I count myself blessed, that reading and books are such a huge and important part of my life.


A ship of thought

I have found a beautiful quotation by 19th century American Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, which sums up how I feel about books and reading:

Theodore Parker

"The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty."

Reading has always been a passion of mine, to the extent that it has occasionally got me into trouble, when I have been too deeply buried in a good book to pay attention to life going on around me. Yet few things give me greater delight than the discovery of a new book that makes me think; that makes me see the world and everything in it in a new light. In his introduction to Mister God, This is Anna, Vernon Sproxton speaks of Ah! Books, "those which induce a fundamental change in the reader's consciousness. They widen his sensibility in such a way that he is able to look upon familiar things as though he is seeing and understanding them for the first time. ... Ah! Books give you sentences which you can roll around in the mind, throw in the air, catch, tease out, analyse. But in whatever way you handle them, they widen your vision. For they are essentially Idea-creating, in the sense that Coleridge meant when he described the Idea as containing future thought - as opposed to the Epigram which encapsulates past thought. Ah! Books give the impression that you are opening a new account, not closing an old one down."

Everyone will have different Ah! Books. Mine include Beliefs of a Unitarian by Alfred Hall; Quaker Advices and Queries; Enough by John Naish; Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain; Rilke's Book of Hours by Rainer Maria Rilke; The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong; The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran; Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life by Frederic and Mary-Ann Brussat and A Backdoor to Heaven by Rabbi Lionel Blue. And of course Mister God, This Is Anna. Each of these books has shown me the world in a different way, and made me think about myself in relation to it. They have influenced what I believe, and how I behave in very fundamental ways.

What are yours?