Five Books that Shaped my Life
Fellow bibliophile:
After asking, and getting, wonderful lists of books that have changed your life it is only fair to tell you mine, though I think shaped might be a better word for the process. From authors such as Elizabeth Goudge, L.M. Montgomery, Charlotte Bronte, Gordon MacDonald, Jane Austen, Victor Hugo, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Dickens, C.S. Lewis, and many more - I find threads woven into the very fabric of my life and mind. From each I have learned a little more of heaven and a little more of earth, and they have opened my mind and heart to infinity.
I have a vivid memory of sitting in our kitchen in Missouri, about five years old, and “reading” a book I had memorized because I wanted so badly to read. I think it was an old Berenstein Bear book, and perhaps it rhymed. Now I only remember these lines:
Mama, mama, I went to town!
Inside outside upside down.
There you have it, the first book to impact my life. From there it was a short step to a little parochial schoolhouse about a mile away (I guess) where all eight grades sat together. There were four kids in my class and I remember little from that year except the unsurpassed delight of finally, reading. Everything was a feast that I gobbled and I loved learning, as much as I despised my classmate, Eddie. Poor Eddie, he probably grew up to be a nice man, but his position in my mind was irrevocably set as a pest. I have only a handful of memories from first grade and learning to read, and he figured prominently in two, neither of them pleasant.
I do have another memory of my teacher setting up flash cards as a game of stepping stones to get us over a pond. My goodness, it was marvelous. I aced it, and reflect now that if there was a pest in that class it was probably arrogant little me. My teacher was patient, however, and I was the type of kid to correct my course at a hint of a stern glance so I was saved from tripping over my own conceit - most of the time. But still, I was a snooty little first grader with her first taste of a heady new world: a wonderful, magnificent adjective laden world with dancing dew drops of new words glinting off the sunlight on the swings. Words I had heard all my life and some I hadn’t, finally took form and shape in my mind.
Mom started homeschooling when I was entering second grade, which was sad because we didn’t see our friends every day but also fun because mom worked hard to make it exciting. Mom was a born teacher, she liked teaching, but more than that she was every bit as excited about learning as I could be. She craved knowledge and facts and history and social studies and there was nothing she wasn’t interested in.
Every two weeks we got to go to the library and each select five books. What adventures! What books! As an adult it makes me groan a little to think of how much work she had to go through to screen five books for anywhere from 3-5 kids, but she didn’t make it seem burdensome. It must have been a burden, of course, particularly considering that once we got home there was no getting any real chores done for the next day.
But we loved to read.
FIVE BOOKS TO SHAPE THE COURSE OF MY LIFE
At 13 and 14 years old I shifted my taste. Before it was as many mystery and history novels as I could cram into my head, and now I began to be interested in the classics: Jane Austen, books by the Brontes, Lorna Doone, Les Miserable, Bleak House... My boss, when I was a late teen, challenged me to read Les Miserable. I agreed to it, if he would read Pride and Prejudice. I made it through the unabridged Les Miserable after a long time, but he never did finish Pride and Prejudice.
Photo by Dexter Fernandes on Unsplash
JANE EYRE
I can’t quite describe to you the leap that I made going from reading juvenile fiction to attempting Pride and Prejudice the first time. The language was so strange! Everything took twice as long to say, or so I thought. I persevered though, and even worked my way through Lorna Doone before landing at the opening page of ‘Jane Eyre.’ My heart opened up to an orphan girl, alone and cold and at the mercy of Mr. Brocklehurst - horrible man. To follow the curve of her life as it wove through her first real job, a less-than-handsome-but-bewitching-and-intelligent boss, tales of what absorbed her, what inspired her, her art, what made her fall in love, and finally, her character. I lived in her world, reveled in the chapter about the grand charades, the descriptions of the house, the fireside conversations with Mr. Rochester, shivered over the terrible secret of the house, and the way a heart can break when character and truth become inexorable. <omg, their first kiss>
Their relationship is hilarious.
“Am I hideous, Jane?
Very, sir: you always were, you know.”
I wonder now if that is the first time I began to understand the crossroads of mankind and our struggle. How beautiful it is to have a heart and how much it breaks when the course our heart wants to steer, clashes with what is right. Who decides what is right, and how? And yet! How there is a beauty strange and wild and wonderful as the northern moors when we decide that love, to be any good, must be subject to truth; truth, to be any good, must be motivated by love.
“Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour ... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?”
To see that we can lose the whole world and gain our soul.
MERE CHRISTIANITY
I write these chronologically because otherwise it’s possible to miss something I’ll regret. To C.S. Lewis I owe almost all of my processes of thought. He woke something in me, a love of mind somehow; before I was skeptical of my mind and its abilities. He showed me how the discipline of the mind can open doors the heart does not know how to open; where the light shines in and we finally understand the thing which plagued the corners of our hearts with no explanations. Some things are discovered through feeling and intuition and heart, and yet it is through our mind that we shape consciousness. If we were all heart we would love ill indeed.
I will always be grateful to Lewis for this gift. The things he said in Mere Christianity (and Perelandra) will shape my understanding of Christianity for always, but it is in the awakening of my mind from which I credit most of my thanks. That, and his argument for moral law.
“Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think...of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the 'right' notes and the 'wrong' ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.”
LORD OF THE RINGS
This series was somewhat taboo for me while growing up. Nobody exactly said I couldn’t read them, but I was skeptical of it because of certain articles I had read about it. As a teenager, a friend recommended it so I borrowed the series. I immediately lost myself in a world of starlight, furry-toed little hobbits, distant flutes playing on grassy hills, and beauty and evil contrasted sharply. I didn’t know if beauty was the antithesis of evil, but for the first time I could see how evil is intent to destroy the sacred and lovely.
From Lord of the Rings I received two gifts that have stayed with me always. One, the meaning of friendship.
I can’t carry it, Mr. Frodo, but I can carry you.
Two, for the first time in my life, I wanted to see and know heaven. Before it was always something that frightened or bored me (am I really saying this?) and suddenly it woke an imagination within me I had never had before. It wasn’t something I had been told, but I was suspicious of things that included the imagination. If it couldn’t be seen, touched, tasted or handled then I was skeptical. I was definitely a Corinthian.
To long for heaven… thank you Tolkein.
PILGRIM INN
Pilgrim’s Inn leaves me almost without words, so near does it come to my heart. Remember the disciple John and how much Jesus loved him? In a different way this is the Book that I Love. It’s not for anything I can exactly state, except that deep within me is a thirst for beauty that is quenched here, a desire that nothing on earth ever quite reaches. The story is wonderful and the characters developed, but so are many of the other books I’ve read. E. Goudge does spin a great story.
What stands apart here is a feeling I expect to recognize in Heaven. A feeling of being completely, home. To have overcome the greatest struggle of my life and to be in a place where the centuries have passed and yet time has stood still. This book has the feeling of the second after I die.
Also, I will never not be a goner for natural descriptions. I love when I can see things in words.
“The dawn came - not the flaming sky that promises storm, but a golden dawn of infinite promise. The birds came flying up out of the east in wedge-shaped formation, and the mist lifted in soft wreaths of sun-shot silver. Colour came back to the world. The grass glowed with a green so vivid that it seemed pulsing, like flame, from some hidden fire in the earth, the distant woods took on all the amazing deep crimsons and purples of their winter colouring, the banks were studded with their jewels of lichens and bright moss, and above the wet hedges shone with sun-shot orbs of light.”
GOOD TO GREAT
I have debated about which book to include as the fifth, because there are at least five more that could occupy this spot. Finally I narrowed it down to a book that contains principles to which I apply the most difficult challenges of my life, and honestly it’s this one. Written by Jim Collins (and his team) it analyzes what sets apart the good from the great companies of the 20th century, but I’ve applied it far more often to other aspects of my life: ministry, team building, relationships, existential crisis’, and well, everything. Every time I go to figure out short term questions that will impact my life in the long run, I appeal to concepts in this book. When a new endeavor seems particularly difficult I remember that to get a flywheel moving it takes many times the energy as it does to maintain momentum. When things are confusing I return to the hedgehog. What is the one thing? Where is the heart of this question?
“The Hedgehog Concept comes from the Greek fable about the fox and the hedgehog: while the wily fox knows many things, the simple hedgehog only knows one thing, but that one knowledge bite is highly impactful in protecting itself against danger. Discovering that simple but essential element is what created the success of the good-to-great companies.”
It’s somewhat of a dry book, full of statistics and facts, but underneath runs a river of gold.
ORDERING YOUR PRIVATE WORLD
It’s the sixth option, but I really just had to mention this one because it was the first time I started to understand that our outer and inner worlds, while they overlap, are not the same thing. You can build a wonderful life full of success on the outside, but if you have neglected the inside it all turns up rather empty when life goes south, or when we die. It was profound to me to realize there is really only one kingdom shaping our experience: the inner world. The outer world is what happens to us, the inner one is who we are, and we can’t afford to neglect it.
The author, Gordon MacDonald, is also full of wisdom and speaks words of life to some of our difficult external experiences… right before he turns it around and shows how our neglect of the inner world can be the culprit.
“ Today, many people write about burnout. Why didn’t Jesus burn out? I think the answer rests in three simple principles: Jesus measured all investments of time against his purpose, he took time for solitude with the Father, and he didn’t try to do too much.”
Finis. It’s a difficult post to publish only because I want to keep going, for pages and pages and pages. It was especially hard to leave ‘A Severe Mercy’ off the list, but what is a body to do when there is the always the slippery slope of “oh, and this one…!” There are honorable mentions by the reams, but I want to leave you with a quote from one of the most recent books I’ve finished:
“From my father I had learned that books were to be either adored or exiled. Books that were of God...were not to be studied so much as cherished, like a thing perfect in itself. I had been taught to read the words of men like Madison as a cast into which I ought to pour the plaster of my own mind, to be reshaped according to the contours of their faultless model. I read them to learn what to think, not how to think for myself.” -Educated, Tara Westover
There is a right way and a wrong way to read books; books are not perfect. They are not idols to be adored or depended on to be the truth in our life. They are fallible, written by fallible people. However taking into consideration the fallibility of humanity we can yet consider that God used such people to write the Bible, a book that has endured thousands of years. It is possible that the truth of life is contained in the pages of the books of mankind, and if we mine for it we might discover gold.
L. Raine
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