We continue this week with our Summer Reading series as Elisabeth describes which authors and titles deeply influenced her mind and heart. . .
A friend gave me The Imitation of Christ when I was in college, and I read it slowly, finishing it the following summer during evenings in a university stadium where I climbed up to watch the sunset.
One year when I was tutoring I came across, in the library of my pupils, a dull-looking novel called Salted With Fire. I had never heard of George MacDonald, but his writing gave me a whole new vista of the love of God. There was a shining quality to it, and a deep humanity. C. S. Lewis, I later learned, had found it, too, and did an anthology of MacDonald’s work. The biographies of missionaries-Hudson Taylor of China, James Fraser of Lisuland, David Brainerd of early New Jersey, Raymond Lull of North Africa-influenced the course of my life. Sometimes, if we can catch the sound of music that other people march to, we can fall into step.
It was when I lived in the jungle that books were hard to keep. Mold, mildew, crickets, and smoke did their worst, and I did not always have a way to transport more than one or two books at a time, or a place to keep them other than an Indian carrying net hung under the thatch. But they became even more precious, more indispensable in times when I had little contact with English-speaking people. I got around to reading some great books then-Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Teilhard de Chardin’s The Divine Milieu, Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa. Each spoke to me in some powerful, personal way.
Continued next week. . .
**Excerpt originally published in All That Was Ever Ours, pp. 9-92