We conclude our Summer Reading series with today’s final installment. We hope you have been blessed by Elisabeth’s winsome commentary on books that have shaped her faith and heart, and of course her own writing and speaking.
Kafka said that books should serve as ”the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Tolstoy showed me my own vulnerability and need of redemption—as Flannery O’Connor does, too, in her “stories about original sin,” as she describes them. De Chardin illuminated for me the immanence of God. Dinesen reveals majesty and dignity in human beings and animals as creatures of God, and the laughter at the heart of things. (In one book, Seven Gothic Tales, she touches the courage of the Creator, the power of women, a herd of unicorns, the reason for seasons, the dogs of God, angels and chamber pots, coffee and the word of the Lord, and Mary Magdalene on Good Friday Eve. Imagine the humor and courage it takes to put all that in seven stories!)
A reader understands what he reads in terms of what he is. As a Christian reader I bring to bear on the book I am reading the light of my faith. “All things are yours, for ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s,” said Paul. Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi expresses it this way:
… This world’s no blot for us, nor blank;
It means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.
**Excerpt originally published in All That Was Ever Ours, pp. 92