Strain on the Bookshelf

One thing among many that happens when you are an ordained member of the Body of Christ is that you acquire other people’s cast-off books. Sometimes they are very useful. Over recent weeks, for instance, Il Rettore has given me copies of Mitri Raheb’s Faith in the Face of Empire, a profound examination on what it means to be a Palestinian Christian and why, in Dr Raheb’s view, God chose to be incarnate in this scarred region contended between global powers; and Monica Furlong’s biography of St Therese of Lisieux, an account of how God took a near-pathological personality and made holiness out of it. Again, occasionally an elderly book proves valuable when it might not have seemed so when you got it, like Agnes Sanford’s Sealed Orders which I almost randomly plucked out of a box at the home of a parishioner at Goremead when called on to do so without knowing who Agnes Sanford was and how illuminating the book would be.

Some older religious books remain worthwhile. Not long ago I mentioned Catherine de Houeck Doherty’s Poustinia; once St Therese is out of the way I will probably begin The Enduring Melody, the late Dean of Westminster Michael Mayne’s thoughts on his terminal cancer, and CS Lewis’s essay collection Christian Reflections: Lewis’s originality is always good value even if I find him a bit smug now and again. These works aren’t that affected by the passage of time.

But the truth is that few genres of literature age more rapidly than religious books. From Biblical exegesis to prophetic declarations about ‘the Church of the Future’, their outlooks and concerns – and even graphic design, I find – fall behind the times horribly quickly. This may be partly a reflection of the anxious state of the Western Church in the last sixty years (always seeking ways to keep up with the contemporary world, and never quite managing it), but looking into the past it seems that there has always been a vast ocean of religious books that is doomed to become forgotten and sargassum-covered. I think it’s more to do with the openness of the subject: everyone with a clerical collar and very many of those without one thinks their opinions are worth other people’s time, if they can get someone to publish them. The result is that the bookshelves of lots of good churchgoers are clogged with these flotsam of past spiritual thought, and, stricken by the kind of guilt that leads people to dump stuff outside charity shops so they can take it to the tip rather than face doing it themselves, they give them to the nearest clergyperson.

And, when I retire and have to strip my bookshelves, children, I WILL DO THE SAME.