Two Very Different Booklists: Pt. 1, Lenten Novels

There's nothing I like better than for someone to ask me for a booklist. So since various lovely commenters have requested book lists in response to recent posts, I feel delightfully honour-bound to comply. Those requested were a list of the grace-filled novels I mentioned in the Lent in Love post, and the titles of the books I am exploring for my paper on theodicy (i.e., the paradox-studded study of God's goodness and power in a clearly fallen and often evil world). I'll start today with the novels, since we are in Lent, and I think they are a gift to give shape to the quietness of this season, to provide companions of imagination in this reflective time. I'm delighted to share these - they are the quiet books that delve into the inner lives of their characters. They are pilgrimages, not of outer adventure, but of inward exploration. They are stories that have companioned me in some of the most difficult times of my life. We'll start with those in this post.

I find the theodicy booklist to be more difficult as I am reading widely. While there are several main 'camps' that theologians generally join, there are countless, subtle variations in the way that theologians wrestle with the reality of God as good in the midst of a fallen world. Some of the books in my reading list, I mostly embrace, some I find challenging, some problematic or just downright wrong. The wide reading allows me to form the argument and theology I need to make a claim in a paper, but its difficult to know what to recommend here.

I'm thinking on it. And I'll have a list to you soon. But for now, the novels.

Lila, Home, and Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. I was late in loving Gilead, and in fact, it was the last book I read in what could loosely be considered a trilogy. It was Lila's story that captivated me first, the inward journey of an orphaned girl in her quiet wrestle with a Christianity that would seem to set her at odds with the woman who raised and protected her. I love Lila's frank questions and stark wisdom, and the slow, startling love that rises between her and a deeply solitary minister. Robinson's narration is masterful, I found myself thinking along with Lila, forgetting myself as the reader and simply looking through her eyes. Home gripped me differently. I read it during Lent last year, a story of, well, a difficult story, a tale of one family's many hidden sorrows, a story of human frailty and the way that the hurting of one person so often wounds another, even those beloved to us. I love this as a Lenten book, one that helps a reader to journey admit what is broken, to realise the sorrowing state of the human heart. Only in acknowledging our frailty can we realise the possibility that we will be made whole. It's a story to make you hope for Easter. And finally, Gilead, the one I was supposed to read first: the letters of an old man to the young son whose adulthood he knows he will not see.

Remembering: A Novel (Port William) and Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry. I've been on an unintended, but no-less intent campaign to get as many people to read Wendell Berry's novels as I can. It started with a paper I wrote in the doctrine of the Incarnation, when I suddenly realised that the novels of Wendell Berry were saying in story form exactly what I was reading in the best works of Incarnational theology. Remembering is, I think, an ideal Lenten story, one you could read (possibly) in a day, the story of a man who has lost his hold on identity, family, and faith. It is his inward pilgrimage as he comes near to breaking, but finds that he is 'held, though he cannot hold', as he discovers afresh 'the blessedness that he has lived in, in his anger, and did not know', one that kept the faith when he could not. Hannah Coulter is equally arresting in a different way, the quiet account of a Kentucky housewife who comes slowly to understand that it is in our faithfulness to the place and people given it, 'our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven'.

The Island of the Worldby Michael O'Brien. Imagine that a medieval mystic poet wrote a modern novel with communist Yugoslavia as his setting and a little boy as his hero and you will begin to get the gist of this book. Following Josip from his idyllic childhood in a village called 'Rajskja Polja' (the 'fields of heaven'), the book chronicles the brutal loss of his innocence and his growth into a mathemetician and 'cultural rebel' under Tito's regime. The gift of this story lies in its unblinking portrayal of human brutality as it is juxtaposed with the light, the poetry, the Love that still bubbles up in the heart of a wounded boy and calls him relentlessly home. Longer review HERE.

The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge. I know I've mentioned this one before, but of all Goudge's novels, it is one that is for me almost devotional, a riveting story that traces the making of one woman's soul in the wild solitude of mental illness, and the way that her story captures and renews the faith of the girl to whom she left both her home and her journals. I have a quote from the book as the background to my laptop screen at the moment: 'there are three necessary prayers and they have three words each. They are these: 'Lord have mercy. Thee I adore. Into Thy hands.' If in times of distress you hold to these, you will do well.'

Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. It's been too long since I read this, but it was one of the novels I read in my teens that helped me to understand what profound grief looks like, what doubt and struggle can be in the heart of a faithful believer. Set in South Africa in the era of apartheid, it is a story in which grief, the brokenness of sinful people, and the sorrow of those that love them, is unblinkingly recounted. It is a tragedy in its way. But one whose final word is a grieved, aching hope.

Adam Bede (Oxford World's Classics)e by George Eliot. George Eliot is just ever and always one of my favourite writers, a woman who wrestled profoundly with her faith, and eventually rejected the Christianity she knew, but lived always in pilgrimage toward the Christ whom, I think, she never completely abandoned and whose self-giving love she portrayed again and again in her profoundly human heroes and heroines. This story of a pure-hearted farmer and his love for both a passionate Methodist woman and a fallen girl explores compassion, sacrifice, and selfless love.

Ah friends, may these stories companion you from sorrow to grace, from grief or frailty, to the knowledge of the Love that holds you all times, even when you feel you cannot hold.