Advertisement It happens in churches, it happens on rivers, it happens in China, in Cameroon, in prayer, schools, music and prisons.
During the past week, I’ve chatted with folks around town about how books inform whatever spiritual paths they are on. Some of their answers are on this Faith page.
For me, spiritual books are always gifts. I can trace back most of the meaningful books on my shelves back to a person.
A monk gave me “The Way of a Pilgrim,” a classic of Russian Orthodox spirituality about a man learning the Jesus Prayer.
A mentor gave me “The Song of the Bird,” a collection of religious stories from around the world by the Rev. Anthony De Mello, a Jesuit priest.
A friend gave me “The Gift,” a book of translated poems by Hafiz, a Sufi mystic, with titles that include “Stop Calling Me a Pregnant Woman,” “Between Your Eye and This Page,” “I Vote for You for God” and “The Mule Got Drunk and Lost in Heaven.”
My father introduced me to my favorite spiritual author, Garret Keizer, an Episcopalian whose books “A Dresser of Sycamore Trees: The Finding of a Ministry” and “Help: The Original Human Dilemma” define for me just what a spiritual path is.
Such connections to people, as the Rev. Rob Devens talked about in his interview, are part of the value of books.
You can’t read alone. Books, like religion, form community, either between people who share books, between an author and a reader, or between two people reading the same book who will never meet, never know they’re reading the same book, but are nonetheless inspired through the same words.
For me, such community through reading starts where everything else started: at home, in childhood.
I remember lying in bed with my two older brothers while my dad read us “Black Elk Speaks.”
I wonder what I dreamed the nights he read us pages from that book about battles and visions and a heyoka ceremony, where the truth comes with two faces — one weeping, one laughing.
Like much of life, I had little say in the matter. I was being shaped by things beyond me — my dad and the words of a book.
Joe Orso can be reached at (608) 791-8429 or jorso@lacrossetribune.com.
Rev. Rob Devens, 55, associate pastor, First Evangelical Free Church, Onalaska, Wis.
The Rev. Rob Devens recommends Kathleen Norris’ “The Cloister Walk” to a lot of people.
He’s read several of Norris’ books, including “Amazing Grace,” and is currently reading her book, “Dakota: A Spiritual Geography.”
“Faith is also an intellectual activity so in reading we think and re-examine and it expands our ability to think about things,” Devens said. “It widens our world.”
Devens described “Dakota” as a series of stories about Norris’ return to the Dakotas and how she relates that to faith and her growing up.
In it, she writes about reading as a way of having community.
“Even though reading is solitary,” Devens said, “still, by reading different authors, it kind of provides you a sense of community with people you wouldn’t necessarily have a connection with.”
Rabbi Saul Prombaum, 52, Congregation Sons of Abraham
A book is spiritual if it changes your perception of the reality around you, says Rabbi Saul Prombaum.
“If you start with that question — that the world is worth
living in, it’s a good world, I’m here, what am I supposed to be doing? — you can practically open any book and if you open that book, secular or religious, you’ll be staring into a mirror held up to you that tells you something about you,” Prombaum said.
Prombaum is reading “Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present,” by Michael Oren and is proofreading a book about Jesus as a proto-rabbi as portrayed in the Gospel of Matthew, due for publication at the end of the summer.
Prombaum’s No. 1 book, he said, is always the Bible, and he quoted a Jewish teacher to describe what reading it is about: “When I pray I talk to God. When I study God talks to me.”
JoAnn Skinner, 28, student at Western Technical College
The first book JoAnn Skinner read about Islam was the “Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Islam.”
Raised a Catholic, she converted to Islam four years ago and still goes back to the book.
But it was another book she gave to her mother: “Daughters of Another Path: Experiences of American Women Choosing Islam.”
The book, which tells how families have reacted to women converting, helped JoAnn’s mother, Paulette Skinner, understand the decision.
“I was really glad to get it because you don’t know where to find anything like that or how to find people that are in the same situation,” said Paulette, who is in a Catholic book-reading group.
“So when you have questions and you don’t know how to answer them, that book really helped me and I’m glad she sent it to me.”
The book helped JoAnn, too.
“You have to know about how people see you,” she said, “not just how you think you’re being seen.”
Blake Auler-Murphy, 23, Pearl Street Books
Blake Auler-Murphy grew up around books.
His dad has been in the book business most of Blake’s life, and has owned Pearl Street Books for seven years. Auler-Murphy, who has worked at the store for two years, goes to the transcendental writers for spirituality.
He continually returns to stories in Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” and a collection of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Such writing, he said, helps in “the quest to be oneself, not necessarily to find oneself or ultimately understand oneself but to continue being and persevere through some of the harder things in life.”
The Rev. Linda Grounds, pastor, United Methodist Churches of La Crescent and Dakota, Minn.
The Rev. Linda Grounds always has one book going for her spiritual life.
Currently, that book is “Intercessory Prayer” by Dutch Sheets, which she first read seven years ago.
She said it’s not only inspirational, but gives the Biblical
theology behind why people pray, why God wants people to pray and how praying releases God’s power.
“Reading gives you the opportunity to pause and think about what’s being said,” Grounds said, “whereas sometimes when you’re listening to a sermon, you catch little bits here and there, but unless you take notes and go back to it, you may not get to think about each point like you do in a book.”
TOP 6 LOCAL BOOKS
Of the top 50 religion and spirituality books sold over the past 13 weeks at the Barnes & Noble in La Crosse, 26 titles were classified as religious fiction, 10 as Christian living, and four as religious inspiration. Here are the top six:
To Bugs from R.D. part 3 wrote on Jul 27, 2007 2:05 PM: