Also by Cather:
My Antonia
Death Comes for the Archbishop
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
The story that so challenged me to faithfulness, this is Dickens’s dark, vivid, intertwined tale of the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a lawsuit regarding a disputed inheritance whose complications entwine the lives of the orphaned Esther Summerson with the cousins Ada and Richard as they are all taken in by the kindhearted Mr. Jarndyce. A story of mystery and murder, a critique of a corrupt justice system, and an exploration of the forces that shape lives toward generosity or greed, this Dickensian novel is a marvel. And Esther, with her compassion, calm, and daily good sense, is one of my favorite characters in literature.
Middlemarch by George Eliot
This book is so good I’ll risk including it in two lists. This is one of my dozen best-beloveds, but it is also a marvelous novel of womanhood, so I couldn’t keep from mentioning it here. As I said in my earlier review (found on page 49), there are several marriages at the heart of the story. The women in each of these—Dorothea, Rosamond, and Mary Garth—are studies in the ways a woman’s choices and her responses to difficulty, challenge, and love both form her own powerful character and have infinite and continuing influence on the lives of each person she touches. I have rarely encountered such a profound and insightful exploration of feminine character and influence.
The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge
You have already encountered Goudge as one of my great favorites, but this story is one I return to for spiritual sustenance again and again. This is the tale of Mary, a competent and accomplished woman in London who inherits a country home and abruptly decides to leave the whirl of modern life behind. Her startling choice leads her to a radically altered life shaped by the deep thoughtfulness of the countryside and the journey she begins in reading the journals of the brave mentally ill woman who lived there before her. For me, Goudge’s story is almost devotional, a riveting narrative that traces the making of one woman’s soul in the wild solitude of mental illness and follows another woman on a journey of quiet revelation. At the moment I have a quote from the book as the background of my laptop screen: “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.”
Two from Galilee: The Story of Mary and Joseph by Marjorie Holmes
I first encountered this fictional retelling of the events surrounding the Christmas story when I was a teenager. I was riveted by Mary and by the rich, girlish humanity with which the author describes her love for Joseph, her loyalty to her sometimes-difficult family, and her personal engagement with the Yahweh of her people. This book was one of the first to liven me to Mary’s intelligence, strength, and what Denise Levertov, in her beautiful poem “Annunciation,” termed her courage, as the author imaginatively portrays the rare qualities necessary for one young girl to partner with God in revealing the love behind creation anew.
The Emily Series by L. M. Montgomery
The Emily books present a character in some ways similar to Anne of Green Gables—an imaginative orphan girl sent to live with two maiden aunts—but Emily’s character wrestles with loneliness and discouragement, with the burning sense of a vocation to write that made this series instrumental in helping me come to terms with my own teenage identity. The Emily books get to the heart of what I felt as a young writer, trying to capture the wonder I saw in the beauty of the world (what Emily calls her “flash”) even as I began to wrestle with the reality of suffering, of loneliness, and of my own capacity for darkness.
Two of the things I value about the Emily books are their honesty and their kindness. Their honesty lies in their portrayal of the frustration Emily feels at being misunderstood; her scorn for some of the sillier social constrictions of her age; her difficulty in disciplining herself to write, to work, to hope. Their kindness lies in Emily’s insight into the people around her—her refusal to simply resent the aunt who most frustrates her, her gratefulness for friendship when it comes, her capacity to find humor and interest in the most ordinary of souls. In her stubborn, hopeful, amused walk through her teenage years, Emily was my companion on the road to adulthood and the writing life.
Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley
Imagine if you were a middle-aged woman on a farm altogether fed up with caring for an old house and an ungrateful brother, when a charming little wagon with a bookshop on wheels rolled into your yard. Imagine, further, that you bought this movable wonder on the spot and set off posthaste for a new life both gypsy and literary in nature. Good. Now go finish the tale in this endearing novel.
A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter
This is a book whose delight is heightened for me by the fact that it was one of the novels my mother and I read aloud together in our special “girls only” times when we stole away from the clamor of the boys. I returned to it in adulthood to discover its power afresh, to rejoice in its portrayal of the strong-hearted Elnora, and to delight in a greater knowledge of its author. A Girl of the Limberlost follows Elnora Comstock, impoverished and neglected, whose home lies in the many-splendored Limberlost swamp of northern Indiana. Determined to gain an education, she turns for help to the swamp world she knows like the inside of her own heart, collecting the fascinating moths of the Limberlost to sell as specimens to collectors. Aided by the inimitable and generous Bird Woman—part scientist, part poet, and part ecologist—Elnora grows into a woman with “a compound of self-reliance, hard knocks, heart hunger, unceasing work, and generosity. There was no form of suffering with which the girl could not sympathize, no work she was afraid to attempt, no subject she had investigated she did not understand. These things combined to produce a breadth and depth of character altogether unusual.”
This book was one of those, like the Anne books, that met me in the formative years of girlhood and modeled what determination, spunk, gentleness, and a holy hunger for life could look like in a young woman. There is a reveling in the beauty of the world in this book, such a hearty faith in what may be accomplished by determination. A bit more research introduced me to the marvel of the author herself, a real-life bird woman, who, like Elnora, begged God to “help me to unshackle and expand my soul to the fullest realization of Your wonders.” Porter’s work as a self-trained naturalist and conservationist meant the preservation of the riches of the actual Limberlost, along with novels that led her readers to the wonders of nature.
Also by Stratton-Porter:
Freckles
The Keeper of the Bees (reviewed on page 191)
Kristin Lavransdatter Trilogy by Sigrid Undset
Undset’s story of Kristin, a medieval woman of deep religious faith and long endurance, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928. Riveting from a historic point of view, as Undset draws deeply on Nordic myth and culture and crafts a novel of both gritty reality and beauty, it is even more compelling for the depth of its religious insight, as it examines the complexities of Kristin’s difficult life as daughter, wife, and mother. She is an image of womanhood in its power, its frailty, and its capacity for strength and beauty.
“Courage, Dear Heart”: The Spiritual Classics That Made My Heart Strong
(OR, BOOKS TO NOURISH AND STRETCH THE SOUL)
WHEN I FIRST ARRIVED in Oxford amid a golden and crimson October, I intended to stay only a single year. I had just turned thirty, and I was ready for a change of scene. It seemed a perfect season in which to study the history of my faith a bit more in depth. Then, too, it was Oxford, city of my many teenaged hopes and literary dreams. I thought a year of theological immersion would deepen my faith and stretch my mental muscles, but I never intended theology to become the full-time fascination of my life, the subject whose irresistible depths would end my twelve-year spate of “gap years” as I finally signed up to finish a bachelor’s degree.
Wh
at captivated me, within the very first weeks, was the depth and breadth of Christian doctrine and the intricate way it influenced not just my general belief in God but the way that faith works itself out in the smallest details of my life. How do I regard my body? What value do I place on creation? What does forgiveness look like in a violent culture? What does it mean to be ethical when it comes to medical technology? Within the first weeks, I recognized that even though I was a long-time believer, I had been unconsciously operating by tiny heresies. As I moved more deeply into the realm of theology and more clearly grasped the core doctrines of my faith, I felt as if floodgates had been opened in my heart. Understanding rushed in to free me from fear and guilt and to widen my view of God’s goodness.
This is the sense that has come to me through the reading of spiritual and theological classics throughout my life, books that widened my view of God, helped me to understand myself in light of his love, and empowered me to act from that redeemed identity. Some of these I read in high school, books that became the foundation of my young Christian faith. Some I encountered in hours of intensive study in my lonely twenties; some I have discovered in Oxford, books that in some way revolutionized my understanding of God. Some are contemporary, some ancient. All of them are classics that specifically shaped both my identity as a Christian and my capacity to act, love, create, and give out of that core understanding. I hope you will find freshened hope and brightened vision as you encounter their depths.
On the Incarnation by Athanasius
We’re off with a bang with this church father! This book was assigned for one of the first essays I wrote in Oxford. I considered it basic (if ancient) Christian stuff, as in “God became human.” But what took me entirely by surprise was the way every aspect of my Christian identity is affected by this doctrine: my view of the body, my concept of the material world, my idea of what Jesus’ death accomplished, and how relevant this ancient text is to the dilemmas of my age. Don’t be put off by an old name; Athanasius was the bishop of Alexandria in the fourth century, and his whole point in writing this classic work was to help the common Christian understand the fullness of what Christ accomplished by taking on human flesh. We often think of Christ in terms of the Cross, our understanding dominated by his sacrificial death. But redemption began the moment “the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14, NASB), for as Athanasius says, Jesus “became what we are so that he might make us what he is.”
Also by Athanasius:
The Life of Antony
Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale by Frederick Buechner
The title alone could hook the eyes of fairy-tale loving me, but Buechner’s poetic account of the gospel, his narrative view of Scripture, and his capacity to get past the sometimes primness of theology into the depths where we wrestle like Jacob and dream like Joseph have made this book a touchstone in my Christian walk. In an account that is part story and part sermon, in words that glimmer and sing, Buechner tells us the truth of the world and of ourselves:
The tragic truth of the Gospel, which is that the world where God is absent is a dark and echoing emptiness; and the comic truth of the Gospel, which is that it is into the depths of his absence that God makes himself present in such unlikely ways . . . the tale that is too good not to be true because to dismiss it as untrue is to dismiss along with it that catch of the breath, that beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears, which I believe is the deepest intuition of truth that we have.
Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home by Richard Foster
I first encountered the writing of Foster as a teen, and his words worked powerfully in my heart in those early days when the shape of my faith was molded by what I read. Foster is a theologian and writer in the Quaker tradition, best known for his Celebration of Discipline, the 1978 book that introduced a more evangelical audience to the power of spiritual disciplines such as prayer, fasting, solitude, and simplicity. His quiet, clear, heartfelt tone captivated me in three specific books, which I will briefly mention here. First, his Streams of Living Water helped me grasp the width and breadth of the church throughout the world. Foster examines six major church traditions, evaluating their particular strengths, acknowledging their gaps, and demonstrating the grace possible in recognizing the way that each reveals and prizes different aspects of God’s character and action in the world.
His Freedom of Simplicity continues to inform the way I think about work, worship, and the cadence of rest. In the midst of a culture increasingly shaped by materialism and a consumeristic mind-set, Foster urges us to “still every motion that is not rooted in the Kingdom, become quiet, hushed, motionless until you are finally centered,” to live in attention to Christ, basing our use of time, our material gain, and our activities on a profound trust in God’s provision and attention to his movement in the world.
Finally, when I read his clear and deeply moving primer on prayer, Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home, it felt like having a guide take me by the hand and lead me safely through the gorgeous wilderness that is prayer, showing me the hidden caves of contemplation and the clean, clear road of liturgical prayer and the windy mountaintop of waiting for the Spirit. John Wesley described his conversion as having a “heart strangely warmed,” and my heart felt kindled, quickened, and companioned throughout the reading of this book.
Also by Foster:
Celebration of Discipline
Streams of Living Water
Freedom of Simplicity
Against Heresies by Irenaeus
When Gnosticism (the belief that matter is evil and only spirit is good) threatened the early church, Irenaeus went to war with his pen, not only composing a refutation of Gnostic belief, which is profoundly relevant in our own materialistic culture, but articulating the redemptive power of the Incarnation in a way that rings with victory to this day. One of the best things I read in my studies. (For an excellent and beautiful commentary, read Hans Urs von Balthasar’s The Scandal of the Incarnation: Irenaeus against the Heresies.)
Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich
Part of me has to love this one simply because it was the first surviving English book that was written by a woman. Composed in the fourteenth century by the remarkable Julian, an anchoress (someone who withdrew from the secular world for the purpose of solitude and prayer) who was known as a counselor and consoler to many in an age marked by plague, death, and poverty, it deals with sixteen visions or “showings” that came to Julian, revealing God’s love and presence. This book is considered a classic Christian mystical work (see my review of Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism on page 118 for a definition of Christian mysticism). I read it over a spring holiday in Oxford, when I was mostly alone in the deserted college, wrestling with loneliness in the days leading up to Easter. Julian’s awed love of Jesus, her grasp of his presence in our suffering, and her radiant affirmation that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well” has helped me to imagine, to trust, and to live more deeply in the worship Julian describes this way: “The greatest honor we can give Almighty God is to live gladly because of the knowledge of his love.”
The Prodigal God by Timothy Keller
A teacher and theologian who preaches the gospel and teaches the Word in a way uniquely relevant to twenty-first-century believers, Timothy Keller has a grasp of Scripture, and a way of making it practical and plain, that offers constant encouragement. My husband and I regularly listen to his sermons and find ourselves girded up for the daily walk of obedience in the midst of a confusing culture and secular society. The first book by Keller that I read (also one of his shortest) is still my favorite, The Prodigal God, an exploration of the inexorable Father-love of God as it pursues not only the desperate younger sons but also the angry older children who keep themselves outside the feast of love.
Also by Keller:
The Reason for God
Counterfeit Gods
Generous Justice
The Genesis Trilogy by Madeleine L’Engle
When I was seventeen, I went through a year of profound doubt and, let’s be honest, outright anger at God. It had to do with my first real experience of suffering, and my small rebellion (which I have to chuckle at now) was to stop having quiet times and reading my Bible. At all. Which was really something for a child of ministry parents raised with all the ideals of evangelical Christian devotion. What I did read (for oh, God knew how to get to me) was this luminous trilogy by Madeleine L’Engle. The books in that series saved my faith, for what I encountered in these personal, narrative explorations of the stories in Genesis was what I most needed at that point: a reaffirmation of God’s goodness dancing in the beauty of creation, his love at work to redeem us, his powerful presence available to us as we battle and hope, work and love in this broken place.
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