I SAT IN THE RAINY half-light of my tiny English living room, in the blank silence of the loss of my first child, a “little bean” I would never meet. The world had gone so quiet. My heart was so, so cold. I found I could not command my feelings, either of sorrow or of hope. Grief felt like the suspension of normal life—as if my entire being had been tossed up into the air and I was waiting to see what would crash to the ground and what was still safe. The old things I loved—cooking, walking, writing—there was no help or joy in those for now. I simply sat. But reading was so deeply a part of my habits that I found myself skimming a book brought by a friend before I really thought about what I was doing. In that gray light I read about Julian of Norwich’s vision of something that looked small as a hazelnut but was actually the whole world, cradled in the palm of God’s hand, and her knowledge that “God made it. . . . God loves it. . . . God preserves it.” I remembered that my baby was about the size of a hazelnut when he died. I read on and found Julian’s luminous affirmation, chanted down through the war-torn ages, that because of the love of God “all shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.” And I began to weep as my mind filled with the image of my own lost babe, held like the hazelnut of the world in the palm of God’s hand—not lost, but found, and waiting for me.
And in that moment I lived afresh the truth that a woman who reads has learned how to hope. She understands that the grief of the present—small sorrow or searing pain that it may be—is not the final word. “Love,” as Chris Rice croons in his ballad, “has the final move,” and the best stories teach a woman who reads how to frame her sorrow within the larger tale of both human endurance and divine redemption. A good story, a piece of true theology, a radiant poem help us to look beyond the darkness of the present toward what Tolkien called “joy, joy beyond the walls of the world,”[1] the light that endures beyond all pain and one day will invade our broken world to “wipe every tear from [our] eyes” (Revelation 21:4). A woman who reads has heard what Alfred Delp called the “first notes as of pipes and voices”[2] that signal the radiant fulfillment to come, even as she dwells in what C. S. Lewis called “the shadowlands”[3] of earthly life.
But a reading woman is also a realist; she lives in this broken place, and she grapples with the daily stuff of life in a fallen world. Broken bodies, shattered relationships, a world in which wars and flat tires and miscarriages are daily realities—this is her story, and the great works of fiction and theology show her what redemption looks like in ordinary time. I find it ironic that the reading of novels is sometimes criticized as an escapist activity, because some of the novels I love best are the ones that have taught me how to accept and survive the most grievous facts of my life. It was Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country that first made me honest enough to admit the way personal pain made me doubt God’s goodness or the way grief made ordinary life feel pointless. But it was that same book that showed me the possibility of a creative, stubborn faith that could endure even in total tragedy. Set in South Africa, in the era of apartheid, with two fathers grieving two sons, Paton’s story confronted me with this conversation:
— This world is full of trouble, umfundisi.
— Who knows it better?
— Yet you believe?
Kumalo looked at him under the light of the lamp. I believe, he said, but I have learned that it is a secret. Pain and suffering, they are a secret. Kindness and love, they are a secret. But I have learned that kindness and love can pay for pain and suffering. There is my wife, and you, my friend, and these people who welcomed me, and the child who is so eager to be with us here in Ndotsheni—so in my suffering I can believe.
I needed those words. I first encountered them in my early twenties when I was in the early days of my wrestle with a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder, a mental illness that I knew would be present for the rest of my life. As I dealt with the reality of a brain I considered “broken,” I had to confront my own limitations, my inability to live a “normal” life (whatever that really means), to have a body within my control, or even to respond in an optimistic way. I wanted my prayers to bring about instant relief, and when they didn’t, the discouragement felt overwhelming, making ordinary life seem useless. My impulse was to just retreat into a dark room. But novels like Paton’s came into my anger and hurt, showing me that “the tragedy is not that things are broken, the tragedy is that things are not mended again.”
Those words were the first in a series of novels that helped me to understand and see in character and plot that redemption isn’t something zapped down upon us but rather is rooted in the “deeper magic”[4] (in Aslan’s terms) of God with us in the broken place, bearing our sorrow and turning death backward. In the vision of Sam Gamgee, exhausted and alone in the deserts of Mordor, I learned that hope isn’t found in the absence of suffering but in glimpses of “light and high beauty” that help us to believe that “the darkness is a small and passing thing.”[5] Through the works of George Eliot and her tale of an abused and desperate wife who discovers God’s love through a preacher’s compassionate words, I learned that my small sorrows don’t leave me unable to help in “the blessed work of helping the world forward,”[6] if only I will choose to act, to hope, to work. Her words that “the real heroes of God’s making” come into their action “by long wrestling their own sins and their own sorrows”[7] were a rallying cry to me, a challenge to rise from discouragement and learn to love, work, and hope again. Those novels taught me that I had the power to choose a gentle and holy defiance. I could resist despair by choosing instead tiny, daily acts of creativity, kindness, beauty, and prayer, acts that were rooted in “the greater love that holds and cherishes all the world,”[8] as Wendell Berry puts it.
Sally Clarkson
You already know her as the marvelous, matchless, imaginative mother who read to me while I was still a babe in the womb. She is also a splendid writer herself, one whose books have shaped the hearts of countless women, whose wisdom, creativity, and joy in learning have shaped me every day of my life. You can read her in her own right in The Mission of Motherhood, Own Your Life, The Lifegiving Home (which we wrote together), Different, and The Lifegiving Table. But here you get her own list of best-loved reads, the books she most deeply savored in her own reading journey.
Favorite Books as a Youth
Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
Christy by Catherine Marshall
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
My Favorite Books as an Adult
The Keeper of the Bees by Gene Stratton-Porter
The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places by Eugene Peterson
The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey
A Circle of Quiet and Walking on Water by Madeleine L’Engle
I read a lot of Berry just before my own marriage. The months leading up to my late-summer wedding held an interesting tension for me—on one side, the pure radiance of this love that I had been given in my husband-to-be, of the Oxford wedding to come, and of the new life in a little English cottage about to begin. On the other side was a summer remarkable in my memory for the daily headlines of death and destruction—the war in Syria, political unrest in the US and the UK, nightclub shootings, sniper killings in Dallas—and the way those greater sorrows niggled at my own more private fears. What would suffering look like in marriage? Could our love weather loss? Would my husband truly be able to cope with OCD, my own small, daily battle with darkness?
On the morning of a bridal planning day organized by my sister and anticipated by us both for weeks, we woke to news of the Bastille Day terrorist attack in Nice. We sat in my room, cups of tea in hand, feet propped on my battered old armchairs, and wondered what to do. The joy of that bridal and sisterly day seemed insignificant next to the immensity of pain throbbing in the world. How could we shop or laugh or even plan a menu when people were dying? We weren’t quite sure how to
act, and when my sister left me for a few minutes, I found the old darkness and doubt suffusing my thoughts as the larger grief of the world niggled to life the fear I bore as I journeyed toward one of the largest commitments of my life.
But bless my sister, she returned with freshened cups of tea and poetry books in hand. No matter what, she said, we were going to begin this day with good, strong words to revive our souls. I blinked back tears. First on her list of bridal delights was the savoring of love poems. We sat there as the light out the window gathered strength and took turns reading: Shakespeare’s assertion that “love . . . looks on tempests and is never shaken,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s declaration that she loved “to the depth and breadth and height” her “soul could reach when feeling out of sight,” and Yeats’s radiant assurance to his love that “one man loved the pilgrim soul in you” (oh, I love that line).
And then we came to Wendell Berry. It wasn’t a romantic poem exactly, considering the title included the words “The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.” But it was about love: fierce, exultant, enduring love as clothed in the acts of the everyday, defying the death and grief and distraction of the modern world. His rallying cry was to “love the Lord” and to “love the world,” to daily do “something that won’t compute” with the dour expectations of the fallen world. “Laugh,” wrote Berry. “Laughter is immeasurable” (and my sister began to giggle). “Be joyful / though you have considered all the facts.” And soon the words began to blur through our tears as we saw our own moment on a Colorado morning in its beauty and took comfort in each other and in our love despite the headlined facts of that morning. We read aloud with shaky but joyous voices down to the last, radiant line: “Practice resurrection.”
I suppose that line could mean many different things depending on the reader, but in that moment, for me, it was clear. To practice resurrection meant to take joy in the gift of my upcoming marriage, in the precious camaraderie of my long sisterhood; to not allow those marvelous gifts of love to be diminished by darkness. It meant to let our hearts be joyful in the face of “the facts,” to let the happiness of picking out wedding shoes and planning little gifts for the guests proclaim a different reality from that of destruction. To practice resurrection that day for me meant also to trust—in the presence of God to sustain us in that moment, to root my marriage, to keep us safe, even from the foibles and vagaries of OCD.
Very soon after that day, I came across a line in Hannah Coulter, the Berry novel I was reading at the time, that helped me to understand that my choice to rejoice in love that day with my sister was a small model of the hope that the whole of my marriage was meant to image. When Hannah, a young farmwife, marries Nathan Coulter, a survivor of the same war that took her first husband, she states her belief that her new marriage stands for
the possibility that among the world’s wars and sufferings two people could love each other for a long time, until death and beyond, and could make a place for each other that would be a part of their love, as their love for each other would be a way of loving their place. This love would be one of the acts of the greater love that holds and cherishes all the world.
That love, holding and cherishing all the world, is exactly the love I glimpsed afresh in Julian’s words in the rainy half-light of that Oxford morning as I mourned the loss of my first little babe. Little did I know, when I read that passage before my wedding, that my husband and I would confront our first deep sorrow within a year, holding hands as we stared at the still little form on the doctor’s screen. Little did I know what grief like that would feel like, voiding light and joy from the rest of the world. But little also did I know that my husband’s cherishing of me in my grief would indeed be startling, creating for me a space in which I tasted that greater, divine love that I had glimpsed in the Berry passage.
Words like Berry’s have sheltered and strengthened me throughout the sorrowing moments of my life. They have been a silvered thread weaving the broken fragments of my heart and my hope back together, helping me to trust that nothing is ever lost in the great hands that hold all of our lives like a tiny hazelnut, cradling us in a love that “contains all the world” and yet throbs also in the center of our hearts, leading us toward a great and coming redemption. Such words have come to me countless times through the gift of good books, and I believe that they come to every woman who reads, agents of strength and comfort that take us bookish girls by the hands and teach us not just to feel hope but to live it, to clothe it, to “practice resurrection” every day of our lives.
[1] J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” in Tree and Leaf (London: Harper Collins, 2001), 68.
[2] Alfred Delp, “The Shaking Reality of Advent,” in Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas (Walden, NY: 2001), 94.
[3] C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle (New York: HarperTrophy, 2000), 198.
[4] C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (New York: HarperTrophy, 1994).
[5] J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: Deluxe Illustrated Edition (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 957.
[6] George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life (Ware, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 2007).
[7] Ibid.
[8] Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2004), 68.
Not Escapism: Novels That Helped Me Cope with a Broken World
(OR, BOOKS THAT COMFORT THE SOUL)
“HUMANITY can be roughly divided into three sorts of people—those who find comfort in literature, those who find comfort in personal adornment, and those who find comfort in food,” opined Elizabeth Goudge. While I do in some part identify with each of the types above, I usually turn to books first in times of distress, discouragement, or general disillusionment with life. Some of the novels I love with an abiding and grateful affection are the ones in whose vision of the world I have dwelled as in a shelter. These are the books that acknowledge pain, both of body and mind. They make no bones about the reality of loneliness or loss, the way some wounds and some relationships will never be whole this side of heaven. I will warn you: a few of the books on this list are outright tragedies. But I include them here because they tell the truth of the world’s sorrow, something we sometimes need to hear affirmed, even as they allow us a glimpse of the hope that is always working to make our suffering the ground of a new beginning.
Tolkien made quick, scornful work of critics who accused readers of fiction of “escapism.” The critics, huffed Tolkien, confuse “the escape of the prisoner with the flight of the deserter,”[1] for we often read novels not to escape reality but to engage with it afresh. When our capacity to see or our ability to hope has been diminished by exhaustion, grief, or boredom, it’s books like the following that help us to gird up our loins and keep the story of our own lives going.
A Place on Earth by Wendell Berry
When Gwen and I discussed this novel years ago, we decided that one of the best words we could think of to describe its quality was hush; the story is hushed in the way our own lives, lived in the circle of our own days, is hushed. When I enter the world of a Berry novel, I’m not whisked away to an exotic land or a romantically unrealistic setting. Rather, I’m immersed in the workaday thoughts of people who eat and love and work pretty much like me, and in this case, who carry on with normal life in the face of a rising grief. In this novel we walk in thought with Matt Feltner; Margaret, his wife; and Hannah, his daughter-in-law (whose life is fully explored in Hannah Coulter, review on page 47) as they endure the slow loss of their son and husband, who has been declared missing in World War II. The tale of grief is told slowly, following its rise in dark evenings and its slight waning in the normalcy of working days and old friendships. It’s an ordinary tragedy, but one richly imaging the grace that can rise amid hard work and a community that, while never denying grief, seeks to move through it into a fragile hope. I have found it to be deeply sustaining, a steadying hand in times of struggle.
Silence by Shusako Endo
A novel
that is a narrative contemplation on the nature of suffering and God’s silence within it, this story considers the life of a persecuted Jesuit missionary in seventeenth-century Japan and the two young priests who go in search of him who are unwilling to believe reports of their mentor’s apostasy. The story delves deeply into suffering when idealism is stripped away, when right and wrong appear confused. An aching but honest story of faith, probing the heart of Christ’s presence with us in the broken place.
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Narrated by Stevens, the proper and upright butler who is dedicated to the service of Lord Darlington, this story considers Stevens’s relationship with Miss Kenton, the housekeeper who both frustrates and draws him, the woman whose significance to his life it takes him a novel’s length of narration to realize. This is a story that deals with the sorrow of unexpressed love, in which we recognize with Stevens only too late the way that “there was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.” A tragedy, but one that teaches the urgency, the irreplaceable preciousness of love. (Even if you had a difficult time with the film—considered something of a classic, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson—give this book a chance, as I felt the story works so much better when you are allowed to get inside Stevens’s thoughts.)
Rilla of Ingleside by L. M. Montgomery
I was riveted by this final book in the Anne of Green Gables series and its heroine, Rilla (named after the famed Marilla), Anne’s youngest daughter. Idealistic, innocent, with an excellent sense of humor and a penchant (like her mother) for awkward moments, Rilla comes of age at the opening of World War I, watching her brothers, her childhood friends, and the boy she is just beginning to think she loves leave for the brutalities and griefs of the battlefield. I love this book for its daily, down-to-earth account of tragedy and uncertainty as those who remain faithful at home endure and are transformed. For Rilla is left behind to watch and wait, and this is the chronicle of the loving maturity she reaches through loss, through faithfulness, and through the deep hope and rooted humor she fights to keep in the face of pain. It’s a triumphant and aching story that helped me to take courage for my own small battles.
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