Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
This was the novel that first helped me to understand what faith and a grieved, loving faithfulness can look like in the midst of devastation. It’s a tragedy, set in South Africa and centered on the character of Stephen Kumalo, a native African priest. The story explores the racial abuses and tensions that led to apartheid, weaving those evils with the long, grieved account of Stephen’s search for his beloved and lost son, Absalom. There is no lessening of social or personal guilt here; the effects of poverty and the consequences of hatred are clear. But so is hope; its quiet presence is unabated by the reality of grief, and that is the gift this novel gave me. Through this book, I came to the realization that hope does not mean the cancellation of grief or fear; it is rather present right in their midst, denying death the ultimate word. In Kumalo’s words: “For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing.”
Also by Paton:
Too Late the Phalarope
The Chosen by Chaim Potok
This is the kind of novel that draws you into its narrative and characters so fully you don’t realize until the end that in the reading you have come to fundamental understandings about faith or suffering or friendship, or in this case, silence. This is a tale of fathers and sons, and their competing ideals of faith as lived out in the lives of two Jewish boys, one a devout but secular Jew, the other the son of a Hasidic rabbi. Reuven Malter and Danny Saunders are both growing up in Brooklyn against the backdrop of World War II, but Danny, brilliant and analytical and hungry for education, is destined to follow in his father’s footsteps as leader of their Hasidic sect. The two boys become close friends as Reuven comes to observe the strange and grievous fact of Danny’s life: he has been raised in silence. His father will not speak to him unless they are studying the Torah. This story of friendship, of fatherhood, and of what silence may communicate is one of my favorite novels (and my husband’s, too, I might add).
You can listen to silence, Reuven. . . . You have to want to listen to it, and then you can hear it. It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn’t always talk. Sometimes—sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it. It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to.
Also by Potok:
My Name Is Asher Lev
The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
I didn’t expect to like this book. I picked it up as an adult, feeling that I must dutifully skim it for a children’s book list I was compiling. I knew it was about a boy and his adopted fawn and was generally a coming-of-age tale. I was bored before I even started. But I obediently began, and ah, I was captured. I met myself afresh in this story that is indeed about a boy and his fawn and the difficulties of maturity, but one that aches with the beauty of a child’s innocent affection, of the world when it is still unmarked by suffering. It is a novel that deals in grief, the shattering of heart that comes to each person when that glorious, unbounded innocence is lost. This novel is one of those that taught me how to sorrow, how to live in the fallenness of the world and still to see the “fineness” of its beauty and to go on despite the darkness. For as the wise and gentle Penny Baxter tells his son:
You’ve seed how things goes in the world o’ men. . . . You’ve seed ol’ Death at his tricks. . . . Ever’ man wants life to be a fine thing, and a easy. ’Tis fine, boy, powerful fine, but ’tain’t easy. Life knocks a man down and he gits up and it knocks him down agin. I’ve been uneasy all my life. . . . I’ve wanted life to be easy for you. . . . I wanted to spare you, long as I could. But ever’ man’s lonesome. What’s he to do then? What’s he to do when he gits knocked down? Why, take it for his share and go on.
(Though this isn’t a book recommendation, Andrew Peterson has created a beautiful album of music themed around The Yearling called Light for the Lost Boy. I can’t recommend it highly enough as a companion to this story.)
Home by Marilynne Robinson
You’ll know from my review of Lila (see page 56) how much I respect Robinson’s skill in untangling the self-deceptions and suffering of the human heart. Lila and Gilead, the other books in this loose trilogy, also deal deeply in the consequences of evil and pain, the trust it takes to hope. Lila is definitely a book I would include in this list, but Robinson is equally powerful and particularly poignant in this story of the Reverend Boughton (best friend of the old man in Lila), his prodigal and maddening son, and the bereft daughter watching their last days together. A novel that masterfully shows the way that the secret sorrows we bear frustrate and separate us, this is also the story of love’s frustrated, dogged, inexorable power to try once again for connection.
Also by Robinson:
Gilead
Lila
The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien
If you think I’m trying to sneak a bit of Tolkien into as many lists as I can, you’re right. I am fascinated by the origin story Tolkien wrote for his imagined world, one that directly examines the entrance of sin and suffering into a good creation, in the terms of an ancient epic. I think this was Tolkien’s theodicy—his defense of God’s goodness—written after his time in the trenches of World War I. The creation account of God’s creative song as joined by legions of angels is matchless.
The Hawk and the Dove by Penelope Wilcock
Quiet and wry, a novel centered on the medieval Benedictine abbey of St. Alcuin, this story considers the arrogant and impatient Father Peregrine as he wrestles with his soul while seeking to be a faithful abbot to his community. This is the first book in the series, with the later books describing the deep faith required when Father Peregrine must come to terms with illness and infirmity, a process both agonizing and humorous, and requiring as much grit for the suffering as any more obvious persecution.
[1] J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (London: HarperCollins UK, 2012), 61.
God Is Big Enough: Spiritual Books That Helped Me through Seasons of Struggle
(OR, LITERARY COMPANIONS FOR CRISES OF FAITH)
MY FIRST REAL CRISIS of faith came when I was seventeen, and it wasn’t so much about God’s reality so much as his goodness. I didn’t think there was much tangible evidence of it. (We’ll leave aside teenage absolutism for the moment.) My family was making a difficult cross-country move, I had my own small host of troubles, and in that terrifying insight that comes to children at one point or another, I realized that my parents had no control over our painful circumstances. I remember sitting with my mom late one evening (my mother says that all her children waited to have their spiritual crises until far past bedtime), almost spitting out my doubt and fear, my sense of betrayal. I also remember the keen sense of knowing that came to me when I finished and we both sat in the silence and I realized that my mom couldn’t answer. There was nothing she could say to settle my questions or make things better in that moment.
What she did say probably saved my faith.
“God is big enough for your questions. Don’t be afraid to doubt, but go to him to do it.”
What those words helped me to do was struggle with God instead of away from him, and the books in the following list are the ones that came alongside me in the next decade and taught me to struggle well, to fight toward hope, toward a renewed grasp on God’s love as it comes right into the heart of our brokenness. These books are the ones that helped me to form an understanding of suffering, of daily struggle, even of the restlessness that comes amid happiness, not as something zapped down upon me or watched without care by a distant God, but as the ground Christ himself invades, the place where by his life and power, beauty grows afresh. Some of the authors, like Buechner, I discovered as a teenager. Some, like Von Balthasar, I first encountered in a college library. But all the faithful writers below did exactly what my mom encouraged me to do: they wrestled with God and, in so doing, equipped me to live out my hope in God’s redemption right in the middle of a broken world.
Letters and Papers from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I must be honest. I wrestle with Bonhoeffer. I read his Discipleship in my teen years and felt challenged by his idea of “costly grace” but also intimidated by the stark, uncompromising nature of his theology. But when I had to study him for a year as part of my degree, I came to respect him for what is one of the driving elements in his writing: his uncompromising and total devotion to Christ. He was a remarkable man: a German philosopher, a theologian, a Lutheran pastor who was put to death by the Nazis. It was in reading his Letters and Papers from Prison—the record of his anguish and his unfaltering faith, but also his growing conviction that Christ invades the very heart of the world’s suffering—that I discovered the voice of a mentor I will return to throughout my life. To know Christ—to encounter him in the grief or joy of each moment, to embody his self-giving life—was the core of Bonhoeffer’s theology, one that captivated me in this book. Be sure to get an edition that includes the poems Bonhoeffer composed in prison, poems in which he expresses both his hope and his anguish, his self-doubt and his confidence:
Who am I? This or the Other?
Am I one person today and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
And before myself a contemptible woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army
Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine!
Speak What We Feel: Not What We Ought to Say by Frederick Buechner
Buechner is a theologian and a pastor, but he is also a poet and a novelist. His frankly beautiful writing, with its questioning, honest tone, has been a companion to me in many seasons of struggle, loneliness, or change, but this contemplation on the way suffering sometimes helps us to speak truth is one of his books to which I most often return. Speak What We Feel takes its title from King Lear’s famous statement in the moment of his undoing (“The weight of this sad time we must obey, speak what we feel, not what we ought to say”). In it, Buechner examines four writers—Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mark Twain, Shakespeare, and G. K. Chesterton—whose times of greatest darkness forced them beyond the bounds of popularity or reason to speak, in story or poem, the deepest and hardest truths they knew. A beautiful account of the way that suffering can sometimes reveal hope in a depth and quality we have never touched before.
Also by Buechner:
The Sacred Journey: A Memoir of Early Days
The Hungering Dark
The Magnificent Defeat
Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner
The Pilgrim’s Progress and Dangerous Journey: The Story of Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
You no doubt know of the classic The Pilgrim’s Progress, but I’ll recommend the somewhat simplified and arrestingly illustrated retelling of it in Dangerous Journey. This classic allegorical account of the Christian’s journey to heaven, with its vivid images of Vanity Fair and the Slough of Despond, rings remarkably true to the daily struggles of discipleship.
The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? by David Bentley Hart
To wrestle with doubt is, I believe, integral to a real and healthy faith. My doubt has centered mostly not on the existence of God but on his goodness. How can we hold to a loving and powerful God in a world so devastated by violence and sin? This slim, wordy (it must be admitted), but eloquent book, written in response to the devastating 2004 tsunami in Asia, has helped me to a clear, aching grasp of God’s incredible love as it invades the sorrow and shattering of the world. It’s a “quick” read, originally an article in the Wall Street Journal, that draws on history, theology, and writers like Dostoevsky to defend the overwhelming love and redemptive will of God.
At the Scent of Water: The Ground of Hope in the Book of Job by J. Gerald Janzen
I first discovered Janzen’s work on Job in the dawn light of my college library, the day before my Old Testament essay was due. I was supposed to be collecting last-minute quotes for a project on Job. Instead, I found myself immersed in a commentary on one of the most mysterious books in the Bible that startled me with this assertion: “Why is the man so pious and so upright? Is it only because he is so blessed and so prosperous? The question which is raised in heaven is not answered there but is given into the hands and heart of the man to answer in the context of manifold suffering.”
What became clear to me in Janzen’s compassionate and frankly poetic prose is that the story of Job is an affirmation not merely of God’s sovereignty in suffering but of humankind’s capacity to respond in loving, mature trust. This is what Job declares before the assembled powers of the world: a conscious, radical affirmation of the enduring goodness and real justice of his Creator. This is the theme slightly more personally explored in At the Scent of Water, a book combining academic observation with a delightful amount of poetry and an account of Janzen’s own battle with pancreatic cancer to demonstrate the deep hope that lies at the root of Job’s strange story. (If you’re interested in the commentary as well, it’s called Job: Interpretation: A Biblical Commentary for Teaching.)
Thoughts to Make Your Heart Sing by Sally Lloyd-Jones (illustrated by Jago)
This may seem an unlikely title to include in a list of books meant to help with great grapplings of faith. It’s a children’s devotional, created as a companion to the wildly popular The Jesus Storybook Bible. What I love about it—and the reason I include it here—is that in times of my spiritual exhaustion, it isn’t necessarily another brilliant defense of God’s goodness that enables me to keep believing. It’s a single word, an image of beauty, a promise of his faithfulness to which I can cling, and that’s what this book offers in devotional thoughts that focus on a single Scripture or promise, accompanied by luminous illustrations that bring each promise to life. This book is created to nourish the heart of a child, which is what I often become in times of struggle. I have found these devotions to be surprisingly potent—and radiantly lovely—contemplations in times of weariness.
A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis
This is C. S. Lewis’s deeply personal account of his grief at the death of his wife, Joy. After losing her to bone cancer just three years after their marriage, Lewis scrawled out his anger and terror, his sense of futility, his inability to grasp hope, in poignant fragments in a few notebooks. The angst he expressed was so raw that the book was at first published under a pseudonym. But for all its tortured grapple with pain, this is also one believer’s account of his wrestle with God, one that drew him inexorably back to faith. I have loved this work in times of struggle because of its honesty and fearless doubt. Lewis is a writer who says what we all wish we could find the words to express (and are sometimes afraid to say), and this book of grief offers the gift he so generously gives in his other works: the image of a faith not lost but deepened in its encounter with question, sorrow, and desire.
The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming by Henri J. M. Nouwen
Some books speak to the part of us that yearns for glory; some kindle our strength; some touch the secret places of our sorrow, helping us to open what is grieved, guilty, and lost to the touch of Christ. Nouwen, for me, is the third: a writer who helps me to face what is most broken in myself not with renewed effort but with a run into the arms of my Father. In this aching and beautiful exploration of the ways in which we all, whether addicted or yearning or depressed, live the life of the prodigal, Nouwen leads the reader to this realization: “I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found.” Centering his contemplations on Rembrandt’s painting of the prodigal’s return, Nouwen draws us into a recognition of our need and of the grace that waits to receive us, for “when I look through God’s eyes at my lost self and discover God’s joy at my coming home, then my life may become less anguished and more trusting.”
Also by Nouwen:
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br /> Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World
The Way of the Heart: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers
The Wounded Healer; Ministry in Contemporary Society
Love, Henri: Letters on the Spiritual Life
A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society by Eugene H. Peterson
Perhaps one of the foremost books on what Christian discipleship really looks like for the modern believer, this classic of spiritual formation reiterates Peterson’s long-term message that the gospel isn’t about a quick fix for happiness or a token for self-fulfillment or a zapping remedy for sin. Rather, it is “a long obedience” requiring us to walk a few more steps every day in the company of Christ. Written around the beautiful psalms of ascent, it is a realistic and encouraging challenge to contemporary believers.
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