When I began preaching, almost 50 years ago, the now ubiquitous practice of preachers talking about themselves in the pulpit was frowned upon. Fortunately, I was an English major. I read fiction. So instead of unearthing a first-person anecdote from my life that might illumine the ancient text before us, I opened a novel. In fact, for more than half of my 74 years, every book I cracked (fiction, nonfiction, theology, science), every newspaper I perused (the physical version, delivered daily to my doorstep), every New Yorker or Atlantic article I underlined, provided fodder for Sunday morning’s sermon. I was not so much in search of an illustration as I was a character whose words and actions embodied the human condition. Pull a book of fiction off the shelf of my library and you likely will find, on its once-blank last pages, 50 sermon titles. Next to the title is a page number that returned me to a paragraph whose protagonist was able to clothe my otherwise abstract theological claims about the text with flesh and blood.
Let me hasten to add, I also read the Bible. Perhaps because my concentration as an undergraduate and as a divinity student was theology and literature, I read Scripture the way I read novels and novels the way I read Scripture. Barbara Brown Taylor speaks of “a long sitting spell with an open Bible on my lap as I read and read and read the text … I am waiting,” she says, “to be addressed …” That was how I read the Bible, too. But I was equally open to being addressed while reading Steinbeck’s East of Eden or a poem from Jane Kenyon’s “Otherwise” or the argument of a George Steiner essay or selected lines from Tom Stoppard’s Utopia or an article on “Mapping the Genome” in Sunday’s New York Times.
Now I am retired. Mercifully, I occupy a pew, not a pulpit. While I spent my whole life reading books with an eye to Sunday morning, now I am an amateur reader. Amo. Amas. Amat. I read for the love of it. Except, in these times, that is not exactly true. I am purposefully reading literature from the 1930s. A Man in the Pulpit: Questions for a Father was written by Ruth Rehmann. Born in 1922 in Germany, her father was a Lutheran pastor. Fifty years later, she wrote to understand why he did not speak out against Hitler. In a sentence, her father chose to uphold the “peace, unity, and purity of the church” rather than speaking truth to power. It is a story for such a time as this. I am also reading Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, written in 1935. Lewis imagines that the United States chooses fascism over democracy. Liz Cheney’s Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning, and Ann Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy are my “eat alone at the bar” books. I read these books as a citizen and a Christian whose faith seeks understanding. Reading these books has become a calling of sorts.
Finally, I have succumbed to “reading” audiobooks as I drive from Pennsylvania to my cottage in Maine: Paul Harding’s This Other Eden, about Maine’s Malaga Island where a mixed-race community was evicted at the turn of the last century; James McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store set in Pottstown, Pennsylvania’s Chicken Hill district, where Jews and Black people in the 1930s were harassed by the then-MAGA Presbyterians.
My remarkable brother, Jeff Jarvis, is reading his latest book to me, The Gutenberg Parenthesis, as I drive. Fifteen years ago, in his first book (What Would Google Do?), Jeff wrote, “We need to get over books. Only then can we reinvent them.” At the conclusion of The Gutenberg Parenthesis, he recants and goes on to confess, in an Atlantic article, “The book is the book. It is a space between covers to be tamed. Its finitude makes demands on the author and editor, who decides what fits, what is worth saying, and what they hope is worth discussion and preserving — though the reader is the one who will ultimately make those decisions, who finishes making the book.” That will preach!
