Blowing Where It Will

My Books and My Prayer Chair

I was sitting this morning in my prayer chair, that place where I spend so much early-morning time, praying, meditating, reflecting, reading the Psalms each day, studying other parts of Holy Scripture, when I caught a glimpse of my book cases across the room.

I could distinguish some of the titles even from that distance, a number of books on leadership by my mentor and friend Max DePree, a whole shelf of books by N. T. Wright, including my first, life-changing encounter with The Challenge Of Jesus, a shelf of C. S. Lewis, Lesslie Newbigin’s Foolishness To The Greeks, where I first found my calling to engage the culture, Walter Brueggemann’s Finally Comes The Poet, that brilliant reading of how the Bible speaks in poetry, and then of course the many shelves of English and American literature, along with tons of modern and contemporary poetry, which I taught for so many years.   

I had this sudden thought that each one of those books had touched me at one point along my journey, in some small way had helped to shape the person I have become, what I may have contributed, what I think about, what I long for, how I think about my failures. Almost none of that life-shaping experience was frivolous to me, then or now.  

But then another thought occurred to me, with a touch of sadness: What will become of all these books that have meant so much to me when I die? Will anyone want any of my precious books? Who could ever recreate the meaningful experience I had reading each one of them? I think of my kids, and maybe a couple of grandkids, who will come over and pick through the books, maybe choosing one or two that fits their current concerns.

But mostly my books will be left to dispose of, sent off to the library of one of my beloved colleges or universities, where they will be sifted through and mostly discarded.

Of course it’s not the material worth of my books I am thinking about, though they must have cost a bunch over the years, both to buy them and to ship them from home to home as we moved about. No, it’s that life-shaping stuff I’m pondering, represented by each one of those books—will that too be discarded?

I’ve been rereading Henri Nouwen’s marvelous Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living In A Secular World. In one section he shares thoughts about how we will continue to give gifts even as we die. He begins this section declaring that “we become beautiful people when we give whatever we can give: a smile, a handshake, a kiss, an embrace, a word of love, a present, a part of our life.” There’s nothing here about my books, but he suggests we can continue to give gifts such as these even as we pass on.

Maybe as I am dying, Nouwen imagines, I will continue to give “the greatest gift I have to offer,” which has been “my own joy of living, my own inner peace, my own silence and solitude, my own sense of well-being.” Oh, I thought, maybe that’s how my books will be passed on?  

Just maybe my books have done their work on me, helping to build up whatever “fruitfulness”  my “little life” has offered, whatever “little act of faithfulness, every gesture of love, every word of forgiveness, every little bit of joy and peace,” even though I so often fell short of these aspirations. Just maybe these acts “will multiply and multiply” even after I am gone, when my books are finally thrown into the waste bins by people who have no idea what they have meant to me or how they have shaped who I wanted to become.  

Here I was, pondering this morning, sitting in my prayer chair, feeling a bit of sadness about my worthless books, but imagining, as if in prayer, that “the spirit of love, once freed from our mortal bodies, will blow where it will, even when few will hear its coming and going.”

Maybe our lives, though gone, will not be gone, but rather will go on rippling, ever so slightly, like a stone thrown into the pond, rippling out so others may know the gift of love I always wanted to give them.