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I have been ill, and I have been reading.
Covid finally caught up with me, and I have spent much of the last couple weeks in bed. Most of my waking hours have been spent reading. No, not listening to podcasts or streaming the latest hits on Netflix, but reading – reading books.
Lest everyone think I am a complete fossil from centuries past, I should clarify: With one exception, all the books have been read on an e-reader, not from paper pages or papyrus scrolls! I may be old, but I am not totally antiquated.
Some of the reading has been pure entertainment or distraction: Classic British mysteries by Dorothy Sayers and Ellis Peters. But there have also been some substantial works: David McCullough’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning biography of John Adams, one of the architects of U.S. independence and the second President of the United States; Holy Envy, a reflection on interfaith relations by Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor; and Braiding Sweetgrass, where Robin Wall Kemmerer brings Native American spirituality into conversation with contemporary ecological science.
For this issue, I offer you some passages from these books that have stayed with me:
From Holy Envy:
“The God of your understanding is just that: the God of your understanding. What you need is the God just beyond your understanding” (p. 27, quoting Rami Shapiro).
“To walk the way of Jesus” requires “entrusting yourself to the God who cares more about your transformation than your comfort” (p. 156).
From John Adams:
Adams was the first President to move into the White House, on November 1, 1800. The next morning, in a letter to his wife, who had not yet joined him there, Adams wrote, “I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that shall hereafter inhabit. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof” (p. 551).
In a letter to one of his grandchildren, written late in his life, Adams wrote, “The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know…. Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough” (p. 650).
From Braiding Sweetgrass:
“Ceremony is a vehicle for belonging” (p. 37) and “Our elders say that ceremonies are the way we ‘remember to remember’” (p. 5).
“If all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow. When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy we become” (p.31).
“Many native peoples … have this in common – we are rooted in cultures of gratitude” (p. 106) and “Wealth among traditional people is having enough to give away. Hoarding the gift, we become … too heavy to join the dance” (p. 381).
“This is our work, to discover what we can give. Isn’t this the purpose of education, to learn the nature of your own gifts and how to use them for good in the world?” (p. 239).
--Bill
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