Tag Archive - novels

ENOUGH: Put Down Those Ministry and Self-Help Books and Pick Up a Novel

March 11, 2010 in Ministry-Theology, Therapy-Psychology with 27 Comments

“Novelists work the same field in which Christians pray, believe and obey, plowing and sowing and harvesting all the interconnections of ordinary lives. This statement by John Updike supports my conviction that the novel is an essential component in spiritual reading: ‘Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that mankind has invented yet. Psychology and X-rays bring up some portentous shadows, and demographics and stroboscopic photography do some fine breakdowns, but for the full parfum and effluvia of being human, for feathery ambiguity and rank facticity, for the air and the iron, fire and spirit of our daily moral adventure there is nothing like fiction: it makes sociology look priggish, history problematical, the film media two-dimensional, and the National Enquirer as silly as last week’s cereal box….In fiction, everything that searchers for the important tend to leave out is left in.” (Take & Read: Spiritual Reading, An Annotated List by Eugene Peterson, pp. 48)


[image by Gibson Claire McGuire Regester]

Honestly, I’m pretty tired of all the ministry and self-help books (and by self-help I mean pastoral care, therapy stuff) that seem to be saying the same thing over and over again. It’s hard to tell them apart at times. It’s almost as if people are just rushing the books out to get published before the material becomes irrelevant. Before you think I’m being too harsh, let me say that I probably buy more ministry and self-help books than a lot of people. And many of them are super helpful.

But what I find missing in a lot of these books is a sense of imagination and narrative. Something that pulls me into what is being said, and isn’t simply reliant upon 7 steps to this, or 3 steps to this.

I have always loved novels, but I have been going back to them more and more frequently. I try to average about 2-3 novels a month, and I find myself re-reading some of them 5, 6 and 7 times over. And I’m going back and reading and re-reading the classics (and there are lots of lists).

The problem with steps is that we don’t know what to do when the formula doesn’t work. Steps don’t take into account the nuances of life and the dynamics of human interaction.

One of the things that I have found very fascinating is that I am about to complete my second reading of Susan Howatch’s Starbridge Series — 6 novels, over 2,500 pages of small print. Some of the novels I have read 7 times. And what is fascinating is that no reading is the same. Characters are constantly changing as I pick up different nuances, and as I enter into the various perspectives of the multiple narrators.

They are teaching me more about human nature. More about ministry. More about therapy. More about redemption. More about grace. Than any ministry or self-help books I have read.

So you don’t have to give up on your ministry and self-help books, but put them down for a season, and pick up a novel. Let a novel transform your thinking, your life, your relationships, and watch the power that will have on your ministry and therapeutic work.

Limits On Our Knowledge of the Other Person

February 9, 2010 in Marriage-Family, Ministry-Theology, Therapy-Psychology with 0 Comments

I think we live in a culture that likes mystery, but we don’t want to go too long without that mystery being solved and unraveled so that it answers all of our questions. I can’t imagine too many viewers of LOST being satisfied after this last season if the mysteries aren’t made completely known to them. Or think about how we often fail in our attempts to simply let God remain mysterious in how we does things. We try to answer all questions, and somehow feel like if we don’t have all the answers than we are somehow not being the right type of Christian.

We also take this mentality into relationships as well. When we meet that other person our desire often seems to begin the process of unraveling the mystery that is before us in that other person. That’s why we spend countless hours on the phone talking, in conversation over dinner, emailing, sending texts, playing together, etc. We believe that the more we know, the more mystery that is solved, then somehow we are better off. Or that somehow we are more intimately connected because of the knowledge of each other that has passed between us. I remember many early days in dating, especially back in high school where you spent countless hours early on just telling the other person all about you. The more they told, the more close you felt. We wanted to unravel the layers to get to the core of who they were, their personality, etc. — as soon as possible.

But I’m beginning to realize that we are more mysterious to each other than we often give credit for, or even allow. Last week I wrote on the topic of allowing your spouse the freedom to be who they are, and the mysteries that are often a part of our marriage.

The more work I do as a therapist, the more convinced I am that we can truly never know what goes on in a marriage. And often, spouses can rarely know all the mysteries of the person they are married too.

It’s something that I have to push back on myself about. Some mysteries will remain in my work with people as a therapist, and it’s not my goal to find them out. Some mysteries will remain in our work as a pastor as we try and communicate the work of God in people’s lives. And it’s not our job to have answers to all of them.

Last night I finished Scandalous Risks by Susan Howatch (it’s the 4th of 6th novels in the Starbridge Series which centers on the clergy of the Church of England through the last century. It’s an amazing series which I have read two times before, even reading some of the novels up to seven times. I can’t recommend them enough, and Howatch’s storytelling through various narrators in each novel reminds that we are perceived in many different ways by many different people. That in essence we are a mystery to others, and not all questions can be answered.

As I finished the book last night I read this quote that I want to leave with you…a quote that better says what I have tried to say in the words above.

“But surely you know the whole truth about the Bishop?”

Mrs Ashworth smiled. Then she said:  “When I first met Charles long ago in 1937 he seemed very straightforward, a successful young clergyman from a comfortable middle-class home.  But the reality behind the glittering image was far more complex, I assure you, then I could ever have imagined, and even now I daresay there are still mysteries in his past which I shall never unravel.”  She hesitated but added:  “He was a widower when I met him.  He’s talked to me about the first marriage, but not in a way that has ever encouraged me to dig deep into what actually happened.  I’d like to know more, of course, but I’ve accepted that there’s nothing more he has to say: I’ve accepted that there’s a limit on our knowledge of even those who are closest to us.  The older one gets the more one realises how saturated life is in mystery, and the biggest mystery of all, it often seems to me, is the mystery of the human personality.” (pp. 438)