[The Bookshelf #63] To Love Is To Be Vulnerable
Inhabiting the world openly, attentively, and courageously
Confession time: it’s been two months since I last wrote The Bookshelf. Truth be told, a month ago it just completely slipped my mind. Oops. Chalk it up to Arizona summer brain, which is like brain freeze, but the opposite.
Nevertheless, I’d be remiss not to nudge you, dear reader, in the direction of three things I’ve posted at the handsomely redesigned timhoiland.com during that time:
A very brief review of Uli Beutter Cohen’s Between the Lines: Stories From the Underground.
N.T. Wright’s riff on John 21, the call of Jesus to Peter—and to us.
Walker Percy on the challenge of returning to a place we once considered “home.”
Feel free to bookmark timhoiland.com, as that’s where much of my writing, other work, and yes, even my complete reading list (going back to 2003), all live and move and have their being. If anything over there sparks your curiosity, I’d love to hear from you.
Now, on to the books.
What I’ve Read Recently
My favorite thing about the original edition of Douglas Kaine McKelvey’s Every Moment Holy is the poetic yet earthy particularity of the liturgies.
On a weekly and daily basis, and for some of the biggest moments of life—weddings, funerals, baptisms—we Anglicans lean heavily on the Book of Common Prayer. The confessions and collects, the Eucharistic prayers and the prayers of the people, they give voice to the longings of our hearts in simple, biblical, truthful language. But what about those in-between moments: quotidian, maybe, but no less significant? They may be joyful: feasting with friends, gardening, going on vacation. Or they may not: insomnia, work deadlines, news-induced anxiety.
All these moments matter to us. All these moments matter to God. Ergo, every moment holy.
Here, in volume two (also from Rabbit Room Press), McKelvey leans especially into the dark stuff. He does so not in despair, but—as the Prayer Book puts it—“in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection.”
In the book’s Foreword, he calls us to reclaim “a more robust theology of dying” and to reexamine “the ways in which we relate to and care for the dying and the grieving among us.” McKelvey writes:
Such care should not be the sole purview of therapists and practitioners of medicine, after all—though they each have their valuable places. But neither of those fields is generally equipped to offer spiritual shepherding, nor compassionate community, nor to infuse the journeys of the dying and grieving with the great and central hope contained in the sweeping story of God’s redemptive works across history and into eternity—namely, that death is not the end, that all creation will be made new, the children of God resurrected unto eternal life in glorified physical bodies in which we will live and play and take joy, all to the glory of God, in community, in creativity, in worship, in wonder, and in celebration. Remembrance of this story, and of how our own deaths find their context in it, is one of the great gifts the church has been given to steward, and a gift that we ought to continually offer to one another. It is the best hope in all of creation.
The best hope in all of creation. We need it. I need it. Flimsy substitutes will not do.
Just as in volume one, the liturgies here are written for very particular moments. In some cases, the titles alone are enough to pierce the heart: “For the Morning of a Medical Procedure,” “For Those Facing the Slow Loss of Memory,” “To Stir Courage in a Child Facing Death,” and “For Removing One’s Wedding Ring,” to name a few.
Whatever the particulars of our lives—and the particulars of the lives entrusted to our care—all too many of these liturgies will, at one time or another, speak directly to our distress. But they will also anchor us in the love of the Suffering Servant who has died, is risen, and will come again to make all things new, to wipe away every tear.
“These prayers and liturgies are offered in light of that eternal hope,” McKelvey writes, “and in the hope that they might serve the Body of Christ, encouraging us to give ourselves more fully to the experience of our present sorrows in light of those unshakeable joys to come, to better learn what it means to nurture, serve, encourage, and carry one another, and ultimately to reclaim a greater sense that these journeys of dying, caretaking, and grieving are holy moments to be experienced in communion with God, and in fellowship with one another, just as any other facet of our discipleship.”
What I’m Reading Now
I’m gonna be honest with you. I don’t read fiction as consistently as I’d like to. And I read even less of the kinds of fiction that sit on the New York Times bestseller list. But sometimes I do, and more often than not, I’m glad to have taken the plunge.
Right now I’m reading Where the Crawdads Sing (Putnam) by Delia Owens. It’s a book you’ve undoubtedly seen all over the place, a book our fiction-reading friends Instagrammed on the beach way back in 2019. I caught wind of the upcoming movie adaptation right around the time a gently used paperback copy found its way into the Little Free Library in our front yard. So I brought it inside and gave it a whirl.
It’s a compelling and heartbreaking novel about Kya, a girl left to raise herself in a shack in the marshland of mid-twentieth century North Carolina. She spends her childhood and young adult years in isolated survival mode, always tentative in her interactions with the people in town. For good reason: she comes from a long line of leavers, to borrow a phrase.
We learn right away that there is a death at the heart of the story, which may or may not be a murder (I haven’t gotten there yet). There’s also some fairly explicit passages about domestic violence and sexual assault, so this won’t be a book for everyone. Caveat lector.
Delia Owens is a talented, engaging writer who has written a page-turner. But Crawdads also has emotional depth, which comes (to me) as something of a surprise. As someone whose own childhood was marked by an endless parade of goodbyes, I empathize deeply with Kya’s anguish over the extent to which she will allow herself to trust, to hope, to love.
For people like us, the temptation to numb our hearts is real. To preemptively close ourselves off from anyone who may eventually hurt us—it can seem like the only option for survival. But it’s no way to live, despite all the very real dangers of the world. I know this first hand; I’ve got receipts.
Stories like these—stories with heart, stories that don’t sugercoat the awful stuff—might just hold some clues that can help us.
What I Might Read Next
The work of Andy Crouch has meant a lot to me over the years. Culture Making changed the way I think about the Creation Mandate and our cultural calling at a pivotal time of my life. And Playing God made some needed connections between idolatry and injustice.
I’ve been fortunate to get to know Andy a bit over the years, through brief but imagination-expanding interactions at a seminary in Philadelphia, a conference room in St. Louis, and elsewhere. Most memorable was the time we brought him out to speak at Common Good PHX in the spring of 2013 and had pupusas at a now defunct Salvadoran place on 24th Street.
His latest book is The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World (Convergent) and it seems like a book I need.
I’m at the age where friendship is getting harder, and the events of the last few years haven’t done much to help. I know I’m not the only one experiencing this. So how do we cultivate true, meaningful friendships, given the circumstances? That’s what I want to know. And that’s why this book is vying for the top spot on my to-read list.
As always, thanks for reading.
I always enjoy connecting with thoughtful bibliophiles, so if you’re so inclined, tell me what you’re reading these days and how it’s changing the way you inhabit your world.
Tim
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“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
— C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
Really appreciate your brief, pregnant, and poignant sentence on friendship: that it has been hard and has grown more challenging in recent years. Agreed, and to hear it stated so plainly helps.