Notebook
Last Sunday two young men called to see me after Mass. They’re students, sharing accommodation and, apart from their studies, they want to grow in holiness, to become the men God made them to be. They told me they had cleared a space on their bookshelves for books that would help them in this task.
They each have Bibles – the indispensable foundation of any Christian reading list – and they had a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, but they needed more. Naturally, I was more than happy to oblige, and they left with armfuls of good books.
Meeting these men made me think of the effect a single book can have on the life of an individual. Just two weeks ago, this paper carried a fascinating article about the way in which reading St John Henry Newman gave the members of the White Rose Movement the clarity and courage they needed to resist the Nazi regime, even to the point of death.
One of the members of this movement, Sophie Scholl, handed a book written by Newman to one of her friends with the explanation: “There’s a wonderful world awaiting you there!”
A few decades earlier, another young German woman discovered a world within a book. Edith Stein, an exceptionally gifted philosopher, raised in the Jewish faith but by now an atheist, was visiting friends and opened up a slim volume in their library: St Teresa of Avila’s autobiography.
She read the work in a single sitting, and in the small hours of the morning she closed the book and remarked simply to herself: “This is the truth.”
In the life of this Spanish nun she had made out the face of Jesus Christ, and she gave himself entirely to him, first in baptism, then in religious life, and finally in martyrdom in the murder camp of Auschwitz.
Change
Just 10 years later a young medical student, also German, found herself reading a book that would change the course of her life too. Ruth Pfau had recently been baptised an evangelical Protestant, but she now found herself drawn to the Catholic Faith, largely thanks to a book by Josef Pieper about the thought of St Thomas Aquinas.
It was thanks to this book, said Pfau later, that she found “the courage to be human”.
Soon after her reception into the Church she consecrated her medical work to the Lord by joining a missionary order of sisters, and was sent to Pakistan. By the time she died in 2017, she had founded 157 clinics for the treatment of leprosy, providing treatment for nearly 60,000 patients.
Sophie, Edith and Ruth would agree: there’s a whole world awaiting you in a good book, and opening the cover of a really good book might well change your life.
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Books can inspire people to greatness, but they can have the opposite effect too. There’s a great literary example of this in Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. You know the story: Dorian Gray makes a pact that enables him to keep his beauty as he descends into corrupt hedonism, while his portrait grows old and ugly, showing clearly the true nature of his sins.
But where does Gray’s downward spiral begin: with a book, referred to only as The Yellow Book, given to him by his friend, Lord Henry Wotton. In reading this book the relatively innocent young man is gripped by the glamour of evil. “The Renaissance knew of strange manners of poisoning – poisoning by a helmet and a lighted torch, by an embroidered glove and a jewelled fan, by a gilded pomander and by an amber chain. Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book.”
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How about you? If a young believer keen to grow in faith asked you to recommend some reading – apart from the Bible – what would you propose? Would you go the literary route, and suggest some inspiring novels or short stories? Or would you fill their hands with apologetic manuals, to equip them with answers to standard objections? Or maybe well written lives of saints?
If you can come up with a ‘top five’, list them in a letter to the editor of this paper – it would be interesting to see what titles crop up!