Chapter 9: Books Can Deepen Your SOUL
The Gift of Pondering
In a world of noise, confusion and conflict it is necessary that there be places of silence, inner discipline and peace. In such places love can blossom.
THOMAS MERTON
IN THE MISTY GLOOM of an early winter’s eve, I was scuffing up a chill Oxford street after a day of lectures and library time. It was four o’clock in England, which meant shadows stretched like great black hands over the streets and curtains were pulled tight over all the little windows I passed. The tug toward home in that darkling hour usually would have turned my feet, but that day I had a special book in my bag and a heart in search of an hour’s contemplation. I tucked myself into a corner table at a marvel of an old café, a domed glass building piled in and out with luxuriant potted plants and lit by globe lights strung from the ceiling. It’s a once-a-year kind of place, expensive and exceptional, but at four o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon in January, it was wondrously deserted, and those magical orbed lights glimmered in the dusk like small moons and stars. It was this space and this hour of enchanted quiet I wanted in which to carry out my January tradition of reading Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea.
I sat. I breathed. I opened the pages of this slim friend of a book and read afresh the words that gripped me with calm as the new year opened at my feet, helping me to halt the run of my frantic thoughts, the rush of my steps, to begin the journey back to what the wise Lindbergh calls “a central core to my life.” This comforting mentor, mother of six children, and wife of a world-famous pilot reminded me that “women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.” I savored her words as night fell. I let the hush of that empty café surround me. I read a psalm and opened my journal, and in Anne’s quiet company, I looked at my life anew in its goals and dreams, its rhythms and stresses, and began to learn all over again to “be still,” as the psalmist puts it (Psalm 46:10), or to “live ‘in grace,’” as Anne describes it. My writing was a prayer, and peace came into my bones.
In that moment I remembered again that a woman who reads is a woman who ponders, who knows the holy secret of time spent in quiet, the power that comes from stepping back from the madness of screen and email, schedule and headline, to seek an inner place of hush in which she may know her own heart and the voice of the Holy Spirit afresh. A woman who reads is a rebel, defying the pace of the instant at which the modern world gallops from dawn till dusk. Her mind is her own, formed not by a scroll down the social-media feed or the frantic scurry of too much to do but by her daily decision to walk in company with the wise, those authors who help her to step back, to listen, to pray, and to ponder. Like Mary, the mother of Jesus, tangled up in the greatest task and story the world has yet seen, she knows that she must step back from even the holiest drama to ponder, to treasure in her heart (Luke 2:19) the things that are good and slough away the needless things that keep her from peace.
The first woman who modeled this life for me was my mother. The form of her curled in the corner of the couch in the half-light of dawn, with a Bible, her journal, and a book of theology or devotion nearby, lurks in the sweet shadows of my earliest memories. I sensed from little girlhood that those moments centered my mother in grace; I knew the quiet into which I crept was somehow sacred (though that certainly didn’t keep me from breaking it with morning chatter). By the time I was a teen, I’d copied that practice as well as her habit of a dawn-light walk. During the years that we chatted and tromped in the mornings, I began to notice the way my mother was shaped by her walk with the words of wise authors. “This morning I was reading . . .” It might have been Philip Yancey or Dallas Willard, Edith Schaeffer or Amy Carmichael, but what she read led her to reflect, giving her the strength of an independent mind rooted in the gathered wisdom of those who had traveled before her.
As I began to follow in her footsteps, I stumbled (quite literally) across a book in my late teens that deepened my understanding of what those times of quiet and reading accomplished. During an introverted ramble through a big, old bookshop in Nashville, I managed to catch my foot on the jutted corner of a bookshelf, thereby upsetting both my balance and the excellent cappuccino I held. A mere drop of coffee splashed onto the page of the small book I was perusing, but oh, it looked very large and dark on the clean, creamy paper. There was nothing to do but to buy it. What grace that I did! That book, so humbly written, was Interior Castle by the inimitable Saint Teresa of Avila. I came to love the wise, compassionate, and profoundly realistic voice of this spunky medieval nun who wrote about prayer as the soul’s journey back to the center of one’s being where God, whom she called the Beloved, always dwells, ready to be ever more known. Teresa saw the cultivation of quiet as the journey to which every soul is called out of the madness of life (medieval or modern) and back to the ground of the love that keeps us in life.
The part reading plays in that journey is that of companion and guide. Words—in novel, poem, or devotion—are often the road I walk in my journey toward prayer, on my way toward a centered and gracious peace. The more authors I have explored, particularly in my devotional life, the more I have come to notice that those whose words most help me toward maturity share a common theme: the pursuit of quiet as the choice to listen not to the countless and clamoring voices of the world but to the still, small voice of love within. Their words hold me up and help me to that listening when my own strength is small. In the early mornings, when my brain was weary and my heart sore, words kept me on that road of quiet reflection that leads toward peace—the words of Thomas Merton urging me to “learn to be alone”[1] or the poetry of George Herbert telling me of the way “love bade me welcome”[2] or the writings of C. S. Lewis, with his humble and humorous common sense, telling me that we must “lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.”[3]
But reflection is something I’ve had to fight for in the last several years, and I think it’s a battle faced by countless women in the modern world. We live in an age of profound and constant distraction, a way of existence increasingly centered on screens that accompany us from dawn till dusk, fragmenting our attention and driving us into restless and constant activity. The older I get and the more my hours of work and rest have become entangled with the online or virtual world, the more I have noticed a restless anxiety growing in my heart. The longer I’ve spent on social media, the more I notice the frantic leap of my mind, from this opinion to that as my fingers click restlessly in search of the next best thing. I think this is a restlessness common to the modern mind.
Is online reality wrong? Of course not. It is the space in which I work, the community to which I often write, with my laptop as my daily tool. Social media has connected me with friends and peers, with good work and life-changing insights. My phone connects me to family and friends scattered around the world. But what concerns me is the way the incessant activity of the virtual world increasingly invades the whole of my daily experience, reshaping my patterns of thought, filling my moments of quiet. I recognize myself in Dana Gioia’s research as one of the people whose long habit of thoughtful reading is being replaced by my time on the screen. To an extent, this is contemporary life. But when I found, a few years ago, that I could no longer even rise in the dawn light without fighting the impulse to check my phone or read for an hour without the need for distraction, I decided to take a break from the online world to see what state my mind would be in after a few weeks away from the online bustle and back in the slower pace of books.
Of course at first the habit of checking phone or screen felt like an itch that I longed to scratch. And the loneliness of my quiet moments cut a good bit deeper in the long silence of writing afternoons or solitary evenings. But I stuck out the weeks by sheer stubbornness, and in the long spaces of quiet, I began to read in earnest. I read a biography of the Brontës (fascinating women). I delved into Island of the World, a novel whose quiet beauty and bared grief left me sitting in a long, long quiet at the end of each chapter. I tried a bit of poetry. I got my early mornings back into their old rhythm, and I read a lot more of my Bible in those quiet times and began the massive undertaking of Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism. What I found was that the echoed words of wise authors helped me to prayer, led me by the hand into silence, and left me there to ponder.
At the end of my break, I checked back in to the world of screens, but I found that they did not grip my attention in the same way. I had a renewed capacity to choose what I would skim or click, to stop when my mind grew weary. In the end, as I evaluated the quiet that seemed to reign again in my thoughts, I realized that my time away from the online world and in the presence of good books had allowed me to reclaim the sovereignty of my own mind. The words I read in slow quiet helped me to regain the direction, rhythm, and source of my thoughts. And that single fact has made me unashamed of standing on soapboxes when it comes to the priceless value of reading and reflecting as activities we must continue to cultivate even amid a world driven by and turning on the presence of screens.
Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, writes that “the Net is, by design, an interruption system. . . . It seizes our attention only to scatter it.” But how do I apply a scrambled attention to the command to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17, NASB)? How do I reconcile the constant mental activity online with God’s ringing directive to “be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10)? How do I choose the one thing needed of sitting at the feet of Christ (Luke 10:42), listening, while giving my brain to the thousand articles and opinions paraded online? These were the questions that prompted my break in the first place. They are the questions that continue to drive my resolve to seek times of reflection and that strengthen my belief in the power of a book in the hand, binding my attention to the unclickable presence of its physical pages, requiring my silence and my fixed attention to help me back toward peace.
That step toward a pondering heart so often begins with reading. I’ve seen this in the life of just about every woman I respect. If there is a single factor common to the people I want to be like when I grow up, whose lives are marked by wisdom, creativity, independence of thought, and centered peace, it is their daily and dogged pursuit of quiet, reading, and prayer. Gwen, my tante, in whose home I have spent countless special days, begins each morning of my visits with fragrant coffee in china cups, an open Bible, and a pile of books from which she can’t wait to read me the wonders she has recently discovered. Phyllis, my mentor and adopted grandmother, greets me each time I visit with a table set for tea and a Bible on the arm of her chair. “Look at this, Sarah,” she’ll say, pointing out some quote or verse, alert to its power to shape and change our lives.
The women my own age whom I admire are the same: Mari, my brilliant academic friend and kindred spirit, reads me snippets of Mary Oliver as we walk in the sprawling parks of Oxford between her speaking engagements; Jenny, my former housemate and bosom friend, read me Wendell Berry love poems at my bridal shower; and Katrina, that best and oldest friend, sends quotes in her letters from all the old books we love even as her tiny daughter squirms nearby.
These are my models of women who ponder, women whose souls are rooted in the wise words and quiet they have grown in their chosen hours of reading. I know that in my yearly sojourn with Anne Morrow Lindbergh, I’m keeping company with a bevy of book girls who are on their way to what Anne describes as the “state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God.”[4]