Books that Mean Something

Today is Lazarus Saturday, which means that it is the two-year anniversary (liturgically), since becoming Orthodox. It is also the day that my church does a deep clean. We do not have a janitorial staff. Rather, every week, certain families rotate the responsibility of doing some simple work around the church, after liturgy (mass, if you prefer). Lazarus Saturday, however, is spring-cleaning. Today, several of us got together to celebrate the liturgy, and commemorate Christ's raising of Lazarus, and then we scrubbed, swept, dusted, mopped, and sweated a bit. My job consisted of changing the light-bulbs in the chandeliers, and then dusting all the high places with a webster, which was mounted on a very long, extendable pole.

Having done this, I asked my priest if there was anything more to do. So he had me join him in the sacristy to scrub down some counter-tops. While there, I mentioned that I was reminded today, during the reading of today's gospel (John 11:1-45), of a verse that impressed me soon after I graduated from college. A good friend of mine, and one of my professors, sat me down in his office one day and told me how important it was for me to compile a list of books that I must read before I die. He helped me, of course. Yet he faltered over one book: A Prayer for Owen Meaney, by John Irving. He said that he hates recommending this book because he is afraid that it will not have the same impact on his friends that it does on him. Yet he mentioned it to me, and I put it on my list.

Make no mistake. This is an amazing book, and yet I am not sure everybody should read it. I think that it is a book to be read by people who have felt the pain, or are feeling the pain of desiring a genuine faith, but being unable to find it within one's own context. This book will not teach a person who to be a better Christian, but it reminds us of the beginning point of our faith - that moment between belief and ownership.

In the gospel reading, Jesus tells a grieving Martha, "your brother will rise again." In response, she explains that she knows all about that; that she understands that someday there will be a resurrection of the dead. I imagine a little bit of frustration in her voice as she says this, reciting a lesson, the object of which is far off and obscure. Then Jesus says those words that should be remembered during every funeral service: "I am the resurrection and the life. He who abideth in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die." This is the theme from Irving's book that stood out to me during that first summer in Modesto, five years ago. I didn't realize the scriptural context, then. Owen Meaney read it out of The Book of Common Prayer (a clerk at a local, Christian bookstore asked me for the name of the author, once).

I mentioned this to my priest - how I had read the verse in Owen Meaney, but didn't make the connection right away, but that I had re-discovered it when I read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. When I read it, this last summer, the book did not make much sense to me until Sonya, the young woman sold into prostitution by her father read to Rodya, the tortured killer, this very same gospel passage. I remarked to my priest that I have never run across a Russian novel that was not a winner.

After joking about the possibility that climate might be a factor, he said that he believed it is their Orthodox faith that allows them to produce literature with such richness (He said much more, but out of fairness to him, I will confine myself to my own thoughts). A light went on for me, because it has always bothered me when I saw Christian writers and musical talents copying the style of a "secular" artist. Our faith is the ultimate faith, so why isn't our art at the fore?

I'll leave that discussion for you to have with yourself, and I will keep the rest of the details of my conversation a secret for the time being. But now I have new reason to stew on John Keats' conclusion to his "Ode on a Grecian Urn:"

Truth is beauty; beauty, truth.
That is all ye know on earth,
And all ye need to know.

-Rob