Over the last few years, especially when I moved out of my study at First Baptist Church of Asheville, I’ve culled hundreds of books from my personal library.
During Lent this year, I took a critical look at the ones I still had and thinned-out the mixed herd.
I immediately decided to keep books given to me by other people because the inscriptions by these friends mean even more to me than the content of the books.
Where the other books were concerned, I used questions inspired by Marie Kondo’s The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up: Have I opened this book in the last year or so? Even if it was once important to me, am I likely to read this book again?
This time, I let go of books which had meant a lot to me. Among them were almost all the books by Harry Emerson Fosdick which I’d painstakingly collected over the years. I kept only his autobiography, For the Living of These Days. Fosdick, founding pastor of the Riverside Church in NYC, was a pivotal figure in American progressive Christianity; at one time, his writings were a lifeline for me.
I gave away books by Frederick Buechner, Fred Craddock, Stanley Hauerwas, Douglas John Hall, and Jurgen Moltmann. Though I kept Buechner’s memoirs, Craddock’s As One without Authority¸ Hauerwas’ Gifford Lectures and his autobiography, Hall’s Lighten Our Darkness, and Moltmann’s The Crucified God and The Church in the Power of the Holy Spirit, scores of others by these authors are gone.
I no longer have the short stories of J.F. Powers, the novels of Graham Greene (except The Power and the Glory and A Burnt-Out Case) or essays by Annie Dillard (other than The Writing Life and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek).
It was hard to part with these books. I haven’t lost the content, since I have extensive notes from most of them; and the heart of my library will still provide the oxygen of inspiration when I need it, especially since I kept all the poets, every volume of Wendell Berry’s writings, and all the children’s books.
The difficulty was, in part, that these books had been friends and companions along the journey. As I flipped through their pages, I could remember where I was as I read them and what was going on in my life. Marginal notes and underscoring reminded me of questions I’d asked and guidance I’d been grateful to receive.
I was also painfully relinquishing part of identity which was bound up with those books. Many of them had been central to my vocation and crucial to my faith. To give them away was to acknowledge that these things have changed and will continue to change.
As I face-off with tighter limits and the nearing of a once-far horizon, my calling isn’t to accumulate more knowledge but to offer whatever wisdom I’ve managed, often in spite of myself, to mine from the veins of my mind and heart.
These days, I’m feeling a good deal of loss, so the ritual of downsizing my library helped. I feel lighter and clearer.
There is more space.
I want it to be filled and to flow with love.
As I sit here reading this I am surrounded by books that I’ve read, books I’m reading, and books I want to read, although there are so many of those I guess I will need to ask if it’s okay for me to take them with me to the Next Place. I’m hoping books are allowed there if God is okay with that. A fair number of the books I own are thanks to you. Barnes and Noble should pay you a commission on the books that I (and I’m sure others) have purchased because you mentioned them in a sermon or in a Bible study or in a conversation. For your voracious appetite for books and knowledge and for your passion for sharing what you’ve learned, I and others are richer people. Thank you for that. Some day, I expect I will be doing what you are doing, assuming my children have no interest in the many books I’ve given a home to, but they would prefer that I send them on to another place to live. As I read this I imagined you taking each one of those treasures in hand, recalling those memories of when and where and why you read them, the ways that you interacted and conversed with them, and then deciding whether to return them to the place they’ve been living or to pass them on to a new home with a friend who will love and appreciate them in their own ways. I think one of the hardest things about life is knowing what to keep and carry and knowing what to let go of and when to do that. But, even in the letting go of the physical there will always be a part of those collections of words that will stay with you because they are part of who you are. That is the gift they gave and you get to keep for all time. Again, I thank you for the ways that you have shared and continue to share your knowledge and wisdom, your faith and your goodness with me and with so many folks. Peace, Lynnette
Lynnette, thank you for this beautiful response to my post. it mean a great deal to me. Like you, I hope that there are books in the Next Place. I’m also hoping for a lot of still-unanswerd questions, higher mysteries, and deeper joys. Somehow, I feel that the process of becoming and growing continues. Again, thank you.
Everything I want to say, Lynnette – in her ever present eloquence – has already said. Blessing my friend.
Thank you, Cathy. Blessings to you, too!
I retired ten years ago and I am still in this process. I know exactly, even to some of the same books, what you are going through.
I suspect we’ll be sorting through the remaining books until we can’t! Thanks, David.
You are a better man than I. But it was Lent, so I undetstand. Except Fosdick, I don’t undetstand that, but…
Letting the Fosdick books go was hard. . . Not sure I understand either!