Summer Reading

What if the right summer novel could help you see your everyday life in 3D? This reflection explores how stories help us come more fully alive to the moment we’re already in.

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The 7/20 Sunday Morning Café Event is officially SOLD OUT!

Thank you for the incredible response to our very first in-person gathering on July 20 — we can’t wait to see everyone!

Missed your chance to register? Good news: The next Sunday Morning Café Event is happening on Sunday, September 21—and registration is now open!

Get your ticket for SMC 9/21.

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A great deal of my attention went into preparing our SMC Event this week. As a result, I thought I’d pull up a favorite old article from last year about a subject that is as breezy and fun as a summer’s afternoon in the shade with a cold drink. Enjoy! See you next week! Thanks for reading. – Tom

I’m not sure which version of COVID I caught? The ability of that clever little virus to shape shift around vaccines has to have exhausted the Greek alphabet by now? Less than the flu, but more than a cold, whatever version I’ve been hosting, kindly delivered last week’s five-day vacation/retreat. Fortunately for me, I discovered my public library’s version of books on tape a while back (i.e., Hoopla). From the comfort of my sickbed, I was able to download two of Wendell Berry’s novels set in his semi-autobiographical farm community of Port William, Kentucky.

Berry’s plot lines were perfect for my COVID consciousness. They move at a pace similar to a baseball game. Like E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, his lush descriptions of rural farm life move as deliberately as the river that runs out on the edge of his semi-autobiographical community of Port William. If I accidentally drifted away for a minute, I’d miss stunningly beautiful writing—more poetry than prose—but the plot would always graciously await my return—just like a summer’s afternoon baseball game on KMOX.  

About five days into the recovery process, I felt healthy enough to take our dog for her morning walk in the wooded park behind our house. By then, the remnants of Hurricane Beryl had stalled over the Midwest, delivering a slow, steady, drenching rain. As I stood, leash in hand, a scene from the novel, Jayber Crow, re-animated my imagination. In it, the narrator described how rowing his boat in the rain was magical, despite his being soaked to the skin. Fortified with that frame of meaning, Winnie and I launched ourselves into a soaked park for a half an hour of magic!

It was in the midst of that walk when I noticed myself getting younger. Splashing around with my standard poodle reminded me of my college introduction to St. Louis, when Dan Bergbower and Jerry Meier, and I decided to go for a mid-summer night’s romp in the rain. If Wendell Berry were sharing the memory that surfaced on my walk, he’d want you to know about Dan Bergbower’s laugh. A cross between a whoop and a cackle, Dan had a laugh that could shatter crystal. On that soggy adventure decades ago, sweeping soccer kicks of water would activate that laugh, accompanied by a string of good-natured curses. In a move suggestive of his future priestly vocation, Dan would grab hold of a wet branch, pull it back like a slingshot, and let it fly like an aspergillum right into our unsuspecting faces—cackling like a whole tree full of crows!  

Far from taking me away from the moment I was enjoying with Winnie, my poodle, that memory somehow made me more present to it. I’m hoping that’s how old age will work.  In his beautiful book of reflections, Anam Cara, John O’Donahue described how attributing “memory” to computers is a misnomer. They are capable of information storage. But memory? Only people can do that. The gift of aging, according to him, is that accumulation of memories which has the power to insert you more powerfully into the multi-layered texture of this time and this place that may well contain a little more unforeseen magic for you.

Come to find out, a good summer’s novel can function like a treasured memory, inserting you more vividly into the here and now moment. When I conduct a little epistemic surgery on my walk in the rain, what emerges is a daisy chain of inner events that opened me to an enchanting morning. Wendell Berry’s imagination gave me a kind of encouragement to step beyond my comfort into the rain. Once on my adventure, I was looking through the lens of his lush writing, revealing a brand new three-dimensional landscape that I’d been walking through and around for twenty years! Fully immersed in this Transcendent moment, a doorway into a similar Holy landscape from decades earlier graciously yawned open. The passage through it miraculously did not remove me from the here and now moment; it only enhanced it. It was almost as if, in those woods between the worlds, I could titrate the delight of forty years ago into my current adventure.  

Spiritual reading, biographies, documentaries, and self-help books all have their rightful places and purposes! But for my money, a profoundly well-written piece of summer fiction that carries real meaning in it is like Mary Poppins’ “spoonful of sugar” that “makes the medicine go down in the most delightful way.”

Dialogue and Discussion Questions: Longtime SMC readers know that “the Dialogue” section of this article is set aside for a good conversation over a cup of coffee—with a friend, with a group, or just with yourself! As always, feel free to share your reaction or reflection in the “Comments” section below.

• Surface and reflect upon significant novels in your life from the various segments of your life, starting with childhood fiction to the present moment. Be sure to include in your conversation how the book affected you. What subtle changes did it add to the way you see life?

  
  

• Who are some authors you’ve always wanted to read? Can you schedule time this summer to check out one of their books or audiobooks?

  
  

• Have you ever been tempted to write? If you did, what would the story be about?

  
  

• What was a significant chapter in your life’s story? Find someone who is an excellent story listener, and ask them to hear this chapter in your story all the way through. Ask them what they heard in your story. What struck them as memorable? As they listened, what significant aspects of you did this story shine a light on…as they heard it? A good story listener will often pick up things in the story of your life that you hadn’t thought of….  

  
  

• If you two are up for it, switch roles.    

  
  

Please share with the SMC community your thoughts and/or reflections in the comments below.