Simple pleasures... and books

I'm back to reading Dr. Robin R. Meyers' book, Morning Sun on a White Piano: Simple Pleasures and the Sacramental Life (Doubleday 1998, ISBN 0-385-48954-4). His third chapter begins:

Children's books are now edible. This is a fairly recent development, and a very sensible one. With cardboard pages and rounded edges, these board books (or chunky books, as they're called) can be gnawed on and slobbered over in lieu of actually being read. It occurs to me that this is not only a good idea for babies, but the perfect analogy for the importance of reading in life--long after the impulse to cut teeth has faded. Because no matter what our age, we ought never to stop eating books, for books are the feast of the imagination (p.27).

I've had a long love affair with books, and for the past eight years, I've kept a list of the ones I have read. Each year I go through my list to name my own "book of the year," usually a book that has moved me or stretched me in unexpected directions, or has stuck in my brain for one reason or another. Here are the last eight "books of the year," just in case you're looking for something to read during these long, dark winter nights:

2002 Rush Home Road, a fabulous story by Lori Lansens, an amazing Canadian writer. The final scene of the book is my favourite picture of heaven, ever.

2003 84 Charing Cross Road, by Helen Hanff. A book about book lovers writing letters. It didn't disappoint!

2004 Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver. Some of her beautiful images and ideas stay with me yet. Had I kept my book list in 2000, I suspect her The Poisonwood Bible would have been my book that year.

2005 Stepping Lightly: Simplicity for People and the Planet by Mark A. Burch. Most of my reading consists of library books, but this one I own by necessity, as I return to it again and again.

2006 The Time Travellers Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. It was recently made into a movie that somehow, I can't bring myself to watch. Hollywood has ways of messing up a really good book (except for The Lord of the Rings, but that's another story for another day.)

2007 Morning Sun on a White Piano: Simple Pleasures and the Sacramental Life. Have I sung Dr. Robin Meyers' praises enough yet?

2008 Clementine by Sara Pennypacker. A favourite among my favourites, and a children's book to boot. If you're looking for the perfect Christmas present for an eight year old girl, or the mom of an eight year old girl, this is it. It will be the subject of a future moodling, I suspect.

2009 The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak. An unexpectedly moving story, recommended to me by my eldest daughter.

I won't supply publishers or ISBNs for any of these, as I'm sure they can be found through libraries or the internet, and I only keep track of authors and titles on my book list. Last week, while my youngest had the flu, we read The Enormous Egg (by Oliver Butterworth) together, and I relived my childhood a little. There are so many books that I would love to share with my girls, but for memory loss -- why didn't I start my book list when I was younger? For example, today the name Mrs. Medlock came unbidden into my head, and I couldn't place it. Of course, she is the head housekeeper at Misselthwaite Manor in Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, another magical book. And Julia discovered The Hundred Dresses (a fantastic little story about bullying written by Eleanor Estes in 1944) without my recommendation. I'm racking my brain for a book about a little Jewish girl that I absolutely loved, but that's the extent of my clues on that one. If you have any recollections in that regard, please let me know.

I've always preferred reading to TV and movies, especially when violence is part of the story. I never understood why that was until I read Robin Meyers' explanation further on in his chapter on books:

... by far the most important thing that books provide us is the best means for developing the most vital human faculty: the imagination. Words can describe, but it takes a reader to conjure up images, to shape them, and, if necessary, to censor them. Our children are committing too many physical crimes these days because too many visual crimes have been committed against them. Graphic images of violence are being hung in the gallery of their minds without first being checked at the door. The people who bring us "special effects" have a moral responsibility not to "burn" such things into psychic places that were meant to stay green.

Unlike the visual arts, books leave us humanely in charge of that process by which images move from type to flesh. Sadly, our society mocks this process with the pejorative phrase, "It's only your imagination." But what else can save us, if not this silent essential transportation of the soul? Most human cruelty would be eliminated if people had the capacity to imagine. As a prerequisite to empathy, imagination makes kindness possible by allowing us to inhabit the skins we weren't born in. Lack of imagination, on the other hand, makes the inflicting of pain, in all its forms, possible...." (pp. 31-32)

So here's my own little tribute to the compassion that comes from the imagination awakened by books, borrowing a lot of words from one of my favourites. Here's to many feasts of the imagination, including the one my husband is having at the moment as he plows through the second half of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

And while I'm at it, I'll put in a plug for local libraries rather than buying books. Books are like great scenery or live music -- they're meant to be shared, not hoarded.

Favourite book of 2010? The jury is still out, but I suspect my favourite will be A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life by Donald Miller. A quirky, funny, challenging little book that makes me want to be a better person. Then again, I'm reading Robin R. Meyers' latest work, and it may steal first place... but that's another moodling for another day.

Seven simple words

"Preach the Gospel; use words if necessary."

This is one of my favourite quotes, often attributed to St. Francis, though no one really knows from where it comes. Seven simple words that underline the importance of a life well lived. Our lives say more about what we believe than we can ever say. What we do carries more weight than who we pretend to be.

No one has taught me this more clearly than my own daughters. Children, especially when they reach the teen years, scrutinize their parents more carefully than they do themselves (and they definitely scrutinize themselves -- one of my daughters has been known to change her clothes four times before leaving home for the day). We parents can't get away with the slightest hypocrisy. And I guess that is just the way of things, and probably, the way things should be.

In Morning Sun on a White Piano: Simple Pleasures and the Sacramental Life (Doubleday 1998, ISBN 0-385-48954-4), Dr. Robin R. Meyers puts it this way:

If you have children, consider parenthood a high and holy art, until death parts you from their constant gaze. Remember that children crave limits and secretly thrive on a wholesome kind of discipline. They will learn to navigate time, to cherish tenderness, to temper judgment, to remember birthdays, to defend the weak, to notice beauty, to endure inequity, to preserve humility in success and integrity in failure, to care about ideas, to be generous, and to be faithful -- all by watching the sermon that is their parents' lives. (pp 42-43)

Even though I've known these seven simple words for my entire parenthood, I've never thought of my life as a sermon for my girls. But I think they're doing okay in the above categories, so I must be, too, mostly...

How's your life's sermon going?

Simple pleasures... and less TV

I'm rereading one of my favourite books. I don't often reread a book, simply because in the face of how many wonderful books there are, there are too many that I haven't read! But this one's simplicity and poetry makes me return to it from time to time, to savour its contents with a sigh of pleasure. It reminds me of the things I appreciate in life.

It's written by Dr. Robin R. Meyers, and it's called Morning Sun on a White Piano: Simple Pleasures and the Sacramental Life (Doubleday 1998, ISBN 0-385-48954-4). I think I love it so much because Dr. Meyers speaks so beautifully of things that I love: conversation, music, books, parenting, pets, letter-writing, living the moment, romance, mercy, freedom, activity, and anticipation. By the time I've finished reading, it's hard to think of a single pleasure that he has missed.

Here's a wee taste from the first chapter:

Conversation is the currency of passion; it is the courier of concern. To be listened to, really listened to, and to be heard is so fundamental to the renewal of intimacy that it has become the desperate refrain of our time (p. 9).

Dr. Meyers goes on to prescribe that we cut the cord on our TVs, to be entertained less and to talk more about important things, even (gasp!) religion and politics, because that's how values are shared and relationship is sustained. He's totally right.

When our family was small, we banished our TV to a solitary life in the basement. It might get used briefly once or twice a week, if that. The rest of the time, we enjoy lively kitchen table conversation without commercial interruption, and all three of our girls have turned into bookworms, tinkerers, artists and musicians. They are also less consumption-oriented than a lot of young people their age who let television tell them what to wear and how to look and act.

Robin Meyers' book is stuffed with wonderful suggestions for living more simply and joyfully. I've picked up two copies through Abebooks.com (a highly recommended online site that allows me to avoid the temptation of bookstores by buying used books rather than new) for friends of mine. If the library loses this copy, I'll have to pick up a third. It's that good.