My 2023 Reading

 Those in bold are this year's top ten: 

January

1. Jocelyn Brooke, The Orchid Trilogy
2. Ocean Yuong, On Earth We're Briefly Beautiful
3. Katherine May, The Electricity of Every Living Thing
4. Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera, The Awakening of Miss Prim 
5. Natalia Ginzburg, Happiness, as Such 
6. Valentine Low, Courtiers: The hidden power behind the crown 
7. Mary Renault, The Last of the Wine 
8. Tom Crewe, The New Life 

February

1. Sean Hewitt, All Down Darkness Wide
2. Tim Chester, Truth We Can Touch: How Baptism and Communion Shape Our Lives 
3. John Moore, The Water Under the Earth
4. James Salter, Last Night: Stories
5. DA Carson (Ed.), Worship by the Book

March 

1. Wendell Berry, How It Went: Thirteen more stories of the Port William Membership 
2. Christine Barnabas, Consecrated Celibacy: A Fresh Look at an Ancient Calling 
3. Mary Renault, The King Must Die 
4. Patrick Ness, Different for Boys 
5. Frederick Buechner, Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought to Say): Four Who Wrote in Blood
6. Mary Renault, The Bull from the Sea
7. Gregg A Ten Elshof, I Told Me So: self-deception and the Christian life

April 

1. John Mark Comer, Live No Lies: Recognize and Resist the Three Enemies That Sabotage Your Peace 
2. Barbara Pym, The Sweet Dove Died 

May 

1. Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
2. Arnold Bennett, Clayhanger 
3. John Carey, A Little History of Poetry 
4. Collin Hansen, Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation 
5. Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 
6. Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life
7. Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost 
8. David Gibson, Radically Whole: Gospel healing for the divided heart 
9. Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow 
10. Sean O'Nan, Ocean State 
11. Philippe Besson, In the Absence of Men
12. Mary Renault, The Praise Singer

June

1. Matthew P W Roberts, Pride: Identity and the worship of self 
2. Jonathan Rauch, Denial: My 25 years without a soul 
3. David McCullough, 1776: America and Britain at War 
4. Douglas Stuart, Young Mungo 
5. David Haynes, Right By My Side 
6. Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside 

July

1. Claire Keegan, Foster
2. Eve Tushnet, Tenderness: A Gay Christian's Guide to Unlearning Rejection and Experiencing God's Extravagant Love 
3. Ted Sorensen, Counselor: A life at the edge of history
4. Niamh Campbell, We Were Young
5. Elizabeth Strout, Lucy by the Sea

August 

1. Tony Horsfall, Spiritual Growth in a Time of Change: Following God in midlife
2. Christopher Landau, Loving Disagreement: The problem is the solution  
3. Roger Preece, Understanding and Using Power: Leadership without Corrupting Your Soul 
4. Adrian Bell, The Cherry Tree
5. Peter F Drucker, Managing Oneself 
6. Maggie O'Farrell, I am, I am, I am
7. Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles
8. Rachel Cusk, Outline

September

1. CS Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
2. CS Lewis, Prince Caspian 
3. CS Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
4. CS Lewis, The Horse and His Boy
5. CS Lewis, The Silver Chair
6. CS Lewis, The Magician's Nephew
7. CS Lewis, Mere Christianity 
8. CS Lewis, The Last Battle 
9. Hua Hsu, Stay True: A Memoir
10. Annie Dillard, The Writing Life 
11. Margaret Laurence, A Jest of God
12. Tim Chester, Enjoying God: Experience the power and love of God in everyday life
13. Dominic Sandbrook, Who Dares Wins: Britain, 1979-1982
14. Alistair Gordon, Why Art Matters
15. Penelope Fitzgerald, The Beginning of Spring

October 

1. Gregory E Ganssle, Our Deepest Desires: How the Christian Story Fulfills Human Aspirations
2. Malcolm Guite, Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God  
3. Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans [Audiobook]
4. Annie Dillard, The Living: A Novel 
5. Karen Swallow Prior, The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images & Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis 

November 

1. Michael Green, Baptism: Its purpose, practice and power 
2. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
3. Winifred Peck, House-Bound
4. Tom Wright, The Meal Jesus Gave Us: Understanding Holy Communion  
5. John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to stay emotionally healthy and spiritually alive in the chaos of the modern world 
6. Rory Stewart, Politics On the Edge [Audiobook] 

December

1. Mary Renault, The Mask of Apollo
2. Victor Heringer, The Love of Singular Men
3. Julia Strachey, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
4. Zachary Wagner, Non-Toxic Masculinity: Recovering healthy male sexuality 
5. Tim Chester, Fixated: Advent meditations from the book of Hebrews 
6. David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
7. JRR Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring [Audiobook] 
8. Arnold Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns

THE GREAT FAIRY-STORY

'The Gospels contain a fairy-story, a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels - peculiarly artistic, beautiful and moving; 'mythical' in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfilment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. The story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the 'inner consistency of reality'. There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of the Primary Art, that is Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.'

JRR Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories in The Monster and the Critics, p.155.

THE HOPE IN FAIRY STORIES

'The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous 'turn' (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially 'escapist', nor 'fugitive'. In its fairy-tale - or otherworld - setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

It is the mark of a good fairy story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to the child or man that hears it, when the 'turn' comes, a catch of breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given my any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality.'

JRR Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, p.153.

SUCCESSFUL FRIENDSHIP

'Successful friendship, like successful therapy, is a balance of deference and defiance. It involves showing positive regard, but also calling people on their self-deceptions.'

David Brooks, How to Know a Person, p.257.

WRITING IS ACTUALLY READING

'The writer David Lodge once noted that 90 percent of what we call writing is actually reading. It's going back over your work so you can change and improve it.'

David Brooks, How to Know a Person, p.167.

DEPRESSION DEFINED

'..malfunction of the instrument we use to determine reality...'

Michael Gerson in David Brooks, How to Know People, p.128.

POWER DYNAMICS

'Remember that the person who is lower in any power structure than you has a greater awareness of the situation than you do. A servant knows more about his master than the master knows about the servant. Someone who is being sat on knows a lot more about the sitter - the way he shifts his weight and moves - whereas the sitter may not be aware that the sat-on person is even there.'

David Brooks, How to Know a Person, p.115.

EACH PERSON IS A MYSTERY

'Each person is a mystery. And when you are surrounded by mysteries, as the saying goes, it's best to live life in the from of a question.'

David Brooks, How to Know a Person, p.93.

A GOOD CONVERSATION

'A good conversation is an act of joint exploration. Somebody floats a half-formed idea. Somebody else seizes on the nub of the idea, plays with it, offers her own perspective based on her memories, and floats it back so the other person can respond. A good conversation sparks yo to have thoughts you have never had before. A good conversation starts in one place and ends up in another.'

David Brooks, How to Know a Person, p.73.

EVERY PERSON AN ARTIST

'Every person you meet is an artist who takes the events of life and, over time, creates a very personal way of seeing the world.'

David Brooks, How to Know a Person, p.64.

SIMPLISTIC DESCRIPTIONS

One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some a particular way - said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but very river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy, or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently he is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.'

Leo Tolstoy in David Brooks, How to Know a Person, p.36.

LIFE SKILLS

'The real act of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: disagreeing without poisoning the relationship; revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to end a conversation gracefully; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to sit with someone who is suffering; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another's point of view.

These are some of the most important skills a human being can possess, and yet we don't teach them in school. Some days it seems like we have intentionally built a society that gives people little guidance of how to perform the most important activities of life.'

David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, p.8.

TRUE COMPLEMENTARIANISM?

'Any human endeavor done without the input, support, and cooperation of both sexes is not a fully human endeavor.'

Zachary Wagner, Non-Toxic Masculinity: recovering healthy male sexuality, p.180.

THE POWER OF THE SYMBOLIC

'...symbolic actions are among the most powerful things in the world...'
Tom Wright, The Meal Jesus Gave Us: Understanding Holy Communion, p.59.

SELF-KNOWLEDGE

'We're all of us the better for seeing a caricature of ourselves now and again!'
Winifred Peck, House-Bound, p.244.

EVERYONE INTERPRETS

'Wrong interpretation is dangerous, and we must strive to avoid it. But lack of awareness that one is interpreting and that one interprets in community, within a tradition, is more dangerous. It is a danger to which evangelicals - with all their innovations and individualism - are particularly prone.'

Karen Swallow Prior, The Evangelical Imagination, p.255.

THE EVANGELICAL CRISIS OF CREDIBILITY

'If the Reformation was a crisis of authority - one that rightly gave the highest authority to the Bible rather than the priests - then this reckoning (or perhaps even a new reformation) is one of credibility: Do we who profess to believe in the authority of the Word present ourselves as credible witnesses of that Way, Truth, and that Life?'

Karen Swallow Prior, The Evangelical Imagination, p.231.

EVANGELICALISM & IMPERIALISM

'...the spread of the gospel during the missionary age is so intertwined with the West's expansion through imperialism that it is almost impossible to imagine an evangelical movement that is not an empire-building enterprise, not a movement rooted in political and cultural domination, and not propagated by the power of money, business, and capitalism rather than the power of the Holy Spirit. (It is almost, but not quite, impossible to imagine such a movement; it is possible because such a movement is there in Scripture in the early church.'

Karen Swallow Prior, The Evangelical Imagination, p.200.

UBELIEVABLE DEATH

'Of course, he had always known he was going to die. He never, however, believed it.'

Annie Dillard, The Living: A Novel, p.323.

WHEN POWER GOES UNDERGROUND

'The failure to recognize power that doesn't look like power creates conditions ripe for the abuse of power.'
Karen Swallow Prior, The Evangelical Imagination, p.148.

THE POWER OF METAPHOR

'Metaphors are hard.

To discover similarities, to find connections once unseen, comprises some of the holiest work we can do as human beings, for it is a work of reconciliation. But this truth also entails the obverse: making wrong connections can be as dangerous as attaching the wrong cable clamp to the wrong battery terminal.'

Karen Swallow Prior, The Evangelical Imagination: How stories, Images & Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis, p.49. 

WE NEED THEOLOGIANS & POETS

'...when we seek to enter into the mystery of our faith we must call the poets to the table as well as the theologians.'

Malcolm Guite, Lifting the Veil, p.51

WHAT YOU SEE IN THE SUN

'"When the Sun rises, do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?"
O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, "Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty."
William Blake in Malcolm Guite, Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God, p.14.

UNION WITH GOD

'Union with God, in Christian thinking, is not a dissolving of the self. Union is not the absorption and dissolution of the human being into the substance of God. On the contrary, the human person is never more herself as when she is closest to God. The presence of God is a personal presence. It is an intimacy of relationship between two ontologically distinct persons. It is an intimacy that is closer than relationships between two human beings. God knows each human being perfectly. God also knows without measure. To be known and yet to be loved is the foundation of intimacy.'

Gregory E Granssle, Our Deepest Desires, p.130.

HOPE DEFINED

'Real hope involves a confident vision of my future prospects as good.'
Gregory E Ganssle, Our Deepest Desires, p.123.

BEAUTY GREETS US

'Beauty presents itself to us. We do not look for beauty as if it were a static thing waiting to be found. Beauty encounters us. It is the beautiful that initiates, that moves, that captures our attention. We do not make the first step. Beauty, in some sense, seeks us. We may put ourselves in places that leave us open to beauty, but it is the beautiful that acts on us.'

Gregory E Ganssle, Our Deepest Desires, p.74.

THE PROBLEM OF GOODNESS

'Perhaps goodness is invisible because we expect it to be there. We expect the world to be good and our lives to be rewarding. It is only when something interferes with the goodness that we are startled into noticing. Evil is an intrusion into the normal. When something intrudes, we want to know why. When nothing intrudes, we do not ask questions about why things are the way they are,. It is not until the normal is disturbed that we begin looking for explanations.

The expectation that things will be good makes it easy for us to forget that we ought to seek an account for the existence of goodness as well as evil.'

Gregory E Canssle, Our Deepest Desires: How the Christian Story Fulfills Human Aspirations, p.54.

HOW ART HELPS

'Art is the poem that finds the words when all other words fail. Art is the painting that knows the colour of our grief. Art is the actor identifies with us and says, "Yes - this is happening and it might not be OK.'"

Alastair Gordon, Why Art Matters, p.92.

BEAUTY & TRUTH

'We often hear it said that all truth is God's truth. By the same token, we might also say that all beauty is God's beauty...'

Alastair Gordon, Why Art Matters, p.78.

CHRISTIANITY & ART

Christianity...never leaves us in any doubt about what art is for: it is a medium to remind us about what matters. It exists to guide us to what we should worship and revile if we wish to be sane. It is a mechanism whereby our memories are forcibly jogged about what we should draw away from and be afraid of.'

Alain de Botton in Alastair Gordon, Why Art Matters, p.15.

COULD I BE A WRITER?

'A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, "Do you think I could be a writer?"

"Well," the writer said, "I don't know...Do you like sentences?"

The writer could see the student's amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, "I liked the smell of paint."'

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, p.70.

THE CHALLENGES OF WRITING

'I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand, and hope it will get better.

This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress can turn on you.

A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a musing on which you one day fastened a halter, but which you now cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You can visit it every day and reassert you mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, "Simba!"'

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, p.52.

THE MANY CURRENCIES OF FRIENDSHIP

'There are many currencies to friendship. We may be drawn to someone who makes us feel bright and hopeful, someone who can always make us laugh. Perhaps there are friendships that are instrumental, where the lure is concrete and the appeal is what they can do for us. There are friends we talk to only about serious things, others who only make sense in the blitzed merriment of deep night. Some friends complete us, whilst others complicate us.'

Hua Hsu, Stay True: A Memoir, p.44.

THE SELF-INTEREST OF CHRISTIAN SELF-SACRIFICE

'The principle runs through life from top to bottom. Give yourself up and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death or your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end; submit every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find him, and with him everything else thrown in.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.225.

THE RESILIENCE OF CHRISTIANITY

'Again and again it has been thought Christianity was dying, dying by persecutions from without and corruptions from within, by the rise of Mohammedanism, the rise of the physical sciences, the rise of great anti-Christian revolutionary movements. But every time the world has been disappointed. Its first disappointment was over the crucifixion. The Man came to life again. In a sense - and I quite realise how frightfully unfair it must seem to them - that has been happening ever since. They keep on killing the thing that He started: and each time, just as they are down the earth on its grave, they suddenly hear that it is still alive and has even broken out in some new place. No wonder they hate us...'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.222.

THE DAILY STRUGGLE

'...the real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to the other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.198.

THE CHRISTIAN LIFE IN A LINE

'God looks at you as if you were a little Christ; Christ stands beside you to turn you into one.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.193.

DRESSING UP AS JESUS TO PRAY

'Its very first words are Our Father. Do you now see what those words mean? They mean quite frankly, that you are putting yourself in the place of the Son of God. To put it bluntly, you are dressing up as Christ.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.187.

THE TRINITY & PRAYER

'An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get into touch with God. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God - that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying - the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on - the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to the goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.163.

THE LORD'S SUPPER IS A DIVINE KISS

'If baptism is like a wedding, then communion is like a kiss. It's the reaffirmation of love. Christ comes close to reassure us of his love. He comes close to kiss us.'

Tim Chester, Enjoying God, p.105.

GOD'S SOVERIGNTY OVER SUFFERING

'...he told how he had never known his real father or mother and had been brought up sternly by the fisherman. And then he told the story of his escape and how they were chased by lions and forced to swim for their lives; and of all their dangers in Tashbaan and about his night among the tombs and how the beasts howled at him out of the desert. And he told about the heat and thirst of their desert journey and how they were almost at their goal whenever lion chased them and wounded Aravis. And also, how very long it was since he had had anything to eat.

"I do not call you unfortunate," said the Large Voice.

"Don't you think it was bad luck to meet so many lions?"

"There was only one lion," said the Voice.

"What on earth do you mean? I've just told you there were at least two the first night, and -"

"There was only one: but he was swift of foot."

"How do you know?"

"I was the lion." And as Shasta gasped with open mouth and said nothing, the Voice continued. "I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the Horses the new strength of fear for the last mile so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.'"

CS Lewis, The Horse and His Boy, p.129.

GOD THE SCUPLTOR

'This world is a great sculptor's shop. We are the statues and there is a rumour going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.159.

FAITH OR WORKS?

'Christians have often disputed as to whether what leads the Christian home is good actions, or Faith in Christ. I have no right really to speak on such a difficult question, but it does seem to me like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most necessary. A serious moral effort is the only thing will bring you to the point where you throw up the sponge. Faith in Christ is the only thing that can save you from despair at this point: and out of that Faith in Him good actions must inevitably come.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.148.

FROM HIM ALL BLESSINGS FLOW

'Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already. So that when we talk of a man doing anything for God or giving anything to God, I will tell you what it is really like. It is like a small child going to its father and saying, "Daddy, please give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present." Of course, the father does, and he is pleased with the child's present. It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.143.

FAITH DEFINED

'Faith...is the art of holding onto things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.140.

GOD'S LOVE FOR US MATTERS MOST

'On the whole God's love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him. Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair on the will. If we are trying to do His will we are obeying the commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God." He will give us feelings of love if He pleases. We cannot create them for ourselves, and we must not demand them as a right. But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in it's determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to him.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.133.

CHASTITY IS NOT REPRESSION

'When an adolescent or an adult is engaged in resisting a conscious desire, he is not dealing with a repression nor is he in the least danger of creating a repression. On the contrary, those who are seriously attempting chastity are more conscious, and soon know a great deal more about their sexuality than anyone else. They come to know their desires as Wellington knew Napoleon, or as Sherlock Holmes knew Moriarty; as a rat-catcher knows rats or a plumber knows about leaky pipes. Virtue - even attempted virtue - brings light; indulgence brings fog.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.102.

PERSEVERANCE IN GODLINESS

'After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in the worst, for our failures are forgiven. The fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.101.

CHRISTIANITY APPROVES OF THE BODY

'Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body - which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, or beauty and our energy.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.98.

CHRISTIANITY GONE WRONG

'One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting every one else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons - marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.78.

THE ACCESSIBILITY OF CHRISTIANITY

'...one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself.'

CS Lewis, Mere Orthodoxy, p.78.

DON'T BE SCARED OF AUTHORITY

'Do not be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority.'

CS Lewis, Mere Orthodoxy, p.62.

REAL HAPPINESS

'The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.48.

CHURCH AS SABOTAGE

'Enemy-occupied territory - that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in the great campaign of sabotage. When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from our friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.46.

EVIL IS A PARASITE

'...badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled. We call sadism a sexual perversion; but you must have first had the idea of a normal sexuality before you talk of its being perverted...'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.44.

CHRISTIANITY COULD NOT HAVE BEEN MADE UP

'Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing that anyone would have made up.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.41.

BEING TRULY PROGRESSIVE

'We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.28.

ENJOYING GOD

'Our job is to go sunbathing in the Father's love! Close your eyes, sit back in your chair and feel the warmth of his love on your skin.'

Tim Chester, Enjoying God, p.39.

THE WRONG BOOKS

'...Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.'

CS Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, p.70.

MISCARRIAGES MATTER

'It is not ordinary to conceive a life and then lose it; it's very far from ordinary. These passings should be marked, should be respected, should be given their due. It's a life, however small, however germinal. It's a collection of cells, from you, and in most cases, from someone you love. Yes, of course, worse things happen every day; no one in their right mind would doubt that. But to dismiss a miscarriage as nothing, as something you need to take on the chin and carry on, is to do a disservice to ourselves, to our living children, to those nascent beings that lived only within us, to the person we imagined throughout the short pregnancy, to those ghost children we still carry in our minds, the ones who didn't make it.'

Maggie O'Farrell, I am, I am, I am, p.104.

THE NEED FOR A NEW SIMPLICITY

'Without the pole-star of a new simplicity, it seems to me, civilization will continue by turns at deadlock or mad speed, like a machine out of control which bumps itself from one obstacle to another until it falls to pieces.'

Adrian Bell, The Cherry Tree, p.35.

GOD IS BEAUTY

'God is Beauty, who made all the beauties that pierce our hearts, from the burning autumn moon in rags of black cloud to the laughter of the woman you love. He does not want you to reject beauty. The beauties God has made can remind your intellect of, and prepare your heart to encounter, their Creator. He is beauty's climax and crescendo.'

Eve Tushnet, Tenderness, p.169.

WOMEN SEE MORE

'"Eventualities. A good woman can look far down the line and smell what's coming before a man even gets a sniff of it."'

Claire Keegan, Foster, p.66.

SHAME IS SOMETHING WE CAN DO WITHOUT

'"Where there's a secret," she says, "there's shame - and shame is something we can do without."'

Claire Keegan, Foster, p.21.

THE HUMILITY THAT CAN COME THROUGH BEING GAY

'For many high achieving, self-controlled, virtuous and dutiful homosexuals, the gay thing is the first thing that made them admit that they couldn't order their lives through willpower alone.'

Eve Tushnet, Tenderness, p.113.

A BENEFIT TO BEING GAY

'Though I believe it is sinful to be queer, it has at least saved me from becoming a pillar of the Establishment.'

WH Auden in Eve Tushnet, Tenderness, p.110.

SINGLENESS & SOVEREIGNTY

'I want to suggest that our cultural attachment to ideas of "choice" can make it harder for us to see how God is working in the unchosen circumstances of our lives. When Christians argue that the only good celibacy is "voluntary" celibacy rather than mandated celibacy, they gloss over the degree to which all our choices are constrained by the interaction of circumstances and conviction.'

Eve Tushnet, Tenderness, p.48.

LOVING YOUR NEIGHBOUR

'To love your neighbor is to see your neighbor. To see somebody, to really see somebody, you have to love somebody.'

Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary, p.39.

ART STOPS US IN OUR TRACKS

'...art is saying Stop. It helps us stop by putting a frame around something and makes us see it in a way we would never have seen it under the normal circumstances of living, as so many of us do, on sort of automatic pilot, going through the world without really seeing much of anything.'

Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary, p.23.

SOMETHING TO AIM AT

'My hope is that twenty or thirty years down the line, I will be listening to some young whippersnapper who will say, with no idea that she's saying anything unusual, "Oh, I was raised Christian - so of course I've never doubted that God loved gay people.'"

Eve Tushnet, Tenderness: A Gay Christian's Guide to Unlearning Rejection and Experiencing God's Extravagant Love, p.xxi.

PASTORAL SILENCE

'There are moments when one must not attempt to console, when the word must not be uttered to parents of murdered children. When one should keep one's mouth shut. "In Rama there was a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning., Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not."'

Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature, p.440.

THE POWER OF LITURGY

'How is it that something so repeatedly sung, done, or said can remain so spellbinding? Fragments, mere wisps of liturgy, hang about in our hearts and cannot be exercised by unbelief. Familiarity itself becomes unfamiliar. There is no knowing what is happening. Poets know not to grapple with it. To let it be.'

Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature, p.436. 

THE POWER OF PLACE

'We should cleanse our eyes in scenery - use it like lotion.'
Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature, p.388.

SCRIPTURE IS...

'Scripture is a virtual forest and a simple shade, a bare wood and a glorious orchard.'
Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature, p.136.

RESURRECTION HOPE

'Teach me to live that I may dread,
The grave as little as my bed.'

Thomas Ken in Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A lifetime in the English Countryside, p.134. 

THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS

'Holiness is the most beautiful, lovely thing. Men are apt to drink in strange notions of holiness from their childhood as if it were a melancholy, morose, and unpleasant thing: but there is nothing in it but what is sweet and ravishingly lovely. 'Tis the highest beauty and amiableness, vastly above all beauties; 'tis a divine beauty, makes the soul heavenly and far purer than anything here on earth - this world is like mire and filth and defilement compared to that soul which is sanctified - 'tis of a sweet, lovely, delightful, serene, calm, and still nature.'

Jonathan Edwards in Dane Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life, p.144.

SIN IS FALSE BEAUTY

'Sin is false beauty. It is ugliness masquerading as loveliness.'
Dane Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life, p.144.

POETRY DEFINED

'What is poetry? Poetry relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special, so that it will be remembered and valued.'

John Carey, A Little History of Poetry, p.1.

HOW TO UNDERMINE A FRIENDSHIP

'The way to make friends quarrel is to pit them in disputation under the public eye...'
Thomas Jefferson in Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson, p.173.

HOW TO ESCAPE MALICE

'If you meant to escape malice you should have confined yourself within the sleepy line of regular duty...'
Thomas Jefferson in Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, p.154.

WALKING ADVERTS

'A Christian is a mini-advertisement for divine beauty.'
Dane C Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life, p.30.

THE NATURE OF TEMPTATION

'One way to think about temptation is to see all temptation as the appeal to believe a lie, to believe an illusion about reality.'

John Mark Comer, Live No Lies: Recognize and Resist the Three Enemies That Sabotage Your Peace, p57.

FEELING OTHERS' GRIEF

'One feels another's grief most where it touches one's own.'
Mary Renault, The King Must Die, p.242.

HOW TO GET TO KNOW A CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY

'One of the most interesting things to learn about any Christian community is which passages they allow themselves to quote out of context.'

Gregg A Ter Elshof, I told me so, p.39.

HOW SCIENCE STRUGGLES TO EXPLAIN BEAUTY

'The great power of evolution, through natural and sexual selection alike, is that so much order can be created without the process needing to go anywhere at all. This is why it explains so much and so little at once - and why at the end it really is not all that satisfying, because it says little about the precise nature of the beauty that surrounds us. Perhaps the most important things are those about which the least can be said. Was science never meant to capture wonder?'

David Rothenberg, Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science and Evolution, p.45.

INSTINCTIVE RECOGNITION OF BEAUTY

'He did not say to himself that it was beautiful. He felt, he recognized, the beauty of it in his flesh...'
Wendell Berry, How It Went: Thirteen more stories of the Port William Membership, p.27.

COURTESY

'...she had courtesy, which implied a great deal more than civility and good manners. It meant that while being completely yourself, you were all the time helping the other person to be himself, through your appreciation of his point of view, your respect for his individuality, your sensibility, and your quick awareness of how he thought and felt and what he was.'

John Moore, The Waters Under the Earth, p.239.

THE POLITICAL STRUCTURE OF ENGLAND

'"I've got a theory about the political structure of England...I believe that fundamentally it's a matter of Cavalier and Roundhead still. The argument ended when the king's head came off; but the attitudes remain. I believe that the two opposing attitudes are still the main sources of all our political thought and behaviour. Sometimes the pull is one way, sometimes another; but between them they dictate our policies and legislation....

It isn't a question of one side being better than the other," he went on. "In the long run I dare say there's been just as much courage, honour and political genius demonstrated by the puritan-nonconformist-dogooder Roundheads as by the easy-going-laissez-faire-romantic Cavaliers. Allegiance cuts right across Party and class. There are Roundheads on my side of the House and Cavaliers in Labour; there are costermongers and tarts who are Cavaliers like you, and peers who are Roundheads. Both side produce rulers and both sides produce rebels. England wouldn't be what she is if she didn't draw her inspiration from both sources.'"

John Moore, The Waters Under the Earth, p.159.

THE LIMITS OF HUMAN FRIENDSHIP, THE INFALLIBILITY OF CHRIST'S FRIENDSHIP

'A man may love another as his own soul, yet perhaps with all that love he can do nothing to help his friend. He may pity someone in prison, but be helpless to bring him any comfort. We may suffer with someone in trouble, and yet be unable to help. We cannot love grace into a child, nor mercy into a friend. We cannot love anyone into heaven though we may greatly desire to do so. But the love of Christ, being the love of God, is infallibly effectual. It produces all the good things Christ desires to produce in his people. Christ loves life, grace and holiness into us. He loves us also into a covenant of love with himself. Christ loves us into heaven. Love in Christ is his will to do good to the one he loves. Whatever good Christ by his love wills to do to anyone is infallibly done to that person.'

John Owen, Communion with God, p.72.

INFINTE GRACE

'If all the world should drink free grace, mercy and pardon from Christ, the well of salvation; if they should draw strength from one single promise, they would not be able to lower the level of the water of grace in that promise one hair's breadth. There is enough grace, mercy and pardon in one of God's promises for the sins of millions of worlds, if they existed, because the promise is supplied from an infinite, bottomless reservoir. What is one finite guilt before the infinite and eternal reservoir of grace?'

John Owen, Communion with God, p.70.

DIVINE SATISFACTION NEEDED

'We are too needy to be satisfied by a mere creature.'
John Owen, Communion with God, p.69.

THE EPITOME OF DIVINE GRACE

'This is the epitome of divine grace: a meal in the presence of God.'

Tim Chester, Truth We Can Touch, p.59.

THE COMFORTING ARMS OF OUR PARENTAL GOD

'...what a safe place the saints have to retreat to when they suffer the scorn, reproaches, scandals and misrepresentations of the world. When a child is bullied and hurt in the street by strangers, he quickly runs home to the love and protection of his father. There he tells everything and is comforted. In all the hard words and slanders which the saints meet with in the streets of the world, they may come home to their Father and tell him all their troubles and sorrows and be comforted. 'As one whom his mother comforts, so will I comfort you,' says the Lord (Isa.66.13).'

John Owen, Communion with God, p.40.

SET YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE ETERNAL LOVE OF THE FATHER

'All that we learn of God will only frighten us away from him if we do not see him as loving and merciful to us. But if your heart is taken up with the Father's love as the chief property of his nature, it cannot help but choose to be overpowered, conquered and embraced by him. This, if anything, will arouse our desire to make our desire to make our eternal home with God. If the love of a father will not make a child delight in him, what will? So do this: set your thoughts on the eternal love of the Father and see if your heart is not aroused to delight in him. Sit down for a while at this delightful spring of living water and you will soon find its streams sweet and delightful. You who used to un from God will now be able, even for a second, top keep at any distance from him.'

John Owen, Communion with God, p.37.

THE SACRAMENTS

'...baptism and Communion are God's promise in physical form.'
Tim Chester, Truth We Can Touch: How Baptism and Communion Shape Our Lives, p.36.

BELIEVE GOD LOVES YOU!

'The greatest sorrow and burden you can lay on the Father, the greatest unkindness you can do to him is not to believe that he loves you.'

John Owen, Communion with God, p.17.

COMMUNION WITH GOD

'Our communion with God lies in his giving himself to us and our giving ourselves and all that he requires to him. This communion with God flows from that union which is in Christ Jesus.

This communion will be perfect and complete when we enter into the full enjoyment of Christ's glory. Then we shall totally give ourselves up to him, resting in him as the utmost fulfilment of all our desires.'

John Owen, Communion with God (Abridged by RJK Law), p.3. 

THE LANTERN OUT OF DOORS

'Sometimes a lantern moves along the night,
That interests our eyes. And who goes there?
I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where,
With, all down darkness wide, his wading light?

Men go by me whom either beauty bright
In mould or mind or what not else makes rare:
They rain against our much-thick and marsh air
Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite.

Death or distance soon consumes them: wind
What most I may eye after, be in at the end
I cannot, and out of sight is out of mind.

Christ minds: Christ’s interest, what to avow or amend
There, éyes them, heart wánts, care haúnts, foot, fóllows kínd,
Their ránsom, théir rescue, ánd first, fást, last friénd.'

Gerard Manley Hopkins