Saturday Good Reads: Slowing Down

This week didn’t start out in Frantic Mode – we first had to dig out from a 12-inch snow that arrived Sunday. (A huge thank you to the young man who knocked on our door Monday and asked if we needed our driveway shoveled.)

Then on Tuesday, as if to prove exercise is bad for you, I was riding the stationary bike at 6 a.m. prior to my workout with the personal trainer when a partial bridge in my mouth decided to relocate. So – it was pray that the dentist had some space to squeeze me in (he did).

And at work, a situation that had started the previous week was continuing to build, and build some more, until the tsunami arrived on Thursday, and ebbed only slightly by Friday afternoon. I finally had to stop Thursday night (Friday morning?) about 12:15 a.m.; I decided the crisis would be waiting for me when I woke up. It was.

What helped was watching a few Netflix videos and finding a few oases of calm in the online world, like the Saturday Good Reads below.

First, four poems.

Two by Steven Marty Grant at Urbanality, whose poetry always seems to transport me to New York City: Winter in Midtown and God Looks Down.

One by Chris Yokel, whose music I like as much as his poetry: Green Arms (A Good Friday Poem).

And one by Brian Miller, whom I first met at One Stop Poetry when it was going gangbusters and who’s now one of the movers behind dVersePoets: I’ll have the usual.

Am I the only person who reads poetry when things get crazy?

Then over at Slow Church, John Pattison posted a reflection on the novel Silence by Shasaku Endo, in honor of Endo’s birthday. I had read the novel three years ago (and even blogged about it a few times). Pattison’s article is well worth reading.

David Mathis at Desiring God did something unexpected and truly beautiful. He visited and interviewed the 96-year-old theologian Robert Duncan Culver, and came away with The Old Man and His Big Book.

I was rather awed by Culver and his razor-sharp mind, and I was also awed by something slightly older – a graffiti found during a 19^th century excavation of the Palantine Hill in Rome. Tim Challies at Informing the Reforming wrote about it in The History of Christianity in 25 Objects: the Alexamenos Graffito.

I learned something new on Friday. Lyla Lindquist, one of my colleagues over at Tweetspeak Poetry, has more than a slight interest in the Spanish language, and wrote about it in The Poetics of Learning (and Loving) Language.

And then John Blase at The Beautiful Due wrote one of the most original articles I’ve seen about Easter: What Do I Know?

Finally, Greg Sullivan at Sippican Cottage posted a short video the likes of which I’ve never seen. Well, I take that back. I’ve seen the actor Kenneth Branagh do it, but I’ve never seen the “We Happy Few” speech from Henry V by William Shakespeare performed like it is by this young actor.

Photograph by Jean Sander via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

John Blase's "Touching Wonder"

It’s been told so many times, in so many books, movies, plays, in so many sermons, that it’s fallen into almost the status of cliché. So is it possible to tell the story of the birth of Jesus in a way that’s fresh and compelling, that might even recapture the original meaning, which just might take our closed eyes and jaded hearts and open them to the incredible thing that happened in Bethlehem?

The answer is yes. John Blasé does exactly that in “Touching Wonder” (published by David C. Cook; 128 pages; $12.99).

Blasé combines the verses of Luke 1 and 2, Psalm 29 and John, with fictional accounts by Zachariah and Elizabeth, Mary and Joseph, and the shepherds to breathe life into our understanding of what happened at the birth of Jesus. He then adds his own handwritten pleas and prayers.

And the result? We’re there. We’re there when Zachariah is struck mute, and Elizabeth goes off by herself to relish her pregnancy of John the Baptist. We’re there with Mary when she hears the angel tell her what is to happen, and she says, “Let it be so with me.” We share Joseph’s frantic desperation as he pounds door to door in Bethlehem, trying to find a place for Mary to give birth. We’re there with the shepherds, who hear the angels singing and do something shepherds would never do – abandon their sheep to see what has happened. We’re there when the baby Jesus is presented to Simeon and Anna in the temple, and Simeon knows he can now die and Anna, old Anna, suddenly sings with the joy of a young girl. And we’re there when the author unburdens his heart in simple prayer letters to God.

It is a Christmas book, the kind you see piled on the tables at Barnes & Noble beginning int helate fall. But it's also more than that, a kind of devotional from a writer who felt compelled to tell the story of Christmas in a different way, a writer who sees himself as part of the story. And that's what we often miss -- we are part of the Christmas story.

“Touching Wonder,” all 128 pages of it, is a treasure. Well done, Mr. Blasé.

Photo of book cover courtesy David C. Cook Publishing.