On Rereading

What's your experience reading a book more than once?

Dear Readers,

This month, I’m focusing on the chapter of Blessed Are the Barren that features medieval monastic women writers. I’ve enjoyed ruminating on mysticism and especially enjoyed revisiting a favorite saint I studied in seminary, Clare of Assisi. I think I wrote a paper about her, perhaps for a church history class, but I can’t find it. All I have left are some mysterious pencil notations in the table of contents of the complete works of Francis and Clare “Classics of Western Spirituality” edition.

I’ve purged a bunch of good books since seminary to make space for new ones, but Francis and Clare: The Complete Works survived because I remember how much I loved it whenever I see its orange spine. When I decided to write about Clare for my current chapter and picked the book up again for the first time in years, I felt like I didn’t remember anything at all but loved rediscovering Clare. Returning to the book all these years later made me think of the practice of rereading.

As a book hoarder I don’t reread enough, preferring to get something new in my head. (Or at least on my shelf. Sometimes when I purge books, it’s because I’ve given up finishing or even starting to read them.) In my MFA creative nonfiction program at Spalding University, we read the book John Knowles’ A Separate Peace by Kirby Gann, in which Gann, now a writer and writing teacher himself, rereads a book that he loved as an adolescent. I was taken by the concept and reread a book I had read in seminary, Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church. When I first read the book in 2006 I had felt furious with Taylor, because I was preparing to enter a field—parish ministry—that she was leaving, and she had been a preaching inspiration for me when I was discerning becoming an Episcopal priest. When reading the book from that perspective, I felt like she hadn’t created necessary boundaries or practiced other techniques to help her cope with pressures of the job that we were learning in seminary. When I reread her book, however (and I had to check it out from the library because I had not kept the first copy in my fury), I had more than a decade of actual experience as a parish pastor, and understood and sympathized with her viewpoint.

So many exciting new books come out every month, which makes rereading less and less likely for me, but I have made it a point to read a few favorites more than once, like Gail Godwin’s Father Melancholy’s Daughter and M. Craig Barnes’s The Pastor as Minor Poet and each time fall in love again, finding new passages or points that I think I must have missed before.

I’d love to hear from you about whether you have ever read the same book at different times in your life and had different reactions—or if, like me, you have read a book twice (or three or more times) and learned new things each time.

Blessings, Elizabeth

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What I’m Reading:

Matrix by Lauren Groff: picked this up at the library since I am reading so much about medieval monastic life in my research this month.

Clare of Assisi: Gentle Warrior by Wendy Murray: I listened to this one on my morning walks and loved it so much I had to buy a copy. Has an excellent index so I was able to easily reference the parts I loved when listening.

Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen: Church in the 70s.

We Were Spiritual Refugees by Katie Hays: Interesting memoir about a recent church plant. Not finished yet but I’m intrigued. My writing friend Celeste Kennel-Shank recommended this writer.

Keys to Bonhoeffer’s Haus by Laura Fabrycky: I recently reconnected with Laura, a seminary friend (we bonded at the library, where we both spent a lot of time) and I picked it up because I missed it when it first came out (because I was in between my cancer surgeries). Highly recommend—in fact, I plan to use it as our second book club book at St. David’s (in February).

A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende: Sometimes I panic when people recommend books because I often don’t like or finish those books, but I loved this one recommended by my high school friend, Susan.

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What I’m Writing:

My sermons keep getting shorter as we endeavor to keep our (in-person) services short.

Sermon Esther: another one of my “barren” women

Sermon Job (and my dad)

Sermon Possessions (and The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City)

Sermon Wanting to Sit By Jesus