Books That Inspire

[this blogpost appeared in a slightly different form on my other blog, Still I Am One, in March 2012. I am re-posting it to explain how my Unitarian faith is inspired and informed by the writings of others]

I have found a beautiful quotation by 19th century American Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, which sums up how I feel about books and reading:

"The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty."

Theodore Parker

Reading has always been a passion of mine, to the extent that it has occasionally got me into trouble, when I have been too deeply buried in a good book to pay attention to life going on around me. Yet few things give me greater delight than the discovery of a new book that makes me think; that makes me see the world and everything in it in a new light. And so it has been on my journey into Unitarianism. My beliefs and my faith have been formed by reading the ideas and wisdom of others, by hearing it in Unitarian worship, and by discussing these matters in Unitarian communities. It is a rich and fulfilling process, and an ongoing one. The books I listed in the original blogpost have since been augmented, and will continue to change, as I come across new ideas. This is one of the wonderful things about Unitarianism, for me, that revelation is not closed.

In his introduction to Mister God, This is Anna, Vernon Sproxton speaks of Ah! Books, "those which induce a fundamental change in the reader's consciousness. They widen his sensibility in such a way that he is able to look upon familiar things as though he is seeing and understanding them for the first time. ... Ah! Books give you sentences which you can roll around in the mind, throw in the air, catch, tease out, analyse. But in whatever way you handle them, they widen your vision. For they are essentially Idea-creating, in the sense that Coleridge meant when he described the Idea as containing future thought - as opposed to the Epigram which encapsulates past thought. Ah! Books give the impression that you are opening a new account, not closing an old one down."

Everyone will have different Ah! Books. Mine include:

Beliefs of a Unitarian by Alfred Hall
Quaker Advices and Queries
Enough by John Naish
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain
Rilke's Book of Hours by Rainer Maria Rilke
The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life by Frederic and Mary-Ann Brussat
A Backdoor to Heaven by Rabbi Lionel Blue
A New Reformation by Matthew Fox
Eternal Echoes by John O'Donohue
Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives by Wayne Muller

And of course Mister God, This Is Anna. Each of these books has shown me the world in a different way, and made me think about myself in relation to it. They have influenced what I believe, and how I behave in very fundamental ways. What are yours?