Summer Reading: What Book Has Changed Your Life?

Alyce McKenzie

A favorite book of mine is A Diary of Private Prayer by Scottish theologian and ecumenical leader John Baillie. (1886-1960). Written in 1936, it is a devotional classic that offers thirty days of prayers, two for each day, one for morning and one for evening. It offers encouragement and guidance in developing the habit of beginning and ending each day of the month with prayer. I first found the little book at a second hand shop in Edinburgh, Scotland when I was a student there my junior year of college. I have read it sporadically through the years. But last year a student gave me a new copy as a gift, and for the past several months, I have been praying Baillie's prayers twice a day.

You would think that repeating the same prayers once a month would become tiresome, but it has had the reverse effect on me. As the prayers become more familiar to me, they sink deeper into my thoughts, becoming a mind-marinade. Beginning and ending the day with prayer makes it more likely that I'll also pray in the times between morning and evening. It's a sort of saturation of one's spirit in daily prayers. What makes the book ever-fresh for me is the clarity and eloquence of the language and the sincerity of the religious sentiments Baillie expresses. There is an honesty to his confessions, evident compassion in his intercessions, both personal and social, and a genuine gratitude in his praises to God.

Sometimes I read both morning and evening in the morning. Knowing that I'm going to be praying the following prayer just before I go to sleep tonight will affect the way I live between now and then.

Give me grace, O God, to pray now with pure and sincere desire for all those with whom I have had to do this day. Let me remember now my friends with love and my enemies with forgiveness, entrusting them all, as I now entrust my own soul and body, to Thy protecting care; through Jesus Christ. Amen. (Seventeenth Day: Evening)

Alyce McKenzie is Professor of Homiletics at Perkins School of Theology and the author of several books on preaching and Bible study. She blogs at Faith Forward.

Bruce Epperly

Gerald May's The Awakened Heart  has deepened my spiritual life, especially in terms of its process of opening to God - pause, notice, open, yield, stretch, and respond.  Deepening our spirit involves listening to God's voice in our experiences and then creatively sharing our gifts in life-transforming actions.  By listening to our lives, we can let our lives speak!  A great summer theological novel is Patricia Adam's Farmer's The Metaphor Maker, which explores a young woman's journey to discover a life-giving image of God during a time of national and personal turmoil.

Bruce Epperly is Professor of Practical Theology at Lancaster Theological Seminary and co-pastor of Disciples United Community Church in Lancaster, PA.  He blogs at Faith Forward at Patheos.

Susan Baller-Shepard

For me, a book that affected my faith life is Faster than the Speed of Light by Joao Magueijo. It's irreverent, it's funny, crass, and it made me remember what I had forgotten in seminary and in parish ministry, that there is all this space and dark matter out there, full of mystery and unknowns. More than anything, I think it caught me by surprise. Having steeped myself in theology books for years, it was great to read something by someone in the scientific community, someone who was challenging a scientific "gospel truth," Einstein's theory of relativity.

Reading Magueijo's book led me to reading The Evolution of Physics by Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Theory of Everything by Stephen Hawking, God and the New Physics and The Mind of God by Paul Davies, The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin, and to begin reading more widely in science, like The Double Helix by James Watson, or The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.

In Paris, in February 1914, poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, "Looking up from my book, from the close countable lines, into the finished-full night outside; how in starry measure my packed feelings scatter, as though a bouquet of wildflowers were being untied . . . Everywhere joy in relation and nowhere any craving; world in excess and earth sufficient."

This book by a theoretical physicist reminded me that while we have theological theories about how things are, it's important to look up from "close countable lines" into the mystery that is out there, beyond us, in terms of space and dark matter, but also in terms of the mystery of God, "For far inside you the God wishes to consult," as Rilke later writes.

P.S. Joao Magueijo has a new book out, A Brilliant Darkness: The Extraordinary Life and MysteriousDisappearance of Ettore Majorana, the Troubled Genius of the Nuclear Age.

The Rev. Susan Baller-Shepard is a writer, editor-in-chief at www.spiritualbookclub.com with its blog www.spiritualbookclubblog.blogspot.com, and a parish associate pastor at First Presbyterian Church, Normal, IL.