(Previously published for Lessons from the Trail subscribers in February 2021)
For the past several months, I’ve had difficulty sleeping at night. But (after experimenting with other remedial measures) I’ve discovered that the age-old practice of reading in bed measurably improves the quality of my sleep. Thirty to forty-five minutes a night with a good novel has transformed my sleep experience. Not surprising, since research has shown that as little as six minutes of reading reduces stress levels by up to 68%. I’m awake during the night less often and feel more rested in the morning. And the opportunity to spend time in a good book is an incentive to go to bed earlier.
To be clear, I’m talking about reading actual books, not e-books. I’m dedicated to feeling the weight of a book in my hands, to the appearance of the print on the page, the ability to mark my spot by turning over a corner of a page or folding in the flap of the dust cover, the opportunity to flip back through the pages to remind myself of an event or character in the past of a story, and especially with old books, inhaling the smell of the paper. My love for books dates back to the earliest days of my childhood, and even today (in spite of several purges) I own hundreds of books. And so it seems sympathetic with my soul that the solution to my sleep problem is holding a book in my hands at the end of every day.
My life story is the story of a spiritual journey on which books have been my guides and companions. I learned to read at age 5 sitting beside my paternal grandmother (who had separate living quarters within our family home) as she read to me the children’s story from the weekly farm magazine The Family Herald. Those stories fed my imagination and fostered a life-long attraction to words and stories, and to books and the ideas they contain. To tell my story, I’ve chosen one book for each decade of my life, a life that began on August 31, 1953 in the Red Cross Hospital in Mindemoya, Ontario.
1950s
The book I have had in my possession the longest is The Bumper Book, a collection of children’s stories and poems that was a gift from my maternal grandmother in 1957. Some of my earliest memories are of my mother or grandmother reading to me from The Bumper Book, whether it was Edward Lear’s Nonsense Alphabet “A was once an apple pie” or a story like “The Little Boy-who-was-too-thin”. My favourite was “Funny Jack”, perhaps because (not liking work too much) I could see myself in him:
Now, Jack was a good boy, but his mind was always on play instead of doing his work and helping his mother. Jack was a thoughtless lad, but funny for all that. “Jack will never be of any use in the world,” said the villagers. And was he of use? Well, just you wait and hear!
After a series of misadventures, Jack was given half the king’s riches because he made a sad little princess laugh.
1960s
Until I was a teenager, I only read the books others bought for me, books from the church library, or books I found in my parents’ home— and the latter were often were books that had been my father’s or mother’s when they were young. In my grandmother’s bookcase, I found a set of three books from The War Adventure Series (given to my father in 1941) that became my favorites. Their heroes were two young pilots, Dave Dawson and Freddie Farmer—one American, the other British. Dave Dawson with the R.A.F. begins like this:
A perfect summer day! The warm sun, the singing birds, the flowers in bloom—and the war! Twenty miles across the English Channel, less than three minutes by air, Nazi hordes were working day and night toward that great moment when their leader, Adolf Hitler, would give them the order to begin their attempted invasion of England. And on this side of that Channel some forty odd millions of people were also working day and night so that when the order was given, not a single German booted foot would succeed in touching English soil. A beautiful summer day, and the people of the greatest empire on earth were waiting, ready to fight and die to the last man that their empire might continue to survive.
I lived vicariously through the heroes of the books I read. I was not brave but these men were. I was limited to a farm on an island where I felt I didn’t belong, but I could travel the world through the stories that lived in my imagination.
1970s
When I began high school in 1966, I fell under the influence of teachers who saw potential in me beyond my imagination—particularly three English teachers, Marion Seabrook and Joanne Smith, and (later) Tom Porter. I was still bullied by other students as “that brainy Ed Wilson” but in English class I was recognized and affirmed. I discovered the poetry of T.S. Eliot, the short stories of Anton Chekhov, and the plays of Samuel Beckett. I began to write poems in the style of Eliot and short stories in the style of Chekhov. Later, in my second year at Western University, I became friends with Margaret Avison, 1972-73 poet-in-residence. Not only was she an award-winning poet, she was a devout Christian. Ms. Avison helped me find and hone my poetic voice while I re-affirmed my Christian faith. In the title poem of her 1966 volume of religious poems The Dumbfounding, she describes the call of the Christ with these words:
Now you have sought
and seek, in all our ways, all thoughts,
streets, musics–and we make of these a din
trying to lock you out, or in,
to be intent. And dying.
Yet you are
constant and sure,
the all-lovely, all-men’s way
to that far country.
1980s
(In 1980, I began to write The Book of Love with Judy Zondervan, the only girl I have ever loved. 41 years later we are still writing the book. We’re not the only characters in this Book of Love—there are three children in it (all born in the 80s) and four grandchildren. The book won’t be finished until sometime after this blog is published, so I’ll choose another book to represent the 1980s.)
Although I grew up in a conservative evangelical home, I began to associate during my university years with local expressions of the countercultural “Jesus People Movement“. For the next 30 years or so, I identified with expressions of the Protestant Christian church that existed on the creative edge of the mainstream—churches that embraced contemporary worship forms within a “come-as-you-are atmosphere”, expected that a relationship with God would inform every aspect of life, and taught that we could experience God as a kind father. Today, this notion of God as a kind father can either seem normative or patriarchal, but for me in the 1980s it was revelatory. My subconscious picture of God until then was the stern, aloof and grey-bearded figure of Renaissance painting. Instead, as Floyd McClung explains in The Father Heart of God:
One of the most wonderful revelations in the Bible is that God is our Father. But what do you think of when you hear the word ‘father’? Do you automatically think of protection, provision, warmth and tenderness? Or does the word ‘father’ paint different kinds of pictures for you? God reveals himself in the Bible as a gentle, forgiving Father, desiring to be intimately involved with each and every detail of our lives. It is not only a beautiful picture, but a true one.
1990s
In 1994, I became the leader of an emerging church community in the Waterloo Region. By now, I had accepted that people liked me (some people, at least) and I believed propositionally that God loved me as a parent loves her child. Yet, constantly confronted by my shortcomings, misgivings and human failings, I had great difficulty loving myself. Into this dark void Life of the Beloved (by Catholic priest Henri Nouwen) began to speak after I was introduced to the book by my friend Stuart. Written for skeptics, Nouwen contends that everyone of us needs to hear in the innermost place in our beings that words that the Scriptures say God spoke over Jesus Christ at the time of his baptism: “You are my Son, the Beloved; my favour rests on you.” What prevents us more than anything else from hearing these words is self-rejection:
The real trap is…self-rejection. I am constantly surprised at how quickly I give in to this temptation. As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone or abandoned, I find myself thinking: “Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody.” Instead of taking a critical look at the circumstances or trying to understand my own or others’ limitations, I tend to blame myself—not just for what I did, but for who I am. My dark side says: “I am no good…I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected and abandoned.”
Once we have received the Blessing and made it our own, we can give it away to others, and even our brokenness—for we are all broken—is interpreted through the cognitive grid that we are not an accident, not an aberration, but a divine choice.
2000s
In 2003, feeling I had given the church everything I had to give, and desiring to make a new career in nonprofit management, I left the pastoral leadership role to become the executive director of a nonprofit housing organization, Heartwood Place. Even before making this transition, I had begun to study management best practices for insights into how to make the church effective in reaching its target audience, unchurched people who might describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”. Inspired by Howard Schultz’s book Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built A Company One Cup At A Time, we attempted to make our Sunday morning meeting space a Third Place, with tables and chairs set up café style and coffee available on demand.
More and more, I realize, customers are looking for a Third Place, an inviting, stimulating, sometimes even soulful respite from the pressures of work and home. People come to Starbucks for a refreshing time-out, a break in their busy days, a personal treat. Their visit has to be rewarding. That’s why we love the saying, “Everything matters.” In effect, our stores are our billboards…
Today, someone looking for a Third Place will choose an independent coffee shop over Starbucks, and Starbucks is shifting its business model to favour drive-throughs. But, in the early 2000s Starbucks was cool.
2010s
In 2007 we moved to London, Ontario for my job with International Justice Mission Canada. It was my dream job but it demanded everything of me. By 2010 I was depleted emotionally and spiritually. In February of that year, I had a visceral experience that I describe as a “profound sense of the absence of God”, where the certainties on which I had built my life—the existence of God, the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the companionship of the Holy Spirit—were ripped away from me in a moment. After the initial shock wore off, I began to work to rebuild a worldview. One day in April, I went to Indigo to look for books that might help me find my way. I came home with two, one of them being God Is: My Search for Faith in a Secular World by Canadian novelist David Adams Richards. As Richards says in his introduction to the book,
It is a book that simply states God is present, and always was and will be whether we say we have faith or not, whether we observe His presence or scorn His presence. It is a book that says that faith is an inherently essential part of our existence, and it cannot be eradicated from our being.
With the help of Richards and others, I came to realize that faith is not the opposite of doubt, but of certitude. In time, I reached a point where I was able to reaffirm that God exists and that he is interested in revealing himself to me—although I made this choice in part because I was not prepared to invest the effort required to construct a world without God. Coward or brave? You decide. Today, faith exists in my heart in an uneasy relationship with doubt.
2020s
Now in semi-retirement, I have more time for reading than ever before. In addition to my bedtime novel-reading, I set aside an hour every morning for reading on professional topics. Toward the end of 2020, my morning reading focused on a book that I described in my last blog as “the best book I read in 2020”: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. McKeown encourages each of us to discriminate between the vital few things in our lives and the trivial many, and then have the discipline to say no to the non-essentials. But how to discern the vital few—or more challenging, the one thing at which we want to become truly excellent? McKeown suggests that we tap into our brain’s sophisticated search engine by asking three questions:
…”What do I feel deeply inspired by? and “What am I particularly talented at?” and “What meets a significant need in the world?” Naturally there won’t be…many pages to view, but this is the point of the exercise. We aren’t looking for a plethora of good things to do. We are looking for our highest level of contribution: the right thing the right way at the right time.
Over the course of 70 years, I’ve lived through all or part of eight different decades. Now, I’ve given you eight books to illustrate the story of the formation and transformation of one human being. Needless to say, I no longer identify with funny Jack; today, effective work inspires and motivates me. I’ve come to the conclusion that my highest level of contribution is to help teams of people accomplish great things together, which they can do as they marry a great idea with great execution, and respect and honour each other.
I challenge you, my readers, to consider how you could tell your life story in books or songs or photographs, one for each decade of your life.
All text and photos © 2023 Edwin Wilson.
