Read a Book. Change Your Life. Change the World.

"The right stories, read at the right time, can be as important as shelter or food. They can help us to escape calamity, and heal us in its aftermath.” --Terri Windling, American fantasy author

Can books save us? Save our world?

If one could be saved by, say, the sheer volume of books consumed and collected, then “Hallelujah!” I’m saved! You see, I kind have a book accumulation…well, problem. I’m not a book hoarder but I do have something like 1,000 books, probably more, scattered all over my house. Books on bookshelves and end tables. Books piled high upon a bureau I long ago stopped using. Books on the dining room table and the kitchen table, on the shelves in bedroom closets. My nightstand groans under the weight of four stacks of books and yet, I still buy more books. 

I’m definitely a bibliophile which means “a lover of books.” And yes, a bibliomaniac meaning a person who, “has an insatiable desire to collect books.” The Japanese have a wonderful word for folks who acquire books and then let them pile up all over the house—tsundoku.

Now that is absolutely me. Maybe you too.

I have lots of family and friends who are book crazy. My colleague Scott and I used to go to preacher’s conventions (there is such a thing!) and he’d buy so many books on the art of homiletics (another cool word!), that we’d have to visit the local post office before going to the airport. With so many tomes purchased, he needed to mail them home, lest he get penalized for overweight luggage!

Some folks read with a Kindle, or Kobo or iPad and don’t own too many volumes. But I need the feel and the heft and tactile activity, the physicality needed to read a paper book.

Which brings me back to my original questions.

Can books save us? Can books save the world?

Creation certainly needs saving: from wars of bombs that hurt and kill and wars of words that hurt and kill the spirit. We need saving from the fears and suspicions that separate us from fellow children of God. We need saving from staying on our own little islands of identity and beliefs.   We need to be reminded of the goodness of the world and its citizens, the common good, and God’s good too.

And all of this can be found in books.

Books and the stories and ideals they contain can teach us, inspire us and empower us. Rescue us from our worst impulses. Books can give us the wisdom and resolve to resist Herodian wannabee kings and their sycophantic minions.  Books feed our spirits.    

Read or reread the science fiction of George Orwell’s “1984” or Margaret Atwood’s “A Handmaid’s Tale” and get a glimpse into the powers and principalities we are called to overcome. Read Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and remember the eternal need for compassion and simple human decency.  Read Alex Haley’s biography of Malcolm X’s or Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and learn that resistance against oppressive institutional and individual racism has been going on too long and must go on. Poetry can save our souls too, by Maya Angelou. "You may write me down in history, With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt, But still, like dust, I'll rise." By Emily Dickinson, ““Hope” is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all.”

Read a book. Have hope. Rise up!       

So many books, old and new, dogeared from so many readings or fresh off the shelf from your local independent bookstore…these are waiting to change you, me, and this world, of that I am sure. So, let’s buy them and borrow them and lend them. Then with a favorite beverage at hand, read. Just read. Read as we lean against the pole on the subway. “Read” as we stream an audio book in the car. Read in bed each night, and pick up where you left off the night before, and turn the pages and be transported somewhere else.

Books have always changed this world, challenged norms, and started revolutions. Think of the Bible or Thomas Paine’s booklet “Common Sense” or “The Diary of Anne Frank.” Books expand our minds. Enlarge our hearts. Shape our souls.

Can books save us?

I think so.

I know so.

God, I hope so.

(Two world changing books I am reading right now: “Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad" by Eric Foner and "The Ragged Edge of Night" by Olivia Hawker, a story about the German resistance to Nazism set in a small rural village.  What are you reading that helps you change the world? Please let me know!)

(The views expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect the views of the people and church I serve nor the United Church of Christ.)

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.