Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Reading, Writing, and Keeping Your Heart Tender

Ravi Zacharias offers some sagacious counsel:

Over the years, there are a handful of authors I have read who have kept the heart tender. I am most grateful to them. For example, one is F.W. Boreham, the noted English essayist, whose essays are compiled in over forty volumes. Yes, I have every one of them, and they are hard to find, because they are out of print. For years, I have read a chapter from one of his books every day. What is it about his writing that tenderizes the heart?

First and foremost, his essays are thoughtful. He has done his own reading and thinking. They are not just what could be passed off as inspirational fast-food. Years of study and reflection go into his essays.

Second, he wrote on the simplest experiences of life in such a way as to emboss their beauty upon the flatness of daily experiences. He helps me to feel life’s great treasures as I touch the ordinary. Whether it was saying goodbye to a friend or shutting a gate on a country road, Boreham mined the treasures of simplicity. He blessed the routine with eternal value and the mind of the reader soars to heights of splendor even in the common.

But there is a third very important aspect of his writing that would perhaps appeal to a minority of people. Boreham used language as a work of art. He did not believe in reducing everything to the trivial by denying himself the wealth to be found in words.

Somewhere, somehow, we have died as a culture because long ago we lost the place of verbal expression, and we have mistakenly made all writing to meet the test of journalistic barrenness. We have robbed ourselves of great reading and reduced our intake to the minimal and the pictorial and now we mourn our desensitized hearts.

There is plenty of good news around us if only we would be still and take the time to nourish the imagination with the possibility of truth and goodness. This discipline can only come by personal choice. We cannot ask the government or other authorities to do it for us. In this sense, Mark Barton and the writer of the letter to the editor had one thing in common, which we, too, share. We all make trades. We trade our lives every day. Mr. Barton’s trade was a slow death that led to hellish proportions. I am afraid that we have all, in our culture, made such trades. The keepers of our public trust have traded decency for wealth. For many of us, the trade is one of running ragged with the constant input of information, forfeiting that which energizes the conscience. The only way I know to keep that sensitivity alive is to, in my private life, so feed my soul with good news that my heart cracks open, keeping it from becoming impervious to bad news.

For more on Boreham, visit this site.