I sat on a mower in the middle of a two-acre field. Paths of light and dark criss-crossed the grass. Bees darted in and out of the chaff. In the distance, cars drove on the other side of the post-and-rail fence; soon, I would need to walk the trimmer along the posts to clean the growth.
That work could wait, though. For now, I was on break; and deep in the reading of a book.
I’ve always enjoyed reading in out-of-the way locations. To be exact, I do love reading everywhere: at home, on a train, in a library, or even settling into a page at a bookstore. Yet there’s a special alchemy of sorts that occurs when one reads in a spot, or in a manner, that is incongruous with that place.
For me, that space was a field on the property of The Seeing Eye, a renowned guide-dog school in Morristown, New Jersey, located about 45 minutes outside New York City. I worked there each summer as a groundskeeper while in graduate school, where I was studying literature. In America, The Seeing Eye is iconic; the school trains dogs of various breeds – primarily golden retrievers and German shepherds – to assist blind persons in moving through public locations. The dogs are smart, adept and meticulously trained.
In order to train dogs well, you need space. Our campus included several wide fields – and it was my job to keep them trim. I had the right machine to do it – a Steiner 430 with a six-foot deck, used to mow semi-pro baseball fields. Twice a week, I’d mow the fields down to a tight few inches.
Yet I also had books on my mind. My oldest brother had recently lent me his copy of The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. It was the Penguin Classics edition from 1952, with a purple border. A well-worn, used bookstore version, it was fine to take out into nature – annotations snaked between paragraphs, and overly dog-eared corners that had led to diagonal cuts. The copy was read enough times that the pages took on an almost fabric feel, as if I was touching a bedsheet or blanket.
Originally published anony-mously in the 15th century, The Imit-ation of Christ is a work that is both undeniably devotional yet also point-ed. It is difficult to read the work with-out feeling that the author would be deeply disappointed with our own spiritual sense. One of the many essential paradoxes of Catholicism is that we are compelled to live like (and through) Christ, and yet recognise that we will deeply and consistently fall short of the ideal. Yet we are compell-ed to do nothing else but exactly that.
Under the blaring sun – and keeping a side-eye on those sometimes agg-ressive bees – I read with notes of app-reciation and worry. The book is brok-en into four parts: “Counsels on the Spiritual Life”, “On the Inner Life”, “On Inward Consolation” and “On the Blessed Sacrament”. In each section, Kempis – a German-born priest – is simultaneously lucid and elusive. We read him understanding what he seeks to communicate and yet, like Aquinas, he leaves us blessedly bothered.
The book’s first line is taken from John: “He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness.” Kempis soon notes that the life and teaching of Christ “far transcends all the teachings of the Saints” – a line, I felt, that was meant for me to hear. Of course it is a vainglorious reading method to place oneself in a text, but we are compelled to read within and among the lines of religious works. I, like so many Catholics, had been raised on the stories of the saints; each hagiography a work of many genres (drama, horror, even, at times, science fiction!).
Kempis has a common refrain in his book: “Lofty words do not make a man just or holy; but a good life makes him dear to God. I would far rather feel contrition than be able to define it.” Again and again, he calls for Christians to return to Christ: not the intellectual construct of Christ, nor the political or social permutations of Christ – rather, the Christ of the scriptures. Along the way, Kempis turns to those saints who have been so instrumental in forming me and others, and offers them particular praise: “How were some of the Saints so perfect and contemplative? It is because they strove with all their might to mortify in themselves all worldly desires, and could thus cling to God in their inmost heart, and offer themselves freely and wholly to Him.”
It feels especially appropriate to revisit The Imitation of Christ in the time leading up to Christmas – the time when we are most distracted from the person and life of Christ by secular trappings and monetisation. Yet a mature reading of Kempis suggests that it is possible for us to have a joyful Advent precisely because of a return to scriptural principles. Our great anticipation for the arrival of Christ can focus us on the joy of birth, of the body, of creation writ large – sentiments Kempis would appreciate.
If I had originally read The Imitation of Christ at a long table in a book-lined library, I might have taken the route of textual analysis. I probably would have had several other texts at my elbows: works to situate the book within the broader tradition of Devotio Moderna, an ascetic return to simple principles and practice. There certainly is nothing wrong with the scholarly approach to faith – we are in many ways anchored and sustained by our theology – but I am happy that I read this particular book out in a bee-ridden, freshly-mowed field.
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