WHEN he was a boy, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield had a key to his father’s library. He describes it as “that blessed little room”, and the books that he read, he says, “kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something else beyond that place and time”. In short, he reflects, he was immersed in “reading as if for life”.
David Dickinson’s enjoyable and thoughtful book explores why it is that many of us find ourselves doing our theology by way of novels and poetry, and why, at the same time, reading such books can feel like a significant development of our inner life and a borderland of prayer.
Asking why he feels close to God with literature, and wondering whether God “dances across the page uninvited”, Dickinson introduces us to his understanding of a “spirituality of reading” by way of chapters that, among other things, explore “Circling the Text”, “Silent Conversation with the Absent Other”, “Giving Texts Holy Attention”, and “Contemplative Reading”.
Dickinson is a warm and friendly guide. He is insightful both as human being and a theologian. He offers a wide range of reference, from Augustine to Shafak, Ricoeur to Robertson. His thinking is heavily influenced by others who have trod this particular interdisciplinary ground before — especially Alan Jacobs, Daniel Coleman, and Philip Davis.
I particularly enjoyed his curation of the novels that have entered his bloodstream, and he has introduced me to some notable novelists I have since got to know from the work he highlights. I am very grateful for this passionate introduction to the rich prism of literature — one of the sources of indispensable colour to many lives of faith.
Sometimes, I wished for a little more theological confidence from the author and less reliance on others’ quotations. I felt that he had more to say from his own scholarship, and I hope that there will be another volume that leads the reader further into his own generative mind and literary soul.
“We write to taste life twice,” Anaïs Nin said. We read to see its horizons.
The Very Revd Dr Mark Oakley is the Dean of Southwark, and Whitelands Professorial Fellow at Roehampton University.
Reading as if for Life: Spirituality for booklovers
David Dickinson
James Clarke & Co £22.50
978-0-7188-9817-5
Church Times Bookshop £20.25