I’m moving.
Not out but up.
To be more exact, I’m moving up one flight of stairs.
Our church’s growing children’s ministry needs the space
where my second study is located, so I’m giving that room to them. How can you
turn down children?
But this is an enormous task, for I have books, many books.
If my books were all e-books, or on a computer, this would
be a cinch: I’d just carry that little reading device upstairs to my new
hideaway.
If only it were that easy.
I have hundreds and hundreds of books. It’s almost
embarrassing. When I first moved here, I had to ask for this second study, not
just because I do my best thinking when I’m away from the noise and interruptions
surrounding an office, but also because one room couldn’t house all my books. So,
I have books in two offices or studies and more books in my third study at
home.
When I was pondering where to place my books to accommodate
the children, I thought, “Why not just take all my books to the house and have
one study there?”
“Oh no,” Lori immediately voted (And I might add, hers is the
only vote that counts) “there is no way all those books could fit in this house
unless we sold half of our furniture. It would look like a library and not a
home.”
Now my poor books look so lonely and sad, like the puppy
left behind because the family didn’t have room for him when they moved. And
I’m not sure the location on the second floor will solve the book space
problem, for as the church grows, as I hope and expect it will, we will someday
need the new second study space as well.
As I begin the tedious task of packing those books, I
tenderly place them in boxes, holding each one, thumbing through the pages,
reading notes I’d made in margins. It’s like sitting down and getting
reacquainted with an old friend over a cup of coffee. Each book is unique, not only for what I
learned from each one, but also for the memory I have of where I was intellectually
and physically when I read them.
Reaching for the top shelf, I start with the theology
section, in alphabetical order. And soon I find my old friend, Karl Barth, the
Swiss Protestant theologian. He’s impossible to miss, stretching across an
entire shelf with his thirteen-volume magnum opus, Church Dogmatics. It’s
cumbersome taking them from the shelf, (over 6 million words and 8,000 pages)
not to mention reading them. And if
reading them was a challenge, and I didn’t study every word of each volume,
think about writing that much.
Before tucking Barth away, I glance at the tiny print of one
the seemingly endless footnotes he worked into the main text and smile as I
recall being diagnosed with a mild case of eye convergence insufficiency at the
close of the semester I spent with Barth’s Dogmatics.
But I loved him still, and was so was enamored with the “Father of
Neo-Orthodoxy” that when my parents were touring Switzerland, I asked if they
could possibly manage a detour to Basel to take a picture of Barth’s study,
which they did.
Having packed Barth and the “Bs,” I came to the “Cs” and
there sits my old friend, John Calvin and his Institutes of the Christian Religion. Staring at those two volumes,
I’m back at Princeton Theological Seminary, sitting in Professor E.A.Dowey’s
seminar on Calvin, feeling like a nervous kid on the first day of school in a
new grade, for Dr. Dowey was one of the preeminent Calvin scholars of the day,
and after all, this was a seminar on the profound theologian, John Calvin.
Thumbing through the pages, I see notes and the neat underlining I made with a
ruler and ink pen, straight and exact, like Calvin’s thinking.
I’ve only started the “Cs” and time is getting away.
With digital books, I would be done by now.
But there is something about the rustle of the pages, the
details of the cover, the feel of the binding, even the smell of the each book
that for some people like me, evokes memories that in themselves remind us not
just what we learned but how and when and where.
And that in itself can be an impetus to read more,
propelling us forward.
Or at least to the second floor.
