Books remind us of our shared torment

​Someone asked me recently, “why do you have so many books?”

I’ve thought about that a lot. Harassed myself about it. I guess it’s felt too easy – inauthentic maybe – to settle on “I love to read” or “I want to learn.”

I keep landing on a conversation I had with a friend about a decade ago. I was working in one of the most random jobs of my life. Me and a co-worker – who became this friend – we were having a deep conversation about faith. Out of the blue he asks me, have you ever read the book Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller.

I hadn’t read it. Then I did read it. And I haven’t stopped reading books since.

Sometimes I wonder if that one conversation makes that job not so random after all.

In his book, Miller wrote about the wrestling match he was having with his faith. I felt like I was in that wrestling match with him. In many ways, I felt like he was in my wrestling match with me.

James Baldwin says, “it was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”

I think that’s what books are to me.

They aren’t fixes in this or that thing I’m wrestling with in life – as much as they do help sometimes. But more than that, books are my friends. They are people who died long before I was born, who get me - who’ve been there done that. They are people who are still out there today, wrestling with, fighting against – writing about – things that simply in their sharing – make my personal fights seem less lonely.

Books are this beautiful reminder that life isn’t always about – quite possibly, maybe, it’s never about – overcoming every single torment in our life. Maybe it’s about discovering the peace that comes in sharing torment. This united we have in our collective been there done thats.

Maybe the words on a page are a reminder that my friends in my books - they aren’t so different than the friends I meet outside of them. Maybe this unity I find in my reading, it’s also one that can be found in my living. Maybe James Baldwin is right. The things that have tormented me most are the very things that connect me with all the people who have ever been alive – and all who still are.

Maybe reading is a lot like listening.