What Book Are You Most Thankful For?

On Thanksgiving Day this year, Buzzfeed posted an article titled "12 Famous Writers Told Us About the Book They're Most Thankful For." Though Thanksgiving is nearly a month in the past now, I tend to think more about the books I love during long breaks from my job teaching college -- winter break, and the summer, when I have more time to read.

It's difficult for me to pick just ONE book I'm thankful for. I think I'd rather do a Top 100 list, or at least a top 50, but if I have to pick just one, I'd pick Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith & Art, by Madeleine L'Engle. I first encountered this book in college as I was struggling to understand how I might be both a person of faith and a writer, amongst a 1980s Evangelical culture that seemed to be telling me that Christianity and the life of the artist did not mesh well. Here are just a few of the things that L'Engle said to me through this book -- the things that I needed to hear at the time and have returned to over and over through the years.

"... to write a story or compose a song is an incarnational activity. The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver. In a very real sense the artist ... should be like Mary, who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command."

"... to serve any discipline of art ... is to affirm meaning, despite all the ambiguities and tragedies and misunderstandings which surround us."

"Those who believe in God, but without passion in the hart, without anguish of the mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself."

What book are you thankful for?