6 Novels to Shape Your Soul
Tell me a story. Tell me a good story. If you have an idea to change the world, wrap it up in the best story you can put together. This is a reason I find the reading of fiction and novels to be so necessary for ministry leaders of all kinds.
Tell an enthralling story, and you change a person.
In the appropriately titled Eat This Book, Eugene Peterson writes:
“The Holy Scriptures are story-shaped. Reality is story-shaped. ‘I had always,’ wrote G.K. Chesterton in accounting for his Christian belief, ‘felt life first as a story, and if there is a story, there is a storyteller.’ We enter this story, following the story-making, storytelling Jesus, and spend the rest of our lives exploring the amazing and exquisite details, the words and sentences that go into the making of the story of our creation, salvation, and life of blessing. It is a story chock full of invisibles and intricate with connections. Imagination is required.”
Novels teach us imagination. I live in a community still scarred by the largest race massacre in my country’s history. I’ve read a lot about the event. But recently I picked up a novel that puts the reader right in the middle of the events, and I was gripped in a wholly different way. Fiction, whether books or movies, punches you in the emotions in a way factual statements never can.
In seminary, I read all kinds of theology, biblical scholarship, practical ministry how-to’s. But precious little fiction. If we want to learn the shape of the story of the Scriptures—its many characters, setting, movement of plot, themes—we do well to sit with as many good stories as we can. As I’ve continued to read, I’ve learned to always keep a novel as a part of my current stack of books.
Not just any novel will do, though. I’m not suggesting that a leader seek out what’s marketed to Christian sub-culture. One should seek out novelists who tell the truth about what it means to be human while taking the Christian story seriously. Writers like Walker Percy, Flanner O’Connor, Marilynne Robinson, Madeleine L’Engle, and Wendell Berry can lead us deeper into the life of God every bit as much as Eugene Peterson, Henri Nouwen, or Thomas Merton do.
Here are six of my favorite novels that, particularly, have deepened my life with God.
Silence by Shusaku Endo
“Christ did not die for the good and beautiful. It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful; the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt.”
When I first read Silence, it made me think of a cross between the movies The Mission and Apocalypse Now. It’s the story of two Portuguese Jesuit priests, Rodrigues and Guarpo, in 1639, who, upon hearing news that their mentor Ferreira has committed apostasy, journey to Japan to investigate the truth.
The authorities in Japan have driven the church underground. Rodrigues and Guarpo are captured and imprisoned where they witness believers forced to recant or be tortured. It’s a gripping story about faith and leadership, hope in the midst of suffering and cruelty. It’s not an easy read, but it raises the question of God’s presence in the middle of suffering. This book completely changed my take on the New Testament character of Judas. It was made into a film by Martin Scorsese in 2016.
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
“When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God’s image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”
The Power and the Glory shares many common threads with Silence. It follows a Catholic priest, flawed in his own right, in an environment hostile to the church. The setting is Mexico in the 1930’s. The unnamed priest—known only as the “whiskey priest” to the reader—is hunted by the also unnamed lieutenant, who despises the church.
The Whiskey Priest goes town to town, ministering to people as best he can, carrying a heavy sense of penitence with him everywhere he goes. This is a story about grace in the presence of all the frailties and weaknesses of humanity.
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
“There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?”
Gilead is the account of a rural pastor John Ames, written as a memoir to his son, explaining the lives of his own grandfather and father. John hopes to communicate vocation to his son through the exploits of the generations to which he is connected.
Robinson captures the slow and patient work of a small town preacher, the deep satisfactions, wonder, and loneliness. There is sorrow in broken and lost relationships. There is hope, redemption, and contentment in the most unexpected places. Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2005.
Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry
“The world is so full and abundant it is like a pregnant woman carrying a child in one arm and leading another by the hand. Every puddle in the lane is ringed with sipping butterflies that fly up and flutter when you walk past in the late morning on your way to get the mail.”
Berry’s work includes fiction, poetry, and essays. All of it centers on what it means to be human in a world constantly at odds with what makes humans human. And like the fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien, all of Berry’s fiction builds one single world, that of Port William, Kentucky. Each of his novels or short story collections follows a different character through Port William over multiple generations.
Twice widowed, Hannah, now in her seventies, remembers all those that meant the most to her, the men she loved and the children she raised. As most of the Port William collection, this is a story about what it means to be part of a community over time, what it means to belong others.
All Hallow’s Eve by Charles Williams
“Why isn’t one taught how to be loved? Why isn’t one taught anything?”
Williams belonged to a writers group called The Inklings made famous by its more recognized members Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. While you might find this fantastical intersection of the natural world and the supernatural world familiar to the work of Lewis or even the fiction of G.K. Chesterton, Williams has a unique voice all his own.
The story follows two women who have recently died as they come to grips with the afterlife. In the world of the living, there’s a magician with nefarious plans. It’s a story with a thick theology of life and death and everything in between, of evil magic and divine love. It’s like Lincoln in the Bardo but takes seriously a Christian view about death and the communion of saints.
Perelandra by C.S. Lewis
“Inner silence is for our race a difficult achievement. There is a chattering part of the mind which continues, until it is corrected, to chatter on even in the holiest places.”
Perelandra is the second book in his space trilogy series, though you don’t necessarily need to have read Out of the Silent Planet first. Imagine traveling to a different planet, finding Adam and Eve, and witnessing the temptation scene of Genesis 3. This is the set up for Perelandra.
Ransom (the protagonist of the space trilogy) journeys from Earth to the planet Perelandra (in the story, the native name for Venus). There he encounters a pair of perfect, angelic beings as well as the human Weston (the antagonist from the first story). Weston appears possessed and bent on destroying this world.
If you’ve read and like Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, you’ll likely enjoy this as well. It covers similar themes of the nature of temptation and the nature of humanity.
There’s a popular manta, “Readers are leaders, and leaders are readers.” Whatever your field may be, make fiction a regular part of your spiritual practices. Use it to grow and deepen your imagination.