finally checked off my To Read: book list...

"Spiritual guidance affirms the basic quest for meaning. It calls for the creation of space in which the validity of the questions does not depend on the availability of answers but on the questions' capacity to open us to new perspectives and horizons. We must allow all the daily experiences of life- joy, loneliness, fear, anxiety, insecurity, doubt, ignorance, the need for affection, support, understanding, and the long cry for love- to be recognized as an essential part of the spiritual quest."
excerpt from Henri Nouwen's book, Spiritual Direction: Wisdom for the Long Walk of Faith

I have been intending to read John Irving's book, A Prayer for Owen Meany, ever since my friend, Casey Hoskins, in my sophomore class of Western Civilization, leaned over to me and said, "Martha, you have got to read this book." Then he wrote the title and author on the top of my class notes about The Age of Reason. I treasure recommendations of books by friends because I feel like I get to know my friends better by knowing what kind of book they enjoy. I then feel like my friends and I have an unspoken connection because we both spent time focusing and reading the same book. This past week, 3 years after I first heard of it, I finished A Prayer for Owen Meany. It is interesting to see what my life is like now as I finished the book as opposed to my life then. I tend to commit the awful sin of internalizing characters and imagining what the book would be like if I was the main character of the book and what if my real life was enmeshed into the plot. Without "giving away the ending", one of the emphases of the book is Owen Meany's firm faith that God has a specific destiny for his life. Throughout the book, you learn of qualities of Owen, like his childlike voice and his short stature. You read the ongoing pages of Owen and his best friend Johnny, practicing a basketball shot in which Johnny picks Owen up over his head allowing Owen to slam-dunk the basketball. I wondered as I read the book, why in the world does Irving emphasize these seemingly pointless experiences? Why does he think that Owen's odd voice should be so important that he capitalizes all letters of the words that Owen says throughout the whole book? In the end, like a good novel should do in my opinion, everything seems to make sense. Hindsight is truly better than foresight...or something like that. Owen truly believed that every coincidence that happened in his life, every interest that he had, every person that he met, every physical quality that he embodied, every city that he lived in, happened as a means to an end. I am definitely oversimplifying this book and it should not be read to feel like your life here on earth is for a purpose and to make you feel good. But for some reason, I feel like I enjoyed this book much more now, as a wandering 22 year old college graduate living in Fayetteville, Arkansas working in a women's hospital as a Labor and Delivery Nurse who has daily philosophical crises because of her job and unsure of where she will be in the next 6 months, than I would have as a 19 year old sophomore in college at OBU, thinking that I had my post-college life all planned out. Just another little glimpse of hope that there is Something that is greater than I who is in control of this complicated world. And of course, I enjoy making connections with everything that happens in life and the excerpt from Henri Nouwen's book that I also just finished seemed to bring a strange sense of comfort to me and my current life pathway as well. So I encourage you to read both books sometime soon.