Gems for the Journey

By Sue Woolley

All my life I have loved books and reading. A few special books have influenced the way I think, love, and exist in the world. This book shares a few of them, and why they have had such a profound effect on me."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781326533601

Book preview

Gems for the Journey

Gems for the Journey

One Unitarian Pilgrim's Progress

Sue Woolley

Copyright © 2016 by Sue Woolley

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2016

ISBN 978-1-326-53354-0

Unitarian Christian Association

www.unitarianchristian.org.uk

Contents

Introduction: A Lifelong Passion

1 My Bookcase

2 Influence of my Grandparents

3 A Visit to the Library

4 Characters as Illumination

5 A Simple Soul at Heart

6 My Childhood Faith

7 My eyes are opened: Peace

8 Permission to Explore

9 First Awakening

10 Tempering Justice with Mercy

11 The Box Is Opened

12 Telling It Like It Is

13 Open to Challenge

14 First Shift

15 Recognising the Sacred

16 I Discover Radical Christianity

17 Reconnecting With The Joy Of Learning

18 A Simple Lifestyle, Freely Chosen

19 In which I reluctantly accept that I am a 3

20 Overwhelmed By Words

21 Sabbath Rest: Living With Intention

22 The Sovereign Importance Of Compassion

23 Facing the Shadows

24 Coming Home To Mystical Christianity

25 Learning To Love Rather Than Loathe

26 Choosing Life

27 The Road Goes Ever On

Afterword

The Books

"What we are is God's gift to us,

what we become is our gift to God."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Introduction: A Lifelong Passion

Mild panic began to lick along my veins as I gazed at the question on the page: Write down your best memory for the simple sake of treasuring it.

I nudged a few brain cells awake, and my subconscious mind obediently and patiently began to sift through my recollections of the past, looking for that one, special, elusive memory.

- Strolling through beech-green-dappled sunlight beside the stream that leads to Dolgoch Falls? No.

- Skimming stones along the steel blue surface of Tal-y-llyn, with the heather and bracken-clad slopes of Cader Idris brooding above us? No.

- Meandering along the white beaches of Shell Island, the sand warm and gritty between my toes, searching among the sea weed at the tide line for shells? No.

- Toiling in the Giant's Footsteps up the spine of the Malvern Hills, hot and breathless, then standing triumphantly at the top, relishing the views of soft, purple, Welsh hills in the far distance on one side, and the patchwork of neat, English fields on the other? Nearer, but still no.

- The matchless excitement of family Christmases, when we existed in a bubble of love and good fellowship, turkey and presents, visits from the cousins, and re-runs of The Sound of Music and Morecambe and Wise Specials on the TV? Not quite.

- The incomparable joy of holding my children in my arms for the first time, and the realisation that I had better get used to the feelings of overwhelming love mingled with breath-taking awe and gut-knotting fear? No, not even that.

So what did I treasure the most about my life? Reframed thus, the answer to the question came swiftly ... Reading.

Like many of the others, it is an amalgam of a hundred similar occasions, made vivid by repetition. I am lying on my stomach on my bed, chin propped up by my cushioning hands, with a book under my nose.  I am immersed in another world, oblivious to anything and everything else, my eyes flying across the page, my mind dazzled by bright images and sparkling dialogue and fabulous adventures. Alone, yet perfectly content.

I consider myself so blessed. Books have been my companions, my teachers, my inspiration, and my guides, as I have journeyed through life to where I am now.

So is it any wonder that I have grown up with a deep passion for words, when my most favourite pastime is reading, and my second favourite pastime is writing? I cannot remember a time in my life when I did not love both dearly. These days I spend much of my time doing either the one or the other, and getting paid for it to boot.

When I was a student, I had a poster on the wall of my room, which showed a bookworm eating its way through a pile of books, with the maxim by Francis Bacon: Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

I have always loved that quotation, because it describes so exactly what I do. When I have a new book to read, particularly if it is the latest in a series, I devour it, avid to discover what happens. I sit and read and read and read, and don't stop until I've finished.

Then I go back for a more leisurely second reading, savouring the words, rolling them round in the mouth of my mind, and enjoying them more deeply. I know some people who never read a book twice, and I simply cannot understand this. For me, the best books are to be read and enjoyed, over and over, until they become a part of me, chewed and digested. They are food for thought, and some are food for my soul.

I often think about reading in terms of taste - I will read some words and think that they are delicious. And all the words I used about reading just now are taste-related. Which is odd, since reading is done with the eyes, not the tongue nor the palate. Perhaps it is the internalising process that I go through when I find a book that I love - it becomes a part of me, and that is a fully sensory process, involving sight and taste and even smell (the smell of a new book is one of my favourite scents!) so that the book becomes part of my heart and mind forever.

Reading has occasionally got me into trouble, when I have been too immersed in an enthralling book to pay attention to life going on around me. I can remember being scolded as a child, for having my nose deep in a book when on holiday, rather than joining in with the rest of the family. Yet few things give me greater delight than the discovery of a new book that makes me think; that makes me see the world and everything in it in a new light.

In his introduction to Mister God, This is Anna, Vernon Sproxton speaks of Ah! Books, "those which induce a fundamental change in the reader's consciousness. They widen his sensibility in such a way that he is able to look upon familiar things as though he is seeing and understanding them for the first time. ... Ah! Books give you sentences which you can roll around in the mind, throw in the air, catch, tease out, analyse. But in whatever way you handle them, they widen your vision."

My Ah! Books, and how they have influenced this Unitarian pilgrim's progress, are what I would like to share with you.

Sue Woolley

Piddington, March 2016

1 My Bookcase

I simply do not remember being unable to read, although of course there must have been a time when I couldn't. Certainly, by the time I started school, at the tender age of four-and-a-half, I was working my way swiftly through the Ladybird Reading Scheme with my mother, herself an avid reader. I will always be grateful to her, for transmitting her love of books and reading to me. Early joys included the works of Beatrix Potter - The Tale of Mrs. Tiggywinkle being a particular favourite; When We Were Very Young by A.A. Milne, which gave me a love of poetry and rhythm that I have never lost; and two enchanting collections, one of fairy tales, one of nursery rhymes, compiled and charmingly illustrated by Hilda Boswell.

The Beatrix Potter books had been read to me so often that I knew them by heart, and could recite what was on a particular page by looking at the illustration. At the age of three, according to a treasured family anecdote, I startled a stranger on a train exceedingly, by reading aloud The effect of lettuces on young rabbits is soporific. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall that day!

My very first bookcase was a small affair with three shelves, about two feet wide and three feet high. The outside was made of what I can only describe as a kind of plasticy-basketwork, and was painted white. Today it sits in the corner of our bedroom, and houses some of our collection of paperback detective fiction. A selection of odd Agatha Christie stories jostles for space with the Lord Peter Wimsey novels of Dorothy L. Sayers, the first few Dalziel and Pascoe stories of Reginald Hill, the wonderful mediaeval Chronicles of Brother Cadfael by Ellis Peters, and a random collection of green Penguins, written by the likes of Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham, acquired over years of scouring the musty shelves of second-hand bookshops. All the shelves are double-stacked, space being at a premium, so I have to remember what is behind the ones in front. A row of Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone novels takes pride of place on the top, held in place by tatty metal bookends.

The bookcase that means the most to me is the one I was given for my eighth Christmas, at the end of 1967. My parents had been very cagey about what they were giving me that year, and by Christmas Eve, my curiosity was at bursting point. Christmas Day was to surpass my expectations entirely.

Our family tradition, which continued for the whole of my