A Living Library

A Living Library:  15 August 2025

I love libraries.

Traveling in Charlotte this week I needed a place to work in between meetings. I found a library eight minutes away. Free parking and wi-fi, air-conditioning, bathrooms, quiet-ish environment filled with books and periodicals and all kinds of people on their best behavior. Community spaces like libraries strike me as some of the best parts of America. Egalitarian spaces dedicated to knowledge, entertainment, community conversations, and people paid to help answer questions and stoke curiosity. Heaven.

I’d never been to this library branch, at least I didn’t think so. I lived in Charlotte up through eighth grade but moved before I could drive. Some landmarks remain and I’ll find myself in a familiar area but then I’ll cross a street and be totally lost. I don’t know how places connect, and sometimes the present doesn’t layer neatly on top of my past. As Katherine Anne Porter said, “The past is never where you think you left it.”

This week a friend and I pondered the phenomenon of re-reading a book and wondering why we underlined certain parts. Why had my past self found that passage important? This summer I found a book I remembered loving. The author had signed it to my mother. I didn’t remember anything about it, not the characters, not the story, not the dramatic ending. So, I reread it, and liked it this time, too. I noticed more depth than I’d remembered, and I found some parts tedious that earlier I probably found revelatory, perceptive. I also lamented that this really good book probably couldn’t be published now. It’s too long, the print too small, the plot too slow, the subject too narrowly mainstream. It challenged my post-pandemic attention span in a good way.

Here’s a book that wouldn’t be published today—the Bible. Too long, too contradictory, no clear plot line, tiny print, mix of styles, hell on attention span.  And yet, I do find that I get a lot out of it every time I read it. There is a value in liturgical seasons, in reading the same passages at least every three years, in placing different passages next to each other to see how they draw new meanings or insights. That’s what makes something a classic.

“When you re-read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in yourself than there was before.” -Clifton Fadiman

That, more than static lessons, is why I value the Bible. And I value corporate worship because together we draw new meanings that make the community more than it was before.

During a great sermon this summer, the Rev. Dr Buz Wilcoxon offered me a new way to think about a familiar story. Jesus in the boat with the disciples and Peter walking on water. You know the story. Peter walks on water until he doesn’t walk on water, and it’s generally told as faith over fear, if only for a moment. The story has always kinda bothered me, if I’m honest, because if Peter had that much trouble with faith, my odds for success seem pretty slim.

But in a classic such as the New Testament, there’s generally more that appears on first, or twelfth, reading. What did it mean in Jesus’s time? What does it mean for us in this bedeviled time of unrest? This time when Christianity is being torn apart by men, mostly men, who are dazzled by power and wielding religion as though they represent the Roman empire?

How do we reread old texts? What lessons apply to current times? What is our role for the future? These questions challenge me, and I lean on my past, inadequate though it seems.

On Thursday, GPS directed me to the wrong entrance for my breakfast meeting. It took a minute to get my bearings: Oh! That building used to be a bank and it’s where Mama took me to open my first savings account. There had been a bakery beside it that always smelled like sugar cookies. That taco place used to be my favorite pizza place, and over there is the theater where I remember seeing The Pink Panther, and where my brother came out ashen after seeing Jaws. There are now twice as many buildings as before.

From there, on my way to the library, I’d looked for the Chinese restaurant Mama once took me. In its place there was a huge complex of buildings, condos, parking decks and retail stores. My past was floating in there somewhere.

I wonder why Mama took me to that restaurant. I was maybe eight years old and had never been to a Chinese restaurant. Our eyes had to adjust to the low-light, red-and-gold sparkly interior. There was a pond with goldfish in the front of the restaurant! I peered down at the fish as we followed the hostess over a small, fairytale perfect arched bridge to the dining room. A silk-robed waitress brought us eggrolls and a pot of tea to share while we waited for our food. I was completely enchanted. And then there were fortune cookies! Blinking into the bright Southern sunlight on the walk back to the car was disorienting.

Also disorienting: Driving the other way on that same road one day Mama and I saw a huge lighting strike miles to the west. Ten minutes later came a drenching downpour. And the next day at school I learned that a classmate of mine, carrying his metal bat off the baseball field, had been struck and killed by that lightning bolt, which traveled through his body into the ground. It was strong enough to knock other teammates off their feet. The carpool line was swarmed with news crews, and our shock and grief were dissected, commodified, exploited.

Don Henley’s Dirty Laundry was a hit at the time, and all the next week we murmured the refrain: kick ‘em when they’re up, kick ‘em when they’re down…

We got the bubble headed bleach blonde who comes on at five
She can tell you 'bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye
It's interesting when people die, give us dirty laundry

I wish I could remember that boy’s name. It feels disrespectful that I don’t. The past won’t stay put.

I can barely remember that child self in Charlotte. Most memories I do have seem to involve my mother—maybe because she was the one hauling me all over creation. And more than any particular thing she said, the foundational memory is simply of her ubiquitous presence. My invisible, unacknowledged foundation of stability. The air I breathed and water I swam in, the safety that later chafed and felt limiting instead of comforting.

And oh, mischievous time: Now I am chafing my daughter, who sequesters herself behind her bedroom door. I fondly remember her on the other side of the glass shower door asking me to draw a heart in the steam. Though, at that moment, I really had just wanted to be alone and had taken a shower to get away from the persistent questions and requests. Now I’m the one with the questions and requests. My children take long showers.

We need our alone time; but we thrive in community. As long as some of us aren’t overbearing.

In our global community, it would behoove us to remember that Jesus taught a gospel of deliverance from tyranny, of the kingdom of God not subject to any empire. Jesus preached God’s unfailing love and steadfast devotion. Jesus overturned money changers focused on wealth and embraced those outside the purity and piety circles. Jesus’s scandalous message is that God’s love is abundant and free for all, not predicated on any human’s desire to exclude.

So, was Peter’s attempt to walk on water a faith to emulate? As Buz concluded, the story shows Peter giving into “the temptation to an individualistic spirituality, separated from, and at the expense of, the community that he’s supposed to be leading.” (Here’s a video of the worship service, Buz begins with the gospel reading at about minute 27.)

May we all choose community in these polarizing times. May our memories guide us toward wisdom and clarity. May we stay in the boat together.

We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust's jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection. —Oliver Sacks 

May we re-collect ourselves.

Maybe, we could together become a living library: egalitarian; promoting knowledge and curiosity; creating, not dismantling, community; acknowledging and preserving the past while transforming the future. And mostly on our best behavior.