On Books and Life in the Church

A section of one of my bookshelves

I love books. In a real sense, my life is dominated by books. Dealing with books is the heart of my job—selling them, getting them together for orders, speaking to customers about them. At home, my free time is largely given over to reading; I’ve already finished five books this month, and I’m actively reading seven others at the present. Books have always been a big part of my life, ever since I learned how to read. I could attempt to wax poetic on this point, but if you’re a reader you understand—and if you’re not, I doubt I could help you do so.

I suppose it is a sense of mortality peculiar to being a reader (or at least one in the modern age) to be keenly aware that there are far, far more books in the world than anyone could ever get to in a single lifetime. Even if you reduce that set to merely the books you’re interested in, the sheer number of books still prevails. Our time is finite, the number of books continues to grow, and with each book picked up there is an opportunity cost of those left on the shelf.

On Religious Experience

Yesterday in the bookstore I got a call from a lady about We Shall See Him As He Is: The Spiritual Autobiography of Elder Sophrony. Notwithstanding the facts that 1) she already owned the book and so was not looking to buy it, and 2) we don’t even publish that particular Sophrony book (it’s a St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood publication), she was in some distress and asked me to bear with her, and so I did. Basically, she had started reading the book and was worried about the trustworthiness of these seemingly extravagant claims of spiritual experience by a contemporary, uncanonized person. Her parish had been without a priest for months and she didn’t know who to talk to…and so she called us.

It was a slow day, so I gave her my two cents, with the explicit caveats that this was my personal opinion, I’ve never read the particular book, and I’m (obviously) not a priest. We ended up talking for about 20 minutes (far from the longest call I’d had even that week), and, thank God, it seems that my off-the-cuff answer was helpful. This conversation has left me thinking about the nature of religious experience in general, and what place it has (or ought to have) in the Christian life.

On Customer Service and Patience

Cards (icon and otherwise) above my desk at work.

This week at work has found me repeatedly having to dig deep for patience. Already on Monday I was commenting that my threshold for nonsense was feeling dangerously low—dangerously so because, the truth is, I have to deal with a lot of nonsense.

We only have two full time people working in the bookstore, so my job is multifaceted, encompassing more or less everything but the actual packing and shipping (which our part-time staff does) and ordering from suppliers (which our bookstore manager takes care of). I pick the items for orders, which for places like Amazon can be several hundred at a time; I process all the returns; I’ve increasingly been updating spreadsheets; I fold and assemble packs of cards as needed; I’m periodically sent to go represent the Press at various events; and in, short, I do whatever needs to be done on a particular day.