The Association of Seventh-day Adventist Librarians was on the Pacific Union College campus this past week, and I was asked to give a brief worship. Naturally, my mind turned to books, real books, as opposed to the electronic variety. The most passionate book lovers I know are babies. They know what librarians and other books lovers know about electronic books, and why they simply won’t do: you really need to be able to sink your teeth into a book. Smell the paper, look at the pictures, turn the pages. That is why shopping in a used bookstore is an experience, whereas a trip to Amazon.com is just shopping. You wonder about the person who owned the book: did they love it? Why did they give it up? You try to decipher the inscription in the front. Who was Bill? Why did he give Mom a copy of Silas Marner for Christmas in 1932? Even your own old books are full of life: you pick up one you have read before and out drops a card, a bookmark, a photograph. Memories flood back. You remember reading this book on the top bunk in your dorm in France; the pink striped bedspread suddenly is vividly before your eyes. You read your own comments in the margin. Did I really think that once, write those words in that passionate scrawl? We love books not simply for the ideas and stories within them; we also love them as concrete objects full of life itself. And immediately I stumbled up against this paradox: I am extolling the concrete, yet this idea has come to me, and I pass it on to you, by means of the abstract: language—the word—written, and spoken, and zapped across the Ethernet.

We all know the power of the concrete: smells and tastes, touches and sights and sounds of the distant past can be unforgettable. We recall, perhaps, the smell of figs ripening in the hot sunshine of childhood; the fat baby arms of children now grown; the laughter of someone we loved long ago.

Pleasure and pain, some of the most intense experiences we have, come to us through our bodies. I haven’t felt much pain in my life, or perhaps I have forgotten. I did give birth twice. Yet it seems that often the pain fades, whereas the pleasures remain. These pleasures of the body are the recompense we have for being animals, if you will—God’s way of making our mortality up to us. In Philip Pullman’s recent trilogy, the angels envy the mortals for precisely this reason: because they have material bodies and can therefore run and eat and dance.

But what have we Christians to do with the pleasures of the body? Growing up Adventist, I learned, despite our belief in wholeness, to feel the typical shame that pervades the Christian tradition when it comes to the body, the guilty taint that hangs on chocolate, and jazz, and sleeping in—not to mention sex.

It was C. S. Lewis who showed me that our God is the Creator of pleasure, and that the Devil merely borrows it to dangle in front of his victims and remove it as quickly as possible, in a sort of celestial shell game, where now you see it, now you don’t. Lewis taught this in many of his books: The Screwtape Letters, the space trilogy, The Great Divorce, the Narnia books. I came across it again recently in Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer.

He tells us that "pleasures are shafts of the glory as it strikes our sensibility" (89). Forbidden pleasures are pleasures gotten by an unlawful act; a stolen apple is still sweet, still God’s bounty, but forbidden because not ours to eat. But the pleasure itself is good, and comes from God. Lewis tried in his own life to make "every pleasure into a channel of adoration" (89). By this he means not simply giving thanks, but recognizing God in the gift, smelling the scent of heaven in a jonquil, tasting the heavenly feast in a ripe nectarine. He calls this act "to run back up the sunbeam to the sun" (90).

Here, in these concrete expressions of God's creative energy, what Dylan Thomas called "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower," we may really feel the love of God here and now. If we can but know it, and worship, then we will be preparing to adore one day, face to face. "Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy," writes Lewis. "These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ’patches of Godlight’in the woods of our experience" (91). I read it in a book.

I read this in a journal: the journal of the Association of Adventist Forums, Spectrum. Rick Rice, in his recent review of the new Handbook of Adventist Theology, concludes that although we need the theology of ideas and abstractions, we also need a theology that describes the experience of being an Adventist: what it is like to live life as someone who expects the Second Coming, who rests and worships on the seventh day. This theology, he says, would describe the "lived experience of the community of faith" (69). He finds it difficult to explain exactly what he wants the Church’s theologians to do, because he believes that the methodology for such an approach would have to develop organically. "This… way is not easy to define. Its object is elusive, not because it is too abstract for clear analysis, but because it is too concrete" (69).

I don’t have an answer for Rick in his quest to develop a theology of concrete experience, though he may have to call in the artists—the writers and painters and composers. But I do know that he is right: that while we are talking and writing about life, the thing itself can slip through our fingers if we are not careful. While we are reading and writing books about God, patches of Godlight may be shining all around us, in a steaming cup of tea, a poignant intermezzo by Brahms, a rousing game of ultimate Frisbee in a grassy field. We always need both: the abstract and the concrete; the ideas and the experiences; the words in the books, and the books themselves.

Works Cited

Lewis, C. S. Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. San Diego: Harcourt, 1964.

Rice, Richard. "Theology as Topical Bible Study." Spectrum 29.2 (spring 2001): 61–70.

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