Confessions
of an Unemployed Minister - Part
Four: Audio Books
I have to admit that, while I have
been walking everywhere, I am not always taking in the
beauty and wonder of creation, nor always engaging with my neighbours. Sometimes
I am listening to an audio book. One can borrow new or classic audio titles
from the library for free, and enjoy hours of someone personally reading a
story directly into one’s ears. I can often be seen walking along my treks with
those iconic white wires hanging out of my ears and plugged into my iPhone.
When I first left full-time,
ministry employment, I found I was mostly attracted to listening to spy
fiction. I consumed all the books of these definitively macho (and mono-syllable
named) characters like: Jack Ryan, Mitch Rapp, John Wells and Jack Reacher. It
doesn’t take a psychologist to see how, in wounded ego circumstances, one might
be especially drawn to fantasy stories about heroes who are consistently always young, powerful, decisive, correct and successful.
Once I passed through that odd stage
of the grief process, I also listened to some beautiful fiction. One story that
was particularly helpful for moving on was ‘The Little Paris Bookshop” by Nina
George. This is the story of Jean Perdu, who owns and operates a “literary
apothecary” used bookshop from a floating barge on the Seine. Monsieur Perdu can
intuitively prescribe specific books as the precise medicines for individual readers’
needs. The only one he cannot prescribe a healing tome for is himself.
“Perdu” sounds like the French word
for “to lose”, or “forget”. And Monsieur Perdu must cut loose from his moorings,
and, like Huck Finn on the Mississippi, or Charlie Marlow in the ‘Heart of
Darkness”, he must journey the river. That journey becomes a cruse through the
stages of grief, confronting what he has forgotten. According to www.thefreedictonary.com,
another associated definition of ‘Perdu’ is “obsolete”, as in “a soldier sent on an especially dangerous
mission”, like a “lost sentry posted in a position in which death is
likely”. It’s also associated with
“perdition”, as in purgatory.
I found
myself caught up in Perdu’s journey, and the book became a prescribed medicine
for my own emotional voyage. Transitions in one’s life can feel like being a “lost
sentry” unexpectedly “sent on an especially dangerous mission” of faith and
trust. The expedition may pass through some healthy forgetting and remembering,
and through some difficult deaths of old dreams and expectations. But,
hopefully, it breaks through into uncharted, buoyant territories of new gifts
of maturity and wisdom. It may feel like a kind of purgatory at times, but the
promise of new destinations is heartening and healing.
