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I have another friend who reads Thomas Howard’s Evangelical is Not Enough about once a year. It had a profound influence on his life when he first read it many years ago, and I imagine that his annual return helps him keep the edge on the blade. He talks about it like a guy recalling an old mentor.

What I find in such conversations is that people often have a few titles like this. Re-reading books is one of life’s joys, and for many of us it’s a necessary part of our literary experience.

“I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once,” wrote C.S. Lewis in a letter to his friend, Arthur Greeves. Greeves was apparently not much of a re-reader, but Lewis confessed it “is one of my greatest pleasures.”

One the volumes to which I make frequent pilgrimage is Lewis’s own Till We Have Faces. It’s a stark and beautiful novel about all the good stuff, love and pride and jealousy. I don’t know how many times I’ve read it now, but I just can’t stop.

Montaigne’s Essays are like that for me as well. My copy migrates from room to room over the year as I pick it up and casually read a few essays here and there. I find him funny, shrewd, thoughtful, deeply feeling. If someone were to ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I might say Montaigne.

I think that’s partly why we re-read books. We see something of ourselves in them. They are like inky mirrors that give us glimpses of our hearts and hopes. We add their words to the sentences that describe ourselves.

Perhaps it’s a value they extol, or a character we admire, or an adventure we wish we could join. Whatever the particular reasons for the particular book, we identify with them and just can’t do without.

Question: What are the books you come back to?

'Saint James the Less' by James Joseph Jacques Tissot (Brooklyn Museum, Wikimedia Commons).

Given his intense practice, it comes as no surprise that James discusses prayer in the letter that bears his name. These verses in the fourth chapter hit me this morning: “You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.”

I’ve heard people quote that first sentence a million times to say that all you have to do is ask, and if you ask in faith then God will answer. (I notice that people usually quote it from the King James: “ye have not because ye ask not.”) The idea seems to be that God is just waiting around to bless us if we’ll only make a peep.

But what about the second sentence? “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” Passions basically equates to sinful desires. So to that point, what if we live our lives out of sync with our prayers? What if we pray for things to gratify or satisfy our lusts or our anger or our fears or (insert your particular issue)? James seems to say that God won’t give us what we ask.

Other writers have followed James’ train of thought, and I find their observations as helpful as they are convicting.

“Our life should correspond to our progress in the faith, and we ought to offer our prayers to God in accordance with the way we live our life,” writes Mark the Monk, a fifth century ascetic who lived in Egypt. Mark’s comments are particularly interesting because he was a perceptive observer of the human heart. He saw through the subtleties of the passions and how we can be double-minded and undone by things of which we’re barely conscious.

Says Mark, “A passion that someone willingly allows to dominate his activity will later violently stir up the person who is under its influence, even against his will.” The comment reminds me of Paul’s statement of personal frustration with sin in Romans.

“The person who hates the passions removes their causes,” says Mark, “while the person who is addicted to those things which cause the passions is attacked by the passions, even though he may not wish it.” But the trouble he says is that secretly “We love the causes of involuntary thoughts, and that is why they come.”

How many secret thoughts and subtle passions are hindering our prayers? In his essay on prayer, Montaigne says that when we pray while harboring sinful thoughts, “we ourselves present to [God] the rods with which to chastise us.” He paints a worrisome picture of people whose conduct is so double-minded that their prayers are really “only an act.” Taken to that extreme, prayers like this are more superstition than true petition. And sin is what takes it to that extreme.

Reading these passages I am increasingly mindful about seeking anything of God before seeking repentance. I am also gratefully reminded that there are people like James constantly praying for my repentance and forgiveness. I can use all the help available.

(Photo by Horia Varlan, Flickr)

Stop blushing. You know you do it. Everyone does. I only wonder if we’re maximizing the experience. Facebook on your cell phone, a hastily snatched magazine, or a dog-eared book previously abandoned in the bathroom are usually unworthy of the occasion. A greater intentionality is required here. There are certain books that can redeem the time in ways untold, and here are (drum roll optional) a few of them. First, my favorite and then some runners up:

Montaigne’s Essays. Montaigne lived in the sixteenth century, but he could be your next-door neighbor. That is, if your next-door neighbor were wiser, smarter, funnier, humbler, better-read, and more self-deprecating. There is not a human emotion that Montaigne doesn’t touch or treat in the Essays, and he writes about almost every subject imaginable. Within the span of thirty pages, he covers everything from war horses to ancient customs, smells, prayer, and aging. He treats subjects like the love of fathers for their children, will power, thumbs, changing your mind, names, sleep, sumptuary laws, cannibals, inconsistency, fear, sadness, solitude, friendship, even how we laugh and cry at the same things.

In the preface, Montaigne says a reader would be “unreasonable to spend your leisure” on his book. It’s one of the few things about which he was entirely wrong. For his sheer scope and insight, I think it is safe and fitting to say that Montaigne is one of the most fully human writers to ever take up the pen. And his wide reach means you’ll never be bored. Most of the entries are quick reads, thoughtful and amusing. No bathroom should be without a copy of the Essays. There are dozens of editions out there; my favorite is Donald M. Frame’s Everyman’s Library edition of The Complete Works.

C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. Even without the suggestive posture of the gargoyle on the cover of the recent HarperOne edition, contemplating the advice of senior demon Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood while in the confines of the small room makes a certain sort of sense. Screwtape is one of those books that rewards many readings and can be picked up at any place and satisfy just about any mood. Lewis is sly, funny, perceptive, and on-point throughout. The discussions about the physicality of prayer or the dips and highs of living are, for instance, revelatory at the first reading and great reminders ever thereafter. And speaking of the underworld. . . .

Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary. Maybe the original spoof dictionary, Bierce started what became the DD in 1881 with definitions filed in a weekly paper. By 1911 it was a full-blown and riotous tome, made all the better by the posthumously published Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary (my favorite edition). Here’s his definition of cabbage: “A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man’s head.” And belladonna: “In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.”

The Oxford Book of Essays, edited by John Gross. A wide ranging collection of essays by everyone from Francis Bacon to H. L. Mencken, Jonathan Swift to G. K. Chesterton, William Hazlitt to Mark Twain, John Henry Newman to George Santayana. Perhaps best of all you can find Ambrose Bierce’s hilarious and Facebook-timely essay, “Disintroductions.”

Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley on Ivrything and Ivrybody. As you might guess from the language in the title, Mr. Dooley doesn’t speak the King’s English. Or the Queen’s English. Or anybody’s but his own. The books were written a little more than a hundred years ago and involve the ramblings of an Irish—what else?—bartender named Mr. Dooley, also known as the philosopher. (Think Montaigne but with Bushmills.) Mr. Dooley holds forth on the news of his day (some of it is very dated, though still amusing) and subjects of timeless curiosity. A smattering of topics include books, anarchists, family reunions, keeping lent, history, swearing, vice, gratitude, and political reform movements, captured perfectly in this classic statement of his: “A man that’d expict to thrain lobsters to fly in a year is called a loonytic; but a man that thinks men can be tur-rned into angels be an iliction is called a rayformer an’ remains at large.”

Each of these books lends itself to serendipity. Just open one and see what you find. It’s hard to think of a better or more edifying way to pass the time.

What are your favorite bathroom reads? And don’t worry. If you’re embarrassed, just start the sentence with “Well, my friend likes. . . .” I’ll wink and pretend I have no idea.

Cover detail from 'Mystery and Manners.'

I just read a line by Flannery O’Connor in Mystery and Manners that explains why this is so: “what is written to edify usually ends by amusing.” The word “amusing” is what triggered the realization. Humor is often produced by incongruity, contradiction, and paradox. The fool is comic because man is not supposed to be foolish. The wise man is good for a platitude, the idiot for a laugh.

Writers get in a trap when they set out to write what is edifying and seek to avoid the failures, the falls, the disappointments, the crises, the impieties, the sins inherent to life. To the extent that these things are thought unedifying and thus inadequately represented in an effort to be edifying, the writer creates a tale that does’t square and so inadvertently creates a joke instead of a convincing or compelling story. And accidental jokes are only accidentally edifying. Usually they are merely, as O’Connor says, amusing.

I think this is true when writers draw characters who are overly pietistic as well. “A writer writes about what he is able to make believable,” says O’Connor. We live in an age when religion is often seen as threatening or absurd. Overly pietistic characters work well as terrorists (think Islamic militants and abortion-clinic shooters) but as good-natured characters they can come off as boobs unless the character picture is full orbed — which is to say, inclusive of their faults and failings. And even then, watch out.

It is far better to follow Montaigne’s approach: “I do not teach, I relate.” Tell a story, tell it well, and let it be edifying in and of itself. O’Connor again: “The artist has his hands full and does his duty if he attends to his art. He can safely leave evangelizing to the evangelists.” And the comedy to the comedians.