This is Part 2 of a four-part series, a broad conversation about reading and what it does to us over time. No category, no prerequisites. All are welcome at this table. The Table of Contents for this series can be found here.
I owe you a confession before we go any further in this series.
Somewhere in a high school English classroom, decades ago, a teacher assigned The Scarlet Letter. Copies were handed down the rows. Discussion days came and went. And let’s just say those discussions managed to get by without much help from me… because I never read it. Yes… I was that student. The one with the Cliffs Notes tucked inside my 3-ring binder. I have spent a good portion of my adult life nodding thoughtfully whenever Hawthorne came up in conversation, the way you nod at a stranger you’re fairly sure you were once introduced to.
So when retirement finally handed me back my reading life, I made a deliberate choice about where to begin. Before Homer, before Dostoevsky, before any of the books that would eventually fill my shelves, I went back and paid my oldest debt. The first book of my retirement was the one I was supposed to have read at seventeen.
I expected to finally complete a homework assignment. That is not what happened.
What happened was that somewhere in those opening chapters, the book quietly turned around and started reading me. I didn’t plan this, it wasn’t a devotional exercise, and I wasn’t looking for one. But as Hester Prynne stood on that scaffold before her town, and as the good people of Boston pronounced their judgments upon her, I found myself doing something uncomfortable: holding that story up against my own daily living as a follower of Christ. And I did not always like the reflection.
Here is the honest version. I went into that book assuming my sympathies would sort themselves out the way they’re supposed to, with the suffering woman, against the harsh crowd. And they did. But the harder recognition was this: when I searched that crowd of stern Puritan faces for someone I resembled… I found me. Not in my worst moments only, but in ordinary ones. In the reflex to measure. In the quiet confidence of the person who believes he is standing safely inside the lines. I had to sit with a blunt question: how Puritanical had I been in living out beliefs that were never meant to be lived that way? There were gaps between what I professed and how I carried it, and Hawthorne, a novelist, dead more than a century before I was assigned his book, had found them in a few dozen pages.
And then Hester complicated things further. She doesn’t hide. She stands on that scaffold and later moves through that town wearing the very letter meant to shame her boldly, almost defiantly, until the town is no longer sure what the letter means. I couldn’t help carrying that image into our present moment. When I see people in our own culture standing defiantly before the rest of us, boldly wearing whatever label they know we’ve assigned them… I used to see only the defiance. Hawthorne made me ask a different question: is the boldness the beginning of the story, or is it an answer to something that happened first? Is it possible that some of what looks like acting out is what it looks like when people have already felt the scaffold? I don’t offer that as a verdict on anyone. I offer it as a question the book forced me to ask about myself, about which direction the examining should run.
By the final chapters I realized something else, and it made me laugh at the seventeen-year-old I had been: I had stumbled onto what I believe is Hawthorne’s main theme, honestly, the way you’re supposed to, not for a book report, but because my life required it. The book is not really about Hester’s sin at all. It’s about hidden sin and public judgment, about a minister being hollowed out by what he conceals while the woman who carries her failure openly is slowly transformed by it, until the town’s letter of shame means something closer to grace. The judged one heals. The judges do not. No study guide could have given me that. I had to be old enough to recognize the townspeople.
I closed that book a different kind of reader, and I made a decision… one I have never gone back on: from then on, every book would be a practice session. The page, I decided, is the safest room in the world to rehearse becoming who you are trying to become, to sit with people not like me, to hear them out at full strength, to let my reflexes be examined with no one watching and nothing at stake except my pride. You cannot injure anyone by misunderstanding a character. You can only be corrected. Where else in life do we get that offer?
A couple of years into this practice, I found a book that handed me the vocabulary for what I had been doing on instinct: Karen Swallow Prior’s On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books. Prior’s case, made gently and well, is that reading great literature attentively is itself a practice of virtue, that we don’t just learn about patience or humility or justice from books, we get to rehearse them there. I read it nodding the whole way through. It felt less like discovering an idea than being told the name of a road I was already walking.
And the practice keeps going places I don’t expect. A few years further down that road, in the middle of a season when I was digging deep into Hebraic literature and teaching, I picked up, of all things, a young adult novel: Elizabeth George Speare’s The Bronze Bow, the story of a boy in Roman-occupied Galilee whose hatred slowly loses an argument with love. A book written for children, and it leveled me. Because by then I had begun to understand something humbling: the scriptures at the very center of my life come from a Middle Eastern people and culture that is, in so many ways, not like mine, and that we in the West may not have carried all of it across intact. Which means the practice I learned from Hawthorne doesn’t stop at the world’s books. Even my own Bible asks me to cross a culture, to sit down as a guest in someone else’s world and listen before I speak. The practice sessions, it turns out, never end. I’ve come to be glad of that.
So, here is where I’d like to leave you today. You have one too, I’d almost guarantee it. The book you were supposed to read. Assigned and dodged or recommended by someone who knew you better than you were ready to admit, or simply standing on a shelf you’ve walked past for thirty years. Whatever it is, I want to gently suggest that it has been waiting, and that it may know some things about you.
Go pay your oldest debt. Let the book read you back.
And when you return, I’ll tell you about the strangest discovery in my whole spreadsheet… the way books I’d read years earlier turned out to have been quietly preparing me for books I hadn’t met yet. It happens more often than you’d think… and it may already be happening to you.
