Books that change one's life

 

Today is yet another wonderful
memory of a year ago with
Mr. Husband.
We went to church for vespers a year ago,
it was a sunny beautiful day.
*
I am reading Kathleen Norris slowly
again.... her books plunged me into a new reality
and indeed opened the door for me
to be in the Orthodox church
ten years ago...
*
She opened the world of the early church fathers for me
and I suddenly was seeing everything
new and a lot of my old questions
fell right away ~
feminism for one.
*
It was such a gentle turning.
After years of studying literature,
stalking figures in books to see
how they portrayed men, women and
what it all meant,
suddenly I met many who lived long ago
like St. Jerome,
who Norris says 'feminists love to hate' and
his rich friendships with woman and her
deft exploration of these things
led me to see that feminism of today
is something that had not only narrowed things
but had lived only on the surface of things
and suddenly a brilliant complexity and
a much wider open world opened to me
and things were pulled away and
I saw a world where
freedom was and is
and saw that it surely was not
where I had thought it was;
the feminism I followed so long
through so many texts...
not realizing the worlds I was missing
by reading with such a narrow lens.