Today I'm doing the Lenten post over at Hopeful Imagination. This year contributors introduce a book that is important in their own spiritual story. My choice is Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense by W H Vanstone, a book I've already mentioned a few times on Living Wittily.
The sub title is The Response of Being to the Love of God. This book taught me so much about the love of God, and flowing from that, so much else. You might think my comments on the book are the excusable exaggeration of the enthusiast, or sales talk inexcusable in academic criticism. Just read the book – still in print 33 years after it was published - then decide which is the right response, enthusiasm or criticism. Neither word quite covers it for me – the word I would choose is admiration – for the man, and for the ability to write a book like that. If biography is theology, here's the real thing. And if pastoral theology has first principles, they are embedded in the mystery of that self-giving Love that risks, creates and redeems in the willed vulnerability of the Triune God.
I've got an elderly friend whose approach to his faith is much more straightforward than mine, who now and again signals part of a conversation is over by stating with all the authority of a Benediction, "Well, that's whit ah think onywey". Ditto me! 🙂
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