The Body Broken

Tonight I finished one of two books I own called The Body Broken. This one is by Robert Benson. I'll be starting the other very soon.

If you only like books that are overtly scholarly, you will not like this book. If you like a book of stories, this book is for you.

Benson weaves stories of his life and finds connections between them. He has a way of writing that is personal, profound, and somewhat Buechner-esque. Chapters begin with quotes from Scripture and/or The Book of Common Prayer. Through his stories, the importance of unity and the pain of our division comes through clearly.

He concludes the book proper with:

The walls that have been built between us--the ones built out of fear or pride or ignorance--can be taken down. and we who sit on this pew must do exactly that. We are the ones who can stop the daily dividing up of th Body of Christ into pieces and, instead, make it more possible for the Christ to be seen in our world.

We must seek out the things that we have in common and at the same time learn to honor the things that make us different. We must learn to take the things that we hold dear--our sense of community, our love for the scriptures, our hunger for prayer, our capacity for worship--and work to make them wide enough and deep enough to include others rather than keep them at a distance.

We must be willing to cultivate humility along with certainty, to practice tolerance along with devotion, to seek patience along with piety.

We must learn to seek the face of the Christ in those who are different as readily as we do in the faces of those who are like us.

We must learn to love one another.