The Confessions of St. Augustine, which details how he came to faith. I was also struck by Augustine's quite graceful Latin style. (The translation by Henry Chadwick is good if you do not read Latin.)
Apologia Pro Vita Sua -- either "a defense of his life" or "an explanation of his life" -- by Cardinal Newman. In the 1860s, Charles Kingsley (best known for the novel
The Water-Babies) attacked Newman for repeatedly saying one thing at one time, and another -- even the opposite -- at another time. Newman wrote about how he grew spiritually and intellectually, explaining how and why he came to change his mind on various subjects. Considerably later, and in quite different circumstances, G. K. Chesterton wrote, "A man may well be less convinced of a philosophy from four books, than from one book, one battle, one landscape, and one old friend." This echoes throughout Newman's
Apologia.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer's
The Cost of Discipleship. About what the Christian is called to do if his or her claim to being a Christian is genuine. Bonhoeffer himself was executed by the Nazis, basically because he took his Christianity seriously. The section on "cheap grace" is particularly noteworthy.
Several books by Thomas Merton, especially
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, a collection of essays. Some of the strictly political stuff is dated, but his thoughts on religion are brilliant. He writes of a mystical experience he had on a street corner in Louisville, Kentucky of all places:
I have the immense joy of being a man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are, and if only everybody could realize what we are! There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each is in God's eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. I suppose the big problem would be that we would all fall down and worship each other. But this cannot be seen, only believed, and understood by a peculiar gift.
At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth. a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak his name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light come together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely...I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.
Merton is trying to describe the soul itself, what the Hindus would call the divine spark. It has no substance, and the divine spark isn't what emits light, it is what really sees light and good and evil and all the other things.
Something else he wrote echoes in my soul:
The Christ we seek is within us, in our inmost self, is our inmost self, and yet infinitely transcends ourselves. We have to be 'found in Him' and yet be perfectly ourselves and free from the domination of any image of him other than Himself. You see that is the trouble with the Christian world. It is not dominated by Christ. It is enslaved by images and ideas of Christ that are creations and projections of men and stand in the way of God's freedom. But Christ Himself is in us as unknown and unseen. We follow Him, we find Him, and then He must vanish and we must go along with Him at our side.
Another book by Merton that I love is
Zen and the Birds of Appetite, which introduced me to Zen, although he wrote in an afterword that "any attempt to handle Zen in theological language is bound to miss the point," calling his book "an example of how not to approach Zen." I suppose it's an example of how the Buddha which can be spoken of is not the true Buddha.
One not on spiritual growth is
Papal Sin by Garry Wills. This is about honesty and the lack of it in the Vatican. It confirmed many of my own ideas -- basically that all too often, the papacy does not teach or preach honestly. I know Wills, and he and I see eye-to-eye on this subject. (Wills is quite conservative politically. But I forgive him his lapse in judgment.)
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