On this shelf, at top center is the place of honor on my bookshelves, where books by Gordon Cosby and Elizabeth O’Connor sit.
Our family had a copy of Call to Commitment , that had somehow made it into our home after my Mom’s father died (this next November 11 will mark 40 years ago!) . Although basically everything theological and church related from my grandfather’s library went to someone’s church library or some pastor’s library, this book ended up on our shelf. I was to remember seeing that at our house in my childhood, and when I was 20, I picked it up and statrted reading it when some people in my youth group, most of us in college now, were talking about The Church of the Saviour. Our youth minister had told us a story or two about them during our high school years. When a bunch of us started meeting regularly following a MIssion trip, in a couple of years we were, one summer, renewiing those HIgh school Youth group meetings over at the house of one of our members. 5 or 6 of the people in this “Call to Commitment” discussion went to DC that summer (1976) —we were all 19 and 20—- but I was unable to go with them due to my job, but they came back all abuzz. One guy and his girlfriend, who had gone, asked me over one night and told me of a plan to keep “seeking” into the notion of church that had been given to them from all of our reading and their visit and discussion with Mary and Gordon Cosby. He asked me becuase I had begun reading Call to Commitment with them, and afterwards immediately gone out and bought Elizabeth O’Connor’s other books: Journey Inward, Journey Outward (the “sequel” to Call to Commitment, as well as Our Many Selves, Eighth Day of Creation, and Search for Silence, and soon after that , The New Community, and Gordon Cosby’s Handbook for Mission Groups.
We proceeded with the misison group idea and took up “Our Many Selves” as a common discipline to work together as a resource for intense sharing of ourselves and our journeys. We met on Friday nights during college, and OUr Many Selves became for me a hugely significant book (It’s subtitle was “A Handbook for Self-Discovery”, but iut was anything but a “Therapy Model” that one usually gets from titles like that. It was an intense book of exercises and readings from numerous writers on various aspects of discovering the “many selves” that exist in us, the selves that wake up at particular situations and in the face of certain experiences, all of which need redemption and healing. It was in this book that I was first exposed to Dietrich Bonhoefer, and bought copies of Cost of Discipleship and Life Together and Letters and Papers From Prison, the latter of which I don’t remember what happened to my copy. I think someone who had been trying to find it offered me some relatively enticing sum of money to the financially strapped seminary student that I THOUGHT I was.
I was also introduced, via Our Many Selves to various of the Christian classics such as The Cloud of Unknowing, The Dark Night of the Soul, Meister Eckhardt and the works of Carl Jung.
More in a bit. This is fun for me, remembering this stuff.