Are there books in heaven?

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library,” Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges said.

This quote came to me disembodied, without its context, but whatever Borges meant by it, the imaginative notion of books in heaven immediately intrigued and delighted me.

My very earliest memories, after all, concern books – Moody Colportage books like Christie’s Old Organ, A Peep Behind the Scenes, Rosa’s Last Quest, Nobody Loves Me, read aloud to me and my brothers by our mother. These were heartrending tales of miserable lives redeemed by the gospel, and probably, in retrospect, too intense for a five or six-year-old. But they had a powerful musicality that hooked me on stories and began to do in me what books do: take us into the hearts of other people and places and teach us to love them.

It’s an enormous privilege, in fact, to have the pleasure of books, the sheer gift of them, sparked by God’s own nature as Creator (our efforts but glimpses, fallen bits and pieces, pale facsimiles to be sure), and quite plausible, therefore – at least to me – that words gathered into sentences, paragraphs, chapters might also be ours in the house of many rooms where God resides.

I was comforted by that thought again recently, while glancing over “The Globe 100,” the Globe and Mail’s top 100 books of 2006 as selected by its reviewers and editors. Although familiar with many through reviews, I realized I’d actually read only one book on the list.

That one was Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest by Rudy Wiebe, perfectly described by reviewer T.F. Rigelhof as containing “more than a little of W.G. Sebald’s transcendent sense of the power of history, and much of his melancholy.”

A wonderful read indeed, but what of the 99 I missed, and will never catch up on as another year of book launches and “100 picks” at the end of it speeds into the future?

I did a little better with my own short list of “books I’d like to read in 2006,” optimistically set down on the back page of last year’s journal. I got to John Banville’s The Sea, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, as well as Penelope Fitzgerald’s last book, The Blue Flower. Roughly a third of what I’d listed, and in the meanwhile the list had grown. I really want to read Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy, for example, but I haven’t even purchased it yet!

Restlessness

In the larger scheme of things, of course, the unread books aren’t that important. But they represent longings, possibilities, and the limitations of our finite lives. They’re a restlessness we live with that’s positive, and negative.

Rather than dwelling on what’s unread, perhaps, I should consider what’s been. Looking at my notes of what I read over the past year, I marvel at how many other books slipped into my lists, supplanted them – and did me good.

More than once I’ve found, when there’s need, the Spirit lands me in very particular pages for that need. Other times, though, it’s as simple as what this pennywise reader can uncover at the used book nook down the block.

That, in fact, is how In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick, snagged in good-as-new, hardcover condition for just a dollar, became the read-aloud book of choice for a road trip my husband and I made last spring. Learning more than we’d known could possibly be interesting about Nantucket, whaling, the attributes of a good leader, cannibalism, and the real-life story on which Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was based, the book created a unique shared memory for the two of us and also made the Trans-Canada Highway over the prairies seem blessedly shorter.

And I bumped into the work of the Japanese Catholic writer, Shusaku Endo, because I’d spotted his name at two different blog sites. I googled Endo, learned a little, read his novel Silence. It’s an amazing exploration of God’s silence and speaking, of betrayal, testing, martyrdom. “I’m not a saint,” one of its characters confesses. “I’m scared of death.”

Rest

We get only glimpses in Scripture (and see them dimly) of what the new heaven and earth will be like. We’re assured that God fills heaven, that in God’s presence is “fullness of joy.” Paul quotes Isaiah to remind the Corinthian believers that “what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived – these things God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9). In his discourse to them on the resurrection, Paul also uses the image of a seed in relation to the green thing that grows from it to show the vast distance between “sown in dishonour” and “raised in glory” (1 Corinthians 15:43).

These texts, and others, remind us how little we grasp of heaven, but they invite us to imagine and certainly to contemplate this glory with excitement. The Sabbath-rest we anticipate beyond the restlessness of our labours and unread books is more than cessation; it’s genuine fulfillment.

In the meanwhile, I’m making my modest hopeful list of books for 2007 (carrying some over, dropping the others), fully expecting all kinds of divergence in what actually gets read. I’ll also try to remember to pray, as Elizabeth Elliot taught me years ago in something she wrote, “Thy list be done.” Here, as it is in heaven!

Dora Dueck is associate editor of the MB Herald.