Lenten Reading

Two Books to Guide You through Lent

Lent starts next Wednesday. I posted a video on the history and practices of Lent on Friday, but if we are going to benefit from this season in the church year, it pays to plan ahead. Here, I would like to introduce you to two books that can make Lent more meaningful for you.

The first of these should come as no surprise for those who were with me during Advent. It is poet and theologian Malcolm Guite’s The Word in the Wilderness: A Poem a Day for Lent and Easter. Like Waiting on the Word which I recommended for Advent, Guite gives us a poem a day from Shrove Tuesday (the day before Ash Wednesday) through Easter. Some of these are Guite’s own sonnets, others are from a range of other poets.

The poems are arranged in weekly themes: Shriven, Ashed, and Ready for Action: Entering Lent; A Pilgrimage Begins; Deepening the Life of Prayer; Dante and the Companioned Journey; Know Thyself! A Conversation with Sir John Davies and Alfred Lord Tennyson; Prayer that Pierces: The Point of the Passion; and Palm Sunday and Holy Week. Guite also includes poems for the Saints’ Days that come up in Lent.

I was particularly delighted to discover Sir John Davies, a wrongfully neglected English poet and contemporary of Shakespeare. Although he is a sophisticated poet and thinker, his writing is remarkably accessible. A book of his selected poems was released this past September. They aren’t Lenten focused, so here I’ll only say they are a delight. I highly recommend it.

I have made it a practice to go through The Word in the Wilderness every year during Lent, much as I have with Waiting on the Word during Advent. These books have been very important to me in transforming my understanding of poetry and its importance to our world.

The reason for this is the commentary Guite provides for each of the poems. My English classes never taught me how to appreciate poetry. I learned about meter, rhyme, some “poetic devices” like alliteration, simile and metaphor, but I never really understood what poetry is or why in most cultures it has been considered one of the highest and most important arts. Malcolm Guite changed that through his selection of poems and his explanations of what the poets were doing thematically and technically. As a result, I have come to see poetry’s importance and how impoverished we are for having neglected it. As I’ve argued elsewhere, I believe that learning to think poetically is crucial to the task of re-enchantment since it teaches you to see beyond the literal to the meanings hidden in words and the world.

The second book I would like to recommend is new, having just come out in the past few months. It is called Wardrobes and Rings: Through Lenten Lands with the Inklings by Julia Golding, Malcolm Guite, and Simon Horobin. Guite you already know; Golding is an award winning novelist; Horobin is a Fellow and Tutor in Magdalen College, Oxford, holding the same chair as C.S. Lewis. C.R. Wiley, Tom Price, and I interviewed him back in 2024 in conjunction with our documentary on Lewis.

Wardrobes and Rings takes you through Lent via a series of essays on moments and themes from the writings of the Inklings and other related writers. Lewis and Tolkien are arguably the most important inspirations for Christian re-enchantment today and are well represented in this collection, but we also see Owen Barfield, Dorothy Sayers, Charles Williams, George MacDonald, Chaucer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and others. The essays are brief—about 2 pages—and end with a reflection exercise and Scripture verse.

The essays are organized topically by the week. Themes include: Lent Begins; Nature in the Worlds of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis; Time and Worldly Wisdom; Sub-Creation—Creativity and Creation Stories; Conversion, Conversation and Fellowship (ironically omitting the Oxford comma); Going through the Wardrobe—The Importance of Story; and The Ultimate Sacrifice.

I confess that I have not read through the whole set of essays; it is, after all, the first year the book is out. But what I have seen looks excellent, and I will be adding this to my Lenten disciplines this year. Along with The Word in the Wilderness, it looks like it will be an effective Lenten devotion that can help us see ourselves, our world, and the gospel with new eyes.