A Different Kind of Wedding Gift

The July/August 2023 issue of Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity arrived recently and is filled with the usual high quality, thoughtful, informative articles that it always brings.  One brief article has me thinking about future wedding gifts to the newly married. 

In an article entitled Homeward Bound Books, Just Hall explains why he purchased these particular twenty books for a newlywed.  Giving books for newlyweds? While I think books are appropriate for all occasions, celebratory or not, I had not thought of giving books to newlyweds. In my experience, books are never on the wedding register for suggested gifts. 

Mr. Hall begins his article with this explanation.  “I recently gave a friend a wedding gift of twenty books as a cultural contribution to his new home and personal library.  I wrote a letter explaining why I chose them.  What follows is an edited version of the letter.” 

The books he gave cover the breadth of western literature.  Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey begin the list.  The list also includes favorite Shakespeare works, Melville's Moby Dick, Eliot, Waugh, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Solzhenitsyn. He also includes two works from late antiquity: The Confessions by St. Augustine and The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. 

He explains why he includes the Confessions and the Consolation. “Reading Augustine’s Confessions, one might, like C. S. Lewis before him, begin to intimate the synthesis between the Homeric theme of homecoming and the restlessness of Augustine, and to realize that we are indeed migrants in search of a home, but that our home is not to be found in this city of man.

“Meanwhile, Boethius offers us consolation in our restlessness.  In the Consolation of Philosophy, he makes an argument for our place as free beings within the providence of God.  Our happiness cannot be found in the capriciousness of good fortune, he says; rather, even in our lowest moments and worst sufferings, we can yet discover that condition of peace which is the rootedness of a soul in harmony with the purposes of God.  Boethius writes, “O race of men, you hsall be happy when the love that rules the stars also rules your hearts.” The late modernist poet, T.S. Eliot would call this reality “the still point of the turning world.” 

Homecoming, restlessness, true peace and rootedness despite the circumstances of life: these are essential things to reflect upon as we go through the many stages and unexpected circumstances of life.  While blenders and toaster ovens and silverware and dishes all have their place as gifts for newlyweds, especially young ones who are establishing a new home together; what of the mind and soul?  Doesn’t the mind and soul need continual renewal, challenge, and refinement? In particular, for those who are Christian and who know that their ultimate place and joy is not in the material pleasures of this world but within God and His kingdom? 

I suspect that Mr. Hall knows his friend and spouse well. Well enough, at least, to know that these twenty volumes will be valued and used for the betterment of their life together.  Bravo to Mr. Hall for choosing a gift that promotes development of thought, virtue, character, and the soul!