And my heart goes "Hurray for Tomas Halik!"

You know how people say that "you should never judge a book by it's cover?" And yet, when you go to the book store, you find yourself doing exactly that and you hate yourself for doing that?

Well, my dilemma is simply judging books by their amazon reviews and wikipedia. So many books have been recommended to me, but when I do a search online, and the summary doesn't thrill me I will forget about it.

Well, I found a book review tonight that did just the opposite. Click here for the review. It's about a recent book from a Tomas Halik called Patience with God. In short it is discussing the atheist position (Halik is a Christian). His argument moved me something right well in terms of analysis (and i haven't even read the book but I will)....

" the real difference between faith and atheism is patience. Atheists are not wrong, only impatient. They want to resolve doubt instead of enduring it. Their insistence that the natural world doesn't point to God (or to any necessary meaning) is correct. Their experience of God's absence is a truthful experience, shared also by believers. Faith is not a denial of all this: it is a patient endurance of the ambiguity of the world and the experience of God's absence. Faith is patience with God. Or as Adel Bestavros puts it (in the book's epigraph): patience with others is love, patience with self is hope, patience with God is faith. "


When I read that paragraph, and more so that last sentence, it was one of those moments of revelation for me. I would not have been surprised if at that moment a light could have broken through the ceiling from heaven onto the computer screen that held the paragraph. I even had to turn on the theme song from 2001: A Space Odyssey, "Thus Sprake Zarathustra" to just add to the moment. 


Who needs books for these moments? We got book reviews. Soon we'll need "Book Review" reviews just to keep us safe from finding yourself preached to in the midst of the reading for possible future reads.