I live in a church these days, just outside the remnants of a town whose name I cannot recall.

Fifty years ago, when I was but a priest in training, I knew that grass was green. Venturing several years further back, I would play in the grass with my friends. I would roll around in the fields and feel the blades of grass between my fingers. It filled me with calm joy, to feel the slightest touch of His creation—a kind of joy that my friends, by and large, did not understand.

When I began my duty as the keeper of my church, the fact that I would be surrounded by greenery came to me as so splendid that in time I started taking it for granted.

Now I run a semi-decrepit thing that can perhaps be called a church. Within this same building I also run the only library for at least a hundred miles. I have not seen a library that is not my own in quite some time.

People of all walks of life come to my home, out of some curiosity. Parents, beggars, nomads, thieves, whores, entertainers. But for the most part these are uneducated people, too young to remember what it meant to go to school for any amount of time. Too young to remember what it meant to shop for food at a grocery store. Too young to remember what it's like to lie in a field of grass and run one's fingers over the leaves.

Most people I've met have little idea as to what a book is. "What is reading like?" some of them ask. What is reading supposed to mean to these people?

I cannot judge them harshly, though. As with the subtle wonders of nature, I did not respect books as much in my youth as I do now. Make no mistake, I used to read with almost a voracious appetite, but I did not know what it meant to open a book, to flip through its pages, to feel the surface of every page, to read every word as if the act were holy. How could I possibly know that such a common experience could become so rare?

After the calamity, after I had lost nearly everything dear to me, I went about my life in a daze for what must have been months. The calamity did not just affect me personally, but also everyone I knew and everyone I knew not. I began to wonder, during those lost months, if God had played a cruel trick on me, or if I had chosen to believe in a fabrication, and that the true creator of the universe was a malicious child. Ultimately I chose to keep my faith, however strenuous it was to do so at first. Even more strenuous was helping to keep the faith of others—many of whom decided, reasonably enough, to abandon any notion that God loved them.

Faith was the first to die, followed in time by literacy.

Indeed it took a terribly long time for me to open a book again, yet as I recall this incident now I imagine it with terrific clarity. The book was a dog-eared copy of [i]The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth[/i]. I am not sure what compelled me, but I started to read one poem, line by line in a painful fashion, and then another. An hour later it occurred to me that my eyes had become reddened, and that there were traces of tears on my cheeks.

I spent that entire night, until early in the morning, consuming what literature I had on hand. Wordsworth, Whitman, Austen, Eliot, Faulkner, Proust, Morrison, Vonnegut. The Book of Psalms rang true to me for the first time in so long, I was practically driven to tears yet again.

In the years since that fateful night I have tried with all my strength to gather what books I could recover from the wreckage of our world. Even the low-brow books. Even the pornographic books. Sinful to encourage the reading of such material? Maybe—but it is far more sinful to let these children die, for every book is a child waiting to live a long and fruitful life.

Since restoring faith in God seems all but impossible today, I have instead dedicated myself to teaching others how to read and how to lose themselves in the Word. Yet the Word is not merely the Bible, but in fact every written word.

[i]Amen.[/i]