Unexpected

I recently checked out Salinger's Franny & Zooey from the library. I always loved The Catcher in the Rye, and its protagonist Holden is one of my favorite characters in literature. Since Salinger only published a handful of works before withdrawing into his famously reclusive life, I figured I should give one of his other books a try.

It was a quick little read, and is technically composed of two novellas which were initially published separately, nearly two years apart, in The New Yorker. The stories concern a couple particular members of the Glass family, in this case Franny, the youngest, and Zooey, her older brother and the youngest son.

I expected and found rambling characters like Holden, struggling with becoming adults, struggling with making sense of life and more immediately, their own thoughts and actions, all described in the frank and coarse language that put The Cather in the Rye on banned book lists.

What I didn't expect was one character's sudden but impassioned discourse on the person of Jesus Christ, and what it means to pray to and follow Him.

This is but one example of why I truly believe that God's power to reveal Himself is not limited only to the work of those who intend to do so. Salinger is not, at least by all accounts at the time he was being published, a Christian. But something of the truth of God was in these pages as I read them, as Zooey struggled to explain to his sister why she ought to think carefully about who she was praying to and how. Here are a few of the quotes that leveled me.

If you're going to say the Jesus Prayer, at least say it to Jesus, and not to St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi's grandfather all wrapped up in one. Keep him in mind if you say it, and him only, and him as he was and not as you'd like him to have been... The part that stumps me, really stumps me, is that I can't see why anybody... would even want to say the prayer to a Jesus who was the least bit different from the way he looks and sounds in the New Testament... Who in the Bible besides Jesus knew - knew - that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too ****** stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look?

To try and understand the whole person of Christ, as he was, not to cringe away from or try and ignore the difficult parts about who he was and what he taught... what a sobering, convicting challenge. The Jesus who sacrificed himself and loved and healed was also the Jesus who threw tables in the temple, who told me to take up my own cross if I want to follow him, who taught things that are radical and absolute, things utterly at odds with the easy life offered by this world. I have to follow, to love, to obey the whole Jesus. Though more difficult to understand, he's infinitely better and more worthy than any other version I might construct.