Home for restless souls

  Craig Barnes is president of Princeton Theological Seminary and one of several academic leaders giving thoughtful attention to the call for stability and prayerful solutions to the coronavirus challenge.

  Many of his ideas are aired in his new book Diary of a Pastor’s Soul: The Holy Moments in a Life of Ministry (Brazos Press, 2020).
      As the blurb deftly puts it: Barnes presents spirituality in narrative form through a collection of interwoven stories about learning to love others with curiosity, amazement, vulnerability, and most of all gratitude for the grace found in flawed lives.

  But while exploring this latest offering, I came across an earlier Barnes book that has brought helpful perspectives to my family’s challenges during the current crisis: Searching for Home: Spirituality for Restless Souls (Brazos Press, 2003). This often happens when we keep an open mind about age-old truths, especially when reading book reviews and op-ed newspaper columns.

  In my case, my wife and I are relocating to another state after almost twenty years of stability; a family member is doing the same after a recent financial squeeze; and we have six grandkids wrestling for a sense of home as they make huge adjustments to their university studies. We are all among Barnes’s “restless souls.”

  In Searching for Home, Barnes draws on parallels to Dante’s Divine Comedy as he guides us in our own search for a true and lasting sense of home. He insists that we are never lost to God, to whom all roads belong, and skillfully blends Dante’s insights with biblical teachings. 
      He also touches our hearts with stories drawn from his own teenage years, when his father abandoned their family, to nomadically wander his life away, drifting “from one deception to another.”

  Barnes shares wisdom drawn from his many years as a church pastor, including his observation that “life isn’t something we achieve, but a gift to be received from the Creator who gradually unfolds our lives along the way.”

  He takes special delight in a whole chapter devoted to forks in the road (not about our choices, but God’s). He says that all of the roads belong to God. So the real challenge is not choosing the correct fork, but “learning to walk with the Savior who can use any road to bring us home.”

  And it was in a recent Christian Century column that Barnes reminded us that the saints of earlier centuries had much to teach us about the way people in their time faced pandemics that led them to prayer. 

  It’s not that we might as well pray if we have nothing else to do while stuck at home, he writes. Our prayers in humility are also a means of activism. We join 1,500 years of cloistered monks who brought the world’s laments before God in search of a vision of salvation.

  “It’s hard to think of anything more effective,” says Barnes, “than placing a sick world back in the arms of its Creator and healer”(May 8, 2020).

  And I couldn’t agree more.