Pain management and cure flowed down the tube. But nothing during those periods of infirmity ever healed me like the intravenous feeding of a bag of books from the library. A word squeezed into a fragrant, rich, fermented, liquid humus that comes down the tube and enters the blood stream is as essential as blood. When our blood is weak, the authors of fiction carry our oxygen and keep us alive. We owe them our life.
Faith is fiction, fiction is faith.
The gospel feeds our deep yearning for meaning. All stories are fiction, even biographies, and especially the biography of Jesus. Nothing is purely nonfiction, for even the telling of a fact is the reworking of truth. The Word of God is not just the Bible. It is a distillation of Peter Taylor, Walker Percy, James Dickey, Joy Williams, Mary Gordon, Robert Penn Warren, Bernard Malamud, Wendell Berry, and many others.