The Shadow of God: A Journey Through Memory, Art, and Faith

Charles Scribner III takes his faith seriously but, in the manner of a saint he admires, always with wit and grace. It is a delight to accompany him on the spiritual journey that he so beautifully describes in "The Shadow of God." On one occasion, Mr. Scribner tells of walking down Fifth Avenue and pausing to watch workmen dismantle the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. He links the abrupt end of the commercial holiday to the rhythms of a church that is always slightly apart from the secular world around it. The author seems unable or unwilling to accept this "disconnect" between the spiritual and the mundane. Indeed, he sees God's presence everywhere -- in lofty cathedrals or hideous parish churches, in his schoolmates or strangers. He has found a way to unite his faith with the thousands of tiny events that make life what it is. The title of this book is taken from a Latin expression that his father entrusted to him -- Lux Umbra Dei. It not simply the shadow of God but light that is the shadow of God. And this book is filled with light.

The notion that a life of privilege is somehow a strike against an author's ability to tell a powerfully insightful story is ridiculous and would damn a whole literature of such books if true. Marcus Aurelius would have nothing to say to us. Nor would Proust. Scribner writes from what he knows and in doing so goes deep into the universal experience that unites everyone. His writing is refined --and if this refinement suggests a bygone era, it does well to remind us of the measured grace that we have misplaced in the discourse of our own time. "Stately" does not mean staid in this book. The book is a primer for many who may have forgotten that unfevered reflection is profitable for the human spirit and the close proximity Scribner has had to many of the great literary figures of the Twentieth Century (and how he distills this proximity) is not to be missed.