One reason why I prefer owning books, rather than checking books out of a library, is because then they can sit on my shelf until the time is right to read them.

It is often true, of course, that I'll buy a book (almost always at a used book sale) and devour it. But it also happens that my first attempt at a book doesn't take, and it sits on the shelf for months with a bookmark somewhere around page 72.

That was true for Kathleen Norris' latest book, Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks and a Writer's Life. I actually spent the money to buy a newly-published copy. I saw it advertised in the New York Times one evening last summer, called Barnes and Noble to see if they had it, jumped into the car and bought it. And I tried to read it for several days. But within a week, the book began its period of languishing on the shelf.

I was shocked that I couldn't get into Acedia & Me, because, since the mid-90s, Kathleen Norris' writings have greatly deepened my concept of God. And she'd been in a hiatus. She hadn't written anything new for years. I was excited to read of a new book! Maybe, the first time trying to read it, I expected too much?

Fast-forward six months later -- to the day before yesterday. For some reason, I was looking through an old issue of Books and Culture, and I found a review of Acedia & Me -- and the reviewer loved it!

Which made me wonder, of course: what did I miss?

So I pulled the book off the shelf, blew the dust off it, opened it and, sure, enough, it happened. The past couple of days, Acedia & Me seems to me like the greatest thing written in the history of western civilization ...

Simply put: the time was not right, the first time I tried to read the book. Now, the writing is speaking to where I am, and it is necessary reading.

You experience the same thing, of course, when you use a daily lectionary, reading a short passage of Scripture each day and spending some moments in prayer over the words. A passage may connect -- but not according to our demand; instead as the connection is given by God. Something that you've read a hundred times (ho-hum) suddenly speaks with direct importance.

Someone with Christian sensibilities, who sees God active in all things, might even attribute this to the dynamic Holy Spirit.