I don’t think I’m an especially good human being. But you know, I’m interested in the teachings of Jesus and try to be conscious of them in my life; it’s worth thinking about because there’s no narrative in the history of Western civilization that’s more influential than the Gospel of Mark, which is the oldest Gospel. If you can name a story that’s had more effect on human beings than the first gospel ever written, then I would be happy to hear your candidate. I’ve tried to think of millions of candidates, and I couldn’t think of anything else.
So many people never actually sit down and read a gospel, or even hear somebody else read one.
THE ELDER, WHEELCHAIR-BOUND PRICE, A METHODIST WHO TAUGHT AT AT THAT GREAT METHODIST UNIVERSITY, DUKE UNIVERSITY, MORE THAN 50 YEARS
The great Southern writer Reynolds Price has died at age 77.
I could never get into the novels of Reynolds Price, if only because his prose sometimes required more hard work than I’m willing to give an author. And it may be that I could go back to his novels now and be spellbound by them. I find that to be the case with a lot of writers and singers and such. I sometimes find that a novel or a song or album or work of art or entertainment of some kind that didn’t appeal to me years or decades ago will appeal to me big-time now that I’ve officially reached geezerhood. Our tastes and points of view do change over time, or they should change, lest we get stuck in some decade without growing any.
Reynolds Price certainly understood the growth and maturity process. That I didn’t like his novels is not to say that I didn’t slug through some of his memoirs, nor to imply that I didn’t find him very interesting. In fact, I heard him speak and met him in Austin about a hunnerd years ago, pre-cancer, and he was funny and charming and still the fiery young raconteur.
There was certainly much to admire about Price’s Christian faith, and his courage and strong will in the face of the debilitating spinal cancer that he fought through so admirably for so long. One less gracious than himself may have sued for medical malpractice for the cancer treatments that left him a paraplegic, but here’s how he looked at it:
“The fact that my legs were subsequently paralyzed by 25 X-ray treatments … was a mere complexity in the ongoing narrative which God intended me to make of my life,” he said. Price’s account of cancer survival is captured in his 2003 book, A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing.
So Click here for a fairly recent interview with him and with him covering a lot of interesting ground about everything from his humor–and the lack of it in his writing–to what he got out of a stroll with Clint Eastwood.
Take your rest, Mr. Price.
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