5.0 /5.0
I have yet to make the switch to Pro football. Hailing from the American South, the college game is still king in my mind and I know Sunday is for church. (Although I've seen my share of adoring worshippers huddled around Saturday broadcasts from their favorite conference.) Marrying a girl from the North, however, has meant holidays and vacations spent in cold urban places, which has meant lots and lots of NFL. I find myself in a weird twilight: defending the professional gridiron against scoffs from my home turf buddies, while at the same time feeling not quite normal watching millionares play football on the night that used to be dedicated to last minute assignments and watching reruns of the Waltons. Such is the mixed-up mess with which anyone in the middle of a conversion might identify.
For a Christian, the conversion can feel like just a mess at times.
"Regina," I asked as I sat next to her, "why is conversion so hard? [author's italics] Actually, it wasn't that hard, in retrospect. It's the post-conversion that is." I looked at her plaintively. "Why?" I whined, my voice sounding like a child's.
The voice is Carolyn Weber's in her Surprised by Oxford, a superbly told memoir of her heady, heart-wrenching and magical first term at Oxford University. When the author leaves London, Ontario, for graduate studies abroad, she carries the hurt of a broken home, an unrelenting self-reliance, and the memory of one Christian professor from the University of Western Ontario. Horribly homesick, but excited beyond measure to study in the English language's oldest institute of learning, Carolyn was confident she could find answers in Oxford. She just didn't know all of the questions, or at least, as Rilke said, she didn't know yet how to love the questions.
Carolyn eventually adjusts to her new life across the Atlantic and the "lost in translation" moments are few. This memoir has less fish out of water and more hound of heaven. The title is intenionally styled after C.S. Lewis' Surprised by Joy. There is much to treasure in the book for a Inkling's lover since Weber quotes liberally from Lewis and Tolkien and retraces many of their steps at the University. As those men did, Weber looks to literature to inform and inspire and consistently quotes from classic works, especially from the Romantics. Be prepared for a few Wikipedia searches if you want to keep up with her quotations. She has the mind of an apologist, but the heart of a poet. The beauty of her quest is not lost among the search for answers. Over the Michaelmas, Hilary and Trinity terms Oxford reveals its glory and a mysterious theology student reveals his heart. Both mirror the greater romance happening in Caro's life as the Lover of Her Soul continues to surprise her.
*I received a copy of the book for review from the publisher. I had to write a review - good, bad, or ugly. You can do the same at booksneeze.com.*
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