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Five
Books That Shaped My Life
by Lieutenant-Colonel
Ian Barr
These challenges are always interesting, not least because
one’s choices are fairly fluid depending on where we are at
any given time. Sitting in the comfort of my home after three
years of retirement I have a fair swath of history to review,
so here are some books that I think have helped shape my life.
When I was 14 years old I fell seriously ill in a Corps Cadet
house party. It was so long ago the ambulance had a bell
rather than the blaring klaxon we would hear today. After a
day or two my mother brought me some of my collection of
Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries. Our captain came to visit
daily, and when he saw the detective novels he decided these
were not suitable reading for a corps cadet and he took them
away. He returned the next day with
General Albert
Orsborn’s autobiography
‘The House of My
Pilgrimage.’
Now I have to admit I was not best pleased, but I read Orsborn
nevertheless. His
story was influential in my early realisation that God was
calling me to be an officer. It touched me in a deep place and
I just knew that I would one day be an officer. As a
divisional commander, I used to visit the house he had lived
in when he retired from active service, the corps officers who
lived there still had some of his furniture. I often reflected
on the fact that this was where Albert Orsborn wrote ‘The
House of my Pilgrimage’ and here I was serving as an officer
fifty years later.
A single line can sometimes change your outlook on things. As
a new lieutenant in my first appointment I was interested to
read in
Lady Longford’s
excellent biography of
Queen Victoria that the Queen was well aware of the Army,
but ‘thought that Salvation Army lasses were no better than
they ought to be.’ So also with Salvation Army lads, I
concluded!
I have never believed my own officership to be a great
sacrifice, and I cannot get excited by the supposed ‘drama’ of
officership. If I have served God faithfully over the years
then I have done no more than I ought to do, been no better
than I ought to be, and served God no better than anyone else.
Obviously I never met Queen Victoria but she has kept me
grounded over the years.
In terms of my theological outlook I have been greatly
influenced by
DM Baillie’s
‘God was in Christ’,
and in particular his chapter on the Paradox of Grace. He says
that inherent in every commandment or divine requirement there
is a promise. He demonstrates this by reference to the ‘yet
not I’ in Christian life: ‘I laboured more than they all yet
not I, but the grace of God that was with me’ (1 Corinthians
15:10); ‘It is not I (you) who speak but the spirit of my
father’ (Matthew 10:20) ; ‘I live, yet not I but Christ lives
in me.’ (Galatians 2:20)
This ‘yet not I’ paradox works out in almost every area of
Christian life and experience. Therefore in my teaching I have
always maintained that the call to holiness is not a seemingly
impossible command but a promise. ‘You shall be holy, for I am
holy.’
A couple of years ago I read the
Lewis trilogy by
Peter May.
These three connected stories are set on the Isle of Lewis and
they gave me a new perspective on how my life might have been.
I was fostered by a family in Saltcoats, a little holiday town
in South West Scotland, when I was 14 months old. When I was
almost 40 I discovered almost by accident that I was actually
one of three half-siblings and it was both exciting and
nerve-wracking to meet my brother and sister for the first
time. However, twenty five years later, Peter May’s trilogy
was a forceful reminder of something a social worker said to
me at the time of discovery: ‘You were lucky not to be sent to
the Western Isles as an extra pair of hands in some croft or
smallholding.’
May tells the story of a number of children ‘fostered’ by the
local authorities in Scotland’s larger cities – the actual
phrase used was ‘boarded out’ – to tough situations in the
harsh climate, subsistence farming and working life of the
Western Isles. Some suffered a miserable childhood, while many
others made a good home and life for themselves in the island
communities.
It was not so much that I was ‘lucky’ not to have been sent to
such a situation, but rather I finished the trilogy convinced
more than ever that God’s hand had been on my life since
infancy and childhood. He had given me good parents, a loving
family, a happy childhood, a spiritual home in
The Salvation
Army and a sense that my life belonged to God. I do not believe
in ‘providence at the expense of others’ or even ‘divine
favour in comparison with others’, but rather May’s book
confirmed my sense that God’s hand was, and is, upon my life
however imperfectly I have lived it.
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