Book Review: The Time of Our Lives

Title: The Time of Our Lives

Author: Rita F. Snowden

Date: 1966

Publisher: Abingdon

ISBN: none

Length: 198 pages

Quote: “Noise...kills not only cockroaches and their kind in the insect world but a great deal that is fine ad sensitive in our human world...It is never easy to be quiet in spirit, but it is essential if we are not to die inch by inch.”

These short Christian essays, a little longer than the one-page “daily devotional” genre, are suitable to reading before breakfast.

I find The Time of Our Lives better written than many books of its genre and period. There are a few instances of a clever thought labored too hard, dragged out into a story when it ought to have been pared down to an epigram...

“I spent an hour one morning with ten prisoners, and as we separated, I said to myself very firmly, ‘Never again!’ Our meeting was not behind barred walls as you might suppose, but in a suburban vestry; nor were we under guard—each of us was as free as the air to come and go. But all ten, nevertheless, were prisoners—prisoners of the unimportant.”

If I caught myself writing that way, I would remind myself that, although audiences that put up with Free Verse and Advice Columns “Written” by Animals are obviously tolerant, there are limits to everything.

“It was a beautiful morning—perfect weather for gardening, or for that wheelchair cruise through the park Sister Smith, Granny Jones, and Brother Brown have been pining for. Sister Jackson and Brother Johnson spent it looking at the ceiling in the hospital. The Millers’ leaky roof was not mended, nor was a home located for the cousins who have been staying with the Robinsons ever since their house burned down. The topic of discussion was whether black, brown, or burgundy-colored bindings for the hymnals would look best against the backs of the wooden benches. On the way out I heard Deacon Brown tell young Johnny Jones that none of us had time to pray with him about his feelings upon having learned that he inherited the gene for rheumatoid arthritis from his grandmother. It occurred to me that we were being held prisoner by the unimportant.”

That’s not from The Time of Our Lives; it’s from memory. One can imagine the churches in which the cutesy-wutesy belaboring of the cliché would actually be preferred to a statement of the situation that suggests, shudderquake, changes.

Snowden, to her credit, doesn’t indulge herself in cutesy-wutesy belaboring of clichés often. After the example quoted she moves on to an epigram, an historical fact, a Bible reference, an original epigram of her own (“It is so easy to be concerned about temperance in strong drink and never notice one’s intemperance in speech”), and two lines of contemporary poetry. Readers’ tolerance may vary, but Snowden snaps out of her then-expected, and unfortunately still tolerated in many churches, tedious moods before exhausting my patience. Churches may profit by her example.