The Diary of a Country Priest

If I was more clever, I'd rate this a five and if I went by what a struggle it was to get through it, I'd rate it a three, so I suppose this is a spot-on rating for me. I was inspired to read it after seeing it on a list of the 50 best books for Christians, and I do think it's a book that's filled with lots of insight, especially for Catholics. This book is a diary of a very humble country priest, a man that grew up quite poor, a man with a deep desire to work for God among the rather shallow people in a country parish. The priest struggles, with those who don't believe, with those who don't believe much, and with those who love to deride those who do believe. He has lots of fascinating conversations with those of his parish, thoughtful conversations, asking questions we all ask questions about, speculating on things we all speculate about.

**WARNING...SPOILERS BELOW....**
The priest feels led to intervene in a family dispute and it is during the course of this dispute that the priest experiences some of his most intense feelings about God and about his own purpose on earth. He then comes face to face with death, the death of a parishioner, the impending death of a friend, and his own death, and he confronts hard and deep truth in the process.

This book deserves much more than I can spare at the moment, so I will only say that it is a breath-taking character study, with insights that, to me as a Christian priest, ring true and which are important. There is nothing trivial in these pages. I have read criticism that “nothing happens.” And while that is almost true it is entirely irrelevant. Everything happens; everything that really matters happens in this book. At the end, it arrives at the same conclusion all human stories must arrive at, and it does so with grace and wisdom. This is my new favorite book.

Summary: A novel describing the thoughts and life of a young country priest in France. Set in the post WWI era, it feels connected to the modern world and distant from our modern world. 

I do not know when I first heard about the very famous novel Diary of a Country Priest. But it has been years. I do not think that I started looking for the book until it was listed in Eugene Peterson's book about books he recommends to read. Until recently, the 1936 novel has not been available for a price I was willing to pay. But it looks like there has been a copyright change, and now there is a $0.99 Kindle version. There is also a free PDF that just scanned and not a very high-quality version.

Part of what I enjoyed was the look at the strain of being a country priest in an era before the widespread use of phones or cars. There is one scene where the priest is given a ride on a motorcycle. But as unusual as it is to read about this earlier era, and while cars and phones matter to pastoring today, the reality of how people act does not feel too distant. With the culture of the earlier era, a rural French setting is different, but not so different that it is unimaginable.