Can Fiction be Devotional?

I’ve started a new reading regimen for my devotional routine.  It entails reading a chapter a day from five books.  So this is what I am currently reading.

• Bible: The book of Jeremiah
• Third Dawn by Bodie and Brock Thoene
• Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
• Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller
• The Person and Work of the Holy Spirit By R. A. Torrey

I guess the interesting thing is that several of these are fiction.  Christian Fiction and Inspirational Fiction, but nonetheless fiction.  One is more Theology.  Then the other is the Bible.  But I was talking to my friend, Mark, who asked why I was reading fiction as part of my daily devotions.

So, Can Fiction be Devotional?

My answer is obviously yes.  Jesus used parables (stories) to illustrate the concepts of the word of God.  One of my personal greatest joys in life is reading fiction.  So doing something I really enjoy, not just like, is in a sense a part of my devotional life.  Donald Miller in Blue Like Jazz actually illustrates this point in my reading today somewhere in chapter three.  He relates that story resonates with the Human condition because we are in a story.  We have a setting, a place where we live.  We have other characters, people we know, work with and play with, dislike and love.  There is a conflict, that fact that we are a fallen creation of God and He is working to redeem us.  The climax is the ultimate decision that we must make.  The resolution is that we can be restored or that God is indeed just.

Fiction also causes us to think outside ourselves.  One of my favorite books was written by author Stephen Lawhead, called Byzantium.  He relates a story of Aidan, a monk chosen to go on pilgrimage.  A journey that he sees in a dream will ultimately lead to his death.  He goes and faces all kinds of different situations.  The monks are attacked by Sea Wolves (danish pirates) and he is made a slave.  He endures slavery, is freed, then is attacked by Arabs and falls in love with a Arabian princess only to lose her when he abandons his faith.  He frees his fellow monks from being slaves in the silver mines and ultimately finishes his quest to appear before the emperor of Rome to find that his pilgrimage was in vain and that Rome is full of spies, speculation and Roman turmoil.  He eventually returns back to the monastery a broken man, without his faith.  But we find out that it was not all in vain.  The Danish Sea Wolves who attacked him and his friends have become friends and followers of the faith Aidan once boldly proclaimed while a slave with them.  He returns to where he once was a slave to become a priest, and eventually dies in Byzantium as a Bishop of the church fulfilling the dream that he would die there.  But he dies a content old man rather than a victim of a red martyrdom, a pilgrimage gone awry.

I think that the greatest benefit of fiction for my spiritual life is that in fiction I can live a life of someone else and learn the thoughts behind decisions that end for the good or the bad.  In doing so, I gain a greater understanding of my own motives and begin to see the story that exists underneath the surface of my own life and the greater story that I too am a part of.