By: Nikos Kazantzakis
Intro:
Along with many other books that winter, I read The Last Temptation of Christ in the silent, fluorescent, faded breakroom of a Flagstaff, Arizona motel. Often with only a dozen or so guests to check-in each three to eleven PM shift, there was a lot of downtime.
At the time, I was particularly feeling the weight of the path I had chosen to walk in life. This depressing motel, splitting a bedroom and rent with my in-college brother, the heaviness of winter — this innate call into the unknown I had answered with the past five years of my life, “it brought me here?” I couldn’t help but ask myself.
But the way Kazantzakis’s Jesus profoundly struggles, doubts, and ultimately overcomes in those five hundred pages… it was a molotov cocktail defiantly hucked into the waning fires of my spirit. I closed that book for the final time and looked up and suddenly loved those rusty, white-aging-to-yellow lockers on the wall, my soggy peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and all that my journey touched.
Initially, I assumed it was my situation at that moment that triggered such a powerful response in me. But well over a year later, and my eyes run across that book on my (actual) bookshelf, and I ring with this crazy emotional charge and want the whole of my path, not just the sunny side of it.
I include The Last Temptation of Christ among the best I’ve ever read.