Warren Farha died last night. If you’ve heard of Warren or had the pleasure to meet him, if you don’t live in Wichita, Kansas, odds are it is because of Eighth Day Books, an independently owned bookstore in a quirky private residence whose every shelf contains at least a month’s worth of challenging reading, fiction and non-fiction, that will provoke and raise up your thinking about what it means to be human.
Read the wikipedia page about Eighth Day Books or the New York Times 2015 profile (unlocked by Rod Dreher) after taking the Sorina Higgins quick guided tour of the store above. Hogwarts Professor is a weblog for Serious Readers; Eighth Day Books is a pilgrimage site for such people. Like few other places I have been and even fewer business establishments, Eighth Day Books reflects a single person with a vision of a possibility that no one else saw and which grew to include an international and local community of other faithful, intelligent people whose lives were changed by it.
I was invited by Eighth Day Books to be the featured speaker at the first Eighth Day Institute symposium sixteen years ago. I met Warren then, met him again when I spoke a few years later at the Orthodox cathedral in Wichita, and once more most recently at a St John’s College graduation in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Each time I was impressed by his quiet solidity and sobriety, a perceptible depth of character beneath kindness and a sense of humor that was much more about thoughtful smiles and the connection of eye contact than guffahs.
The topos of grief is to say, ‘The world is a better place because of Warren Farha; the world will be less a place of joy and fraternal love in his absence.’ This is true, of course, and profoundly so however cliched the sentiment may seem especially to those of us who were blessed to meet him, even incidentally as my meetings were. I trust that the thoughtful people at Eighth Day Books will continue to run the business as Warren did and that readers here, if they have not been there already, will visit the store in person or via its website.
My take-away from Warren’s life and Eighth Day Books, though, is from the sui generis genesis point of the operation. As he explained it years ago in a talk he gave about vocation:
On May 17, 1987, my wife Barbara was in an automobile accident, injuries from which took her life and the life of our unborn third child some two months later.
At this particular point, I felt that my life had ended in certain deep ways, and that I had to start over. What to do? For a number of months, I had no idea. When I began to recover from the numbness that goes with grief, I began to ask myself fairly obvious questions, including one that was preeminent: what kind of job could I look forward to going to every day?
Well, answering that sort of question involves the tendencies, loves, talents, and gifts that were part of my particular makeup. That thing that I could look forward to — with only a B.A. in Religion and Classical Studies and not much desire to teach — that is, to get up in front of people all day every day — with a family and a firm and wholesome attachment to a home and a thriving Orthodox community in Wichita — was to open a bookstore.
The circle of friends and the tossing around of ideas about what that bookstore would contain came into play. I drew on those discussions, the advice of my friends both past and present, my experience in the evangelical world, by studies in college in the humanities and in literature, my exposure to church history and the Fathers, my deepening convictions about the fullness of the Orthodox faith, my growing sense that all things good and true and excellent and beautiful belonged together — and the essential elements of Eighth Day Books converged.
And my experience in the world of retail sales and all the grunt-work that went with it — these became the wheels for carrying this vision forward. The two discrete halves of my life seemed to coalesce with one another. Life began to make some sort of sense, on the most personal of levels. All the seemingly separate and distinct strands of my life were tied together. A lot of this I can only see in retrospect.
Of course, this is only my contribution to the story. I can’t begin to explain the essential part played by the support my present wife Chris, my extended family, my priest and now bishop Basil, the community of St George, and the wider Christian community of Wichita played in the formation and continued survival of this perhaps eccentric experiment of a bookstore.
There was a time when I knew that I could not not do this thing. Whether or not I sold a single book, I knew that this was the thing that I had to do. I hope and work every day that I might continue to have the honor of doing it.
“This perhaps eccentric experiment of a bookstore” — ‘eccentric’ only in being in large part ‘Christocentric’ — was born, then, in the crucible of grief, a grounded faith, humility, a love of reading, essential retail skills, and the fellowship of like-minded friends. If you read Warren’s talk about vocation (and do read the whole thing), you’ll note that he does not say, “Here is how I followed my vocation; you can do this, too, by doing what I did — just walk on these helpful yellow footprints!”
He acknowledges instead not only all the people who helped him in realizing his vocation and that is was a “coalescence” of the separate “halves” of his life, but also that it was not deliberate or understood by him at the beginning: “A lot of this I can see only in retrospect.” Implicit but not explicit to his essay on vocation is the secret sauce of courage and of fidelity to what he loved (reading!). what he believed (Orthodox faith in Christ), and what he knew how to do (he grew up in a family retail business).
I found Warren’s example challenging the several times our paths crossed; our temperaments define the spectrum end points of personality.
I thought and still find his accomplishment in inventing and sustaining an independent bookstore with only really good books for sale in it during the End Times of Bricks and Mortar Bookstores a marvel.
I think his legacy, most obviously the lives he has changed for the better by living within his vocation without histrionics, self-celebration, or complaint, inspiring.
Much will be made and with good reason about Warren’s death coming as it did on the Feast of the Ascension, perhaps the most neglected and easily overlooked feast in the Church liturgical calendar. Pressed between Pascha and Pentecost, always falling on a Thursday, Christ’s Ascension is forgotten by many, essential though the event was and remains for our hope for communion with God in Christ. I will risk saying the obvious in noting the synchronicity of this man’s death and this particular Feast of the Lord.
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