Too True

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us... We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

Franz Kafka, in a private letter, January 1904

A recent article about the Christian publishing industry mentioned that one publishing house was discussing with a popular author the possibility of a series of vampire novels for Christians. I wish I were making this up, but I doubt if I could, even if I were drunk. The idea is that vampires sell, so since they sell, why not try to sell them to Christians, who buy a lot of entertainment? I am not speculating that money might be the motivation for this venture, the article states as much in plain language. “Twilight Lite” – necrophilia for evangelicals.

Supposedly, this novel (or series of novels) is going to tell the tale of a family of vampires who became “undead” through some process involving the blood of Judas Isacariot. I wish I were making this up for the sake of satire, but I’m not. One person interviewed for the article claims that the Christian message can fit into a vampire story since the bible speaks of the power of blood in the doctrine of the atonement. It is true that we do speak of the power of the blood, but that is a singular emphasis: the Blood of Jesus Christ. To extrapolate that unique concept out into a world of undead, occult figures pining for redemption in the midst of completely depraved circumstances is ludicrous. The only conceivable reason for doing so is that we evangelicals (or a large number of us) are now motivated by precisely the same things which motivate non-believers; lots of money, mass appeal, pop-culture icons of refined evil and mindless entertainment. Let’s have a novel about Hannibal Lechter becoming a televangelist. That way we can enjoy a ripping good yarn about a serial killer, and also have redemption thrown in as a side benefit! We’ll have our cake and everyone else’s too.

Without overstating in the slightest, this venture is evidence of the most crass, vulgar, unconscionable, greedy, depraved, money-grubbing sycophancy imaginable. For years, Christian leaders of a certain stripe have been warning their fellow believers that our habit of imitating the world was getting out of hand. Their arguments are now academic. We have passed a boundary where we apparently feel that the “Christian message” can now be crammed into any container at all. We’ve got past the point where it is correct to hypothesize about a slippery slope; we are now in a free fall toward an abyss of nearly total identification with all things opposed to goodness. Once our music, our books, our complete package is just like the world’s, why bother leaving one for the other? We no longer have anything unique to offer; all we have is what has already been popular in secular circles for months and years. A great Ho-Hum of amused boredom will greet the message of saving grace as long as we persist in this foolishness, and the only answer to the question “Why are we Christians having no impact on the world” will be a hand-held mirror. God willing, it will at least show our reflection.

The Promise

Chaim Potok once wrote a novel about two young men who had grown up as best friends within the world of Hasidic Judaism in the middle of the twentieth century. Actually, one of them was Hasidic, and the other was more of a semi-observant, scholarly, believing but non-Hasidic modern Jew. Ironically, the boy who was raised as a Hasid became a psychologist; the more modern boy became a rabbi.

He told the story of their young adulthood in The Promise. I enjoyed this novel very much because (like a really good story should) it made me relate to some of the characters. One in particular had decided to keep his traditions; sabbath, passover, study of the Talmud, but in his heart he no longer believed that God exists. He was trying to construct a theology for reverent Judaism without faith in God.

In no way can I relate to his lack of belief in God, but there is a question this character posed which strikes all of us. He had made a lifetime of his Torah study, and he genuinely loved the tradition of the Torah, but his scholarly approach had made it difficult for him to continue to feel a sense of wonder, or tender reverence, for his subject matter.

"That's the problem... how can we teach others to regard the tradition critically and with love? I grew up loving it, and then learned to look at it critically. That's everyone's problem today. How to love and respect what you are being taught to dissect."

Have you ever sat through a sermon and felt a passage of scripture becoming so familiar, so well-worn, that it began to lose its impact? I have. I've preached those sermons. Familiarity and scrutiny has a tendency to quash the forcefulness of a new and bracing idea.

How important is it for us to keep ourselves fresh and innocent when we come to the scriptures? You might rather ask, how important is it for the Bible to hold sway over us, to hold the power to astound, shock, humble and amaze us?

I think it is of great importance.

Somebody once said that familiarity can breed contempt, even at the very altar of God. We have a thousand study bibles, a hundred thousand bible studies, dozens upon dozens of conferences and weekend teaching retreats.

Are we now more susceptible to the power of his Word?

I leave that question to you...

The Gospels as Literature

In the Bible there are four accounts of Christ’s life. To use the four gospels together requires a tapestry approach which takes into consideration the content of each, the order in which they place key events, their style and even their theological perspective. As readers, then, Christians will naturally get more out of the gospels as they read carefully, lovingly and faithfully.

Content
The first three gospels are generally lumped together, since they share a great deal of material in common, both the teachings of Christ and major events. But among the synoptic gospels each of the gospels contains information which is unique.
Matthew and Luke each include birth narratives, Mark does not. Matthew and Luke provide genealogies. John gives information which could not have been offered by witnesses such as his opening statement about the Word, and therefore includes material which is not technically “narrative.”
Original material in Matthew begins at Christ’s birth and includes Joseph’s visitation, the Magi, the flight to Egypt, and Herod’s infanticide. Luke approaches Christ’s birth by focusing on Mary instead of Joseph, the shepherds instead of the Magi, and the legal obligations of Jesus’ very Jewish parents rather than the flight to Egypt.
Matthew pours on the Old Testament attributions of Christ’s Messiahship and begins the real narrative (after his baptism and temptation) with scant references to wonders and a long section dedicated to Christ’s teachings. Although the beatitudes have a parallel in Luke, Luke presents nothing like the wealth of teachings which Matthew bunches together in one spot. While Mark and Luke both include Peter’s confession of faith, only Matthew elaborates on Christ’s response, indicating that this was revealed to him from heaven and that Peter would be instrumental in building a church for Christ in the future. In Matthew and Mark’s account of the crucifixion, Jesus cries out the opening phrase of Psalm 22, and after the resurrection Matthew attributes the oldest non-miraculous explanation (that his disciples stole the body) to the chief priests and elders.
Mark presents much of the same material in an abridged format (not necessarily because Mark is an abridgment of Matthew.) No birth narrative, and only a scant mention of John’s baptism of Jesus or of his temptation in the wilderness. Mark gives us the quaint detail about Christ’s “own people” who seek to have him put away for insanity (Mk. 3:21). Mark is the gospel which adds the possibly significant detail about Christ entering the temple on the day of the triumphal entry, looking around at things, then sleeping on it overnight before going in and cleansing the moneylenders out (Mk. 11:11-15). He expands the conversation between the scribe and Christ concerning the greatest commandment, showing us Jesus’ approval of the scribe once they discuss it further (Mk. 12:28-34).
Luke is the only gospel to include any information about Christ’s childhood, a single incident from about twelve years of age (2:41-52). Luke includes numerous parables not found in any other gospel, including the most famous of them all: the prodigal son. In this book we find the good Samaritan and the rich man and Lazarus. He also includes the story of Jesus sending out the seventy, and the story of Zaccheus’ conversion. Luke (as well as John) tells us that “Satan entered Judas” (22:3) before the betrayal of Christ and also the angel comforting Christ at the garden of Gethsemane. Luke gives us the detail about Simon of Cyrene carrying Christ’s cross as well as the dying conversation between Christ and the two thieves. The road to Emmaus is perhaps the most detailed and personal post-resurrection appearance outside of John.
The fourth gospel is the most unique, beginning with the pre-incarnate Christ dwelling from eternity past with the Father. The conversations with Nicodemus and with the Samaritan woman are both unique to John and are tremendously familiar to evangelicals in America. John’s record of Christ’s teachings includes the most singular pronouncements and the most blatant references to his deity, such as the well-known “I am” statements (e.g. 8:12, 10:9, 11, 11:25) and the controversial dialogues with the Jews in 8:58-59 and 5:17-18.
While Matthew includes a massive amount of ethical teaching at the inauguration of Christ’s ministry, John includes a massive amount of intimate conversation on Christ’s final night, alone with his disciples. He washes their feet, speaks about the Holy Spirit and prays his “high priestly prayer” in this section, while at the crucifixion we are told that Jesus entrusted his mother’s care to one of his disciples.
Following the resurrection Jesus appeared very personally to Thomas and to Peter, affirming each of them singularly regarding their personal relationship with him.
Luke and John each include a short declaration regarding the purpose of the book, Luke, in order to make an orderly and full account of the Christian faith in one who already believes; John’s gospel, in order that the reader might believe that Christ is who he claimed to be.

Order of Events
The greatest deviation in the order of events exists between the synoptic and John’s gospel. John mentions the Passover three separate times while the synoptic mention it only in connection with his death. John noticeably places a temple cleansing near the very beginning of Christ’s ministry while the others put it at the very end, after the triumphal entry.[1]
John includes the wedding at Cana, “the third day” following the account of his baptism. This is odd, since the synoptic say he went “immediately” from his baptism to his temptation. This may have been a convention, as when we say a president “immediately” enacts some legislation or other when he really did so in his first week or month in office. One explanation is that after Christ’s baptism he spent a short time in Galilee, then left everyone to go by himself from Galilee to Jerusalem for the Passover (John 2:13), fasting and being tempted on his way.

Style
Each of the gospels has a distinctive style. Possibly Mark offers the easiest analysis, being the most streamlined gospel. Major events in the story of Christ are reduced to a few simple, easily digested phrases, such as John the Baptist’s ministry. On the other hand, Mark has a tendency to give more pinpointed personal touches, such as the discussion between Christ and the scribe asking about the greatest commandment. Mark also is most emphatic about the fear the disciples felt when Jesus calmed the storm. It was Mark who reported that Jesus’ family wanted him put away, and Mark reported that Herod kept John the Baptist alive partly because “he used to enjoy listening to him,” a sorry example of being amused but unchanged by a sermon (6:20). This style is familiar, easy to read and concise. It may remind a modern reader of a really well-made, short documentary which tells the basic outlines of a really intriguing human interest story.
Matthew relies heavily on the Old Testament to relay the urgency of Christ’s nature and ministry. In Matthew Christ is majestic, acting like the Son of David in the way he responds to people and situations. The disciples are imperfect but capable representatives – perhaps a little less fearful, a little less insipid – who are trustworthy. It is not intended to be in any way unbiased or impartial; it is more like justifiable propaganda promoting the person of Christ as worthy and superior in every way. The Messiah who will one day rule, who has dealt with evil once for all, who has a corner on all truth. It is aimed at overpowering the reader with the truth of the claims of its subject.
Luke, of course, seems fuller than Matthew, perhaps because the object of Luke was something more familiar to modern readers; an orderly and factual presentation of the Christian faith. In Luke there is a sense of sensibility to both the narrative and to the material included. Jesus is not merely someone who deserves our reverence, he’s someone who welcomes it warmly. He speaks about lost things, he tells more stories which cut more deeply into our sense of pathos. He is memorable not only for who he is and what he can do, but also for the personal impact he makes on people such as Zaccheus. He accepts the adoration of Mary and gently chides Martha for her preoccupation and her attitude towards her sister. As he appears to the two disciples on the Emmaus road, he takes time with them, discussing the prophecies about the Messiah and becoming recognized by them over the familiarity of a shared meal. Luke is the historian with heart, the researcher who is sensitive to more than just facts and figures; he is warm towards Christ himself. He represents the acme of Christian writing: tender-hearted scholarship.
John’s gospel seeks to persuade. In the course of his efforts he reaches higher than Matthew theologically and descends deeper into the personal details than Luke. Like an exemplary sermon his book begins with a proposition which strains the imagination, pummels the limits of human reason, then settles soft as a snowflake on the man, the flesh and blood figure who is enjoying a rustic wedding celebration with his friends and family. No gospel lingers more attentively on a single conversation than John does, lasering in Nicodemus’ questions and Christ’s answers, then doing the same thing with a plain Samaritan woman with an abominable lifestyle by Jewish standards. In these instances Christ doesn’t preach at the people he’s interacting with, he converses with them. They aren’t there merely to serve as a foil for Christ’s teachings, they participate in the conversation and help to guide it with their concerns and questions. When Jesus approaches the lame man at Bethesda he stoops to ask him whether the man wishes to get well. He takes time to listen to the man’s story, how he waits in vain for the water to spin without a friend to help him down. When he heals the man born blind, John spends an entire chapter relating the subsequent investigation and trial. Over and over the crowds and the Jewish leaders become incensed at his claims, and only John shows the vulnerable Christ abandoned by most of his followers, wondering whether even the final twelve will slink away and leave him alone.
It really is not any wonder that John has been a perennial favorite among believers for centuries. Who hasn’t been fascinated by the image of Christ humbly washing his friends’ feet? Most evangelicals can quote (even if they can’t find) the passage in which Christ claims to be “the Way the Truth and the Life.” Only John humanizes Pilate enough to record his smart-aleck question during the trial – “what is truth?” By the time a reader gets all the way through Luke there is little new to be amazed by; despite the original material there, much of it has been gone over by Matthew and Mark. John, though, brings us a truly fresh and invigorating picture of Christ. Here we see the infinite and the personal believably wedded. John persuades and convicts like an earnest friend.

Theological Perspective
Much of the theological perspective comes out naturally when we consider the original materials in each book. Matthew, for instance, relies most heavily on the prophecies of Christ in the Old Testament, and begins with a genealogy which links Christ to Abraham through David. The repeated emphasis on the kingdom tells us that this is a thoroughly Messianic book with a strong bent towards fulfilling the expectations and the hopes and dreams of the author’s fellow Jews. How do we behave in the kingdom? Check out the sermon on the mount. When will it be fulfilled? No worries, Christ gives us a lengthy end-times sermon in which Christ promises to bring an end to the death and destruction, to come back in victory. He is royalty. In Matthew he deserves our reverence.
Mark’s theology is bound to the responses of the people and the disciples. Amazement, awe, stupidity, fear, rejoicing… all of these reactions illustrate the nature of discipleship and give some warning to those who are considering Christ that discipleship is as serious as life and death, as exciting as the most terrifying storm, adventurous and rewarding and not for the timid. Christ is not merely presenting himself in Mark, he’s presenting a lifestyle based on himself. Even the original ending (16:8) presents the most joyful news on earth in an enigmatic fashion. Rather than joyful shouting and bold proclamations, the women hear the news of Christ’s resurrection and flee with “trembling and astonishment” saying nothing about the incident to anybody “for they were afraid.” What kind of gospel leaves things in such a condition? Perhaps one which wants to seriously confront the dangers, astonishments and ultimate rewards which come along with following the most powerful, hated, loved, feared and original Messiah the world has ever known.
Luke’s Christ reaches out everywhere to everyone. His parables strike perhaps more deeply across more boundaries than the parables in any other gospel. Certainly the parable of the soils, for instance, makes sense even if the details remain most tangible to farmers living in an agrarian situation. But what parent anywhere would fail to feel the distress of the father in the parable of the prodigal son? It is also evident, as one reads along, that money and the usage of money crops up over and over again. The theology of Luke not only crosses boundaries, but applies imminently to this world in which we live. Luke’s emphasis is practical. His stories and parables touch the day-to-day realities which people in his day were immersed, and continue to apply to real life. Not that the other gospels are other-worldly and impractical, but Luke’s concern is special in this regard. Here Christ is utterly tangible, and so is his context.
John’s theology is the most refined and highly developed. The deity of Christ takes forefront from the very beginning, which makes the plain humanity he shows throughout all the more appealing and surprising. More time is spent alone with his disciples here than in any other gospel, showing the relationship he shared with them at their most intimate. Peter’s confession, for example, seems less heroic in John and more of a desperate last stand. When he asks the disciples if they want to leave him Peter responds by saying, “Lord, to whom shall we go?” They simply don’t have any other choices; they’ve put all their eggs in this one basket. When Jesus appears to Peter after the resurrection, a painfully prolonged scene restores their relationship and makes Peter seem so frail and human that we pity him as we read.
Over and over again in this gospel Christ affirms his deity to the Jews. Over and over they reject the very idea. The sermons and parables have far more to do with who Christ is, his nature and his relationship to the Father and his salvific role, than with ethics for kingdom living. It gives us all of the lofty, infinite reasoning which lends plausibility to the ethical teachings in the other books. The person and the reality behind the kingdom. It makes possible the affirmation in 1 Corinthians that Christ himself, not a kingdom standard, is “our righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Cor. 1:30). John’s theology completes the picture given to us by the first three. Christ the infinite, eternal Creator.

The four-fold picture of Christ given us by the evangelists represents something more than the pinnacle of human achievement. It has been suggested that these books were written as an intentional invention, but they reach far beyond anything human being could create on their own. The life of Christ was, and remains, the revelation of all things divine, inasmuch as we can see and understand them. The gospels are echoes of that life, echoes which go on as loudly and as authentically in every generation as they did two thousand years ago. These books are living and powerful because they draw on a life containing all the power of God, living on forever, world without end.
[1] Of course, this could represent two separate incidents rather than one. An argument can be made either way.

two streams diverged in the wood...

To the left is a wide, slow river moving ponderously but faithfully down a grade of less than ten inches every mile. It is mostly muddy and slow, but it can be treacherous at times. Let it be the movement of philosophy and ideas down through the years. It is full of thoughts and discoveries, and it is calling people to a certain standard of living; a life of joy, or courage, or sacrifice. At times it contains such a high and lofty ideal for us that we could never hope to reach it. What’s more, we often can’t even see the idea, for the water is churned up and full of sediment. For centuries men and women have been able to float about on its surface, but going deeper is too troublesome. The water is not clear enough.

To the right is a roaring mountain stream. It is as wide as the other, yet deeper. It may momentarily collect in a pool, but for most of its journey it is racing through rapids, squeezed between daunting cliffs and pouring over the edges of waterfalls. It is vibrant and dangerous and moving unstoppably. This is history. It is the motion and movement of real people in real situations, making decisions and catastrophic choices which propel the whole monster forward. The undertow is deadly. Nothing can stop its flow. Everything is caught up in it as it tumbles along. It is not changeable – rather, it changes the landscape as it moves along.

One tells us the way things should be – the other tells us the way things really are. Somewhere up ahead, the two will meet.

Now consider that some moral philosopher may speak for hours on end to try to get people to behave in a more humane manner. Like the slow moving river, he can inspire, but not enough. He can whip people into a frenzy, but not forever. Most philosophies are impenetrable to the masses, and uninteresting as well. You may swim around in them for hours and never find one compelling reason to do anything noble. It is a cerebral exercise, a tedious mystery.

History however leaves us with the opposite: not what should be, or what could be, but rather what really is, and how short it falls. How few heroes of Right and Wrong have lived up to their potential? How many monsters have had a greater impact on their world and generation than a thousand martyrs? How frustrating it is to look at the merely human endeavors there and find in them some hope for mankind. We cannot force history into a high standard for our lives, for it is simply too broken, too human.

These two streams meet at a junction which has been an expression of humanity’s creativity for thousands of years. For where our ideals meet our experience, we tell stories.

Now these stories, as has been noted, come from two streams, and there can be two results. The first is that the water from each creates a reservoir, a deep, clear lake from which we can drink, a source of sustenance. This happens when we have worthy ideals, when we recognize the faulty ones, when we understand human nature rightly, and when we apply the two together to create worlds where reality is made tangible for people.

But the other possibility is not a store of nourishing water, but a swamp; a flat, sulfurous bog of stagnant water filled with bacteria and breeding insects. This is what happens when we create literature which embraces the basest ideals (or none at all) or when people go looking only to what is and try to extract some meaning or purpose out of it, rather than imposing on the world an ennobling element from the stream of conscience and morality.

What we see in our world is that, too often, the confluence of these two streams results in a malarial bog of hopeless tripe. Either the level of artistic achievement is high and the ideals are low, or else the ideals are high and the artistry is low. We need deep waters, and clear. We require so much more than we have been given. We’ve grown accustomed to settling, so much so that we can barely recognize any longer the potential which exists for real creativity.

It may be that a renewal of true art among believers will accompany, or precede, an increase in the quality of our religion, for the highest ideas in creation deserve the very best creations we can produce.

Frodo's Failure

Some of you have read the book, others have only seen the movie, perhaps some of you are familiar with neither the blockbuster nor the classic in which Frodo the hobbit must carry a ring, permeated with evil power, up to the summit of mount doom and drop it into a crack so that it might be destroyed by the fire below. By the time you reach that point in the story, the quest for mount doom has become almost as much of a burden for the reader as for the hero, and all you want is for him to let go of that ring and be free. If you care at all, if you're invested enough in the recognizability of the tale, then you're tired of reading about his struggle and his weariness, almost as if you yourself are helping to carry the ring just by sharing his story.

But if you persevere that far you will experience something like a shocking surprise. This hardy little hobbit has braved all the dangers of middle earth and all the deprivations one could reasonably expect only to reach the very end of his journey... and fail.

He failed, no question about it. His role was to take the ring to the mountain and destroy it. Instead, he tried to claim it and keep it. He'd carried it around his neck for too long; it had seeped into his flesh and bones, and it had become a part of him. As he slips it on his finger the reader realizes that even the strongest and the bravest cannot endure the mounting pressure of evil forever. Everyone crumbles beneath it at some point.

It is just then, when Frodo disappears into a world of shadow and darkness, and his good friend can no longer even see him, when the creature who has dogged his footsteps for nearly the entire trip reaches out to take the ring for himself. He finds Frodo's finger and bites it off, taking his prize with a cannibalistic violence. Then this creature, Gollum, falls, ring and all, into the fire - and Frodo is left staring into the abyss.

Here Frodo becomes free, but not for anything he himself did. He tried to get rid of his burden, but he could not. In the end he embraced it, and at that point, when it had become a part of himself, it could only be taken from him at the price of disfigurement. A small piece of himself fell into the flames as well. He may have been set free from the power of the ring, but he would never be completely whole again.

There is something deeply disturbing about the suggestion that the kindest, bravest, hardiest character in an epic is insufficiently strong to resist evil all alone - that even the best of us is ultimately corruptible. The idea that a vulnerability to darkness may linger inside of us, and can only be torn away in a violent act of mercy which hurts more deeply the more it is needed. The flesh is weak indeed. As Frodo runs from the scene of his own failure, dripping blood and exhausted, he may indeed have felt as though he were dying; yet he can hardly have regretted it. Can such a survivor ever regret what he's lost, or left behind, the pieces of his heart or his soul that have been destroyed in the course of things? So long as the curse is lifted, nothing else matters. It is enough.

"No one on earth has any other way left but upward." ~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn

I first encountered Alexander Solzhenitsyn intentionally, as part of a personal effort to taste the Russian authors. I began with his book, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, a novel of fact and personal experience which follows one prisoner through an ordinary day in a work camp in Communist Siberia.

I will be frank with you; I chose that book because it was much shorter than War and Peace. I figured that, since I didn’t know whether I would like they style of a Russian author, I didn’t want to bite off more than I could chew. I would only allow myself to become emotionally invested in a smaller sample. Smaller it is, but glorious.

Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp, beginning in 1945. Eventually, as a result of his writings, he had his citizenship revoked by the USSR and was exiled, eventually ending up in the United States. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970.

In 1978 he was invited by Harvard university to address the student body. But that speech was marked by a grave disrespect shown by nearly everybody in attendance, including the faculty, as he began to unburden himself in a fearless and transparent critique of Western culture.

Who better to critique the west? Solzhenitsyn was no proponent of communism, having suffered so much under it. He hated the low estate which the atheistic government of his home land had produced among the Russian people. Adopted by the richest, most “successful” nation on earth, he enjoyed full freedom to commend his ideas and observations to people. He was free to write, and being a newcomer, he could view circumstances objectively, with the fresh perspective of someone who has not been desensitized by immersion. But he was apparently not free to confront those educators and their progeny with truths about the moral condition of our society, for they would not listen.

Consider what he said about that which our culture cannot satisfy: “[T]he human soul longs for things higher, warmer and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor and by intolerable music.” Could it be that a man who had to learn to be by himself with God in a vicious, brutal gulag learned how to be satisfied without the gadgets and the distractions which we use as a substitute for contentment?

He was heckled and booed during his speech that day. He confronted young, power-hungry humanists with the idea that God was the only satisfactory answer for the problems of society and the yearnings of life, and in return he was mocked and ignored – the sound of Nero’s fiddle in the halls of higher learning.

He supposedly said later that the reception to his speech was the saddest moment of his life. It should be an occasion of sadness for all of us, as well. Look at this man who, by virtue of his honesty in the face of mass indifference, stands in the company of the prophets before him. He learned how to face the demands of truth while shuddering under a threadbare jacket, a thin rag wrapped around his face, toiling under the blast of arctic winds in a camp at the end of the world. His haunted legacy haunts us as well, if only we knew it.

the other side of faith...

O Maker-Of-Dreams
In the darkness of night;
Show me which holy things
Will endure in the light.

For a longing you grant
And a dream that you make;
The seedling you plant
And the love that's at stake,

Your Faithfulness borrow
So always reside
Beyond my tomorrow
On Faith's other side.

And the resolute pilgrim
Who lets go of pride
Will awaken the dawn
On Faith's other side.

The Good Work of Death

Artists are almost always improperly appreciated in their own time. I am quite sure that exceptions can be found, but they are bound to be rare, given the fact that it is almost always necessary to let history stretch out behind a life before passing objective judgment upon it. Artists are particularly prone to the fallacy of being given either too much credit, or not enough, while they live and work. How many painters worked in obscurity, unaware that their real influence would only come after death? How many new and interesting artists become all the rage for a season, only to sink into obscurity and oblivion after they are gone? It is a constant curse of the arts that critics are so blinded by the present. Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Vincent Van Gogh - all lauded from the grave. Examples are legion.

Therefore, ironically, death is the ultimate freedom for art, for it is only after death that the worth and effect of an artist's work become measurable. Where too much has been made of a small creator, the applause dies down and the works are forgotten. They are relegated to a footnote of our common story to collect dust. They could not rise above faddism. Death closes the door upon an empty room; the curtain is lowered over a play of no substance. This is liberating, for the art and the artist are revealed, and death is unforgivingly honest.

It also sets free the truly exceptional from the bondage of a merely earthly existence. The artist dies, but her poetry, his paintings, the book lives on! Here it is not a door shutting upon an empty room, but rather a cage being opened wide; the life of the creator no longer limits the value of their own work. It is like the unfolding of a chrysalis, unknown to the one who has gone. This too is necessry, and just.

So the artist (the poet, the writer, the painter, the sculptor, the composer) ought always to welcome death; nothing of substance can be determined until he has come. Behold the coming of the pale horse - will we learn to welcome him? His verdict is inevitable.

The Sack Of Rome - or - How To Make A Fine Young Barbarian

Smoke ascended in greedy gusts from the great city, now in its third day of pillage. The buildings have long since caught fire and continue to smolder in ruinous ash-heaps. Some of the sturdier buildings, those composed much of stone, still stand tremulously, more as though they were leaning than standing, waiting for just the right gust of wind to bring them, too, down.

A handful of scavengers have begun to brave the smoke and the heat, and circle down into the broiling mass of victims, savage stomping warriors and crumbling debris. Here and there some fortunate citizen creeps along from hole to hole, hiding as they go, trying to salvage some piece of their fortune in a fold of their tunic, or in a small sack on their back. Most of the houses have been emptied by the conquerors, piles of gold and silver have been thrown into carts and canvass bags and moved out of the city. The sounds now are muted and infrequent. Earlier, it was one massive, jumbled, horrifying shriek of savage greed and panicky resistance. Now the weapons are mostly quiet, and the losers are silenced by their desperate plight. The victors sing and chant their exuberance as they enslave and rape and abuse the few living remnants they happen to find. It is a gory episode, one which is winding down now. Much of the energy is used up; much of the fun has passed on.

One barbarian has found himself a fine horse in all of this babble. It is a good, solid warhorse, bred for speed and strength and treated well for several years now, showing the effects of better food than its new master has ever enjoyed. This horse will be his transportation back home, and once there, it will be hitched to a plow, only being ridden when it is necessary to travel, which is seldom. His name is not important; what is important is that he has his prizes, his small handful of baubles and jewelry which he will share with his mistresses and his wife. He has his horse, and has enjoyed his fill of the local beauties. He considers himself a lucky and satisfied man. The barbarian’s way of life is filled with a few simple needs, and even fewer, simpler concerns. In short, he was feeling happy and magnanimous when he ran across the youth hiding in the lee of a ruined temple wall, clutching a burnt and soiled chunk of bread to his chest. While the barbarian had been ignoring other survivors whom he had seen, this one made him stop for a moment. In fact, there was something about this youth and the time of day which made him positively conversant.

“Hello there my lad. How did you manage to last three whole days through this madness?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“You don’t know! Well that’s a fine thing. Don’t you know that I ought to kill you?”
“Yes, but I don’t know why.”
“Why? Why! Why not, rather. That’s the question these days my lad. ‘Why not?’”
“I suppose because I don’t want to die.”
“Well there is that. I’m not sure it’s good enough, to tell you the truth, but I’ve given my sword enough work these last three days, and I don’t think you’ll be any great trouble if I let you go on your way.”
“Of course not sir. I’m leaving the city.”
“Wise. Where will you go?”
The young man made no reply. He looked down at his feet.
“Afraid to tell me? Ha! I won’t be looking up any more mischief tonight – or tomorrow for that matter. It’s back home for me, at least for now.”
“I’m going to my uncle’s estate. It’s far from here.”
“You tell them ‘No hard feelings’ will you? Just had to be done.”
“What had to be done, sir?”
“What? Why, this battle here. It had to be fought, don’t you see? Had to be. There was a right good reason, I recall, when we started, but I’m jiggered if I can tell you what it is now.” He paused to pick at his teeth with his little finger. “Must be all the ale I found in that basement over yonder,” and he waved with his hand in the general vicinity of a large, burned neighborhood.
“If you wouldn’t mind, sir, could you tell me what those reasons are?”
“Weren’t you listening, you cloth-eared urchin? I just said I can’t remember!”
“I’d really like to know. I need to know.” He looked as if he would cry, huddled there grasping his tiny loaf tighter.
“Oh, so that’s it, eh? Hm. Let me think on it a moment. It was... something to do with oppression. Yes, that’s it. We were oppressed. And hungry.” He slapped his sides with two hands, laughing heartily.
“Who was oppressing you?”
“Can’t you tell? You were! Well, not you personally, but the city. Everyone knows the city here was the cause of all our problems. Now we’ve given you all a few problems of your own.” He laughed.
“Was that it?” the boy asked, “because I noticed an awful lot of – what’s the word – looting going on.”
“Can’t be helped, my boy. You’ve got to pay for a major war somehow, and we’ve got no money you see. At least, we used to not have any money. I’ve got a full purse today, though.”
“So is that it? You came for our money and our food?”
“Well now it’s not as simple as all that. You see, this here city has been too almighty proud, too high and mighty for too long. Do you know how many slaves have been taken away from my country and brought here to work? Do you know how long soldiers from this city have lived in my home land? Have you any idea how long this blooming city has just been sitting here, bloody well telling everybody else how to live? No more. From now on, there’s no more orders from any stuck-up emperor, no more armies tramping back and forth, no more of the silly dresses you all wear. From now on things are going to be much more like they should be.”
“If you don’t mind, sir, may I ask you a few questions?”
“Certainly my boy.”
“If there are no more soldiers, who will keep the roads safe?”
“Safe? Who needs them safe? Not me, I can tell you that. Nobody would have the cheek to attack us as we go back home; there’s too many of us. Think for a minute, boy. Use that head of yours.”
“That’s fine, but what about next year when you want to travel by yourself. Who will protect you then?”
“I don’t plan on needing to travel alone boy. That’s a simple question to answer.”
“I was taught that it’s only because of our borders being patrolled that we have peace in our empire. It’s called Pax Romana.”
“It might have been called that, I don’t know. But I do know that it’s still safe enough for me today, and that’s all that matters. You’ve got to live in the present, child. You can’t go speculating off down the distant future. No good comes from that.”
“I always used to feel safe when I knew the armies were keeping a watch on things.”
“Well you can still feel safe, boy. Now that we’ve been through here, there’re not enough rascals left standing within one hundred miles to fill my hat with.”
“Won’t they come back?”
“There’s nothing to come back to! It’s all gone.”
“So instead of Pax Romana, it’s Nihilo Barbarica?”
“I’m not sure what that really means, but it has a nice ring to it.”
“Can I also ask why you are breaking down the gates and tearing chunks out of the walls?”
“Well that should be obvious. Can’t have you go putting up walls again, can we. You’ll learn to live like us, without a bunch of bothersome walls to hedge you in. A man needs space to move, to expand, to grow. No good comes from sticking stone walls up around and trying to keep business out that way. It’s not good – keeps new ideas, new truths from getting in. Keeps commerce out. These are the realities of the present boy!”
“So the walls offended you?”
“They did indeed. Yes they did. They had to go.”
“You destroyed our defenses, and you took all of our treasures.”
“That’s war!” he replied with a laugh. “War is all about those two things, I expect: the walls without and the treasure within.” He reached up with his hand and pulled a small book from a sack on his horse’s back. “Take this here curiosity I found. It’s lousy with writing and words. I can’t make out heads or tails of it, and I don’t suppose it would matter if I did. I’m taking it back to my home so my wife can set it up in our library. We’ll be the only house with a real book in our library. I’ll be able to show visitors this book and tell them about the war, and the great deeds I proliferated upon you and your fellow citizens. But do you know, it doesn’t matter what’s inside this book?”
“It doesn’t?”
“Of course not! It’s written in your language, that’s like a wall. It keeps folks like me who can’t read, out. So the wall has to come down – I take the book. But inside there’s thoughts, right? I anticipate that some fat Roman went and had some thoughts one morning and put them down on these pages. Now the secret of plundering, as you see all around you, is to know what to take. I found these trinkets here,” he produced a stunning golden necklace with a pearl pendant as an example, “and I determined that they were of value, so I took them. But,” he continued, “that broken chunk of bread you’re holding onto, well, you can have that! It’s all about figuring the value of a thing. I’m taking this here horse, but not the toga I saw laying on the ground behind me. The thoughts in this book are worthless, like your bread. I don’t need them.”
“I don’t understand. If you don’t think the book is valuable, why take it?”
“Goodness, don’t you use your head boy? Don’t you use your ears? They told me this was an educated city but I doubt it now! I just told you it was a curiosity. It’s not worth a thing, but it’s not an ugly thing to have laying around either. It’s not practical. You can’t buy a thing with it, and you can’t eat it. Furthermore,” he continued, “the man who wrote it’s dead, isn’t he? How clever can he be if he’s dead!?”
The young man had no response for this.
Then the barbarian continued, “Back in my home, a man is valued for what he can do with his hands, and what we can do is pull down your walls, take your things, and burn the lot of it once we’re done. That makes us better. Once you’re dead, you’re dead, and you can’t have nothing to say to us who live. You see that makes sense? It’s only what’s still living that counts.”
“So, you’re saying that you don’t care one bit what’s written in that book?”
“Course not. How could I? It’s nothing but some scribbling from a dead Roman. Don’t look back to the past, boy. You’ve got enough problems in the present! The present is where things happen. You could say it’s like a philosophy.”
“So now we are at your mercy.”
“Sure, for now. But you’re young, and despite the fact you’ve got more questions than a ten year old girl, and despite the fact you’re our natural enemy, I like you. Maybe I’m a sentimental fool, but I like you. Now here’s what I’d do in your sandals: I’d get me to a safe place, find a way to collect some folks together who are strong and who don’t worry too much about other people’s walls and such. I’d put those folks into a group which can go out and get what you need from other people. I’d stop worrying so much about whether they’re ‘our people’ or ‘their people,’ and I’d make everybody in a thousand miles afraid of me. Stop worrying about books and such. A book never stopped a sword. Don’t think so much about the good old days and what some old fraud wrote in a book. Don’t worry about the things that might happen tomorrow or you’ll be afraid to do anything constructive today. Don’t worry about walls and gates, and don’t forget that the only things worth taking are the things that are practical – food and money and such. You don’t forget that nobody really matters except yourself. You’ve got to look after yourself before you do anything else. That’s the secret to success. You remember that, and you’ll make it just fine.”
“I’ll think about that, all the way to my uncle’s estate.”
“I know you will; you’re a clever lad for a Roman.” He let out another tremendous laugh as he began to lead his horse through the ruined town, towards the large barbarian encampment on the edge of the city.

It would be fair to say that the boy did think about those things on his way to his uncle’s estate, including during the brief interlude when he was, in fact, robbed of his bread, for it seemed that the very destruction of the city had created brigands to replace the ones scared away by the invading army. And as he left the city of his birth, he was everlastingly impressed by two compelling arguments which seemed somehow to bolster the confident assertions of the barbarian: The devastation without, and the smoke within.

Considering what poetry is, and what it means to enjoy poetry, I find myself in the wrong century. At some point - I'm not sure when - poetry stopped including banal concepts like rhyme and meter. This is another way of saying that poetry has, for decades now, been struggling along without integrity. Let me explain. Integrity means wholeness. When a building is well built according to a plan, we say it has integrity. When a person's actions match their beliefs and values, we say they have integrity (especially if their values are high and admirable.) Both instances require conformity to a pattern for the sake of structure and consistency. At some point (I'm not sure exactly when, but I suspect it may involve Walt Whitman somehow) poets began to utterly disregard structure. There was no pattern to make their words conform to. This was and is seen, I believe, as progress. Why? Because it allows ideas and words to be completely unrestrained. And this lack of restraint is a very modern romance. We are in love with the idea of living without boundaries. More precisely, we think we love the idea of living without boundaries, but as a philosophy that ideal is so impossible that we cannot conceive of it on any level. Every cell in your body will die unless it maintains its boundaries. Your skin provides a safe haven for your organs. Every law exists to keep people out of someone else's boundaries. You lock the doors of your home at night because you cannot live without the protection of boundaries. All of life and all of creation displays the absurdity of unrestrained impulses and the impossibility of living without borders.

Only in the realms of ethics and the imagination do we crudely believe we have eradicated the need for fences and walls. This is reflected in modern poems which disdain order so that the mind may roam free, and the result is like watching a drunken giraffe try to run hurdles. It may seem deep and intellectual to try and plumb the depths of such poems, but it is rarely worth the effort. Allow me to site one example. The following poem is one which won a national award for student poetry while I was in high school. See if you can relate to the subject, or fathom the deeper meaning here:

As we were laying in bed
us was murdered.

I cannot remember who wrote this poem, but if I could speak to that person I would tell them that the only thing murdered in this verse is the English language. I obviously cannot comment on every single modern poem, but every time I read one which follows this sort of thinking I am struck by the same inevitable thought: modern poetry has exchanged integrity for lack of content.

One of the advantages of writing in a disciplined manner is that it forces us to think in a disciplined way. Anybody who has achieved anything substantial can testify that discipline is mandatory for success, and no discipline is possible until our thoughts are disciplined. My great fear is that we no longer write poetry in an orderly way because we no longer think in an orderly way.

The lynch-pin for getting moderns to understand the necessity of integrity in this arena may actually be music. Music is a field which requires stringent discipline, and the form of the words must match requirements created by the order of the composition. Every student who groans under the weight of a long poem is ecstatic over the release of a new song by their favorite artist. The only difference is that the proximity of music makes the comprehension of the lyrics either easier, or non-essential. It is amazing how many people today don't stop to think about what the lyrics of a song actually mean!

One of my favorite songs illustrates how music may help to lead modern minds into an affinity for real poetry. One of the verses goes like this:

I heard there was a secret chord
David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It went like this; the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall - the major lift
The baffled king composing 'hallelujah'

Unless I am mistaken, there is an obvious and easily identified structure to these words. The fact that they can work apart from any accompaniment is testified by the fact that when this song was recorded, it was really recited more than sung, and the instruments were limited to the chorus with nothing more than soft percussion behind the artist's voice on each verse.

As one very worthy professor recently noted, one reason that modern poetry seems to blather on and on is that there is no structure to force them to stop! Nothing within the poem itself creates a necessity for actually communicating the idea adequately, or in a timely manner. Sure, it takes a little effort to understand well-written poetry, but that is the worst reason of all for avoiding it. As soon as we can't be troubled to think about things which have been written well, we might as well swing wide the gates, for the barbarians have already won. They are no longer approaching the city, they are disappearing over the hill with their plunder, amazed at how easy the sacking of our culture really was.

I am finding that the alarm was sounded in various places and at various times, but nobody was there to hear it.

the Sound of Weeping and Laughter

Ezra lived in exile. Ezra was a son of the defeated, humiliated Hebrew nation. He lived under the control of a pagan emperor who inherited the territory of Judah when it was a smoldering, ruined wasteland. The destruction that Nebuchadnezzar had brought down on that tiny nation before Ezra's birth was so very complete that today it has been called the Babylonian gap; a blank, uninhabited void in the history of the Jews, a desolate empty parenthesis when nobody lived there, and nobody settled there. The houses were burned, the gardens and farms were razed, the walls were thrown down, the palaces were obliterated and the temple was annihilated.

Worship - the link that was not so much missing as torn away from them. They could, of course, express themselves to God anywhere, and they strove to do so; yet at the same time, they could not. At least, not right away. Once the survivors and the exiles had straggled into the precincts of Babylon and settled down, they were asked for music. Their conquerors demanded a song. Can't these Jews, so famous for their singing, manage to whip up one quaint old hymn of theirs to perform for us? But the Jews knew, as all oppressed people know, that tragedy can overwhelm the impulse to sing. They'd had the music torn out of their souls. The symbol of their close relationship with God, the temple, was destroyed. While they lived through that impoverished waiting time, they learned what it is they had undervalued for too long. Life has a way of taking the things you hold too lightly, and it is still true that you don't really know what you have until you lose it.

So when they were permitted to return, naturally many of their children and grandchildren jumped at the chance. Imagine, finding that corner of the old city which grandfather told us about so many times when we were growing up! We'll build a fine home there; we'll be the first to return, we will be settlers in the land God promised to Abraham! It must have felt like the conquest of Canaan all over again. They left in groups and in caravans, disregarding the safety of the pagan empire for the adventure of re-taking their promised land.

Ezra made it there with them. He followed along at some point, confronting them with the failures of their forefathers and the primacy of worship. While he was there, under his constant encouragement, plans were made for rebuilding the heart of their nation and their religion: the temple.

A crowd was there the day they dedicated the ground anew to the Lord. Many of them had never been to Judah. They had been born as subjects. But there were others in the crowd who had spent their childhood in the days before the fall of Jerusalem. Old now, they were perhaps the few hardy elders who could not countenance one more day apart from the land of promise. They had been torn away, and the tear had never fully healed for them. So they took the perilous, unlikely gamble of travelling along with the youth, the young families, the adventurers and the discontent. And they were all together when the outline of the temple foundation was identified, and the rubble and grass and the brush were all cleared away. They reinforced the stones and inspected the joints and corners, perhaps even replacing beams which would form portions of the walls. And when the foundation was ready to hold the walls, when construction was about to begin, they came together to celebrate.

They were celebrating a new beginning, of course. They were wiping away the memory of God's judgment by building again on the basis of his promise. The very project was a living picture of grace (already finished in their imagination).

Here I see an attitude I recognize, for there are so many young people coming into the kingdom in this day and age. As they come, many of them are gravitating towards the newest expressions of worship, the most recent books, the most popular speakers - we Americans believe in the future! We look forward, not back! Perhaps there is something of the ruined, ineffective exile period in our recent Christian heritage. Didn't uncle Tozer say that the church in America was in a modern Babylonian captivity? We haven't lost our promise or our relationship with God, he observed, but we have surrendered the power of our independent subservience to the King of the Universe. We are waiting for a deliverance from apathy, fear and self-interest, he said. Many young people left the church because of what they witnessed in the adults they knew who professed Christ. I have spoken with teenagers who want to believe in God, but simply don't believe most of the Christians they've met! As many of those youth come back, they want to build something new for God. They want to create an edifice which faces the future - a new century and a new hope.

But we have to realize that the foundation is already there, and has been there for centuries. You can't build on nothing. The Jews who returned could build because they were not the first; the young believers of today are not the first either. I see ages and ages of holy men and women whose examples must continue to illuminate and model true faith down through the centuries. They have crafted our creeds and fueled our evangelistic endeavors. Their stories are more nourishing than a stadium full of newspapers and magazines filled with current events. Their lives and their sacrifices will (if we let them) enrich the very soil on which we build our little hamlets for God's glory. But those saints are gone, their lives and stories are finished.

In that great celebration, Ezra tells us that the sound of rejoicing rose up over the crowd because of the newcomers who saw only the future. Mingled with it, and indistinguishable from it, was the sound of weeping as the elders remembered the former glory. Perhaps no other verse so perfectly embodies the current state of the church in America, for we see every reason to hope as we go through transitions and metamorphoses - yet we have every reason to weep for the effectiveness we abandoned during a crucial and dark period in our nation's history. We can remember the giants who stood out from the crowd once upon a time, who are now merely history; we can remember the institutions they built out of nothing but faith and sweat; we can still read the books with which they shook the world; we can remember the songs that have lasted for centuries; the devotions thoughts they were considerate enough to record for our benefit; the impetus given to evangelism and the force of their work for the Lord...

Some of us think that the world has yet to see, in this generation, anything equal to the greatest saints who went before us. And maybe we can be forgiven for the tears we shed when we look at the potential of the present, and remember the glory that used to be. It could be that God will raise up something even more glorious, but for the moment the sound of laughter mingles with the sound of weeping, and nobody can tell the two apart, for both of them are equally true.

The Naked Prophet

I know why Isaiah preached naked. In Isaiah chapter 20 it says that God told him to take off his clothes and preach to the people – which is a little odd. After all, public nudity is (mostly) illegal, and for good reasons. The Bible associates it with shame and humiliation. It is not a spectator sport or a healthy pastime. So why would the greatest prophet of the Old Testament preach that way? If I were to do that on a Sunday morning, I’d be presumed insane and replaced by a pastor who was less inclined to exhibitionism. So why Isaiah?

I think I know. The preacher’s lot is a hard one, and it gets harder all the time. Imagine with me now… it falls to you to find ways to tell people what God’s word means and what God is saying to your generation. A very few of the people you know actually want to hear it. A few others want to hear it, but they believe you have gotten it wrong and they want to tweak things until they are comfortable. A small number of people actually hate what you are trying to do; they regard the precious and magnificent promises which are your breath and blood as nothing more than indulgent, mythological self-delusion, effectively undermined by every branch of science and every intellectual since at least 1703. These folks are actually attacking your efforts, drawing people away from the glory that God has shown you.

But by far the largest segment of people you deal with simply don’t care; and this is the cruelest reality of all. What if you were a doctor (you wonder) and victims of malaria didn’t care about the medication you offered them to prevent the disease? What if you could plant in some young heart a love for the greatest classical music ever written, but they are simply uninterested? To be hated is one thing; to strongly disagree is another; but to be disregarded – to be simply ignored as if the Creator and His message are so terribly dull – this cuts deep. Too deeply, sometimes.

One of the most successful preachers of all times was Charles Spurgeon. In the midst of a ministry which spanned decades and drew thousands of listeners, he once said: “In this world, is it not a weary business to be a minister of Christ today? If I might have my choice I would sooner follow any avocation, so far as the comfort of it is concerned, than this of ministering to the sons of men, for we beat the air. This deaf generation will not hear us. What is this perverse generation the better for years and years of preaching?… The world is not worth preaching to.”

No wonder Isaiah was willing to strip, if only it would cause people to SIT UP AND TAKE NOTICE! How far will I go to get people’s attention, to get them to care? Well, not as far as Isaiah (for now, at least… but I’ve only been at it for five years.) But I know why Isaiah was willing to do what God asked. The message is everything. The messenger is nothing. He threw his pride and dignity aside and walked among the laughing, pointing crowds shouting his warning upon the winds, his voice carried far away. Did they hear his cry?

TaxTime

In honor of Uncle Sam and his indecipherable tax code, we offer this gem from Robert Frost:



Never Ask of Money spent
Where the spender thinks it went
Mortal man was never meant
To remember or Invent
What he did with every cent


Thank You.

mot juste

Mot juste, we are told by the inimitable Hemingway, is more than just a French phrase thrown into our language to impress and influence. It is a standard, a lifestyle - it means exactly the right word; the one word in the entire language which is exactly suited to a particular desire; the one and only perfect word to describe whatever it is you happen to be describing. I am a big believer in mot juste, and I continue to be dedicated to hunting down the perfect word for every situation, which is not only a personal burden I am willing to carry, but a privilege as well.

Five years ago I began working with youth in our church. After a few months a young man began to attend who made fun of the way I speak (something which did not seem laughable to me.) He accused me of using "fancy words" to "impress" people. I took this rather hard, because it was nothing like what was happening. What was in actual fact occurring was that I was simply speaking the way I always do... I was speaking the way I read. Unfortunately, the young man had no idea what I was saying.

Let me digress for a moment and mention texting (the connection will become clear later.) A typical text message between two teenagers does not look like English. It barely looks like Swahili. It is full of unnecessary punctuation resembling sideways-facing faces, numbers substituting for letters, and invented slang which, as someone who grew up during the eighties, I can testify that we NEVER used.

I always thought this was merely an unfortunate trend, until I read a book about punctuation. Really. In this book the author made the cogent point that such behavior is not merely a matter of personal preference, it is actually rude. What it communicates is the following: "I know that words have proper spelling in our language, but that is a lot of work for my thumbs, and I'm quite busy, and so I'm going to invent characters which have no real meaning and let you work it out for yourself. You may have to say it out loud a few times before you get it. It's like a little puzzle I made just for you."

You see what this does? It takes the whole burden of comprehension and lays it upon the poor wretch who is wondering why he just received a message which looks as though it were accidentally typed out by someone's buttock while the phone was in their back pocket. The responsibility to communicate is not assumed by the person speaking, (which is where it belongs) rather it is foisted upon the person receiving the information. If somebody has something to say, it has historically been believed that he or she has a responsibility to make themselves clearly understood. Apparently, that's too much of a bother these days.

Back to my dilemma. I found the same thing happening in reverse when I was speaking intelligible English to my youth group. One reason they were so quiet while I spoke was they were trying to figure out what some of those funny words meant, or which language I'd borrowed them from. Once I realized what was happening, I faced a very serious problem.

Do I continue to work hard to craft my vocabulary in order to maintain high personal standards, and to impart those standards to others? Or do I continuously lower my style of communication down to the level of monosyllabic grunts and hand gestures which would be fundamentally comprehensible to Bobo the trained gibbon? What is a fellow to do in such a quandary? Should I say "twisty, flexible stick thing" when I really mean "withe?" Or should I say "a sort of name that gets stuck to someone like a title" when I am thinking of "appellation?"

According to the above theory, I should take responsibility to make my meaning clear for the listener; but here I run into a philosophical dilemma. In the first scenario, someone who can speak coherently refuses to match up to their own ability, preferring instead to take the quick and painless route, (for themselves) thus contributing to the already-appalling decline of grammar in our society. In the second case, a brave and lonesome, handsome speaker strives to raise the awareness and linguistic prowess of those within his sphere of influence. So who is right?

We can answer the question by remembering the entirely fictional history of a people who should have existed many thousands of years ago, whom we shall call the Nozirev. The Nozirev can easily be imagined as living somewhere between two countries you've never heard of north of the subcontinent. They had a beautiful, sophisticated, sparkling language called Nozi which was capable of both great subtlety and great specificity. It was rife with poetry to melt the heart and rhetoric to stir the soul. This people produced great orators and musicians and writers, and trade unions, subjugating nearby cultures using nothing more than their wit and their semi-annual pilgrimages to the Shrine of Perpetual Verbiage. All was well, until one enterprising man invented a way of capturing pigeons and training them to return to a previously appointed locale.

Before long, these pigeons were all the rage with the teenagers and young adults living in that land. They took to tying little parchment messages on the pigeons' feet and sending them to their friends. But because of the dear price of ink, and the smallness of the parchment, they had to contrive smaller words, abbreviated phrases, and slang. It is possible that this is where the # sign originated, although we will never know for certain.

Soon, all the teen Nozirev were speaking in Pigeon-Nozi, talking to one another in adumbrated phrases which were neither comprehensible to their elders, nor conducive to their rich literary heritage. Within one generation, the adults and the youth could not communicate, which was a great joy to the young people, but a great sorrow to the adults whose job was to preserve literature, teach children, and hire people to work in fast-food booths. Because of this dichotomy, their entire culture soon fell apart. Every trace of their existence disappeared so completely that today all information about them has to be completely invented.

You may not be able to comprehend what I'm saying here, but it sure makes me feel better to say it.

Cause and Consequence

Perhaps the greatest (or primary) tragedy in the drama of the abortion debate is not that millions of lives have been destroyed, but that we have apathetically allowed conditions in our nation to atrophy to such a point that abortion has become an issue at all; that many see it as a practical necessity in light of circumstances is a consequence of placing freedom of choice above God's standard of moral purity.

Let us remember that immoral sexual attitudes came first. When we strike out against abortion we are aiming at a symptom (albeit a tragic and horrifying one) of our nation's growing idolatrous fascination with the view that humanity's great compensation for the woes of this life is sexual gratification.

This view was legitimized by Freud, defanged by Kinsey, popularized by the media and canonized by that generation which is so proud of the accomplishments of the 1960's.

Struggling to make abortion illegal may not be harmful, but it may not be effective either; it is a symptomatic treatment at best, and unless something is done to eliminate sex-worship among all levels of society, our struggle will only be the stamping out of fires which will continue to arise straight out of human nature. History gives us no consolation as we consider the odds against us. Abstinence movements which depend on logical persuasion, trinkets or fear tactics may serve some good, but statistics are not encouraging. What is needed is not incentive to avoid wrong behavior, but a passion for godliness, and genuine morality for its own sake.

One thinks of the fame of pop-icon Brittney Spears. Her once-justifiable popularity is now destroying her like slow acting poison, while the eroticism she and countless others peddle as art eats away at our ability to comprehend purity. Our culture and the tragic heroes of excess we have created are like the new-age image of a snake with its tail in its mouth. What feels like a satisfying meal turns out to be our own annihilation. First the tail, then the body, then the head all vanish in the vulgarity of our appetites.

And in the meantime, we legislate...

Number Two All Time Favorite

In 1972 author Richard Adams gave the world something it didn't even realize it needed: a novel about rabbits. This story is a combination of quaint and epic which is so rarely achieved that it is no wonder that this book remains such a well-known/unknown book. It is well-known because many folks have heard of it, or seen the cartoon (I never have) and unknown because everyone I've ever met who has wanted to read it has never actually bothered. I understand that we, as a culture, are enthralled by the immediate, and the more recent something is the more we value it. But if you can go back in time long enough to lose yourself in these characters, you'll be more than rewarded.

It starts in a meadow, where a large warren of rabbits is about to be destroyed by the machine of progress. The problem is that none of them know it except for a frail, intuitive bunny who somehow glimpses a shadow of tragedy about to come - blood splashed across the shrubs and soil of their hillside. That premonition sets a tiny handful of rabbits on a quest for a home of their own.

The way the author brings these animals to life, forcing you to care deeply about their combined fate, is astonishing considering most people leave their fondness for domesticated rodents (if they ever had one) far behind them once they grow up.

If you find yourself opening this book, watch the transformation of Hazel, one reluctant, average rabbit, as he goes from being a frightened refugee to a leader, a hero and a revolutionary. The journey he takes is every bit as delicious as the actual path which brings these characters through seemingly insurmountable dangers and pitfalls. It is equal to any adventure story in any age.

The charm and strength of this allegory lies in the way it uses such unabashed simplicity to craft a tangible world so very, very like our own. It has the power to make you feel ancient and brand-new, child-like and wise with age. Take a chance on something older than this summer's reading list, and find a copy of this book. You'll thank me.

Watership Down, by Richard Adams - 1972

WHO wants to inhabit a universe
where every riddle is already solved
where every mystery's made common-place
and the power of paradox slowly dissolves?
What will be left to reach out to,
or to wonder and ask ourselves 'why'
when the unanswered questions we
argue and fight for are neglected until they each die?

WHEN we each eat our fill from the apples that fall
from the tree of the knowledge of life which we shook -
and the wonder of ages and space and of love are all
made merely entries in some scholarly book -

WHEN the last lingering question is finally rendered
a point obselete and dated and moot
and we wholesale abandon the longing to know
and discover, which brings us up out of our youth -

THEN why measure time? For the moments which pass
will be nothing but space for the boredom to fill,
unlikely suggestions of godhood will surface; and
the madman's desire to rise up and kill
will be met in our ego...we haven't begun
to be all we will be when eternity's run
finally grinds to a halt and we all disembark
and we pat our own backs as we grope in the dark.

FOR a mystery solved is a victory won and
a lost childhood dream and
a bright morning sun
urging minds, fresh awake, to embrace a new day;
hold your ignorance close, drive it far, far away.

NEVER give up on knowing nor the wonder which keeps
what we don't know before us and fills up our sleep,
For the things we can see and the things just beyond
are both captured and lost as our race stumbles on.

the Breastplate of St. Patrick

I rise today
with a mighty power, calling on the Trinity
with a belief in the threeness,
with a faith in the oneness
of the creator of creation

I rise today
with the power of Christ's birth and baptism,
with the power of his crucifixion and burial,
with the power of his resurrection and ascension,
with the power of his return for the final judgment.

I rise today
with the power of the love of the cherubim,
in obedience of angels,
in service of archangels,
in hope of the resurrection and reward,
in the prayers of the patriarchs,
in the foretelling of the prophets,
in the preaching of the apostles,
in the faith of the confessors,
in the innocence of the holy virgins,
in the deeds of righteous men.

I rise today
with the strength of the sky,
with the light of the sun,
with the splendor of the moon,
with the brilliance of fire,
with the blaze of lightning,
with the swiftness of wind,
with the depth of the ocean,
with the firmness of earth,
with the strength of rock.

I rise today
with the power of God to guide me,
with the strength of God to raise me,
with the wisdom of God to lead me,
with the vision of God to see for me,
with the ears of God to hear for me,
with the words of God to speak for me,
with the hand of God to protect me,
with the path of God before me,
with the shield of God to guard me,
with the friendship of God to keep me safe from
the contriving of demons, the temptations of sin,
the inclinations of my nature, and everyone who wishes me harm...

Christ protect me today...
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ below me, Christ above me,
Christ to the right of me, Christ to the left of me,
Christ where I lie, Christ where I sit, Christ where I stand,
Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye which sees me,
Christ in every ear which hears me.

I rise today
with a might power, calling on the Trinity,
with a belief in the threeness,
with a faith in the oneness
of the creator of creation.

[This translation of Faeth fiada is taken from Philip Freeman's excellent biography of St. Patrick. It is a beautiful read; you would enjoy every minute of it.]

St. Patrick of Ireland, by Philip Freeman

The Greatest Faith Christ Saw

When Christ was approached by a Roman officer and asked for a miracle, the officer specifically said that he was "unworthy" or "not deserving." I would like you to try to imagine the way many modern evangelicals would respond to that statement. Frankly, they would attack such a pronouncement as being "negative" and "untrue", possibly a "lie from satan". Instead, the centurion would be told that he "should acknowledge his worth and the glory he was created for as a person of dignity..." etc. etc. etc. This is such a frequent picture lately that the idea of our great worth is regarded as an inviolate truth from On High.

Please notice however, that Christ did not tell the centurion to think better of himself, or stop thinking worthless thoughts, or to "love himself" or to "forgive himself" or whatever it might be. He said that this soldier had faith. Not just any faith, but greater faith than he'd found anywhere in Israel. You see, significance and worth doesn't come from fomenting feelings of power and majesty in people. All that creates is a diversion towards the self. Lots of people are making lots of waves by preaching a gospel of human potential and glory, but this is not how God has chosen to save us. In fact, this is a short-cut and a regression.

Watch: Adam and Eve sinned and fell from grace. That's why it's called The Fall. Christ came with all the majesty and glory of the Godhead as one of us - he brought the human race a glory and majesty and righteousness which had nothing to do with Adam. Our original created state was the highest pinnacle of creation, and it failed. Redemption is the hand of God reaching down from eternity and it cannot fail. When we focus on the glory we were originally created with we are looking backwards, not forwards. We are forgetting the fact that we are fallen and sinful and miserable. Redemption requires that we go through the temporary darkness of realizing our worthlessness (just like the centurion) and only when we do, can we leave it behind. It doesn't matter how we were once created; that potential was spoiled and lost in the garden of Eden. Christ offers us something new and something more, namely, the righteousness and the glory of God.

Redemption requires that our ego be defeated and abandoned, not refurbished and defended. Christ accepted the worthlessness of the centurion, and by accepting it, by naming it Faith, he raised that anonymous Roman to a higher level than all the others around him. Do you remember that right up to the night of Christ's death, his followers were still arguing about who was best? They had a very firm grasp on human glory. They knew how magnificent they'd been created to be. They knew they were made in God's image, children of Abraham, worthy and worthwhile, deserving and well-chosen. Christ's spirit never worked through their faith until all the greatness of their humanity had failed and left them as writhing, yellow cowards, hating their actions and acknowledging their weakness.

The church in our country is weak today because we are increasingly focusing on our strength and our worthiness. Christian leaders are so busy telling us not to feel bad about ourselves that we've forgotten how much we have to feel bad about. This is called repentance. It requires us to hate one thing in order to leave it behind and accept something else. That "something else" is Christ and he is looking for faith. He found it once in a pagan foreigner who compared himself not to Adam, but to Jesus Christ, and found himself worthless. Do you want great faith? Get your focus off yourself, get rid of the advice telling you to pump yourself up with inspirational back-pats, and memorize Philippians 3:7-16. At least read it. It would do all of us a world of good.