The Voyage of the Lost Treader

So once there was this guy named C.S. Lewis, and he wrote this amazing series of novels about a magical land called Narnia. One of the most amazing of these seven stories is called The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The framework of the story is a sea voyage, but the themes are deeper themes of personal development and . . .

. . . the new movie based on this book touches on some of them, and they get in most of the key episodic elements, but I kind of feel like they missed the overall point. Also, somebody in Walden Media is clearly a Lost fan. I don't really think mini green Smoke Monsters were exactly what Lewis had in mind. Somehow. I dunno. There was also something highly reminiscent of a hatch moment, some "Others," eerie whispering voices, and some sort of nameless evil that had to be overcome by a more or less arbitrary action which, in the end, didn't seem to answer any questions or have much to do with anything.

Also, not related to Lost, the undragoning of Eustace was pretty disappointing . . . although not as disappointing as I was afraid it was going to be.

I think if you don't know the story, it was probably a decent movie as far as entertainment goes. But I just threw in a spoiler so . . . maybe not. Heh.

Blue Like Jazz

Look--my "Uncle Steve" is directing this project. I wanna help . . .

The Answers

The World's Cutest Niece (now to be abbreviated "Twcn"--or possibly "Toucan") likes maps. Evidently. The second-to-last time I skyped with her and her parents, she spent much of the time saying "Camel! Camel!" while her parents recounted their trip to the environs of the Dead Sea. She had gotten to ride a camel with her daddy on the trip and was still very excited about it. Much of the rest of the time, she marched smilingly in front of the webcam with a book of Israeli maps. Then she climbed up between them on the couch and gave the book to one of them to "read" to her. Did I mention she's not even two yet?

The three adults (her parents, on one side of the globe, and me on the other) all laughed indulgently at this, and then Sister-in-Lu picked up one of those photo-illustrated guidebooks and waved it at me. "She also likes to look at this," she said. "She'll sit down and look through the whole thing." Apparently sometimes she makes her parents identify everything in the photos. Even the tiniest photos. Even if she couldn't possibly have any point of reference for the subject of the photos.

Dave describes it like this:

This happened again when Lu came back with a camera full of pictures from the City of David excavation south of the Old City of Jerusalem. The ruin is an archaeological mess of eras.

Hannah points at a specific feature of a picture. She says, “Bah-TANNN!” (or some combination of syllables we can’t agree on). Emmylou says, “Hannah, that’s a stepped stone structure (Hannah says, “Steps!”) that supported the fortifications of the ancient city.” (Hannah points at it again, saying “Bah-TANN!”) Lu: “It might have been from the Jebusite period, or maybe from when David was king.” Hannah points at something else in the picture. “The tower on the left is Hasmonean.” Something else is pointed at. “Bah-TANN!” Lu: “See that house in the middle with the four columns? (Hannah says “Co-UMs!”) That’s from the seventh century [BCE]. It was built right into the stepped stones! And see, those are steps going to the roof! (Hannah: “Steps!”) And that room over there? It still has a toilet seat in it! That’s where they put their stinkies.” Satisfied, Hannah is ready for the next picture. The next picture appears, and Hannah points to a specific feature and says, “Bah-TANNN!”

She did this for the whole photo shoot, which was around 45 pictures. She’s gone through up to 60 pages at a time of the pictorial travel guide this way too.

We were marveling over this together--the brilliance of TWCN and the mystery that is the mind of a small child. "Maybe," I said, "she just needs to know that you know the answers. She doesn't need to understand them. She just needs to know there are some, and that you, her parents, know them."

Life would be so much easier if I could just relax in knowing that Someone--my adoptive divine Parent--knows the answers. I have some other allegorical and analogous thoughts about this facet of my niece, but, as I am wont to do, I shall discuss them at another time.

Photo:

Underwater Observatory Marine Park, Eilat. Photo presumably taken by Sister-in-Lu. Stolen from Facebook by jennwith2ns. 2010.

You Learn Something New . . .

I have enrolled in my first seminary course. It is "Church History to the Reformation," and I am finding myself surprisingly riveted. I've always had a sort of passive interest in church history (feed it to me and I'll gobble it up, but no hunting/gathering really happens here), but I think what surprises me most is that the main textbook for the class--naturally a weighty tome--is so well-written. I've never had a textbook, which wasn't a novel for a literature class, that I have looked forward to reading so much. (Well, except for maybe Dr. Blomberg's Jesus and the Gospels.)

As I'm reading it, I'm finding lots of thoughts entering my head, not to mention information I never knew before. Like this: in 1975, when this book was written? The author thought that Gnosticism had totally died out. Huh. Maybe not.

Here's something else. It is impossible, in a post-DaVinci Code world, not to have heard about the bad, bad, misogynisitc, racist, close-minded clerics who gave Gnostics and other heretics a run for their money . . . or tried to get them to totally die out. Said clerics may in fact have been misogyinistic and/or racist--or they may have been products of their time and not been thinking about those issues because they were thinking of whether or not Jesus was both fully God and fully human and what that meant. There were some less-than-pleasant characters among them. I'm just saying, they might not be the villains it is currently fashionable to paint them as.

Among the lesser-known details about these accounts is that on occasion, the heretics won out--at least temporarily. Arius, for example, was sent into exile, but for some time later his doctrine almost completely triumphed, dying out mainly because divisions within the group's own ranks.

I have friends who promulgate something like the Arian heresy and although I disagree, I don't feel inclined to exile them or anything. If I get brave and motivated enough, there may come a post one of these days where I wrestle more with the question of heresy and orthodoxy in general. But right now, because I'm feeling a little fed up with fashionable conspiracy theories, I feel like telling some heretics to stop whining--they had their day, and they still have it . . . heresies come and go and come back, for goodness' sake (or something?), so stop making stuff up about the 2nd and 3rd century theologians (not to mention, say, the apostle Paul) and try to deal with orthodoxy. Accept it, reject it, whatever. Just . . . is it really necessary to make up stories about Paul being a Gnostic and Jesus marrying Mary Magdalene just because we're uncomfortable with Jesus' life and claims?

Okay. Enough soap-box. It's going to come back to bite me (if soap-boxes can bite), via my own words or someone else's--or both--soon enough.

But here's the other thing I just found out. Evidently, in the time of Tertullian, when people got baptised, there was a lot more to the ceremony than there is in most churches I've ever been in, but also, after the baptism, the one who had just been baptised "refrained from the daily bath for a week after having received the rite" (Latourette, p194). I'm glad that tradition didn't stick around . . . although it might explain why people hardly bathed at all during the Middle Ages . . .

Green Eggs and . . . a Jewish Carpenter? or, What I Got Out of a Facebook Quiz

At various times in my life I've had people who aren't particularly enamoured of Jesus say things like, "Do you really have to try so hard to find Jesus in everything?"

No. I don't. It just kind of happens, I'm afraid. Like last week when I randomly took a "Dr. Seuss Personality Test"on facebook. First of all, let me say that you should never take a facebook quiz too seriously. This one, for example, only asked five questions, and I'm not sure how they related to any Dr. Seuss characters at all, actually. Secondly, if I were going to really do this scientifically (?), I should probably take all the other Dr. Seuss quizzes online, just to see if they match up. There are quite a few of them, I've seen. But . . . I'm not going to bother.

Still, though, when it turned out that, according to this quiz, "I am Sam--Sam I am," and that cute little short guy with the sign and the plate appeared on my profile, I thought, "Yeah! That's me! Sam-I-am!" Well, except for the short part.

Check it out. Here's Sam. He's all stoked because he's got something he thinks everybody would (or, at any rate, should) love. He doesn't give the impression of thinking he's better than anyone. He's just so enthusiastic about green eggs and ham he can't let up until his friend/innocent bystander/person-that-doesn't-really-like-him-much tries them. He doesn't seem to realise that, to an onlooker or an outsider, such a dish looks at the very least sketchy, with any inherent delight being, to that perspective, indiscernible.

Not to be discouraged, Sam tries to "frame" his green eggs and ham in ways that might appeal more to his resistant friend. The two characters, now thrown together under more and more bizarre and extreme circumstances, continue their back-and-forth for several more pages. At the point when the train has driven off a cliff, the boat has sunk, and both Sam, his victim and an entire menagerie of animals and other characters are floundering in the water, the poor beleaguered green-eggs-and-ham-avoider decides that he will try the dish just to get Sam off his case. Then--joy of all joy and surprise of all surprises!--he likes them! Sam is vindicated! Green eggs and ham really are delightful! They're so great that the former hater doesn't even worry about swallowing his pride along with the green breakfast and whole-heartedly thanks Sam-I-Am for, as wikipedia calls it, "his persistence."

I dunno. It kind of reminds me of my life . . . a little . . . ? Here I am, both suddenly and gradually delighted and overwhelmed by the knowledge that, messed up as I was and still easily am, God Himself came here to join in my life and to sustain me through it. He came to be my life, and though life with and through and by Him can often be alarming, I also wouldn't (by His grace) have it any other way. And I just know that He came to be life to everybody, and I just want them to realise it.

So sometimes I can get a little annoying. I'll try to be "all things to all people" like the Apostle Paul, sometimes even to the point of ridiculousness, and sometimes even to the point of some suffering and inconvenience. But I still think that, though they may "swallow" the whole thing differently than I do, that the real source of life for anybody--anybody--is Jesus. And so . . . it's not that I want to be annoying. I just want my friends to experience how worth it this is, in spite of the difficulties and the sometimes sketchy-looking nature of what I'm trying to share. Right now, I guess I'm still pushing green eggs and ham on people in boxes and houses and trains and boats, but one of these days I really hope someone--or a lot of someones--will decide that . . . well look. I don't even care if they decide they want me off their case. I just hope they see that Jesus is for them--and that at the end of the day they'll thank somebody.

Unloved Characters

Sometimes there are things you know, and then there are things that you confirm by doing, and I can certainly confirm, now, that a writer, a story-teller, an artist, might craft something solely to exorcise his or her own "demons." (Or, you know, zombies or whatever.) But here's something else I discovered through the whole NaNoWriMo project:

If the author doesn't care about the characters, nothing is going to happen to them.

I suppose it's not really a coincidence that right before NaNoWriMo started I read Donald Miller's new book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. (Or is it A Million Years in a Thousand Miles? Or something else? I can never remember. The book was better than the title.) Miller (or maybe his friend Jordan, actually: chapter eight, page 48) defines story as "a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it."

He makes the point that conflict is a necessary part of story, and if God is telling The Story, and He wants it to be a good Story, then there's going to be conflict. He even kind of implies or maybe even states outright that at least some of the time God puts the conflict right in there.

It's maybe a little presumptuous to imagine that every life experience I have can turn into a point-by-point analogy about God. On the other hand, even though I don't agree with the Milk Guy that image-of-God necessitates that God actually behave exactly like human beings (or that we always behave exactly like God), I do think it means that we can learn things about God through our experiences and even our reactions or those of others.

So, while I was writing the Story That Shall Likely Never See the Light of Day (oh wait--that's kind of all my stories except Trees), it finally dawned on me that if God is really a storyteller, it's not very likely that this story is just His way of working out His own issues. And I'll tell you why.

I do believe there is something cathartic about storytelling and that you can process what you are going through by telling a story. But if that's all it is--if it's just a psychological-healing exercise--if there's no actual story being unearthed in its own right, as Stephen King describes it, it's kind of rubbish. It ends up like the "story" I wrote during NaNoWriMo--boring. If I don't care about the characters (which I discovered I didn't last month), I can't be bothered . . . or even think how to . . . find out what they want or what conflict they need to overcome to get it. I don't know them, who they are, what they like, even if I'm writing from their points of view. Their personalities change from one day to the next, not because they are developing as characters but because they are subject to my allegory which, it turns out, isn't a very good one. In a sense, we (the characters and I, too) are slaves to the story, but since it is a lame story, we're all just stuck and bored. In the end the whole thing--characters, story and author--
grind to a screeching halt.

If you're in a frame of mind which makes you think God's writing you a lousy story, you might wish for it to grind to a screeching halt, or think that it already has done, but whatever got you to that point, though painful, was probably not boring, and just might have affected your character a little bit. And I will also posit that it doesn't mean God hates you, or that He is indifferent to you. To hate a character, I feel, requires too much energy and the author might then just as well become indifferent to him or her. And indifference, as I've said, does not elicit conflict or suffering--or peace, either. It elicits boredom and lack of resolution.

I'm not trying to justify God in this particular post, nor am I trying to minimise anybody's pain, because what do I really know about it? I am saying that, from the perspective of "creates worlds," I think it's pretty unlikely that all this creation is, is a cosmic attempt to sort out the psychological convolutions of the Divine. I thought it was unlikely before, in theory. Now I think it in practice.

A few more writerly thoughts on this still to come.

One Lesson Learned

Much as I may enjoy reading (or watching) sci-fi/fantasy stories, I am utterly unable to write them. I've tried it before. This last attempt, through NaNoWriMo has sort of put the nail in the coffin on that dream for me.

But maybe I just need to read more of it. Even (or maybe especially) children's. Which makes me grateful to Son-of-Milk-Guy, who gave me his entire collection of Spiderwick chronicles. I'm pretty sure he never read them himself, but I was rather pleased that he thought I might like them . . . all by himself.

How Do You REALLY Feel?

I have an idea that it's politically incorrect to make a statement like, "I love Jewish novelists," even though it's a positive statement and it is, to date, true. Or at least I can accurately say I love the novels that Jewish novelists write. Chaim Potok, Bernard Malamud, and now Saul Bellow, are the writers whose books I love. I suspect I should and would love the works of Elie Wiesel also, but somehow I seem to have missed them thus far. Don't ask me why. (We could also include the Coen brothers in this, but they're not exactly novelists, and some of their stuff gives even me pause, though I have huge amounts of respect for them.)

Now what I'm trying to figure out is why I like Jewish fiction so much, and maybe also why, by and large, I find Christian novels so unappealing. There are exceptions, like C.S. Lewis (obviously!) and Tolkein (of course!), and I'm sure there are some out there today who write compelling or thought-provoking stories. I think the "Christian Publishing Industry" (can an industry be a Christian?) is trying to raise the bar these days on the kinds of books that hit the bookstore shelves, and three cheers to that, I say! But I haven't read the new generation of Christian fiction, because an enormous percentage of the small percentage of Christian fiction I have read is, in my opinion, just not that good. (That is probably not politically correct either.)

Even though I feel free to have strong opinions about this and to air them on the internet (potentially to my own undoing if I want to have any more play in arena of getting-books-published) I don't really feel very qualified to talk about this much because, as I say, I'm really only comparing the novels of three Jewish guys with the novels of a spattering of Christian ones, and I can't say that this is really a very well-researched point of view, or that there's a very representative cross-section of these books.

But here is my hunch. There are some similarities among the books of the three Jewish authors I'm citing. Often the action in the stories takes place as much in the characters' heads as it does internally. The characters may be at varying levels of Jewish Orthodoxy, but somehow their identity as Jews is ever-present. On the other hand, it is often not very overt. You can't forget that you're reading about Jewish characters in these books, even if they're not actually directly talking about it. The people in the stories are sometimes sort of caricatured (for example, Moses E. Herzog, about whom I'm thinking a lot right now because I'm reading Herzog), but they still ring true. They have identifiable thought patterns--either ones I've had myself or ones I must, come to think of it, have experienced others having. They struggle with the identity they impose on themselves, and with the one the world imposes on them. There's always a morality and there's always a message, but it is rarely if ever spelled out; the reader is, in a way, left to his or her own devices at the end of the book, to come to an interpretation themselves.

In the Christian fiction I've read (previously named authors mostly excepted, although even Lewis gets bogged down in his message sometimes), the characters generally seem flatter. The books are more plot-driven, and the plot, it seems to me, is often contrived. The characters usually have struggles, but they get worked out in the end, under the auspices of Christ. All the people the reader comes to care about (if the reader comes to care about them) become Christians by the end, if they aren't already. Things tie up neatly. There's an Answer. And just in case we didn't get it, it's usually spelled out for us.

This makes some people feel comfortable. I guess it makes evangelicals like me feel like the message got out there or something. But the problem is, I don't know that the people who we wish would hear the message are usually going to get it in this format. I think it's too bad. I think there is an Answer, and He is Jesus. But I don't think He usually ties up loose ends, exactly. I think walking with Him involves getting mad at Him, and trying to run away from Him, and fighting with Him, and then getting to the point where you realise life is often going to stink no matter what, but that you'd rather go through it all with Him than without.

Grin

There are a lot of movies I like, but very few about which I can say I grinned almost the entire time (if not the entire time) I was watching them. Neither of them were ones I would have expected to feel this way about. The first one was Hairspray. Tonight it was Romancing the Stone.

When I was in high school, my youth group had an all-nighter at our youth leaders' house once, and we watched bunches of movies ranging from Joni to The Empire Strikes Back. Oh, and some episodes of Miami Vice, I think. At some point someone put in Romancing the Stone. I remember thinking I wasn't going to like it, but actually finding it kind of funny, but other people must have had different opinions, because the only part I remember is them staying in the fusillage of the crashed drug-running airplane.

Ever since then, I've sort of thought vaguely that I might like to see the whole thing sometime. And then I got Netflix. I know. It might have to go, given the whole budget thing (October starts tomorrow, people!) but anyway, I have it right now, and discovered that I could watch the movie streaming to my computer from the internet.

I don't really know what it was about this movie that I liked so much. The crazy-lonely-single-female-writer stereotype? The fact that she knew how to deal with traumatic situations because of what the characters in her books had done? The fact that people knew how to thwart her because they had all read her books? The totally inappropriate muzak during one of the chase scenes? Michael Douglas' mullet? A fun, light-hearted romance, where two totally mismatched people end up living happily ever after because they can because it's a movie?

Yeah. All that. Grin.

There's just one thing that's bothering me. Some time within the last six or seven years, I read a book by a Christian author who used this movie to illustrate some deep relational/theological point. It was someone famous in the evangelical world--someone like Philip Yancey or Donald Miller or John Eldridge. One of them. This has now turned into one of those things that is likely to bug me for at least a month now. So, kudos (and, if I know you and can think of something to send, a small prize) to anyone who can tell me who it was and what they were trying to illustrate through it.

Defacing Public Property

I go through phases . . . with pretty much everything. Including the library. I will go the library religiously for a year or so, and then suddenly I don't feel like looking through the stacks for books I've never heard of that I might or might not like, and so I return whatever I had out last, and don't go back for another year or two.

Seriously, I don't think I've been to the library since sometime in the middle of 2008. But then the other week I was looking for a book to read in my mom's bookshelves, and I realised that I am no longer really into most of the types of books that she's into. She likes mysteries and historical novels, and I like . . . I don't know, really. What do I like? All the stuff listed in my blog profile, I guess. I read one of her historical novels anyway, out of desperation, and I ended up liking it more than I expected . . . or at least wanting to know what was going to happen. But I took today off from work and all of a sudden decided it might be a good idea to visit the library again.

Last time I visited there, they didn't have Trees in the Pavement in their stacks, even though I had told them about it. I suppose it would have been classier of me to donate them a copy, but frankly, I wanted as many sales as I could get. Anyway, I had this idea that they had quietly decided not to purchase it, and since I'm rarely very pushy about things, I could hardly blame them.

Today I found about four books that I thought I might like to read, with little effort, which was nice. I checked them out. Then, as an afterthought, I decided to search my book on the library computer. What do you know? They have it! In the children's section . . . so I went down to the children's section just to see my book on a library shelf. There it was, next to the Raggedy Ann stories (which, if you know me really well, you may realise is sort of apropos). It doesn't look like anybody has read it. Which--why would they, since they've never heard of me. Still, there it was.

I thought about going up to the librarian and thanking her for having my book on her shelves, and asking if I should autograph it. It seemed like a weird question to ask, though. What was she going to say? No? Besides, she was clearly more than occupied with a family who seemed to have very complicated things going on with their library cards. I went back to the shelves. I knelt on the floor and took a pen out of my pocketbook. I looked around, opened the book to the front page . . . and scrawled my name across it. I suppose I was defacing someone else's property. But it's still my book.

A Girl's Best Friend

Diamonds just don't really do it for me. I mean, I guess if some guy I really really liked, who I would commit to spending the rest of my life with, offered me one, I wouldn't turn it down, but I would hope that in that case he would be my best friend (and fulfill a few other roles, too), and the the gem I was wearing on my hand would be a sign of that friendship, but not the fulfillment of it.

Neither of those things are forthcoming anytime soon, though, so right now I'm encroaching on man's best friend territory, and getting a dog. Since, you know, I only have one job anymore, and I no longer have to count hours and be gone for twelve a day. The trustees of New Church (which I'm going to have to come up with another nickname for pretty soon, I think) have even said I can bring my canine to work with me if I want. I do want, although I think there will need to be a few weeks' adjustment period before I do something like that.

Oscar is a black cockapoo who is enough cocker to remind me (and my mom) of the cocker I grew up with, which might be why I decided on him and the shelter promoting him, even though he has to be shipped to me from Arkansas and I didn't get to meet him first and his adoption "donation" is one of the higher ones. I stole the photo from the internet before they took his profile off because of my having committed to adopting him.

His original name was (still kind of is, I guess), "Bounty," but that reminds my dad of paper towels, and me of British chocolate bars. The Milk Guy is at least cultured enough to be reminded of a book. I settled on renaming him "Oscar" because for some reason I was thinking of Desiree, a historical novel I had read as a teen and from which I had gleaned many names I found romantic. Oscar was the son of the heroine, and became the crown prince of Sweden. I didn't think Oscar was romantic at all at the time, and I still don't, but I like it because it's unusual. Plus, my dog is fuzzy like a Sesame Street monster, and Oscar is my favourite one. I have toyed with the possibility of other names, but Oscar is the only one that seems to work for me. I suppose this means it's a good thing I have no children, because they would probably all end up with unfortunate names which I would be compelled to name them, for interest's sake.

I'm currently on vacation, visiting Dave, Sister-in-Lu, and the World's Cutest Niece, but after I've been back home a week, Oscar will arrive in Connecticut from Arkansas, and I will drive down and pick him up and take him home. I sent in my "donation" last night, so I can now honestly say I have a dog. I'm nervous. I keep dreaming about badly-behaved puppies. But I'm also excited. And I can't wait to get home and go shopping for dog treats and a dog bed and stuff.

The only thing about all the developments in the last few weeks is that now? The entire author blurb on the back of my book is a lie. Maybe it doesn't matter, though, since the book no longer remotely ranks as a top seller in CFP's children's fiction . . .

Lions and Tigers and Bears

Sometimes I muse about cartoons. They're such a weird art-form, where there's a picture of this thing that doesn't look anything like the real thing it represents, but somehow our brains go through some kind of instant, subconscious process, and everybody agrees that Mickey Mouse is a mouse--even though I promise you I have never seen a mouse that looked like him. I don't know whether we get socialized to do this, or if there's some other intrinsic human factor that causes this to happen, but anyway, sometimes I marvel about it.

This phenomenon or ability is all well and good--probably helpful, even, in most situations. But sometimes it leaves you a little misinformed, when you're in a situation where you don't know what the real thing looks like. For example, the World's-Cutest-Niece-Hannah has a book in which a cartoon horse and a cartoon duck appear on the same page, but the cartoons are so stylised that she thinks, based on the other duck drawings she's seen, that the horse is a duck.

Then yesterday Sister-in-Law-Lu (who one day I might just call "Sister-in-Lu") sent us some more Hannah stories:

We went to the zoo on Saturday for the first time since Hannah was a wee little thing. She was stunned by all the children, and it took her awhile to even notice the animals. But then, maybe while we were looking at the exotic sheep, something clicked, and she started to get interested. The big tortoises were especially intriguing, prompting Hannah to say her new word of the week: turtle. And then there were the bears, which completely rocked Hannah's world. At first she looked confused when we called the grizzly "bear." But then she processed it, and she started saying it too. After we got home, Hannah had a new interest in her "real" bear (as opposed to teddy bear) books-ones she didn't used to care about-like the Eric Carle illustrations ("Brown bear, brown bear." "Polar bear, polar bear.") and "Bear snores on." She also got really excited about Ebenezer, the sprawling brown bear who sits on her dresser.

This story, in combination with another blog I was reading yesterday, reminded me of the wonder that sometimes happens--dare I say should happen--when one stumbles into the reality of God.

It seems like we can grow up hearing about God, and even believing in God, but sometimes all we really have in our heads is some kind of cartoon-y version which might be sort of okay if we had a basis of reality to work from first, but ends up getting us really off track if we don't. Some books (like the ones in Hannah's library with bears in them)--or preachers or teachers or blogs or television shows or . . . whatever . . . present a more realistic picture of things than others. You can end up with the "God as indulgent parent" caricature in your head, or the "God as sadistic, brimstone-hurling monster" one, and neither one do justice to who God really is.

And then you have an experience where God shows up for you personally, and someone points it out to you, and you can be either terrified and run away ("Bears! Augh!") or you can be properly awestruck ("Oh! This is what a bear is! I had no idea!"). And then you can be drawn to the books and the people who were best able to show you what God looked like in the first place.

Books

I think this post is a result of combined laziness and self-congratulation. There's this meme-like fad going on over at facebook where people are writing down 25 random things about themselves and then tagging 25 people to do the same thing, and I'm pretty sure I've been tagged more than 25 times, but seriously, folks--I think you could come up with 25 random things about me just from this blog, and I'm not doing it.

However, this week a long-lost friend from elementary school tagged me in the following note and this one I thought was pretty cool. Mostly because the only thinking I have to do involves putting the correct symbol after each selection. But also because I'm pleased to report that I've read more than 6 of the books in this list. And also because it's intriguing to see what they list. I'm not going to tag anybody, but if any of you want to pick this up and do it yourselves, by all means go for it.

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally up the ones you've read and put the number at the bottom


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen x +
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien x +
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte x +
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling x
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee x +
6 The Bible x +
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens x
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy x +
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (no--but many of the works of Shakespeare!)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier x
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien x +
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot x +
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald x +
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh x
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky x
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll x
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame x
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens x
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis x +
34 Emma - Jane Austen x
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen x
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis x +
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini x +
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne x +
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown x
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving x
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery x +
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy x
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan (couldn't get into it)
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (couldn't get into it)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons x
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen x
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens x +
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon x
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (couldn't get into it)
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville x
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens x
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett x +
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath x
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens x
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchel
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White x
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad x
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery x
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams x +
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare x
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl x
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I think I counted 45 x's, me. How about you?

If a Tree Falls . . .

I first decided that growing up might have some compensations when my mother told me that even grown-up books sometimes have talking trees in them. (She was reading Lord of the Rings at the time. I guess that might go without saying.)

I think I'm still waiting for the other compensations, but I actually wasn't really planning to discuss the relative benefits of maturity. I wanted to talk about trees. And Lord of the Rings, I guess. I think it's interesting that in the worlds of both Tolkien and Lewis, you can tell things are really dire when the trees either shut down or are cut down. The worlds of The Two Towers, Prince Caspian and The Last Battle, for example, are highly informed by the state of the trees.

So I've got to say that the ominous feeling surrounding the devastated economy, the renewed violence in Israel and the more personal concerns of cancer and such, is kind of getting highlighted for me over here because of what is happening to our trees.

Last month trees all across our county were ripped to shreds by the wind and ice which ravaged the area. One entire dread-filled night I spent listening to trees shuddering, groaning, cracking like gunshot, falling with loud, earthshaking thuds . . . and I felt as if I could, in all that, hear them screaming. Much as I feared a tree might any minute fall through my roof, I also found myself grieving, grieving the trees.

If that were all, it would be a sadness. Trees which had been perfectly healthy, if they haven't fallen down completely, will have to be taken down because they've suffered too much damage to survive. In addition, however, there is an even more serious menace. The Asian Longhorned Beetle, which the USDA has fought to eradicate in Chicago, New York, and New Jersey, was discovered in our City last summer.

The beetles have been present in this area for over ten years it turns out, and the passionate and hardworking folks at APHIS are a little freaked out, because this is the first occurrence of this tree-destroying pest in an area with such close access to full-fledged forest. In an attempt to keep the beetle from destroying an entire ecosystem up here, they have begun a massive programme to cut down and chip to nothing . . . pretty much all the trees in the City, and many beyond. If the beetle only infested one kind of tree, that would be one thing, but "this one goes to eleven"--there are at least eleven tree species they seem happy to call home. The oaks, apparently, are safe, and I suppose the pines, but the maples' and the chestnuts' and the birches' days are numbered. Trucks have been on New Church's street yesterday and today, and for about half an hour this morning a herd of "tree-care" workers hung out and laughed and talked at Starbucks.

If things go well, replanting will begin in a few years. But no one in the City will see a mature maple tree on their property again. If these trees don't come down, many more will, eventually. But it already feels suspiciously like a losing battle, and we've only just started to fight it. It feels like a harbinger of something, and makes me wonder again, "What is this world coming to?"

Why Do We Do This, Again?

The Milk Guy says that if there's a God, He must be a cosmic Sadist.

I never really know how to respond to this when he brings it up, because frankly, sometimes I think things like that myself, and so I have no idea how to explain how Christians (generally) view trials, without sounding like we have made ourselves into Masochists-for-the-God.

Here are some cases in point:

1. Pretty much all the Old Testament prophecies. God's people are not cooperating with Him. He gets mad. He causes or allows (depending on your theology--but the words in the Bible usually sound like "causes") really horrific things to happen to them. Today I read in Zechariah 14.2 (NRSV) "For I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem to battle, and the city shall be taken and the houses looted and the women raped . . . " It actually goes on from there, but the rape thing alone causes me to recoil so violently, I kind of lost track of the rest of it. He mercifully allows some people to be spared these monstrosities, and then He restores them, and they're supposed to (and do, at least for a time) return to Him with love in their hearts because He essentially beat the stuffing out of them. Or . . . that's what it reads like.

2. I'm reading an autobiography of an English evangelist, whose prayer as a child was that she could get into the center of God's heart. Or something like that. She had a fairly difficult childhood and then suffered some serious health issues (and miracles) as an adult, and at the end of the second-to-last chapter, she renewed her request to God that she be satisfied with only Him. Three weeks later, her husband of 30 years, who had been involved in ministry with her, left her for another woman. What?!

3. I've prayed similar prayers, and meant them, and I've even asked God to do whatever it takes (even to me) to cause certain people to come to know Him. Now I have cancer? I don't know if that's "what it takes," but I do know there's some way that this is supposed to draw me closer to Him.

Don't get me wrong. I love the Old Testament prophets (although I've decided I don't like Zechariah all that much), and I think the prayer for God and God alone is probably the best one we can pray. (It's also pretty audacious, if you think about it, and so the fact that we can pray it is pretty amazing.) I love that God wants to relate to us enough to open Himself up to our rage--to the point of His own death in Jesus. I know (at least intellectually, although sometimes that's all it feels like) that He doesn't ask us to do anything He didn't live through Himself, or experience along with us. I've sensed His presence with me in this cancer adventure and I've seen Him answer prayers in surprising ways and I know He's been faithful to me through my whole life.

I also understand that if He tried to coax us to Him with blessings all the time, it wouldn't work. We just get distracted. All right, I get distracted, okay? I get all caught up in the blessing and start to treat it, instead of Him, like God.

I'm just saying that causing or allowing the rape of the people He chose when He hates rape, or answering Jennifer Rees Larcombe's prayer through a divorce when He hates divorce, is downright baffling, and I don't really know how to argue with the Milk Guy when he says, "You talk like everything God does is perfect. But He makes bad stuff happen, too. You have to take the good with the bad."

"As for God, His way is perfect," but I do see the Milk Guy's point. For all I said about "It's all good," God's perfect way often feels really bad. And even if I am settled in myself that I have about as complicated a relationship with God as I do with the Milk Guy but that it's good; even when I feel that I can trust in God when I suspect He might hurt me and that I love Him even when He does; even when I know that I am free (thanks to Jesus) to argue with God and that somehow through all this turmoil it will bring me closer to Him, I really don't know how to explain that to anybody without its sounding like I have some kind of psychological malfunction that causes me to seek out pain. I don't. I really don't like pain.

So . . . why do we do this, again?

Illumination

Have you seen this yet?It jumped out at my eyeballs the other day while I was waiting for a friend to turn up for coffee at Barnes and Noble. I managed to scan through the Gospels before she arrived. I guess I don't agree with every single visual interpretation, but I found a lot of them unbelievably powerful, and some of them made me cry.

Today I was at another Barnes and Noble with my mother on her way to the airport. She wanted to see this book, and I couldn't find it anywhere in the shelves, so I approached a clerk behind one of the counters.

"Excuse me," I said, "Do you know if you have--I don't know exactly what it's called--it's a version of the New Testament that looks like a magazine?"

He looked slightly perplexed but dutifully turned to his computer and began searching. "You don't know who published it at all?" he asked hopefully. "The author?"

I paused a moment before saying, with a bit of a grin, "Umm . . . God?"

Strangely, he didn't grin back.

"It didn't look like this, did it?" he asked after a moment, turning the screen toward me.

"Yes," I said. "That's it."

So . . . I didn't get the grin. But there was a look of surprise and interest. That might be good enough.

Sci-Fi

Sometimes I feel like I have inadvertently ended up in one of Madeleine L'Engle's sci-fi novels; an adult version of A Wind in the Door or something. (I just need a sibling to shrink into my bloodstream and sort out my mitochondria and such. Um, Dave . . . ?) In what other context do people phone you whose caller ID's show up with names like "Quadax"?

Anyway. A very nice lady from said company, who talked like my college friend Marcia-Marcia-Marcia (who is also a very nice lady), phoned me this afternoon as I was surfacing from a nap. Because I was surfacing, I might have got this wrong (I didn't, though), but it sounded like she was telling me that my insurance company will, in fact, cover the Oncotype-DX test. I mean . . . I still have to pay a portion of it. Given how much the test costs, though, it's pennies. (And trust me, it isn't pennies!) If you're a Praying-Reader (which I'm pretty sure most of my readers are so far), thanks for that.

Now you can pray, if you want, that I end up testing as having a less-than-10% chance of recurrence. We'll see what other freaky science-fiction kinds of things end up resulting. I've already seen some. Thanks for that!

"(If You Don't Understand Grace, See Page 177)"

I am supposed to teach a confirmation class at my new church. This is a good opportunity to lay out some solid Christian teaching. If only 1) I were a decent teacher and 2) I knew what a confirmation class was really supposed to look like. This is not part of my church tradition.

Meanwhile, I've been given certain tools and helps, such as files from past confirmation classes, and a book from my new pastor. The book is pretty useful, though maybe a little simplistic. I was particularly struck by the simplistic bit when I read the quote that makes up the title for this post. (I'm not sure it was page 177, but you get the idea.)

I think when you grow up in the church and basically follow the rules, the concept of grace is particularly hard to grasp, both because the word gets thrown around a lot, and because you don't realise how much you need it and have been offered it. I still remember a particularly rocky time in London when it finally hit home to me both how powerful grace was to receive, and how difficult it was to give. I thought to myself, "How did I even think I was a Christian before?! I never understood this!"

And I'm not sure I understand it even now. Grace shows up in unexpected places, and is required in them, too. Sometimes I blink and miss it, and sometimes it stares me unblinking in the face so that I can't miss it but I almost want to run from it. It's so simple and so difficult, and right now I feel more in need of giving and receiving it than ever, and from many different angles.

What I do know is that, even when I'm afraid of it, I'm grateful for it. I don't understand how people make it through life without it. And I'm quite sure page 177 isn't ever going to sum it up.

Me-Ville

I was going to introduce this post with a funny little story about me as a kid conflating words in songs and thinking they said something else . . . and then I realised that the post would end up being about me, instead of about the book my friend the Zimmerman recently had published. Which would be ironic, since the book is called Deliver Us from Me-ville.

Me-ville, where everything is all about me. That would be in my head. And, respectively, in most other people's heads, too.

This is a tricky topic to tackle. How do you write about self-absorption without being self-absorbed, and yet also without sounding as if you think you're preaching to a whole bunch of people who you think are self-absorbed, while you yourself are exempt?

I'm not sure how the Zimmerman did it, but he definitely did it. It doubtless helps that he has a knack for self-deprecation, although even that can become an outlet for selfishness if overdone. He did not overdo it. He's just self-aware enough to know that he can be as guilty of self-absorption as the rest of us. He admits it, but doesn't get mired in a self-gratifying public guilt-fest.

As a reader, reading it was a different but similar kind of challenge: if I happened upon a part to which my gut responded, "Hey--he's talking to me!" I then had to pull back with a, "Hey--wait a minute . . . " How can I not resonate with talk of self-centeredness? But . . . it did seem a little suspect.

I'm glad he wrote the book. I'm glad I read it. I don't want to tell you you're selfish or anything, but you might want to pick up a copy and read it, too.

While you're waiting for your order to come in, you could play along with this little game which the Zimmerman devised recently in a brief email exchange we had about the prophets of the Old Testament:

"Which prophet's trials and tribulations would you be least unwilling to endure?"

He says this would be a good icebreaker for Bible nerds. I agree. But even if you weren't the kids whose hands they tied down in youth group so that you wouldn't answer all the trivia questions, I think you can play along . . .

Apparently, My Niece Is a Girl After My Own Heart

When I was two, my parents made an audio cassette of me opening presents. (This was because we didn't have anything more technologically advanced, and we were living in Honduras at the time, and they wanted my grandparents to be able to "hear" our Christmas.) Fortunately I was a highly verbal two-year-old.

After some paper-crinkling and discussion of what I was opening, my mother said, "Jennie, would you like to open some more presents, or read some of your new books?"

Without a moment's hesitation I said, "Read books."

There you have it, folks. It looks like Hannah is heading in the same direction . . .