Saturday, February 24, 2007

Home Sick, Thinking about Women Yesterday--Thursday--the fogged rolled in. I've always been afraid of taking drugs recreationally, fearing I'd like them too much, but days like yesterday convince me that's not the case. Cold medicines, especially the ones with the "p.m." label, invariably make me loopy in some fashion, and I'm too much of a control freak to enjoy it. But yesterday, I took some "p.m." thing, hoping to sleep. The result was brain fog. So I read and watched films, along with pushing forward on a few plans for various meetings coming up. It turned out to be an interesting day. First there was the short story by Katherine Anne Porter called Maria Conception. Porter is an mid 20th Century writer I'd not heard of, but I started doing research on the town of Kyle, Texas, which is going to have some significance in Cyrus Manning's life (of Leaving Ruin fame), and I discovered that Porter, who won the Pulitzer Prize back in 1966, was from Kyle, and that many of her stories were set in the surrounding countryside. So I ordered up The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter and yesterday read the first story in the collection. Maria Conception is the story of an eighteen-year-old Mexican girl whose young husband betrays her. Porter's telling of Maria's story is a glorious ushering into a world far removed from ours: Maria headed to market with half a dozen living fowls slung over her shoulder; her barefoot discovery of her husband with the fifteen-year-old beekeeper (Maria Rosa) among the cactus-bristles; the subtle camaraderie among the villagers when Maria Rosa turns up dead. No moralizing here, just an objective eye piercing the heart of a woman determined to have justice and the life she wants. Then there was the piece from the latest issue of Image. The title of the essay by Jill Patterson intrigued me: When Marriage is a Tomb Where Silence Dwells. Her story is of a marriage gone bad, two English professors whose careers end up with different degrees of success, the woman's outstripping the man's. The woman takes a break from the marriage, retreating to a corner variety store in small town Colorado, and rediscovers the simpler joys of life, and in the end, finds that sometimes, divorce can be the face of grace. Then I watched a film called The Shape of Things. Still more groggy than I wanted to be, I sat down to this film in hopes of helping my daughter with a scene she's working on from the stage play on which the film is based. Another interesting female character drives this film, played fairly by Rachel Weisz. "Evelyn" is a graduate student in art at Mercy College (interesting choice) whose Master's thesis project consists of manipulating an unsuspecting nerd into changing everything about himself. He, of course, thinks its for love, and that Evelyn's subtle suggestions for change have only his good in mind. The reveal at the end of the film is a cruel one, but has strong things to say for how we determine who we are, and the value we place on physical beauty, and more telling yet, the way personalities change when beauty is substantially enhanced, a la the now so common "makeover." And finally, the last viewing of the day: Babel, which I will blog about later, but needless to say, the journeys of the three women that are the anchors of the film are all compelling and heart breaking. At the end of the day, I couldn't help but reflect again on how difficult women have had it over the centuries, in cultures all over the world. Men have been dominant brutes so often, and women have suffered so terribly. Certainly we[base ']ve all suffered under the brutish reality of sin, but I can't help but see my wife and daughter and pray to God that we do what we can to nudge our parts of the world closer to the compassion and concern of Jesus. He dealt with women so counter-culturally. So should we. ...they deserve better... 10:04:26 AM    comment []

Monday, January 29, 2007

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell 846 pages later, I put down this amazing book and wondered what makes for a good story. I certainly have no investment in the return of practical magic to England in the 19th century, nor do I have an affinity for the history of English magic, yet somehow in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, a wonderful book by Susanna Clark, I was captured for well over a week in the spell of this tale of two very different magicians. Mr. Norrell, a bookish little man who has hoarded all the ancient books of magic, wants to see the return of magic to England, and he hopes to see it put to good use in practical ways, be as a means of frustrating the French in the Napoleonic wars or protecting the coastline from both invaders and inclement weather. But he is against all fairy-magic, fearful of it's dark effects, and hopes to keep a firm control over what magic is done. Jonathan Strange, on the other hand, is a bit of a live wire, excited to learn whatever magic there is, and harbors none of the fear of the fairie world that inhibits Mr. Norrell. As they work spells of various kinds, a dark underworld opens up, and both magicians end up facing far more than they'd expected. Ms. Clarke sense of language and story is compelling, and she the fact that she expertly sets her shadowy world in the context of history makes the story especially evocative. This is a really good--if not great--book. New Line Cinema has decided to film it, and IMDB lists its release date as sometime in 2008. That will be one to look forward to, depending on who they cast and who directs. Let's hope they get it right. (Great visuals throughout.) Great Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell website, too. ...move over Mr. Potter... 9:47:07 AM    comment []

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Culling Books I am a packrat. "Stuff" appeals to me. Even when it comes to aesthetic properties that draw me as an artist, I am all about texture and layering. (Someday I am going to collage.) Memorabilia is hard to throw out, and with the recent exit of my daughter from the house (don't worry, she just went to college), the bittersweet scent of nostaligia virtually drips from the mantel. Nonetheless, I've been convicted that "stuff" needs to go. The place of hardest culling is with books. I have probably 4000-5000 volumes. And quite frankly, these are my friends. Reading has been my teacher, so much so that whatever I've learned of say, tennis, I learned from a book. It has always been my first instinct to go to a book when I needed to learn a thing. I still consider that a virture, as archaic as it sounds in these days of internet and theology by watching film. What came as baggage though--specifically American baggage, I'm afraid--was the desire to own all these books. I wanted them on my shelf, so that I could pull them down on a whim. And frankly, given my teaching over the years, I've needed a lot of them close at hand. But many of them just sit there, staring at me, collecting dust. I've moved them across country, boxed and unboxed some of them 4 or 5 times, never cracking the cover. Just for the fun of it, I pulled out a few books, around ten I think, and thought I'd run down to Half-Price Books here in Seattle, and see what I could get for them. I picked books that were nice volumes, but that I really wasn't all that interested in. Still, it was painful. For 10 books, they gave me $6. Those books probably cost me $150. Ouch. So I'm culling the ones I'd need on my desert Island, and saying goodbye to the rest. I figure they deserve to be read, so I should make them available to others. The tug of wanting to own and hoard is a strange beast, revealing more than I'd like it to. I have a friend who believes very much in the "lightness of being" and I can't for the life of me think of why he's not dead on. What books would you keep? My initial goal is to get down to 500, and then we'll see where we are. (I'm taking a pretty large boat to get to my desert island, I guess.) Next dilemma. Should I sell or give away? And remember, Amy just went to college. My world will be lighter... 5:10:47 AM    comment []

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

What I'm Reading I've been thinking a lot during this haitus from blogging, and for what it's worth, here's a look at what I've been reading. The Call:Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life, by Os Guinness. I know, I know...Rick Warren already told us our purpose, but for those of us who like a bit more meat on our bones, Os Guinness is worth a read. He's a brilliant man who wants "to bridge the chasm between academic knowledge and popular knowledge, taking things that are academically important and making them intelligible and practicable to a wider audience, especially as they concern matters of public policy." From Guinness's bio at The Trinity Forum. Guinness had a strong relationship with Francis Schaeffer and has written some great books, including The Dust of Death, a great critique of the '60's written during the thick of it. We're going to be studying The Callthis fall in our Arts Ministry Bible Class. Always looking for guidance about how to know what to be doing. Anthony De Mello has been messing with my brain again as well. He's a radical sort of the Jesuit writer, whacking away at what he calls our "attachments" pretty convincingly. His book Awareness argues, among other things, that love is primarliy awareness, because once you've stopped having conversation through the prism of what you need from the other person (you're no longer "attached" to them) you can actually see them, which is a much better postiion from which to help--and love--them. For fun, I've been whizzing through the Ender Series, as in Science Fiction, by Orson Scott Card. Great fun, and in Ender's Game, I was thrilled by the great reversal at the end. For those of you who know the book, I was totally shocked by the reversal. Why is that so satisfying? If you like sci-fi and haven't read it--and the books that follow--go do it. Tomorrow, I'll tell you about my latest radical decision... It's about my books... 9:38:12 PM    comment []

Saturday, March 25, 2006

On Reading the Bible Each January, one of the more common resolves among Christians is to read the entire Bible in one year according to one of many available plans. Usually, it's a matter of several chapters a day, weaving between the Old and New Testaments in some manner of logic that I can't really speak to, seeing as how I've never actually completed one of those plans. But about a month ago, for reasons unknown, it struck me that I'd really never sat down and just read the whole thing like a book, front to back, all the words with no stopping. So I started. I haven't gone in order, choosing to get the ball rolling with many of the shorter books first, thinking if I could whet my appetite, the longer books might be easier to digest. Because my particular plan is to read this thing in about 70 days or so, a book a day. The day I read Jude will be all of ten minutes. The day I read Psalms could be an all day affair. Now approaching the 40th book of the 66, my all out blitz of the Bible is beginning to make some large overall impressions. First, it's brilliance: it will always be the most amazing thing ever compiled, for all sorts of reasons. Frankly, I love this library of writings stretching over thousands of years. It is God's book, and the manner in which He delivers it to us tells me a lot about what He is after as He tries to explain the unexplainable--Himself. There are sections of the Old Testament that are simply hard to swallow, not only in terms of fantastic metaphysics (the sun stopping, the earth opening to swallow a hapless family punished for the sin of the father, the dropping of eatable bread from the sky), but the ferocity of God's demand for holiness and obedience. And as I've plowed from Leviticus through Judges over the past week, I keep thinking of Jesus, and what it means that He came and replaced all this bloody business with a more perfect understanding of God, a more perfect sacrifice. But I'm convinced there is something about our God that still asks for our holiness and obedience, even though grace has freed us from our failure to live up to such a call. The Bible is a story about God and His pursuit of Humanity, and the manner in which His children, first chosen and now free to choose, seek him and betray him in our ongoing dance of fickleness. From Moses to Joshua to Samuel, the call of the prophets rings out to choose to love and obey the Lord if you seek life. More as I keep reading... ...as for me and my house... 9:23:46 AM    comment []

Wednesday, February 1, 2006

Metaphor, Literalism, and The Da Vinci Code, Part II Words matter. The Hebrews writer defines faith like this: "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen" (NAS) or as the NIV has it, "Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." This definition of faith is at odds with Robert Langdon's definition. Let me repeat the quote from yesterday's blog: "Sophie, every faith in the world is based on fabrication. That is the definition of faith--acceptance off that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove....Metaphors are a way to help our minds process the unprocessible. The problems arise when we begin to believe literally in our own metaphors." "Fabrication" is a word that suggests "made up." Now Dan Brown may have Langdon thinking the first definition of "fabrication" which is simply to make or create, but it strikes my ear that the notion of "false" in terms of reality is what's really behind the suggestion. So faith proceeds from fabrication, what we make up in our heads, albeit with good intention. Not only can we not prove that which we have "faith" in, but it's really just a simple matter of us trying to process the unprocessible, which again, I concur with, because human beings contemplating God are stuck in just that dilemma. And without the revealed word of God found in scripture, that would be precisely where human beings would be left. With the wandering ideas--some quite brilliant--about the nature of things cultures have been coming up with for centuries. Back to Hebrews 11: notions like "assurance", "conviction", and "being certain" fly in the face of today's thinking concerning the notion of faith. Assurance and conviction is the very position you are not allowed to take if you are to honor everyone else's faith. Today, the word "faith" is used to suggest something in opposition to real knowledge, though that something is not without its practical uses. Again, metaphor ends up looking like a useful falsehood. And for the people who approach the Bible as if it actually says a true thing, well, this "useful falsehood" business smacks of deceit, so again, out goes metaphor into the street, and the artists right along side. There are events in my own history that I know took place...I was there. But in the retelling of these events, both in my own heart, and in the retelling to others, some of those events take on symbolic and metaphoric properties. I suspect that's the reason these kinds of events linger in our minds so powerfully. Just now, I won't give you a list of those moments in my history that serve as metaphors for the totality of my life, but I suspect you know what I'm talking about. There are memories of childhood, of school, of certain friendships and relationships, certain events with my wife and children that speak to me of the deep movements of life and my various successes and failures, loaded now with symbolic content. This relationship between events as they occurred vs. the way we infuse these events with symbolic content is one of the things in question in the James Frey A Million Little Pieces affair. I haven't read the book, but apparently for the sake of embellishment, Frey "fabricated" some things. Yet, the book struck a deep chord with many people--meaning that they set the stories of the book against their own lives in some fashion, making a metaphoric move, and resonated with something of its experience--but frankly, these same people were offended that they'd been duped by a reporting of events that hadn't happened. Why then, should we feel good about texts that claim to report historical events (which is different that saying they were writing histories for history's sake) which are in fact false just because we can get some pragmatic metaphors out of them? Human beings must make metaphoric moves as we think about things, events, and relationships. As Dorothy Sayers and so many others have pointed out, all language is analogical. Here's the point: metaphor and literalism are not in opposition. They exist side by side. So Robert Langdon's point in The Da Vinci Code is a tricky one, one that we have to reject in its pitting of metaphor against the belief that Jesus was just who the gospel writers say He was. If not, then we are just people who have been duped by historical writers no better than Jim Frey. Good books maybe, these gospels, but if they're not "true to the events", then as Paul puts it, we are fools. As for me and my house... 8:08:26 AM    comment []

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Metaphor, Literalism, and The Da Vinci Code, Part I I just read back through Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. The first time I read it I didn't really read it, but listened to it on cassette during my long drive back to the Northwest from Act One: Screenwriting for Hollywood[base ']s summer intensive. That was the summer of 2004. Listening through all those hours, I didn't assume that what I was hearing was true, and at the end of the ride, I thought, what[base ']s the bruhaha all about? But of course, what I now realize is that people believe this stuff, and that we're going to be hearing a lot more about the Gnostic Gospels and Mary Magdalene when the Ron Howard/Tom Hanks film arrives. What I'd like to address is one particular passage in the book that speaks about the relationship of religion to metaphor. I've been championing the value of metaphor for many years, dating back to statement I heard a major theatre director make in a workshop. "Evangelicals don't do metaphor," he said, citing this blind spot as the reason these otherwise intelligent and decent religious people could be dangerous, especially to artists. The statement struck me as true, and over the past 15 years or so, I've been working, along with many others, to help reclaim both the understanding and the use of metaphor in our part of God's Kingdom. Here's the passage that caught my eye from the paperback edition of The Da Vinci Code. It starts on page 369. The context (here I'm assuming you are familiar with the story and what is in question. If not, be warned that there are spoilers ahead) is that Langdon and Sophie are discussing whether or not Langdon believes it is time the world hear the proof that "the New Testament is false testimony." "There's an enormous difference between hypothetically discussing an alternate history of Christ, and..." He paused. "And what?" "And presenting to the world thousands of ancient documents as scientific evidence that the New Testament is false testimony." "But you told me the New Testament is based on fabrications." Langdon smiled. "Sophie, every faith in the world is based on fabrication. That is the definition of faith--acceptance off that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove. Every religion describes God through metaphor, allegory, and exaggeration, from the early Egyptians through modern Sunday school. Metaphors are a way to help our minds process the unprocessible. The problems arise when we begin to believe literally in our own metaphors." Langdon goes on to say that "those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical." After Sophie protests that her "devout" Christian friends believe in the literal virgin birth, Jesus literally walking on water, and the literal transformation of water into wine, Langdon answers, "Religious allegory has become a part of the fabric of reality. And living in that reality helps millions of people cope and be better people." Sophie replies, "But it appears their reality is false." Langdon then replies with a comment about cryptology and the fact that mathematics has properties that work in reality, but aren't really there, either. Okay...having said all that, here's my concern. What Dan Brown is telling us is that metaphor is the basis of religion, and functionally, it works in terms of making people better, helping them cope, etc. It is a pragmatic move for people to make mentally. 'Hey...if it helps you to believe that Jesus rose from the dead, great. But what you need to understand is that it really doesn't matter, because what's important is the way Jesus lived, and the fact that his death is a metaphoric way of approaching an understanding of life, love, death, etc.' So now we face a true/false situation in terms of metaphor vs. history. And of course, postmodernism tells us there is no real history, because what we understand to be history is just socially constructed descriptions of events, those descriptions being the ones we get because of who held power at the time the histories were written. Which puts we believers in the historical resurrection of Jesus in a bit of a quandary: we have to choose...metaphor or history? The typical kneejerk reaction is to recoil, kick metaphor out the door, and stick to my historical guns. Once again, metaphor equals falsehood, and the rich layering that is part and parcel to the most basic functions of the human mind is lost, and literalism leads to fundamentalism leads to some pretty basic ugliness. So here's the challenge: how do we maintain the historicity scripture claims (if Christ has not been raised from the dead, we are fools), and yet also capture the vast nuance that rises to us through the metaphors and symbols the writers of both Old and New Testaments are giving us (through the work of the Holy Spirit, I might add)? Here's my first comment: when Langdon claims these are metaphorical stories, I agree. Stories are metaphors by their very nature. Some stories are fictional, some are historical, but in the telling of both kinds, metaphoric comparisons are created with our own lives, thereby creating a context in which our own attititudes and action can be examined, challenged, and/or affirmed. The comparative move that is metaphor does not imply historical hyperbole. The resurrection of Jesus is certainly one of the strongest metaphors we can think of for the notion of a renewed life, and stands as a deep symbol for the human desire to overcome death. It's true that there are many ancient religious stories about various god figures being resurrected--the desire to escape that final reality is deep in the race. But the crux of the matter for Christians is that the documents we call the gospels and epistles make the historical claim that Jesus did in fact come back from the grave. So the metaphor and symbol stand, but they do not negate the history. The combination of history plus metaphor is powerful, and to miss the move to metaphor because you fear it undercuts the historicity, one being "true" and the other being "false" is to wall off a major portal to the meanings of God's work in the world. More tomorrow... 3:11:37 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2007 Jeff Berryman .