Jeff Berryman : Books

Sat, 24 Feb 2007 18:04:26 GMT

Home Sick, Thinking about Women

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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...

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 17:47:07 GMT

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell

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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...

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 13:10:47 GMT

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...

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 05:38:12 GMT

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

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...

Sat, 25 Mar 2006 17:23:46 GMT

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...

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 16:08:26 GMT

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...

Tue, 31 Jan 2006 23:11:37 GMT

Metaphor, Literalism, and The Da Vinci Code, Part I

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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."

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...

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 22:40:54 GMT

The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture

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A couple of days ago I was waiting to pick up my son Daniel at a rehearsal, and so I went into the local Episcopal Book Store near his high school on Stone Way. It's been one of my favorite bookstores for years. It was in this bookstore that I first met Frederick Beuchner, Esther de Waal, Barbara Brown Taylor, and other writers who I hadn't stumbled across in my browsing in what were for me more typical Christian Book stores. There are books on Lenten practice and Lectio Devina and edgy theologies. Icons of various sizes line the walls, and there are even singing bowls...glorious things I'd never heard of until about six months ago. As I was parking the car, I prayed a little prayer that God would bring me a book, help me find something that would really be helpful in these days of more depression than I've seen in a long time. So I finally made it in the shop, looped around the sections on prayer and Benedictine Spirituality, sauntered past the icons and the crosses and the wall hangings, and landed in a back corner with great, thick books on theology. And the name N.T. Wright jumped out at me. N.T. Wright is an Anglican Bishop in Durham, England, and I've been hearing his name for the past several years. I'd never read anything of his, but just this past week, when I was in Abilene to teach my class, I'd asked my teaching partner, Dr. Ken Cukrowski, a New Testament Scholar, to talk to be about the notion of inspiration as it related to scripture. When I began to ask myself questions last year about whether or not Paul was being self-referential in referring to "scripture," it occurred to me that I probably needed some help thinking through the various issues of scriptural inspiration, which is a subject stratospherically (is that a word) over my head. But still... So the title of this little book on the shelf (in between all the bigger tomes) caught my eye: The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture. That is exactly what I was needing...a new understanding of the authority of scripture. Well, as I usually do, I sat down and blew through the book in about 5 hours. I do this when the book captures me and won't let me go. I won't capsulize here, but trust me, here is a very smart man. What I love about what Wright does in this work is that he captures so many of the nuances of the current situation as it relates to "evangelicals" and "liberals", "right" and "left", and as he sets the parameters for what he sees as a real path through the challenges of both modernist and postmodernist criticism, he calmly and assuredly reveals the shortcomings of most sides of the arguments. He traces the history of the notion of "authority" as it relates to scripture from the Ancient Hebrews to the latest postmodern challenges, and then lays out a clear proposal to re-establish the role of an authoritative scripture in the lives of Christians. It is balanced, thoughtful, scholarly, and in the end, pretty practical. The only real downside to his plan is that it requires work, certainly more work than I've been doing biblically. But it made me want to get to it...

Fri, 25 Nov 2005 17:11:05 GMT

Blue Like Jazz

Well, let me jump on the bandwagon. Blue Like Jazz is a book everyone's been telling me to read, and frankly, I was a little reluctant. Why is hard to say, except that what I was hearing people say about Donald Miller's anecdotal odessey made it clear that it was going to impact me, and I wasn't sure I wanted to be really rocked at this particular moment. But finally, Thanksgiving morning, I picked it up and began to read. Sure enough, it rocked me. "Honesty" is a concept that keep cropping up in my work and in my thinking, and it comes, I think, from acknowleding somewhere inside that there is a deep disconnect between what Jesus had to say about life among the people in the Kingdom of the Heavens and the life of Christians that gets lived out here on the planet. Which is fancy way of saying hypocirisy is as rampant now as it was in Jesus' day, and I am infected with it. What's exciting about Miller's book is that it helps those who want to see that infection clearly do so. For those of you unfamiliar with the book, Blue Like Jazz is Miller's perky tale of his own spiritual journey as a student at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, a place where Christianity is openly disdained and the intellectual life flourishes with great panache. Miller roams around in a frank search for a Jesus that is something other than what is now called "Christianity" and in one telling story, refuses to defend the whole notion of Christianity, seeking instead to talk about Jesus, which for him, is an entirely different subject. Here is why it rocked me: his honesty is bracing, and a call to the rest of us who hem-haw around about what we can feel. If we've never told a single person about the way Jesus has impacted our lives, then chances are, he hasn't. There are many ways around that kind of thinking...as a practicing Christian, I am well skilled at it. Christian-this, Christian-that...it's all well and good, maybe, but a discussion of Jesus is indeed a different matter. I told a friend of mine yesterday, I feel like I'm in the process of leaving the Old Country headed for the new, but there is a long dark journey to be made inbetween. I wonder how many people decide to stay on the shores of the Old Country even though they know there is no real life there anymore. They stand longingly at the banks of an ocean they have to cross. God is calling them to cross that ocean, even providing a boat that He says would rival the ark of Noah. Problem is, he's making no promises about the weather, or about just who will survive the journey. But it's pretty sure the old you won't. Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz is a message from a man at sea. But by God, he makes me think there's a New World out there after all. Anybody wanna go?......

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 23:15:05 GMT

The Great Divorce

I remember reading this great book by C.S. Lewis when I was in graduate school. In fact, after I finished it, I can remember being absolutely thrilled by its imagery of Heaven, the hard, sharp surfaces of reality that travelers in that world had to grow into. For some reason, the book made its way back into my consciousness yesterday, and I pulled it down off the shelf. C.S. Lewis is a marvel, and there is little more than can be said about it. How does a man of such enormous intellect manage to speak so simply and plainly about the human condition? For those of you who haven't read this slight book, run immediately and get it. If you are a fast reader, it will take you all of 2 hours. If you are a slow reader, it's only 128 pages. The Great Divorce concerns a certain bus ride taken by the inhabitants of a gray, sprawling town to a place high and far away above them. They are grumblers, boarding the bus with their mean-spiritedness and selfishness, hoping (somewhat hopelessly) to find some reason to stay in "Heaven" when they get there. But the place of arrival isn't what they thought, or perhaps a great deal more than they thought. And they are but phantoms sharply wounded by Heaven's reality, its diamond hard edges, its weighty flowers and fruit. The brilliance of the story is in the vast array of characters who each in their own way fail to see the foolishness of their various manias, phobias, and obsessions. One by one, Lewis makes plain the absurdity of the normal idolatries so many of us struggle with, pitting our petty grab-em-and-keep-em lives against the unspeakable joy of the Kingdom of God. We watch helplessly as character after character chooses some small trinket or attitude to give their very souls to, ignoring the brilliant joy of the life that awaits their every step, if they would but take it. A wonderful argument in favor of Willard's assertion that personal human choices are behind the vast majority of the world's suffering. A few quotes:

"Free, as a man is free to drink while he is drinking. He is not free still to be dry."

see

"An hour hence and you will not care. A day hence and you will laugh at it. Don't you remember on earth--there were things too hot to touch with your finger but you could drink them all right? Shame is like that. If you will accept it--if you will drink the cup to the bottom--you will find it very nourishing: but try to do anything else with it and it scalds."

"Milton was right. The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words, 'Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.' There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy--that is, to reality. Ye see it easily enough in a spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper than say it was sorry and be friends."

"Why, if you are interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, you'll never learn to see the country." "But that's just how a real artist is interested in the country." "No. You're forgetting," said the Spirit. "that was not how you began. Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about light." "Oh, that's ages ago," said the Ghost. "One grows out of that. Of course, you haven't seen my later works. One becomes more and more interested in paint for its own sake." "One does, indeed. I also have had to recover from that. It was all a snare. Ink and catgut and paint were all necessary down there, but they are also dangerous stimulants. Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from the love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn't stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower--become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations."

May we keep loving the thing we tell of...

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 19:31:54 GMT

Moser's Bible

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Inevitably, as I'm researching online, I come across something that has to be shared. In this case, it is a rediscovery. Do you know about the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible, illustrated by Barry Moser? If you don't, you should. Moser is the first major artist in nearly 150 years to fully illustrate the Bible (Dore was the last). It is a masterful work that turns much of our visual understanding of the Word on it's head. I grew up looking at the sentimental images in my dad's Bible--colorful renditions of crowd scenes with everyone looking stricken (with piety or outrage, it didn't really matter). I liked them okay, but I'm not sure they offered any new understanding of the text. But the images in Moser's work are astonishingly gritty and beautiful. Here's a quote from Moser:

"I think when people have illustrated the Bible, most of them have been devout Christians. Because they're devout Christians they can't separate themselves from the work. They get mired in piety, so they can't see the darkness. They only see the light of salvation. But if you don't have the darkness to contrast with the light, then what are you offering but cotton candy for Sunday school children? I think that some of the images in this Bible will be disturbing to a lot of people. The Bible is a very disturbing book."

here

Get one...you won't be sorry...

Thu, 28 Jul 2005 19:28:07 GMT

The Wet Engine

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A few years ago, I met an aquisitions editor from Paraclete Press--a gem of a publisher-- and since then she has been kind enough to send me various things Paraclete publishes. I recently received a book by Brian Doyle called The Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart. Last night, trying to fight off a depression that's been biting at my ankles, I sat down to read this slight volume, hoping that a plunge into the regions of the heart through a different door other than evangelicalism might be just the thing. It didn't stave off the depression, not completely, but what a book. In The Wet Engine, Doyle does a brilliant literary riff on the physical and emotional life of the fist-size muscle sitting in our chests. His starting point is history of his son's faulty heart. The boy was born with a single ventricle, instead of two. Enter a pediatric cardiologist named Dave McIrvin, and the miracle that is the doctor and his field of medicine and the amazing heart that holds his attention comes flying into view. Doyle's soulful attention to detail, his storyteller's flair, and his ability to turn the inner workings of the bloodstream into a windswept journey of sea and sail all make for a beautiful meditation on what God hath wrought inside of us. ...a beautiful book...

Fri, 13 May 2005 21:49:16 GMT

The World is Flat

The World is Flat. Now here's a book about the way the world is changing that really challenges me, makes me think, "What an amazing time God has placed us in." Thomas L. Friedman, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist with The New York Times has been sitting around thinking about what he calls the "The Triple Convergence." Here's the quote from page 181 of the book that sums it up:

"It is this triple convergence--of new players, on a new playing field, developing new processes and habits for horizontal collaboration --that I believe is the most important force shaping global economies and politics in the early twenty-first century. Giving so many people access to all these tools of collaboration, along with the ability through search engines and the Web to access billions of pages of raw information, ensures that the next generation of innovations will come from all over Planet Flat. The scale of the global community that is soon going to be able to participate in all sorts of discovery and innovation is something the world has simply never seen before."

There is a unique challenge in this period of time, a challenge to respond to the needs of an emerging world in both the material and spiritual planes. His conclusion is an appeal to the imagination, that we must imagine new partnerships and new collaborations in order to maximize the innovative possibilities. Something about Freidman's tone in all this collided with Brian McClaren's book The Last Word and the Word After That that also finished a few days ago. Both books are calls to action on behalf of the world, calling for fresh thinking, fresh commitment to action, fresh creation. Freidman's is largely a pragmatic appeal, though he seems to care deeply about what's happening to individuals in the developing nations. McClaren's appeal is on behalf of the Christ. All I know is that, again, it feels like it's time to wake up and watch in wonder at what God is doing... ...and figure out how to take part.

Tue, 30 Nov 2004 07:37:50 GMT

Order is Beauty

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Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Flow

psychic energy

"We create ourselves by how we invest this energy." (p. 33)

Willard, in The Divine Conspiracy defines spirit as "unembodied personal power," and argues - much as Csikszentmihalyi does - that the thought-life, what Csikszentmihalyi calls psychic energy, is the determining factor in a person's life, or as in Flow, in one's "quality of experience." Csikszentmihalyi goes on to say that entropy - a degenerating inner state moving toward disorder, or chaos - is the natural process of the unattended mind, and that the way to improve "quality of life" is not an unfettered following after instinct - which he says will simply lead you deeper into chaos - but is instead the process of bringing order to thought-life through controlled attention and meeting increasingly difficult challenges, which will require and lead to the acquisition of greater skills and greater complexity. In other words, in Flow, you grow. Thomas Merton said some of the same things, albeit differently. Here's a quote of his I came across a long time ago, from The New Man.

"The mark of true life in man is therefore not turbulence, but control- not effervescence but lucidity and direction..."

Reading Csikszentmihalyi lead me to a renewed conviction that "cosmos from chaos" is a principle that flows from the heart of God into the mind of humanity. Csikszentmihalyi went so far as to say this is why the positive attitude works - it's fighting back the entropy, holding hope, making sense of what to the pessimist appears to have no sense at all. So resolve, perseverance, long attention paid... ...all this is beautiful, too...

Thu, 18 Nov 2004 20:11:01 GMT

Art Needs No Justification

article

Hans Rookmaaker

Modern Art and the Death of a Culture

InterVarsity

Modern Art and the Death of a Culture

Art Needs No Justification

Wed, 17 Nov 2004 16:17:41 GMT

Liturgy and the Arts

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Mon, 01 Nov 2004 15:53:13 GMT

Tarradiddles [Macro error: Can't find a sub-table named "radioResponder".] G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man has been on my shelf for well over a year now, but I've finally cracked it open, and though it's dense, I'm finding it harder and harder to resist. This morning's chapter was"Man and Mythologies"and not only did I get a great new word--terradiddles--out of the deal, I also got some gorgeous words on the nature of imagination, the pursuit of beauty, and the common need of humanity to reach out to touch the invisible. Chesterton argues against the scientific deconstruction of myth, calling us to leave the mythologies of the world in the realm of imagination. He sees them as deeply honorable fancies whereby human beings find their proper posture--kneeling with outstretched hands offered to something. Doesn't even the atheist feel something of the mystery behind (or perhaps for the unbeliever, embedded in) the material, even if it is nothing more than his own fanciful consideration of his ability to construct fancy?

"Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows off things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there; something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up."

Listen to this:

"Suppose somebody in a story says,'Pluck this flower and a princess will die in a castle beyond the sea,' we do not know why something stirs in the sub-consciousness, or why what is impossible seems almost inevitable....Very deep things in our nature, some dim sense of the dependence of great things upon small, some dark suggestion that the things nearest to us stretch far beyond our power, some sacramental feeling of the magic in material substances, and many more emotions past finding out, are in an idea like that of the external soul."

One more quote:

"Mythology, then, sought God through the imagination; or sought truth by means of beauty, in the sense in which beauty includes much of the most grotesque ugliness."

"Tarradiddles"--I think this is what he means--are stories of imagination told in the way children tell tales, with a sort of wide eyed honesty that is perfectly delighted in cows jumping over moons. Maybe that's how I'll answer the question from now on. "What do you do?" says the curious stranger, sizing up the worth of the balding man. "I make tarradiddles." Or maybe even... "I tarradiddle..."

Wed, 20 Oct 2004 00:40:21 GMT

The Time Traveler's Wife

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Read a wonderful book over the weekend as I waited to go on stage at Gallery 7 Theatre in Abbottsford, B.C.: The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. Another great idea that had me smacking my head wishing I'd come up with it. A heartbreakingly romantic literary novel, The Time Traveler's Wife is the story of Clare and Henry's long time romance that begins when she is six and he is just past 40. Now wait, wait--it's not what you think. Henry has a genetic abnormality that causes him to time travel, but only within the scope of his own life and the life of those closest to him. The book begins with Clare meeting Henry in 1991, when Clare is 20 and Henry is 28. The twist is this: In Henry's future, he will visit Clare's past, so that when Clare meets Henry in 1991, Henry's never seen her before, but Clare has known Henry all her life. A fascinating premise that allows for some remarkable scenes as Henry crisscrosses his life in time in a story otherwise strongly rooted in simple reality. "A truly extraordinary novel...a magical love story that is as sad as it is joyous." (Daily Express, UK) Amen to that. (Click here to check out The Time Traveler's Wife on a web page that gives you the prologue as well as reviews, etc.) In one interview, Niffenegger, who teaches in Chicago, in the MFA program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts, says that she was interested in time, how it affects us, and how we must live in and through it. And that is exactly what the story brought to mind. The strangeness of time's passing, that only yesterday my father was still alive, and how he still travels with me, so to speak, as I do Leaving Ruin. To think that very few of us will still be alive in 75 or 100 years, to think that my kids are nearly grown, to think that so many of the firsts I longed for as a child have come and gone. And to think of God standing outside of time (as my friend Jeffrey says) with all of time at his disposal, while for us it unfolds a moment at a time. Just helps me remember that each day, each moment, is precious...

Mon, 13 Sep 2004 14:28:41 GMT

Return of an Old Friend: Thomas Merton's Seeds of Contemplation "Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul." Last night, I had coffee with a dear friend of mine who brought me a book. She was returning my hardback copy of Merton's Seeds of Contemplation, a book which is one of the five I would take with me to that proverbial desert island. I thought I'd lost it for good, seeing that I've asked most of my friends if they were the ones I'd last loaned it to, each of them saying shaking their heads, saying no. Having given up, I bought a paperback edition of New Seeds of Contemplation, which is the same book, but expanded...but somehow, I still preferred my old copy, with my notes inside. So when I saw it sticking out of my friend's bag, I was thrilled. While she ordered her coffee, I sat with the book, leafing through, reading again about God's love coming in the rain and the sun, in the bread of the day as well as the hunger. The challenge to give up that which we think we desire in order to find that which is the real desire...the love of God. We need old friends to remind us...