So Brave, Young, and Handsome
Got a nice selection of items from the Amazon Vine program this month. One I especially want to feature here. The novel So Brave, Young, and Handsome by Lief Enger. Here’s my review:
“I said, ‘Most men never have the chance to be both things at once, the hero and the devil.’
‘That is ignorant. Most men are hero and devil. All men. That is what ruins it with wives.’
‘She wanted just the hero?’
‘Bad men or good she would’ve had me either way. She couldn’t endure both, however. She said to pick one and to be that thing only so that she might trust me until the day of Jesus.’”
There is a perspective in some ancient cultures about in-between places and times. Dawn and dusk, which lie between night and day. The seashore, that lies between water and land. Halloween, that time in which the spirit world and the physical world are perilously close. During these moments, in these places, it is both and neither all at once, indistinct and undefined. So too human life encounters these moments in identity. People are often caught in this nebulous middle, seeming one thing and another all at once. Sometimes this is being caught between their actions and their ideals, or their sin and their virtue. They are half-people of a sort, unrealized and unformed, without an identity of their own.
Some stay in this place their whole lives, never becoming, and never discovering themselves for who they really are. Others cast off from the dock, refusing to settle any longer for what was, and yet not yet knowing who they can or should be. It is a journey of becoming a whole person.
So Brave, Young, and Handsome is this story told of three primary characters, with a few others thrown in along the way. It is a road story telling of a physical journey that brings out the metaphysical of each of the characters, but not in a mushy, spiritualistic, heavy-laden way. And that’s what is so brilliant about the book. It’s not philosophy. It’s a great tale in the tradition of great American writers from decades past.
This is a book about in between times and in between people drawn with immense clarity and insight, while retaining a direct and sparse prose. Enger tells us of an era and certain characters, a story not a message. It is in this story, however, that we see so much of real life as it so often is: in between.
We are between the old and the new, the good and the bad, the honest and the false, the artist and the laborer, the young and the aged, the adventurous an the prosaic. The characters hope, but don’t know how to find this hope. What they do is carry on, having tasted something of who they know themselves to be they won’t let themselves go back. As Enger says in his acknowledgments, “Sometimes heroism is nothing more than patience, curiosity, and a refusal to panic.”
What I like so much about Enger’s work is that it is so hopeful. Absolutely honest, mind you, there’s no false hope to be found here or sentimentalism seeking to manipulate our emotions. These are real people, faults and all. But unlike so much contemporary literature and film Enger doesn’t feel a need to obsess with corruption or ruin. His is a book that shows people who are not handsome, or young, and rarely brave. But they want to be, and be such in ways that matter to them, not to others around them. They are seeking wholeness for themselves.
Not all succeed. Some do, but not in the expected ways.
“For at the same time he lost everything–the very direction of his own steps–he won the thing he held so precious he wouldn’t approach it in words.”
It is a story of real life. Not gritty, corrupted, malformed caricatures. Real people, or at least characters who are desperate to become real people, who learn what it is to be a real person.
With all this depth and insight it might sound ponderous. But it’s not. It’s very gentle and easy-going. It moves along at a varied pace, with enough movement to never seem tiresome and enough twists to never seem predictable. My only slight irritation is that sometimes Enger jumps ahead a bit and is so eager to bring a slight twist that he breaks the moment with unnecessary foreshadowing, sort of a “you’ll love what comes next!” moments. I wish he just let us experience the story as it happened a bit more. But this is a minor qualm and he does even this within the contexts of a fitting narration.
It’s a brilliant book, in craft and theme and insight. It’s the best work of contemporary fiction I’ve read in a very long time and guess it will be my favorite book of 2008.
The High Calling
A good friend sent me this today and it very much was what I was needing to hear and be reminded about.
The High Calling
If God has called you to be truly like Jesus, He will draw you into a life of crucifixion and humility and put on you demands of obedience that sometimes will not allow you to follow other Christians. In many ways He will seem to let other good people do things He will not let you do.
Other Christians, and even ministers, who seem very religious and useful may push themselves, pull strings, and work schemes to carry out their plans, but you cannot do these things. And if you attempt them, you will meet with such failure and rebuke from the Lord as to make you [deeply remorseful]. Others can brag about themselves, about their work, about their success, about their writing, but the Holy Spirit will not allow you to do any such thing; and if you begin bragging, He will lead you into some deep [humiliation] that will make you despise yourself and all your good works.
Others will be allowed to succeed in making great sums of money, or having a legacy left to them, or in having luxuries, but God may only supply you daily, because he wants you to have something far better than gold – a helpless dependence on Him – that He may have the privilege of providing your needs daily out of the unseen treasury.
The Lord may let others be honored and keep you hidden away in obscurity, because He wants to produce some choice, fragrant fruit for His coming glory, which can only be produced in the shade.
God will let others be great, but keep you small. He will let others do a work for Him and get the credit for it, but He will make you work and toil without knowing how much you are doing. And then to make your work still more precious, He will let others get the credit for the work which you have done, and this will make your reward ten times greater when Jesus comes.
The Holy Spirit will put a strict watch on you, with jealous love, and rebuke you for little words and feelings or for wasted time, which other Christians never seem distressed over.
So make up you mind that God is an infinite Sovereign who has a right to do as He pleases with His own and needs not explain to you a thousand things with may puzzle your reason in His dealings with you.
God will take you at your word; and if you absolutely sell yourself to be His slave, He will wrap you up in a jealous love, and let other people say and do many things you cannot do or say.
Settle it forever that you are to deal directly with the Holy Spirit and that He is to have the privilege of tying your tongue, or chaining your hand, or closing your eyes in ways that others are not disciplined.
Now when you are so possessed with the living God that you are, in your secret heart, pleased and delighted over this peculiar, personal, private, jealous guardianship and management of the Hold Spirit over your life, you will have found the [entrance hall] of heaven.
~Anonymous
Religion of the Heart
I say of the heart, because religion does not consist of right opinions or orthodoxy. While such matters are not necessarily outward things, they are not of the heart, but of the understanding. A person may be orthodox in every point, espousing right opinions and zealously defending them; he may think correctly concerning the Trinity, and every other approved doctrine taken from the Scriptures; he may agree with al of the historical creeds, and yet have no religion at all. He may be as orthodox as the devil, and still have no more religion than a pagan. He is indeed a pagan if he is a stranger to the religion of the heart.
This alone is religion as it is truly so-called. This alone is of value in the sight of God. Paul summarized religion in three particulars: righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.
~John Wesley, “The Way to God”
active and contemplative
If we compare the two ways of knowing, it is easy to see that modern men and women need at least a balance between the vita activa and the vita contemplative, the active and the contemplative life, if they are not to atrophy spiritually. The pragmatic way of grasping things has very obvious limits, and beyond these limits the destruction of life begins. This does not apply only to our dealings with other people. It is true of our dealings with the natural environment too.
But the meditative way of understanding seems to be even more important when it is applied to our dealings with our own selves. People take flight into relationships, into social action and into political praxis, because they cannot endure what they themselves are. They have ‘fallen out’ with themselves. So they cannot stand being alone. To be alone is torture. Silence is unendurable. Solitude is felt to be ’social death’. Every disappointment becomes a torment which has to be avoided at all costs.
But the people who throw themselves into practical life because they cannot come to terms with themselves simply become a burden for other people. Social praxis and political involvement are not a remedy for the weakness of our own personalities. Men and women who want to act on behalf of other people without having deepened their own understanding of themselves, without having built up their own capacity for sensitive loving, and without having found freedom towards themselves, will find nothing in themselves that they can give to anyone else. Even presupposing good will and the lack of evil intentions, all they will be able to pass on is the infection of their own egoism, the aggression generated by their own anxieties, and the prejudices of their own ideology.
Anyone who wants to fill up his own hollowness by helping other people will simply spread the same hollowness. Why? Because people are far less influenced by what another person says and does than the activist would like to believe. They are much more influenced by what the other is, and his way of speaking and behaving. Only the person who has found his own self can give himself. What else can he give? It is only the person who knows that he is accepted who can accept others without dominating them. The person who has become free in himself can liberate others and share their suffering.
~Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life
I shoulda been a physicist
Scientists figure out traffic jams.
For a few years I was in daily traffic. All that time in traffic got me thinking about what caused it and what to do. I came up in my mind exactly what they are talking about in this article. But unfortunately I was a theology, not a physics, student so couldn’t publish my intuitive findings.
The wave increases in intensity as others adds to the slowing, making small increments into eventual stops. So the answer to this is to be a positive force, by maintaining following distance, advancing in speed when possible and otherwise serving to refocus the traffic speed to it’s right pattern. One person can’t fix it but if everyone does then it’s fixed and slowdowns are alleviated.
Of course, being a theology student now I think how this applies to church and ministry. Cautious, nervous people in churches can slow down ministry, getting ever more cautious, insisting everyone else goes no faster than their worries and fears. Soon the church is stopped. People get off and travel down different roads or are stuck for no real reason in the same place for a long time.
Church is like traffic! I think I made a point on that somewhere in my book.
Relatively Speaking
Richard Bauckham, The Theology of Jurgen Moltmann, p.125ff.:
The church is related to the whole, through its participation in the universal mission of Christ and the Spirit on the way to the universal future of all reality in the messianic kingdom, but it not the whole and will never itself become the whole. Consequently, ecclesiology can and must recognize the relativity of its subject and its own standpoint without subsiding into mere relativism. As a particular related to the unique eschatological person, Jesus Christ, and his universal future, the church fulfills its eschatological mission in open and critical relation to other particulars, its partners in history on the way to the kingdom of God.
Because it is itself ‘on the move’, as one element in the movement of God’s trinitarian history, it can engage in real relationships with these partners, living relationships in which both participants are open to change, and direct these relationships in hope towards the common future of the kingdom of God. In other words, although the church does have a special relationship to the universal (the kingdom of God), it has this special relationship only in relation to other particulars. It fulfills its messianic vocation not by absolutizing itself but in open relationships of dialogue and co-operation.
Which is why when those in the church begin to see themselves as the absolute context of God’s work in this world the church begins to leave behind its power and effectiveness, isolating itself and increasingly dependent on its own energy. The circuit is broken. As a part of God’s kingdom, however, it comes alive, listening, discerning, assessing, shifting, focusing, transforming through the power of the life endowed Spirit.
cause
In case you’re wondering reports are that the fire that came really close to us yesterday was started by a power line knocked down by the heavy wind. Knocked down in a place with heavy brush.
Some places maybe shouldn’t have power lines that can be knocked down.
Someone should work on that.
love and friendships
The art of loving has to be learnt. We learn it through joy in each other, through the forgiveness of guilt we experience, and through the continually astonishing miracle of the new beginning. In that ‘wide space where there is no cramping’ we accept one another, grow with one another and unfold from one another.
Part of love is friendship, which knows how to combine affection with respect for the other person’s liberty. That means respect for the mystery of the other, and his or her still latent and unrealized potentialities. If love stops, we make a fixed image of each other. We judge and pin each other down. That is death.
But love liberates us from these images and keeps the future open for the other person. We have hope for each other, so we wait for one another.
~Jürgen Moltmann, Jesus Christ for Today’s World
buzz words and good concepts
Every so often new buzz words enter into common usage. Most of the time such words stay buzzy as those using them take hold of them third or fourth or fifth hand. Thomas Kuhn, for instance, brought us “paradigm shift” which now is more often used less as what he intended (massive change in which everything is re-assessed and old questions are re-examined in the light of new discovery) and more to say maybe a sermon should be twenty minutes instead of twenty five. When everything is a paradigm shift, it’s not really a sign that things are changing as much as every little change is given increased stature. In growth fields change is a lot like middle east troubles are for End Times enthusiasts. Money is made on finding the next big thing so the best way to be found a prophet is to emphasize everything, because it might actually work out as a big change.
The buzz word of late in churchy circles is liminality. This really isn’t new, it’s been floating along the edges for a while. However, it’s getting increased play and as such it’s getting plenty overused and overapplied. I finally heard the beginnings of a decent explanation a few weeks ago by Alan Hirsch, who is sharp enough to know where that idea originated.
I bought a book that deals with the concept. A ministry book. I don’t really like ministry books to be honest. Too breezy and simplistic and I can’t help think in most cases that I’d be better off going to the original sources. Wheaton had a truly awful social life, but it drilled in me the need to go deeper in texts, to find the root of ideas, to follow the book trails.
Got about fifteen pages into the ministry book and was weary. Ever watch one of those pop psychology gurus on PBS (that’s all the local PBS plays on weekends around here these days)? Ministry books are a lot like that to me. I know some folks really treasure them and they provoke paradigm shifts for untold numbers. For me? I get exhausted by them. Not all, but most, because most aren’t really saying anything new. They’re repackaging. And very few actually are uniquely Christian. Counting the amount of Scripture quotations in most ministry books is a fairly easy process. Rarely does one have to move past the fingers and onto the toes.
So, I got weary and because I’m in a season of life where I can choose what to read and choose what not to read I put that book down and hopped onto my friendly neighborhood internet bookstore, who apparently values my occasional review of obscure theological works.
Anyhoo, I searched for the starting point of concept of liminality as it seems a fine idea for my developing thinking on the process of Christian maturity (in bookstores Fall ‘08, or at least a half year after I finish writing it, which means starting it first). Got The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure by Victor Turner, a book he wrote about various rituals in African society.
All this to note why the occasional quotes from Dr. Turner might be popping up around here. Such as this one:
The neophyte in liminality must be a tabula rasa, a blank slate, on which is inscribed the knowledge and wisdom of the group, in those respects that pertain to the new status. The ordeals and humiliations, often of a grossly physiological character, to which neophytes are submitted represent partly a destruction of the previous status and partly a tempering of their essence in order to prepare them to cope with their new responsibilities and restrain them in advance from abusing their new privileges. They have to be shown that in themselves they are clay or dust, mere matter, whose form is impressed upon them by society.
If you’ve gone through God’s process of maturing, you’ll recognize this. James did.
Consider it pure joy whenever you face trials of many kinds because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.
What’s interesting to me is that we’ve so lost sight of the process of Christian maturity that those who encounter trials of many kinds assume they are doing something wrong, or are cursed, or otherwise out of favor with God. Just the opposite really. Though, that’s a hard teaching in a consumeristic society.
God just isn’t really sensitive to that, I suppose. He does what he does and trains how he will train, which is curiously consistent and curiously forgotten, until we run head first into the wall of his training.
