My 2023 in Books

 Happy New Year, everyone! Each year in January I like to take some time to review the year that was, and set some goals for the year that will be. One of the ways I do this is by looking back on the books I read in 2023, the things I learned from them and the way they impacted me. As far as "years in reading" go, 2023 was a bit leaner than pervious years, but that's partly because I finally buckled down and tackled 1692 page treatise on the Apostle Paul's life and theology, Paul and the Faithfulness of God. This book absorbed the bulk of my reading time and energy, both, and I didn't have much left over for other books, when it was finally through. That said, here's an annotated list of my reading in 2023.

The Phenomenon of Man, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Written in 1948 by a Catholic paleontologist, this book is old, now, and feels somewhat dated, but it is one of the first honest efforts at presenting a thoughtful case for theistic evolution. Even though it got overly mystical towards the end, with its talk of the Omega point and the consciousness of planet earth, still it gave me a lot to think about.

Perfect Present, Greg Boyd

I read Boyd's Satan and the Problem of Evil, and God at War, almost a decade ago, now. and found his case for a Christus Victor theology of the atonement, and his love-requires-free-will justification for the existence evil thought provoking and compelling. This book surprised me, for both its immensely practical approach to the devotional life, and its tendency towards subjective mysticism. It is essentially a collection of reflections on how to practice the presence of God in our daily life, and exercises for growing in the practice. 

Mistborn, Brandon Sanderson

Each year I make a point of reading some fiction, and inasmuch as I grew up reading a lot of J.R.R. Tolkien and Terry Brooks, I wanted to put some high fantasy on my 2023 reading list, for old time's sake. Although Sanderson's Mistborn came highly recommended, I have to be honest and say that I found this book mostly tedious and frustrating. I felt the magic system was too pedantic, the plot too meandering, and the world-building unfocused. I know it's well loved by many, but it just didn't do it for me.

The Relationship Cure, John Gottman

One of the most recognizable names in marriage therapy, John Gottman has written multiple books on marriage enrichment. In The Relationship Cure, his major take-away is the concept of the "emotional bid," the ways in which people make subtle, sometimes subconscious requests for emotional connection with their significant other. Gottman shows how these bids function in the dynamics of a relationship, how to respond to them in ways that enrich the relationship, and what happens when they are rejected.

Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, John Ratey

This was my "self-help" book for the year. Ratey presents some very compelling evidence from multiple scientific studies, showing that regular physical exercise has all kinds of positive effects on cognitive functioning and mental health. Regular exercise can boost your memory, increase your academic success, cure depression and prevent cognitive decline in old age. If you needed motivation to hit the gym, this book should be first on your reading list.

King, Magician, Warrior, Lover, Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette

Moore and Gillette suggest that there are four primary character dynamics that together make up a mature masculine experience. They present a neo-Jungian reading of history, literature, and mythology, to illustrate each one, and show how they manifest in the lives of men. While I did find some of their ideas helpful-- the concept of "accessing" different energies in different circumstances, for instance-- a lot of it felt like pseudo-psychological mumbo-jumbo. Though it is occurring to me, as I write this, that the four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles each align with one of the four archetypes; so maybe they were on to something.

Paul and the Faithfulness of God, N. T. Wright

As mentioned above, this book was a massive undertaking, a thorough and painstaking analysis of Paul's writings, situating them in their 1st Century context and showing how they related to his three worlds-- the world of Judaism, the world of Rome, and the world of Greek philosophy. Because the first three books in Wright's Christian Origins and the Question of God were complete game-changers for me. Although this one felt repetitive at times, and widely-meandering at other times, still, it continued to change the game for me, when it comes to my understanding of the world of the New Testament.

The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Louise Perry

Perry's thesis is that the modern sexual revolution, though it was billed as a step towards the liberation of women, has actually had the opposite effect: it has predominantly benefitted men, who now have greater access to no-strings-attached sexual experiences, it has led to greater exploitation women, who are now being told that commodifying their sexuality is in their best interest, and it has led to increased violence against women, as culture becomes increasingly desensitized to more and more violent forms of pornography. Writing as a feminist sociologists, Perry surveys a wide range of cultural data, and though her case is grim reading at times, I found it very compelling.

Sackett, Louis L'Amour

My father-in-law is a big Louis L'Amour fan, and though I've never been a fan of the genre, I felt it behooved me at some point to experience a good old-fashioned Western novel. This one was about as old-fashioned, I think, as they come. It was full of tough, lonely, resourceful men, determined-but-dependent women, gun fights, fist fights, land claims and gold rushes. I found it tedious reading at times, predominantly plot-driven and only loosely interested in delving the characters with any depth, but it gave me a lot to think about when it was done, regarding the myth of the mature masculine (see above), and the way that myth has been perpetuated in popular culture.

The War of Art, Steven Pressfield

I was somewhat disappointed with this highly recommended meditation on the creative life; I think I was expecting something more concrete, practical, action-able than I got. Pressfield's major take-away is that anyone who commits to a creative life is going to encounter resistance-- practical realities, relational pressures, emotional pushback, psychological blocks, concrete obstacles-- to pursuing their art. It is inevitable, and what separates the artists from the amateurs is that the artists have fought through the resistance, no matter the cost, and whatever the sacrifice. Pressfield says little about how to actually fight the war, but by laying it out in such start terms, he certainly challenged me to ask some hard questions about what it really takes to pursue the arts vocationally.

Hondo, Louis L'Amour

See my thoughts on Sacckett above, for how this book made it to my list this year. According to the jacket blurb, John Wayne called Hondo the greatest western novel ever written. I was warmly surprised by the occasional moments of real poetry in the book-- Louis L'Amour's description of the southwestern landscape often reflects real experiential knowedge and great love. That said, I was startled by the explicitly racist undertones of the book. Indigenous people (in this case the Apache) are presented as vicious savages whom the white hero of the book greatly respects, for their woodcraft and warrior culture, but also exceeds in every respect. 

Blossoms in the Valley, Dr. Thomas Choy

Dr. Choy was psychiatrist-in-charge at the Schizophrenia Program at the Scarborough Hospital for many years; in Blossoms in the Valley he shares the heart-felt stories of 10 real-life people he encountered in his practice who have recovered from schizophrenia. Choy speaks very eloquently about the importance of maintaining hope in the midst of mental illness, and of adopting a strengths-based approach to treatment. I read Blossoms in the Valley for a course on psychopathology I am currently taking through Tyndale University, and, while it was required reading, it challenged me deeply to reflect on the realities of psychopathology and how our society responds to the mentally ill.

Troubled Minds, Amy Simpson

Another read for my course on psychopathology, Simpson's book deals especially with the way mental illness is stigmatized and demonized in church communities, specifically. Writing as the daughter whose mother suffered from schizophrenia, Simpson shares some poignant reflections on the was Christians often respond in harmful, hurtful ways to the mentally ill. A very important read for church leaders.

Leaving Church, Barbara Brown Taylor

I was expecting a deeper exploration of the spiritual, theological and emotional dynamics involved in letting go of the vocation of being a pastor. As it was, Leaving Church is more a memoir about being called to ministry than it is about the struggle to leave ministry (she only makes her decision to "leave church" in the final third of the book). Even so, I find Barbara Brown Talyor's writing thought-provoking, and found much I could personally resonate with in this personal account of what it's like to be a pastor.

Music, Ecstasy and the Brain, Robert Jourdain

I posted a full review of this book a few months ago, in which I dissect some of the philosophical bones I had to pick with Jourdain's analysis of the phenomenology of musical experience. Those bones notwithstanding, I have to say that his detailed discussion of how the human brain perceives music, processes it, and translates it into emotional experience inspired me personally to thank God for how fearfully and wonderfully we are made, to meditate on the deep connections between musical expression and religious experience, and to listen more intently to some of my favorite music. In short, it helped me become more ecstatic in my own appreciation of music. 

Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy, a book review

One of my favorite pieces of classical music is Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, in Eb Major. I love the whole piece, but the second movement is especially moving, both stirring and soothing at the same time. Whenever the opening notes of its gently shimmering piano melody wash over me, I find myself teleported to a place where beauty is more tangible than usual, and feelings like yearning, joy, and passion have concrete form.

At least, that’s how I want to say it after reading Robert Jourdain’s Music, The Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures our Imagination. Jourdain explores the phenomenon of music from seemingly every angle—the anatomy of the ear, the neurology of hearing, the physics of sound, the mathematics of harmony, the art and craft of composition, and the psychology of performance—integrating all theses fields of study to explain music’s power to transport the listener.

“Music makes us larger than we really are,” he writes, “and the world more orderly than it really is. We respond, not just to the beauty of the sustained deep relations that are revealed, but also to the fact of our perceiving them. As our brains are thrown into overdrive, we feel our very existence expand and realize that we can be more than we normally are, and the world is more than it seems.”

Listening to Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 certainly has that effect on me, and, mysteriously enough, it continues to have that effect, no matter how often I hear it.

Jourdain argues that music "works" on us by triggering deep physiological responses in our neurological structures that are evolutionarily “trained” to perceive subtle layers in sonic relations—the inner relationships, that is, between different sounds as they occur in an organized sequence. He suggests that this ability is the result of eons of evolution that refined our sensitivity to sonic relations, as a way of heightening our chances of survival. As a result, our brains are structurally attuned to the subtle (and often not-so subtle) relationships between sounds that well-crafted music presents us with. As a result, music has a unique ability to engage both the right and left hemispheres of our brains at once, stimulating pleasure both through its orderly structure, and through its close association with memories, emotion, and sensory arousal.

This physiological response, he goes on to suggest, interacts on a deep subconscious level with our specific cultural conditioning, which we use to make meaning out of the organized sounds of a musical performance. Our culture trains us to expect certain things of the music we hear, prompting reactions of delight (or disgust) as those expectations are met and/or subverted. At the same time, our bodies resonate physically with the rhythmic patterns of music, responding kinesthetically to the elegant structure it imposes on time. All of these responses—the neurological, psychological, kinesthetic, and cultural—he argues, were inadvertently wired into the human animal, as evolutionary processes naturally selected certain traits that better-fitted us for survival, helping us to avoid being eaten by the proverbial lion on the primordial savannah, and predisposing us to a kind of social interaction that would better ensure the propagation of our species.

I’m not sure how directly he argues that last point, but it is certainly one of the corollaries of his study. The seemingly-spiritual response music produces in us is really little more than a pleasurable biproduct of evolutionary forces that were themselves the result of decidedly unmusical events: those of our ancient ancestors who were less adept at interpreting the meaning implicit in that subtle rustling in the grass on the savannah died in the springing lion’s paws; those who were better at it survived, and passed on to subsequent generations a deep sensitivity to the meaning of sound. Those of our primaeval parents who responded well to the socially organizing effect of cooperative sound-making stayed together and were more likely to survive and pass on that predilection to their progeny. Those who didn’t simply died, and passed on nothing.

While Jourdain’s exploration of the phenomenology of music was profoundly fascinating, I have to be honest that, as a Christian reader, I felt it proved far more than it meant to. The word “ecstasy” literally means “standing outside one’s self" (or something along those lines). But if Jourdain’s fundamental assumptions are true, and meaning is only to be found in the random forces of a faceless evolution, then there is, actually, nowhere outside ourselves to stand. Throughout the book, he continually refers to things like the “elegant structures” of music, making value judgements regarding how “beautiful” some forms of music are and how crude others. Yet throughout my reading, I kept wondering: on what basis—if his basic argument was true—could we safely speak of music in terms of its "beauty" or "elegance"? Probably the most we could say is that certain types of organized sound are more effective at achieving its evolutionary effect, and others less so, but this is a far cry from describing something as intrinsically beautiful.

For all his talk about ecstasy, Jourdain has very little to say concretely about how and why music transports us the way it does, and where, in particular, it is transporting us to. As a Christian reader, in fact, the overall effect of Music, The Brain, And Ecstasy on me was not to cause me to stand in awe at the mysterious results of eons of blind evolutionary processes. Rather, it led me continually back to my deepest faith commitments: if the effect of music on the human psyche really is as complex and mysterious as Jourdain continually insists it is, where could so complex and mysterious a phenomenon have come from?

More to the point: what is really happening in us, when carefully structured and aesthetically pleasing sounds strike our bodies and elicit a response that can only be described, for lack of a better word, as spiritual? The evolutionary answers to those questions—like the ones Jourdain proposes—leave me personally feeling empty and cold. In the words of Puddleglum to the godless Green Witch: “Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one, and the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. That’s why I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can, even if there isn’t Narnia.”

If you’re not a fan of Narnia, perhaps a more concrete quote would help. In his book The Devil’s Delusion, philosopher David Belinski surveys the many confident claims of the evolutionary atheist—and he’s writing as an atheist himself, mind you—but he looks at the wild claims evolutionary atheism makes, of having made the “God Illusion” unnecessary. At the end of his survey he offers this humble acknowledgement: “We live by love and longing, death, and the devastation that time imposes. How did [these things] enter the world? And why? The world of the physical sciences is not our world, and if our world has things in it that cannot be explained in their terms, then we must search elsewhere for their explanation.”

The best of music, I think, puts us in poignant remembrance of the love and longing, the death and devastation that indeed marks our existence, assuring us that there are things in this world that cannot be explained purely in terms of the physical sciences; and whatever else is happening when a rapturous—or stirring, or alarming, or exciting—piece of music washes over us, and we feel it, and respond, we are being pointed out of our world to another. Not that the music itself can bring us there, but it reminds us that such a place exists, a place where the most satisfying answers of all are offered us. To quote C. S. Lewis in quite a different vein: "If I find in myself desires that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probably explanation is that I was made for another world." It is our longing for that other world, I think, that the aesthetic effect of music stirs up in us.

It's not for nothing that even in the earliest biblical witness, people responded to their experience of God in song, and in the fullest glimpse of his throne room that we're offered, we're told it's pulsing with the indescribable music of heaven.

Leaving Church, a Book Review

I first encountered the preaching of Barbara Brown Taylor in a homiletics course I took in Seminary. Taylor is an Episcopalian priest turned professor of religion at Piedmont College in Georgia. As such she doesn’t tend to garner much attention in move Evangelically minded circles, though Time magazine named her as one of the top 100 most influential people in the world, in 2014, and Baylor University named her one of the 12 most effective preachers in the English-speaking world, in 1996. So she has street cred.

In my homiletics course, we were given a number of different sermons to view and critique, as a learning exercise, and a Barbara Brown Taylor sermon on a passage from Ephesians was included on the list. Taylor is a careful wordsmith, with a poet’s ear for rhythm and a storyteller’s taste for imagery, and these qualities sparkled in her preaching. I was still trying to find my own voice as a preacher, at the time, and was wondering if my own love for a well-turned phrase might somehow marry with my passion for speaking the Word of God. Barbara Brown Taylor’s sermon gave me at least one reason to hope that it might. She never became one of my “top 12 preachers” in terms of influence, but the example she set, of using words poetically in the proclamation of the Word of God, left an indelible mark on me.

It was with great joy and much curiosity, then, that I started into Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, her personal story of becoming a priest, serving God in a small Episcopalian church in Clarkesville, Georgia, eventually discerning that God was calling her into something other than the priesthood, and finally, as the title suggests, leaving church. Not that she left faith, or worship-in-community, or serving God, but she did leave active ministry.

I myself have wrestled at various times with my own sense of vocation. Even when I left my career as an English teacher and went to seminary to prepare for ministry, I did not know exactly what form that ministry would take, whether academic, or pastoral, or something altogether different. When the Lord made it clear to me that it was time for me to leave my previous ministry appointment, a post I’d held for some 12 years or more, I was not entirely sure I was being called back into a pastoral position. And over those last 12 years—during a pastoral burn-out in 2014, deciding to complete a doctorate in Rochester, New York in 2016, stepping back for a three-month sabbatical in 2020-- at each point I've had to do some wrestling again. Sometimes this was mild sparing, even play-wrestling, other times it felt like a life-or-death struggle. Each time, however, I eventually pinned my questions and doubts to the mat, and emerged from the ring clear in the conviction that God was still calling me to serve him in this way.

So I was deeply intrigued to read Barbara Brown Taylor’s story, as someone who has wrestled in a similar way.

The book is good read. Even if you’re not in vocational ministry specifically, it asks a whole bunch of important questions that we all should probably wonder about more: what’s the real difference between doing and being? What does it mean to be “called” to a vocation in the first place? What should life-lived-in-community-loving-God really look like, after all?

As a pastor, though, a few things in Leaving Church felt especially poignant to me. Taylor has an extended section where she describes the days immediately after leaving her position as priest, as she begins to realize how deeply she had longed, throughout her ministry, to be treated like “just one of the flock,” and not set aside the way being a pastor often does set aside those who do it. In another scene she describes the moment she realized that she first went into the ministry because she had fallen in love with God, and yet the demands of the ministry were making it harder and harder to experience that love. In another passage, she describes the discovery that her vocation is broader than simply the things she does as a priest, and is tied more fundamentally to who she is in relation to God. These were all things that spoke to my own experience in ministry, some because they were lessons I, too, learned the hard way; others because they’re lessons I’m still trying to figure out.

A few days ago I was having coffee with a friend of mine who is also a pastor, and we were talking about the unique challenges that come with this particular line of work. In a moment of epiphany, I said something to the effect that I was starting to think that being a pastor actually changes the person doing it in some deep psychological way. I hadn’t thought about it like that before I said it, but when he asked me to elaborate, I mentioned how the “setting aside for ministry” and the unavoidable “being setting apart from community” that so often comes with it, how the weight of spiritual responsibility that we unconsciously shoulder, how vagueness of the job and yet its intense precision (we pastor people wherever they happen to be, through whatever they happen to be experiencing, yet our work is tied to and focused on the singular person of Jesus Christ as revealed in his Word)—how all this shapes our psyches in ways we probably none of us fully appreciate.

As a pastor, reading one colleagues journey through ministry helped me to appreciate these things more fully, and caused me to reflect more deeply than I have for a while, on the nature of my own calling. One of the conclusions that Barbara Brown Taylor draws from her experience is that all of us have a calling in Christ, even if we don’t wear a collar to signify it, and sometimes, ironically, the more formally we attach our calling to our work, the more difficult it becomes to pursue it. These are lessons all followers of the Great Shepherd would do well to mull over, not just those who serve as under-shepherds.

Dominion: A Book Review

Two summers ago I went through what I have come to think of as a minor crisis of faith. It was nothing too earthshattering, but I was between ministries, with a bit more time on my hands than usual, and I happened to read a bunch of books in a row that each pointed out some of the unsightly stains on the garment of Church history. The first was a book called Walking the Bridgeless Canyon, which explored, among other things, the church’s response to LGBTQ people, a sobering story marked predominantly by misunderstanding, mistreatment, prejudice and pain. Then I read a book called Jesus and John Wayne, which examined the patriarchy, misogyny, militarism, and hunger for power endemic in American Evangelicalism. After that I read a book called, Yours, Mine, Ours, about the way European Christians used the Doctrine of Discover to justify exploiting and oppressing North America’s Indigenous People, convincing themselves that they were, in fact, doing God’s work by stealing land and violating treaties to “Christianize” the continent.

It was all pretty grim reading, and its cumulative effect was to leave me wrestling with a profoundly unsettled “What If?” What if, I wondered, in standing with the church, I was actually standing on the wrong side of history? Not that I hadn’t known before that there were some horrid moments in the annals of the Church’s story, but somehow, seeing them laid out so systematically, one after the other after the other, confronted me with the dark side of my tradition in a way I hadn’t really seen it before.

I am still wrestling with some of these issues, a year and a half later. Some I have come to terms with, and others have challenged me to find a different way of being Christian than the way that up till now had always come naturally to me. In another post, perhaps, there would be time to unpack the entire journey and explain how the Spirit led me through it.

For today, I’m sharing this only to give some background for a book I read over the holidays this year, and to explain, maybe, why I found it so fascinating. Like the books mentioned above, Tom Holland’s Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, is also a survey of the Church’s story. It traces the formation of Christendom, from the crucifixion of Jesus up to the present moment. Holland is not, as far as I can tell, a follower of Jesus Christ. He is, however, an erudite historian committed to objectivity, and while his version of the church’s story does not shy away from discussing any of the debacles I just mentioned, neither is it content to paint a simple two-dimensional portrait of Christianity as a power-hungry religion intent solely on oppressing, exploiting, and manipulating others for its own private ends.

If anything, Holland’s survey of church history leads him to the conclusion that the vast majority of the values and assumptions held dearest by the liberal, secular society of the West, actually trace back directly and inexorably to the Christian movement. The idea that there could be such a thing as a secular society, distinct and separate from “the religious,” is only one such assumption. The notion that there was such a thing as “religion,” and that it was a particular sphere of human thought and activity, distinguishable from one’s political, national, and ethnic identity is another. So is the modern assumption when it comes to sexual morality, that it’s not okay for one person to treat another person as a “thing” there solely for their sexual gratification. Likewise the belief that the powerless ought to be given special consideration in our society, or the idea that there is such a thing as “universal human rights” that give worth and dignity to all people. The list is pretty long, actually, of the ways Christianity has shaped our civilization, inculcating us with our most deeply held values, values that continue to exert an immense influence over us, long after society as a whole has forgotten the Christian root they sprang from.

Towards the end of this whirlwind tour of Church history, it occurred to me that if I find the Church’s exploitation of Canada’s indigenous people repugnant (and I do)—or if I am appalled at the way the Gospel has been used to mistreat women (which I am)—if the moral failings of the Church really do grate against my values, I mean, it’s primarily because my values have been so profoundly shaped by the last 2000 years of the Church’s influence on our world, that I take them for granted.

In one place Tom puts it like this: when we, as modern secular people, criticize the church for things like misogyny or exploitation, we seldom realize how deeply Christian the values are that we use to make that critique, how rarely those values have formed in civilizations that were not shaped fundamentally by Christianity, and how bizarre those values would seem to an ancient, who lived in a world before the Christian message began to exert its influence.

If the debacles of Christian history trouble us, he says, it’s primarily because we are more influenced by the Christian message than any of us realize.

I’ll let you read the book to see how convincingly he makes this case, by surveying the history of the Persian Empire, ancient Greece, the rise and fall of Rome, the Protestant Reformation, and any number of other historical epochs. For my part, though, Dominion has given me a much-needed counter-point to the hard tale of oppression and corruption I’d been wrestling with for the last year. It’s reminded me that the story of Christ’s Bride can’t be told in simply two dimensions, painted in black and white and framed as an either or. The Kingdom of God, for all its being a field planted with wheat and weeds together, still it remains a good and holy yeast, kneaded into the dough until it leavens the whole bunch. Dominion gives one a glimpse of just how thoroughly the leaven has caused the dough to rise.

The Story of Christianity, a book review

I was raised in a conservative evangelical church tradition, one that emphasized the Sola Scripture legacy of the Protestant Reformation and was highly suspicious of anything that had even a whiff of Catholicism about it. Liturgy, sacrament, even stained-glass windows were all viewed with skepticism. On the books, our church was consistent with historic Christianity in its teaching about the Trinity, the hypostatic union, and other such theological non-negotiables, but the emphasis was not on any of these monumental truths about who God is and how he’s revealed himself to us. It was on, rather, asking Jesus into your heart to get yourself saved, and then reading your Bible and praying every day so you’ll grow, grow, grow. I don’t remember anyone saying this in so many words, but looking back, it’s clear to me that the spiritual leaders of my church community were not at all sure if Catholic or Orthodox believers were worshipping the true Jesus, and even if they were, everyone was sure that their particular expression of faith was “lifeless ritual” and “works-righteousness” and not a genuine form of Christianity.

The very strong impression I took from the church of my childhood was that Christianity began sometime towards the end of the 19th Century or the start of the 20th, and that it really only got off the ground in the 40s, with the preaching of Billy Graham. If pressed, I’m sure everyone would agree that you could trace the origins of the faith back to the early 16th Century and the protestations of Martin Luther. Whether there were any real Christians before him, however, was anyone’s guess, because everything prior to October 31, 1517 was shrouded in a godless mist of Catholic hocus pocus.

I can remember stumbling across things like the Prayer of St. Francis, or the Breastplate of St Patrick, and being absolutely stunned by the beauty of them, but not sure what to do with the “Saints” to whom they were attributed. Were there really Christians back as far as that, and were they really capable of such stunning spiritual depth and profound expressions of having Jesus-in-your-heart devotion?

Since those early days of my spiritual formation, I’ve had many opportunities both formal and informal to experience church traditions that are happily thriving in meadows outside the evangelical fold. I’ve had the privilege of studying church history both broadly and deeply, and I’ve encountered Christians from across Christendom, both living and historical. I’ve come to see the many blinders I had developed, growing up in a church tradition that tacitly implied that there was a 1500-year gap during which no real Christians existed, between the penning of the last book of the Bible (ca. 90 AD), and the start of the Protestant Reformation (ca. 1517).

These blinders, I’ve since learned, had blinded me not only to Church history, but to a very rich, deep vision of who God is and how he has been at work among his people throughout the ages. Not only that, it left me with a great deal of spiritual xenophobia and a prideful assumption that my particular church tradition had a self-righteous monopoly on God’s Truth.

As God has removed these blinders, I’ve come to see how varied and fecund the vineyard of his church really is, what it means to confess belief in the one, holy, apostolic, catholic Church, and how big a family tree I belong to in Christ. I’ve also come to discover how spiritually unhealthy it is to ignore or deny the truth that as Christians, we are part of a 2000-year-long story that God has been telling about his plan to bind people together in community around a shared love for the Lord Jesus Christ.

I was reminded of all this last year when I had the pleasure of reading Justo Gonzalez’s monumental book, The Story of Christianity, Vol 1: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation. The book details the intricate and convoluted story of the development of Christianity, from its origins as a fringe movement within 1st Century Judaism, to its world-spanning presence as a global religion by the end of the 15th Century. Along the way he introduces his readers to the many remarkable theologians, fathers and mothers of the faith, saints, sinners, popes, and reformers whom God used to direct the formation of his Church. It made for riveting reading, not least of all because Gonzalez is so adept at drawing out the human motivations at play in the world changing events of the Church’s history.

It may not be that you ever had the kind of blinders about the Church and its history that I described above. It may be that they were removed long ago. It may be that you’re still not sure you want them removed. Whatever the case, I think every follower of Jesus should at some point or another take a tour of the epic saga that is Church history. It will help you better understand this Jesus you’re following, by seeing how people throughout the millennia have followed him too.

If you’re looking for a guidebook for such a tour, one that is both thorough and academic while still being accessible for a relative beginner, Gonzalez’s The Story of Christianity is about as good a starting place as any I've come across.

Transitions, a book review

Around this time last year, I found myself in the middle of one of the most difficult life transitions I've been through in a long time. The last of our three kids was getting ready to empty the nest, while the job I had been working at for over a decade was coming to a close. Though I didn't have the vocabulary at the time to put it in these words, I was coming through a very challenging "Ending" stage and entering the "Transition Zone," a place marked by anxiety and resistance, on the one hand, and potential and possibilities, on the other.

That's how I've come to think of it now. At the time, all I knew was that a lot of things that seemed routine and reliable in my life were changing dramatically and I had no clue, yet, what was going to take their place. It was all very scary and disorienting, to be in the "Transition Zone" like this; though again, while I was in it, I didn't really know it was called a "Transition Zone," or how common it is, when you're in one, to find yourself grasping frantically for something (anything) to make things feel normal again.

The only reason I'm able to name all these things now, on the other side of my particular life transition, is because a good friend suggested I read a book by Dr. William Bridges, called Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes. In Transitions, Bridges explores "transition" as a psychological phenomenon, explaining what's going on in our brains when our lives are changing dramatically. He offers some very insightful wisdom about how to frame life's transition experiences, and some practical advice for going through them well.

In Bridge's view, "transitioning" is a natural process of "disorientation and reorientation marking the turning points in [our] path of growth" (p. 4). Rather than seeing transitions as crises we have to cope through, Bridges suggests they are key seasons in the "natural process of development and self-renewal" (p. 6). He suggests a three-phase model for understanding transitions in this way: they involve an "ending," where we let go of the old, both inwardly and outwardly, a "new beginning," where we start into something new with better self-knowledge and emotional resources, and a "transition zone," an important "empty or fallow time" in between the two. 

This in-between time is the most crucial part of a transition, but also the scariest. The temptation is to try and turn back to the old and the familiar so we don't have to go through it. We may seek to do this even when it's not really possible to go back. "Growing frightened," he writes, "we are likely to try to abort the three-phase process of ending, lostness, and beginning. We might even twist this pattern around so that beginnings come first, then endings, and then ... then what? Nothing. When we turn things around in that way, transition becomes unintelligible and frightening" (p. 11).

If we can find the the grace, however, to go through the "Transition Zone" staying open to the possibilities that are always there during times of change, our personal transitions can become a path to a deeper self understanding and a wiser way of being in the world.

Bridges' three-stage model gave me some good handles to hang onto as I went through my own transition last year. Especially wise was his reminder that it is impossible, really, to go back to the old once a transition has begun, his warning against trying to, and his encouragement to embrace the in-between time, as scary and lost as it feels, as an opportunity for growth and self-discovery. 

One day I hope to write a book about transitions, as a psychological experience, and the theological importance of Holy Saturday—the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday—as a liturgical experience. My strong hunch is that the evangelical tradition has no clue what to do with Holy Saturday. "It's Friday but Sunday's Comin'" is the victorious mantra of contemporary evangelicalism, with nary an acknowledgement that the only way to get to that Comin' Sunday is through a Holy Saturday. I wonder what impact this tendency has on the evangelical Christian's ability to let their transition experiences be for them what Bridges says they can be.

That book will have to wait until I have more time, and perhaps more wisdom, than I have right now. In the meantime, and until it's written, I'd gladly recommend Bridge's work as a starting place for anyone sitting in their own Holy Saturday moment and trying to make sense of it.

Books Read, 2016

Normally in January, I take some time to look back over my previous year in books, and identify some of the highlights, some of the low-points and some of the contenders for best-read of the year.  This last year, however, I started working on my D.Min studies at Northeastern Seminary, which meant, among other things, my reading list for the year almost tripled.  Because of this, it's a bit of an onerous task to narrow it all down to a few "best-of" picks, or to haiku my way through the whole list, like I did back in 2014.

That said, I've decided this year simply to post the whole list of books read in 2016, with a simple 10-point rating scale and no further comment.  For those interested, here are all the books that entered my brain through my eyes this year (in chronological order).

Spiritual Friendship, Wesley Hill

The Road to Missional: Journey to the Center of the Church, Michael Frost

Replenish:  Leading from a Healthy Soul, Lance Witt

The Giant Slayer, Iain Lawrence

Courage and Calling:  Embracing Your God-given Potential, Gordon Smith

A Time for a Change?  Revisioning Your Call, James Hightower

The Way of the Seal:  Think Like an Elite Warrior to Lead and Succeed, Mark Divine

What Makes Love Last?  How to Build Trust and Avoid Betrayal,  John Gottman

Ten Lessons to Transform Your Marriage, John Gottman

Personality Type in Congregations:  How to Work with Others More Effectively, Lynne Baab

Your Personality and the Spiritual Life, Reginald Johnson

Discover Your Conflict Management Style,  Speed B. Leas

Rest in the Storm:  Self-Care Strategies for Clergy and other Caregivers, Kirk Jones

Pentecostal Healing:  Models in Theology and Practice, Kimberly Alexander

Crucial Conversations:  Tools for Talking when the Stakes are High, Kerry Patterson

Over Sea, Under Stone,  Susan Cooper

The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper

Healing, Francis McNutt

Power Healing, John Wimber

The Healing Light, Agnes Sanford

The Magician's Nephew, C.S. Lewis

Miracles:  The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, Craig Keener

Healing in the History of Christianity, Amanda Porterfield

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis

The God You Have:  Politics, Religion and the First Commandment, Patrick Miller

Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope, Walter Brueggemann

The Horse and His Boy, C. S. Lewis

Discovering John:  Content, Interpretation, Reception, Ruth Edwards

Interpreting the Gospel of John:  A Practical Guide, Gary Burge

Biblical Ethics and Social Change, Stephen Mott

Complete Your Dissertation in Two Semesters or Less, Evelyn Ogden

Prince Caspian, C. S. Lewis

Sabbath Keeping:  Finding Freedom in the Rhythms of Rest, Lynne M. Baab

Solidarity Ethics:  Transformation in a Globalized World, Rebecca Todd Peters

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C. S. Lewis

The Cross and Gendercide:  A Theological Response to Violence against Women, Elizabeth Gerhardt

Signature Sins:  Taming Our Wayward Hearts, Michael Mangis

The Silver Chair, C. S. Lewis

The Last Battle, C. S. Lewis

The Thursday Review: But I Know What I Like

first published September 27, 2009

In an attic storage room behind the choir loft of my old church, wedged in between some dusty Christmas decorations and a couple of boxes of tattered hymnals, rests an ostentatiously-framed print of Warner Sallman's Christ at Heart's Door. Though there is maybe something (more than a bit) kitschy about this depiction of Jesus knocking at what appears to be Snow White's heart's door, in its day it was like the Mona Lisa of Evangelical artistic expression.

The day I stumbled across it (looking for an advent wreath, I think), it got me thinking about the place of art in the experience of Faith, and especially the Evangelical "tradition" of producing art that does little more than reiterate sentimentalized stereotypes about Jesus and the experience of life with him. (Notice the heart-shaped aura of light formed by the arch of the door together with the curve of light behind this "Swedish Jesus's'" shoulder.)

I lingered that day in the attic, though, because only a few months earlier I'd read David Morgan's Visual Piety, which examines artistic representations of Christ and explores their function in the religious experience of 20^th century North America. The premise of his study is that popular religious imagery like this has power and significance specifically because it "contributes to the social construction of reality."

In other words, for all its sentimentality, popular religious imagery like Sallman’s has played an important sociological role in both shaping and affirming people’s religious experience. Morgan develops an aesthetic of “visual piety”- an experience of religious devotion mediated through visual imagery that depends on a “psychology of recognition.” Here the aesthetic experience of the image becomes function not of its formal artistic qualities, but of its conformity to the viewer’s preconceived religious ideal. Thus in the experience of “visual piety,” the picture’s beauty “consists in the satisfying experience of perceiving a particular understanding of Jesus adequately visualized."

In American religious experience, “Sallman’s image of Jesus confirms the traditional formula or convention of Christ’s appearance, but tailors it to the modern evangelical notion of Christ as obedient son and intimate friend." So, according to Morgan, when I see Sallman’s Head of Christ, I see my own preconceived understandings of Christ visually projected; but at the same time I receive and accept cultural values associated with the American Evangelical experience of Jesus. In a related discussion, he describes the process of “composition,” whereby a picture like Sallman’s brings together the essential elements of a wide range of historical and cultural representations of Christ, projecting the “essence” of the Jesus that pervades them all. As a medium of visual piety, then, Sallman’s picture becomes a “picture about pictures,” a cultural apparatus by which people can conjure up in a single representation “the elusive presence [of Jesus] immanent in and authorizing countless pictures."

What does all this mean? (Morgan is a religious-art-history prof at Berkley, after all...)

On the one hand, I suppose it suggests that before we abandon that Sallman print to the "religious kitsch" table at the next church yard sale, we should at least acknowledge the role it's played in a larger cultural discourse about who Jesus is and how we see him. Perhaps more importantly, though, we should let Sallman illustrate for us how tempting it is to try and fashion this Jesus into our own image, and how much we might miss out on (aesthetically and spiritually) when we do.

The Thursday Review: David and Little John and the Language of Love

First posted October 11, 2012

A while ago a friend sent me a link to this article at Touchstone Magazine about the language of love and the death of male friendship in our culture.  I find some of the rhetoric a bit unpalatable, especially towards the end, but the overall thrust of his argument scored a touche for me:  our radically sexualized culture has undermined healthy, authentic, and necessary expressions of affection between men, and this has distorted the male experience of friendship.

You can give it a read if you like.  For my part, it reminded me of the final chapter of Howard Pyle's Robin Hood.  If you've never read it, the aged Robin Hood falls ill and visits his cousin, the Prioress of Kirklees, to undergo a blood letting.  Fearing the king's reprisal for having helped an outlaw, she opens an artery deep in Robin Hood's arm, and locks him in an upper room to bleed to death.  When Robin realizes death is upon him, he sounds his bugle horn to summon Little John.  The scene is moving as Little John bursts into the room and, seeing the pallor of death in Robin's face, cradles him tenderly in his arms as he slips away. 

You can give that a read, too, if you like (click here).  I remember weeping real tears over this scene as a boy-- it was the first book I'd ever cried over-- and re-reading it and re-reading it and crying every time.  There was just something so moving in Little John's artless expression of love for his friend on his deathbed.  I didn't know the words pathos or catharsis then, but I'd use them now.

But the point of the Touchstone article, and I think it's a valid one, is that expressions of love like this are old, natural and (above all) platonic; and one of the unfortunate consequences of the modern sexual revolution is that we are losing (or have lost) the non-sexual categories we once had for experiencing and describing them.  If he lived in our world, where love is assumed to include a sexual dimension unless the term is otherwise clarified, Little John would be hard pressed to cradle his dying friend in his loving arms, without raising some questioning eyebrows (or knowing smiles) about his sexual identity.  And a ten-year-old boy would likewise be hard-pressed to shed real tears over the scene.

In case it seems like I'm just blowing smoke here, let me let me point the discussion in a direction where I think there's more at stake than just a good cry over a childhood classic.  In 2 Samuel 1:26, David is mourning the death of his friend Jonathan, and he says "Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women." 

Some interpreters read this line as evidence that the friendship it so poignantly describes was sexual in nature, and that there were homoerotic undertones in Jonathan's covenant with David back in 1 Samuel 20.

Admittedly, this passage raises far more issues than we have space to wrestle with here, but let me at least suggest this: we may lose more than just some old-fashioned sexual mores, if a  biblical man can't tell another man he loves him without brigning his sexual identity into question.  A biblical imagination when it comes to the language of love--and with it the potential for men to express affection and closeness in ways that are affirming of gender and distinctly nonsexual--may actually be on the line here, if David and Jonathan's embrace must be sexual, simply because it was an embrace.

Postcards from Narnia (V): When Aslan Speaks

One of the beautiful aspects of the Narnia books is the ethereal, almost mystical quality that pervades the conversations Aslan has with the various children of the stories. To the extent that Aslan is Lewis’s literary vehicle for reflecting on the nature of God, these conversations are, I expect, very much like what Lewis’s own conversations with God must have been like, condensed and distilled to a child-like precision, and presented in the literary framework of the Narnian world. Even when I was a child coming to Narnia for the first time, it struck me that when the Golden Lion spoke, there was mystery and wonder, paradox and clarity, wisdom and delight in his voice, unlike anything I’d ever encountered before. It was at once somber and joyful, playful and impassive, stern and tender. As a grown reader, it strikes me that few works of literature I’ve come across have captured so vividly and so simply the experience of speaking to God in prayer and actually hearing him speak in return.

Aslan never condemns, though at the same time, he entertains no self-deception. He insists on the truth, and yet so gently that the truth is only healing and transformative. He insists on full obedience, yet with such tenderness that obedience is a delight. He knows us fully, more truly than we know ourselves, yet he uses that knowledge never to shame or bully, but only to nurture us and strengthen us for his glory.

Every now and then as a pastor I get asked: does God really speak to us, and what is it like when he does? I’ve done my best to answer that question—his voice is one we learn to hear only by listening to it—but if one wanted to practice listening, one could do worse, I think, than to listen to how Aslan speaks to the children in Narnia, and what he says to them when he does.

Among the many samples I could turn to, consider:

Aslan on self-deception:

"Son of Adam," said the Lion. "There is an evil Witch abroad in my new land of Narnia. Tell these good Beasts how she came here."

A dozen different things that he might say flashed through Digory's mind, but he had the sense to say nothing except the exact truth.

"I brought her, Aslan," he answered in a low voice.

"For what purpose?"

"I wanted to get her out of my own world back into her own. I thought I was taking her back to her own place."

"How came she to be in your world, Son of Adam?"

"By—by Magic."

The Lion said nothing and Digory knew that he had not told enough.

"It was my Uncle, Aslan," he said. "He sent us out of our own world by magic rings, at least I had to go because he sent Polly first, and then we met the Witch ina place called Charn and she just held on to us when—"
"You met the Witch?" said Asian in a low voice which had the threat of a growl in it.

"She woke up," said Digory wretchedly. And then, turning very white, "I mean, I woke her. Because I wanted to know what would happen if I struck a bell. Polly didn't want to. It wasn't her fault. I—I fought her. I know I shouldn't have. I think I was a bit enchanted by the writing under the bell."

"Do you?" asked Asian; still speaking very low and deep.

"No," said Digory. "I see now I wasn't. I was only pretending."

Aslan on grief:

"Son of Adam," said Aslan. "Are you ready to undo the wrong that you have done to my sweet country of Narnia on the very day of its birth?"

"Well, I don't see what I can do," said Digory. "You see, the Queen ran away and—"

"I asked, are you ready?" said the Lion.

"Yes," said Digory. He had had for a second some wild idea of saying "I'll try to help you if you'll promise to help my Mother," but he realized in time that the Lion was not at all the sort of person one could try to make bargains with. But when he had said "Yes," he thought of his Mother, and he thought of the great hopes he had had, and how they were all dying away, and a lump came in his throat and tears in his eyes, and he blurted out:

"But please, please—won't you—can't you give me something that will cure Mother?" Up till then he had been looking at the Lion's great feet and the huge claws on them; now, in his despair, he looked up at its face. What he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life. For the tawny face was bent down near his own and (wonder of wonders) great shining tears stood in the Lion's eyes. They were such big, bright tears compared with Digory's own that for a moment he felt as if the Lion must really be sorrier about his Mother than he was himself.

"My son, my son," said Aslan. "I know. Grief is great. Only you and I in this land know that yet. Let us be good to one another.”

Aslan on Obedience:

A circle of grass, smooth as a lawn, met her eyes, with dark trees dancing all round it. And then—oh joy! For he was there: the huge Lion, shining white in the moonlight, with his huge black shadow underneath him. But for the movement of his tail he might have been a stone lion, but Lucy never thought of that. She never stopped to think whether he was a friendly lion or not. She rushed to him. She felt her heart would burst if she lost a moment. And the next thing she knew was that she was kissing him and putting her arms as far round his neck as she could and burying her face in the beautiful rich silkiness of his mane.

"Aslan, Aslan. Dear Aslan," sobbed Lucy. "At last."

The great beast rolled over on his side so that Lucy fell, half sitting and half lying between his front paws. He bent forward and just touched her nose with his tongue. His warm breath came all round her. She gazed up into the large wise face.

"Welcome, child," he said.

"Aslan," said Lucy, "you're bigger."

"That is because you are older, little one," answered he.

"Not because you are?"

"I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger."

For a time she was so happy that she did not want to speak. But Aslan spoke.

"Lucy," he said, "we must not lie here for long. You have work in hand, and much time has been lost to-day."

"Yes, wasn't it a shame?" said Lucy. "I saw you all right. They wouldn't believe me. They're all so——"

From somewhere deep inside Aslan's body there came the faintest suggestion of a growl.

"I'm sorry," said Lucy, who understood some of his moods. "I didn't mean to start slanging the others. But it wasn't my fault anyway, was it?"

The Lion looked straight into her eyes.

"Oh, Aslan," said Lucy. "You don't mean it was? How could I—I couldn't have left the others and come up to you alone, how could I? Don't look at me like that ... oh well, I suppose I could. Yes, and it wouldn't have been alone, I know, not if I was with you. But what would have been the good?"

Aslan said nothing.

"You mean," said Lucy rather faintly, "that it would have turned out all right—somehow? But how? Please, Aslan! Am I not to know?"

"To know what would have happened, child?" said Aslan. "No. Nobody is ever told that."

"Oh dear," said Lucy.

“But anyone can find out what will happen," said Aslan. "If you go back to the others now, and wake them up; and tell them you have seen me again; and that you must all get up at once and follow me—what will happen? There is only one way of finding out."

"Do you mean that is what you want me to do?" gasped Lucy.

“Yes, little one," said Aslan.

"Will the others see you too?" asked Lucy.

"Certainly not at first," said Aslan. "Later on, it depends."

"But they won't believe me!" said Lucy.

"It doesn't matter," said Aslan.

Aslan on self-pity:

"Who are you?" Shasta said, scarcely above a whisper.

"One who has waited long for you to speak," said the Thing. Its voice was not loud, but very large and deep.

"Are you—are you a giant?" asked Shasta.

"You might call me a giant," said the Large Voice. "But I am not like the creatures you call giants."

"I can't see you at all," said Shasta, after staring very hard. Then (for an even more terrible idea had come into his head) he said, almost in a scream, "You're not—not something dead, are you? Oh please—please do go away. What harm have I ever done you? Oh, I am the unluckiest person in the whole world?"

Once more he felt the warm breath of the Thing on his hand and face. "There," it said, "that is not the breath of a ghost. Tell me your sorrows."

Shasta was a little reassured by the breath: so he told how he had never known his real father or mother and had been brought up sternly by the fisherman. And then he told the story of his escape and how they were chased by lions and forced to swim for their lives; and of all their dangers in Tashbaan and about his night among the Tombs and how the beasts howled at him out of the desert. And he told about the heat and thirst of their desert journey and how they were almost at their goal when another lion chased them and wounded Aravis. And also, how very long it was since he had had anything to eat.

"I do not call you unfortunate," said the Large Voice.

"Don't you think it was bad luck to meet so many lions?" said Shasta.

"There was only one lion," said the Voice.

"What on earth do you mean? I've just told you there were at least two the first night, and——"

"There was only one: but he was swift of foot."

"How do you know?"

"I was the lion." And as Shasta gaped with open mouth and said nothing, the Voice continued. "I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the Horses the new strength of fear for the last mile so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you."

"Then it was you who wounded Aravis?"

"It was I."

"But what for?"

"Child," said the Voice, "I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no-one any story but his own."

"Who are you?" asked Shasta.

"Myself," said the Voice, very deep and low so that the earth shook: and again "Myself," loud and clear and gay: and then the third time "Myself," whispered so softly you could hardly hear it, and yet it seemed to come from all round you as if the leaves rustled with it.

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Post Cards from Narnia (IV): Virtue, Vice and the Voyage of the Dawn Treader

 I have a bit of a running theory about The voyage of the Dawn Treader, the fifth book in the Narnia series (it is the third book Lewis wrote, but fifth in the chronological order of the stories).  The Voyage has always been my favorite of the seven books, the one I’ve spent the most time thinking about, so it’s maybe to be expected that I’d have a theory about it (I should also give credit where credit's due: this reading came to me one afternoon when I was watching the award winning BBC film adaptation of Voyage, produced by Wonderworks, which is well worth a watch... far better than the hatchet-job that Walden Media made of the story, which I could barely stomach, let alone watch in its entirety).

If you’ve never read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, stop everything right now, and go read it.  I’ll wait.  If you really can’t spare the time, here’s the book in a nutshell:  Lucy and Edmund, long-time veterans of Narnia, are summoned back to the Magical Country through a mysterious picture frame, this time bringing with them their stinker of a cousin, Eustace Clarence Scrubb (a boy so rotten he almost deserves the name...)  They join Prince Caspian and an assorted crew of Narnians on a mystical quest to sail to the eastern edge of the World, searching for the seven lost lords of Narnia that sailed away many years ago and never returned.  Along the way they discover a number of strange islands, encounter all sorts of wonderful characters, de-stinkify their cousin Eustace and ultimately find their way to the Aslan’s Country, beyond the end of the world.

To get my theory, you have to understand first that, as the third book that Lewis wrote for the series, Voyage is a sequel to Prince Caspian, a book that was, for all intents and purposes, about the revival, or re-conversion of Narnia back to the ways of Aslan (so: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe tells the Easter story, with Aslan's allegorical Death and Resurrection; Prince Caspian is set hundreds of years later, after Narnia has forgotten the story and has fallen away from “the old ways”; Prince Caspian is the only human in Narnia who believes in Aslan and he’s able to “convert” the people back to the old ways.)  Then comes Voyage: Caspian, having led the revival in Narnia, is now on an east-ward journey to the end of the world, to make it, at last to Aslan’s Country.

If Lion is the story of the Cross (Redemption), and Caspian is the story of conversion (Salvation), then Voyage is the story of Discipleship (Sanctification).  It's the story, that is, about the spiritual journey (as symbolized by the sea-quest) through the triumphs and trials of life (as symbolized by the islands they encounter along the way), to reach, eventually, our heavenly home (as symbolized by Aslan’s Country).

This reading takes on weight and substance when you look closely at each of the stops they make along the way.  Lewis has written extensively and eloquently elsewhere (both in The Screwtape Letters and also in Mere Christianity) about the classical virtues and vices of the Christian tradition, and when you read it with that in mind, if becomes clear that at each one of the island stops on the journey to Aslan’s Country deal with either one of the seven deadly sins, or one of the seven cardinal virtues.  In this way, as they confront the seven deadly sins and grow in the seven cardinal virtues, the children advance further in their quest for Aslan’s Country.  This is not just vague symbolism, either.  Consider the following itinerary of the Dawn Treader in its eastward journey. (For your reference, remember that the seven deadly sins are: anger, greed, sloth, envy, gluttony, lust and pride; and the seven cardinal virtues are: courage, wisdom, temperance, justice, faith, hope and charity).

1. Their first stop is on the Lone Islands, where they need to put an end to the slave trade conducted there.  In so doing they explicitly demonstrate the virtue of justice, and encounter the first of the lost lords, Lord Bern.

2.  Their next stop is on “Dragon Island,” where Eustace sneaks away while the work's being done, specifically because he's too lazy to help, demonstrating the sin of sloth.  He takes a nap in a dragon’s cave, only to waken the next day as a dragon himself.  He is eventually restored by Aslan, and they discover the remains of the second lost Lord, who himself turned into a dragon previously.

3. En route to the next stop, they have two narrow escapes:  they are attacked by a sea serpent, where Eustace demonstrates the virtue of courage fighting it off (the text specifically points out his bravery); and then they land on an island where the water turns everything it touches to gold, and they must overcome the enchantment of greed (they also discover the remains of the third lost lord, who unwittingly  swam in the pool and got turned into a gold statue).

4.  Next they land on an island peopled by a group of foolish, one-legged dwarfs named the Dufflepuds.  The Dufflepuds have made themselves invisible because they believe an evil wizard put an “ugly spell” on them, and they couldn’t bear to look at one another; now they wish to be visible again, so they force Lucy to sneak into the Wizard’s study and read a spell from his book.  Along the way Lucy is tempted to read a spell that will make her beautiful, and it is revealed she has always felt envy towards her sister, who was always considered the prettier one.  (The Dufflepuds are the embodiment of folly, the total opposite of the virtue of wisdom, and their foolishness is played up for comic relief.)

5.  Next they come to an island where “all your wildest dreams come true,” which seems promising at first, until they learn that the dreams in question are really the deepest, darkest corners of the id, the stuff that spins your nightmares in the dead of night.  This one’s a bit Freudian, but it’s my contention that this island is Lewis’ way of handling the theme of lust on a level a child would be able to process and understand.  (Notably, they meet the fourth Narnian Lord here, who ostensibly arrived at the island do to his lack of temperance.)

6.  Finally they arrive at the last island in the book, and are forced to decide if they will carry on to Aslan’s country or not.  Here they discover the last of the three Narnian Lords.  It’s worth pointing out here that in Christian ethics (and Lewis cites this concept in Mere Christianity, so we know he was familiar with it), the first four of the cardinal virtues—justice, courage, wisdom and temperance—were said to be virtues even the pagans could attain to, without Christ.  But the last three virtues—faith, hope and love—were said to be virtues that it took the special grace of the Holy Spirit to attain.  So it’s no accident that the last three Narnian Lords are all found together on the last island before Aslan’s Country.  Interestingly, the three lords have fallen into an enchanted sleep because they could not agree whether they should carry on to Aslan’s Country or not, and the only way to awaken them is for the crew to journey on themselves and leave someone in Aslan’s Country. (Also notable: the reason they are asleep is because they had been quarreling about whether or not to go on to Aslan's country, and one of them grabbed hold of a sacred knife in an outburst of anger, causing the enchantment to fall on them.)

7.  When they finally arrive at Aslan’s Country, Prince Caspian himself wishes to stay behind, even though he must return to be king of Narnia.  The rest of the crew tries to convince him of this, but in his pride, he insists on staying, until Aslan encounters him and helps him to repent. 

This is, of course, a rough overview, and if you’ve never read the book, it may not make much sense to you.  But if you have perhaps it will ring true:  the Voyage of the Dawn Treader is really about the Christian voyage, the journey of growth in Christian virtue, and at each adventure along the way, the children must prove themselves in one of the seven cardinal virtues or resist one of the seven deadly sins (or both), and so draw closer to their heavenly destination, the land beyond the rising sun, Aslan’s Country.  Inasmuch as this is a journey that, in the end, all Christians must take, you might say that Voyage is, actually, a fictional, allegorical, children’s-lit discipleship manual,  an imaginative reflection on the spiritual life.

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Postcards from Narnia (Part I)

To this day I can still remember opening The Magician’s Nephew, the first book in the Chronicles of Narnia, back when I was 10 years old. My Dad had purchased me a complete box-set of the Narnia books, through the Scholastic Book Order from school, which was a bit surprising. This was the only time I can ever remember him even noticing the Scholastic Book Order forms I brought home each month. But he did. “Oh,” he said when he saw the Narnia books, “I read those as a kid and I think you’d really like them. Can I order them for you?”

A month later, there they were, on the teacher’s desk with the rest of the Scholastic Book Order purchases. This was novel enough, because I seldom had any items in the Scholastic Book Order when it arrived, and as the teacher read through the names and the kids came forward to retrieve their Scholastic treasures from her desk, I was expecting, like always, to be left out. And then, to my surprise (I’d actually forgotten about my Dad’s purchase), she said my name.

“Dale Harris, 1 box set of the Chronicles of Narnia.”

And I went forward and she put into my hand this mysteriously decorated box, all covered over with evocative drawings of dwarves and unicorns and on one side, a picture of a faun (though I did not know at the time that this is what it was called) standing in a snowy wood next to a lamp-post.

The box set actually remained untouched on my book shelf for months. It was just so mysterious, and really, other than my Dad’s recommend, I had no clue what I would find if I opened it. And I sort of forgot about them.

But then came the long, slow days of summer, and one afternoon when my usual pastimes had lost their luster, I saw this almost-magical looking box on the shelf and finally wondered what was inside.

Book 1: The Magician’s Nephew. In my mind’s eye I can still see myself stretching out on the couch in the sunlight and reading that first paragraph:

This is a story about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child. It is a very important story because it shows how all the comings and goings between our own world and the land of Narnia first began. In those days Mr Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road. In those days, if you were a boy you had to wear a stiff Eton collar every day, and schools were usually nastier than now. But meals were nicer; and as for sweets, I won't tell you how cheap and good they were, because it would only make your mouth water in vain. And in those days there lived in London a girl called Polly Plummer.

By the time Polly and Digory had found their way into the Wood Between the Worlds, I was dully enthralled; by the last page I was mesmerized.

I read the rest of the books voraciously; and I can remember as vividly reading the last page of the last book, The Last Battle. I was lying in my bed on a Saturday morning, and I closed the back cover on the last page, and I lay there, completely still, staring at it for what seemed like three whole minutes. I knew I had just read something far more profound, and beautiful and meaningful than I could put into words, so I just lay there, letting it soak over me, hesitant to move for fear of breaking the spell.

I have read and re-read the series dozens of times since those days and each time I do I find new layers of profoundity, new gleams of beauty, new meanings that I hadn’t noticed before, even as an adult. Over the years, I have tried at various times to express the layers of meaning to be found in these deceptively simple children’s books; I have allegorized and interpreted and exegeted these books many times in my heart. And yet none of these efforts to go deeper have marred the simple joy I find in reading them. There is such a mystical quality to the stories, and such a purity to the prose they’re told in, that even today, I am still that 10 year old child stretching out on the couch, about to embark on a spiritual journey he knows not of, every time I come to them again.

I have been rereading them again this summer, and thought that it might make for an interesting blog series if I wrote up a few “postcards from Narnia”—that is , chose some of the especially magical or particularly pure parts and offered my best reading of them. If you’re a fan of the books, too, this may prompt your own journey of rediscovery. If you’re not a fan, it may inspire you to give them a try.

So over the next few months at terra incognita, I will be posting some “Postcards from Narnia,” as I travel once again to C. S. Lewis’s world within the wardrobe.

And as a teaser, let me offer this little tidbit, to whet your appetite. Scholars have often wondered if there was any inner logic to the scope and sequence of the work; that is to say: why seven books? And why do they unfold in such a seemingly haphazard way?

Recently, I came across the work of Dr. Michael Ward, author of “Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis.” He suggests that the seven books of the Narnia series were conceived as symbols of the seven planets in the Medieval European cosmology. While today we understand the solar system as having 8 planets (plus Pluto), in the geocentric system of the Medieval astronomers (which Lewis was an expert in), there were seven “planets”: The Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

Dr. Ward’s reading—and he makes a compelling case—is that each of the books, in their themes, symbols and content, were meant to stand as symbols for one of these planets. You can read the whole article here:  http://blog.cslewis.com/narnia-and-the-seven-heavens/

In this reading, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, with all its themes of kingship, is Jupiter, the king of the planets. Prince Caspian, with its themes of war and revival, is Mars, the war-god. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, with its journey into the east and the Rising Sun, is the Sun, and The Silver Chair, is the Moon. The Horse and His Boy is Mercury (Mercury governs Gemini, the twins, and The Horse and His Boy has both twin lions and twin boys in it...), The Magician’s Nephew is Venus (themes of creation, fertility abound, plus there is a “false Venus,” an “Ishtar” in the character of Queen Jadis), and The Last Battle, at the end of time, is Saturn (Saturn is named after the god of time; Father Time is his namesake).

No ten year old child, of course, could have known that when he opened that Scholastic Book box set, that they were about to take a spiritual journey through the seven heavens of the Medieval cosmology, but that is the wonder of these books, and the reason why, I hope, they deserve a few "postcards" like this.  Every reading yields fresh insight and yet no new insight detracts from the childlike wonder these books still produce in me.

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