Photo of the Week: Road in the Birchwood

I will pour out my Spirit on your offspring,
And my blessing on your descendants.
They will spring up like grass in a meadow,
Like poplar trees by flowing streams...
Burst into song, you mountains,
You forests and all your trees,
For the Lord has redeemed Jacob,
He displays his glory in Israel.
        - Isaiah 44:3b-4, 23b (NIV)

Quote of the Week: Maximus the Confessor

"When God, who is absolute fullness, brought creatures into existence, it was not done to fulfill any need, but so that his creatures should be happy to share his likeness, and so that he himself might rejoice in the joy of his creatures, as they draw inexhaustibly on the Inexhaustible."

- Maximus the Confessor, 7th century theologian, regarded as one of the "church fathers," with a comparable influence on Eastern Christian theology as Augustine had on the West. (Quote is taken from The Roots of Christian Mysticisim, by Olivier Clement)

How to Vote

Down with "free silver"! Vote for two exquisitely bearded septuagenarians!

 

With a new Republican candidate for president coming forward every other day, it's clear that our culture is gearing up for another long, exhausting haul towards the polls. Like most of our political traditions, the presidential election is both great and patently ridiculous. It engages us in a sustained civic dialogue on issues of national importance, while also taking an embarrassingly long time and costing truly heinous amounts of money. But democratic elections, since they lie at the heart of our culture's decision-making process, make for a good way to understand our own individual decision-making. (And, to add to that point, some recent neurological studies have apparently shown that our own decision-making processes are indeed very much like democratic debates among our brain neurons.) So, with that analogy in mind, here are some thoughts I offered our local newspaper during last fall's midterm elections:

As a citizen who tries to understand the issues and make good choices with my vote, I’ve come to realize that there are two major ways in which a person can choose how to vote. The first way, and the best way, is to make an honest effort to get to know the policies of the respective candidates. This requires studying the candidates’ claims in their own words and seeking to understand their way of thinking. The second way is simply to assume that the policies that appeal to my own presuppositions are of course the only reasonable ones, and to brush aside and ignore any of the reasoned arguments of the opposing candidates. Under this way of voting, we only listen to the pundits that we already agree with, never bothering to listen to the words of the opponents, except perhaps for occasional scandalizing quotes taken out of context.

Naturally, as a conscientious American citizen, I would urge us to take up the mantle of responsibility and choose the first way of voting—listening, studying, and seeking deep understanding of the issues before making our decision. But I’m not really writing about politics here. When I look at the place of Christian faith in American society today, I find that many people unfortunately choose to relate to faith by means of the second way. We hold tightly onto our own presuppositions without questioning them, and we are too often content to write off the claims of faith without seriously considering them. There are many in our communities who have, often through no fault of their own, ended up with a shallow or misdirected understanding of true faith. Perhaps because of disaffected childhood experiences of religion, or abusive and hypocritical behavior from people claiming to be believers, or, perhaps, simply because they have the sneaking suspicion that religion is a means of suppressing honest human behavior behind clouds of guilt, many in our nation have already decided on their vote as to whether Christian faith deserves their attention. The only trouble is that all of those reasons, as valid as they may be regarding our emotional reaction towards the religious establishment, entirely miss the point.

Christian faith makes broad truth-claims on our understanding of the world. It declares that there is such a thing as truth, that the universe testifies to the existence, creative power, and beauty of its Maker, and that God himself has, in his mercy, decided to walk a mile in our shoes, to embrace all the suffering that this world can offer, to take its most violent pains upon himself, indeed, to die—and all this for us. Our faith claims that this great act of God made a whole new reality burst into existence, a Kingdom which offers liberation from the sorrow and the smallness of our lives, which welcomes us into a new existence that can only be described as joy. And we claim that this Kingdom of God is real, that it can be experienced here and now, that the facts of history do, in fact, support its claims when studied carefully, and that, if true, it calls us into the honor and delight of pledging it our highest loyalty. In essence, it calls us to vote, every day of our lives, whether we will pursue the call of faith, or whether we will choose instead to deny its claims. Just like a vote in an election, I would urge you to take this vote seriously—do the best research you possibly can; seek to understand the Christian faith not on the basis of your own presuppositions, but on the merit of its best arguments; and, most of all, dare to open your heart to the possibility that the greatest gift imaginable stands ready to be given to you, if only you will say yes. In this great cosmic referendum, one side actually will be proved right, and one side proved wrong. So seek out truth, pursue it boldly, and when you have it, cast your vote.

(Campaign button, top: John M. Palmer and Simon Bolivar Buckner, nominees for the National Democratic Party in the 1896 presidential election; image is in the public domain in the USA. Painting, inset: "Christ in Glory," by Giovanni Bautista Gaulli, 17th century, oil on canvas; image is in the public domain.)

Book Review: C. S. Lewis' "Space Trilogy"

I've loved C. S. Lewis' writings ever since I picked up The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (Book 1 of The Chronicles of Narnia) as a child. For many years the fourth installment of that series, The Silver Chair (an under-appreciated work) was one of my favorite books. Later on, as I began to read his nonfiction and allegorical works, I found that his voice continued to speak powerfully to me. His Mere Christianity, Screwtape Letters, and Great Divorce all rank extremely high on my all-time books list. Lewis, at least in the way his works speak to me, has four main strengths: (1) he is a brilliant theologian, and a winsome one (two traits that rarely go together in theologians; he can work some marginal theological views into his books, and he does it so beautifully that even those who disagree with him fall in love with the book anyway); (2) he is a very good writer in terms of style, with a simple, fluid manner that always seems to be able to combine accessibility with the expression of ineffable ideas--almost an impossible task for a writer; (3) he is a good writer in terms of his imagination and plot construction (and note, this is different than just being a good stylist--there are a lot of great stylistic writers who seemingly can't produce a compelling story, regardless of their critical acclaim); and (4) he is a mystic whose perception of spiritual realities can stand shoulder to shoulder with many of the greatest mystics of the Christian tradition. For all these reasons, I love C. S. Lewis.

But until this year, I had never read his Space Trilogy. Aside from his early minor work, The Pilgrim's Regress, this was the first major fictional work he ever embarked on, publishing the first book in 1938. This was still the early years of science fiction, when the customary trends of the genre had not yet been established in their now-familiar forms. As such, the Space Trilogy is going to be unlike any science fiction you've ever read. It's not so much about outer space, really, as it is about the relationship between heaven and earth (and the other planets). As such, it's now often published under the title of "The Cosmic Trilogy." And, as with all of Lewis' fiction, it is fiction with a point. Here, the overriding messages have to do with the nature of fallen humanity, the meaning of male and female, and the place of the human race in the broader scope of God's creation.

Out of the Silent Planet (Book 1) - This is the shortest of the three books, and it's also the one I liked best (I might be in the minority here; many other reviewers seem to prefer the other two). It tells about the journey of Dr. Ransom, an English philologist who is abducted by two renegade scientists and taken aboard a spacecraft to Mars (known to the natives as Malacandra). Once there, Ransom joins a village of sentient, otter-like beings before eventually traveling across Mars to the place where the ruling spirit of the planet dwells--an angelic being who governs and protects Malacandra and the three sentient races therein. This book was a wonderful read for me, because it ran against the grain of so much contemporary science fiction. There were almost no action sequences, no laser-gun battles or alien empires. There was none of the habit of today's science fiction of imagining alien worlds to be facsimiles of our own moral degeneracy. Rather, it was the opposite. Malacandra is a world of beings who never rebelled against God, and the contrast of their simple goodness, over against the sensibilities of even a morally good human being like Ransom, is eye-opening. This book also appealed to me because it reads more like an anthropological travel memoir than a science fiction book, and I've always loved the study of other cultures. The pace of the book is slow, but definitely worth savoring.

Perelandra (Book 2) - In this installment, Ransom is transported to Venus (Perelandra) by the cosmic beings that oversee the planets, in order to stop his old nemesis from corrupting the newborn sentient life on that world. C. S. Lewis' imaginative power is on full display here. Having never been tied down to ideas of other planets that he would have seen in the cardboard sets of Hollywood studios had he written this twenty years later, he was free to make Venus a wild world of oceans and floating islands of exotic flora and fauna. His portrayal of this world is descriptively powerful, so much so that the planet itself acts as one of the main themes and characters of the story. This book brings up one of the messages that will be especially prominent in the last installment; namely, the meaning of the sexes (a message seriously worth pondering in our day). But it also harkens back to the first book, portraying a contrast between our fallen nature and this new, unfallen, morally pure world. The story revolves around Ransom's conversations with that new world's "Eve," and his attempts to prevent his old nemesis, now possessed by a Satanic agent, from corrupting her with moralistic rationalizations. The interplay of ideas in their dialogue is fascinating, and Lewis uses it to reveal many of the dangers of secular ideology--of couching moral arguments in fine-sounding and reasonable expressions without admitting that we are immediately off-base by making our ethics so anthropocentric. This book is a good read, but don't expect it to ever become a movie--aside from the Edenic nudity, there's also a long, grisly fight-to-the-death scene between two skinny, pale, middle-aged academics that works well in print but would definitely make this an R-rated film.

That Hideous Strength (Book 3) - This book is the favorite of many who read this series. It isn't mine. It's everything that makes C. S. Lewis awesome (see the four points in the introduction above), all wrapped up in a very weird package. Here we see the conclusion of the cosmic dimension of this story--the angelic superpowers who oversee the planets are landing a D-Day beachhead against the institutionalized, human-seducing power of our own rebel angelic governor (Satan, though never named as such in the book). Lewis spends a good deal of time breaking down the secular mythologies of how we view gender, academics, and the social sciences, and the book is worth reading for that alone. Particularly regarding gender--Lewis has some things to say about obedience within the practice of marriage that are not quite kosher to say anymore, but might just be worth thinking about, since they form the majority position of the Christian tradition, and are probably too quickly dismissed as mere patriarchalism. My favorite section of the book comes near the end, when Lewis describes the entrance of the planetary cosmic powers into an English country house. He is able to put into words ideas and sensations that you probably never knew existed. I've not yet met a writer who can describe the sense of the numinous so well as Lewis can. Also, if you like Arthurian legends coming back to life, disembodied heads possessed by demonic powers, bears and tigers eating people, and 1984-style social institutions getting a grisly (and occasionally hilarious) comeuppance, then this is the book for you.

All in all, the Space Trilogy isn't going to be enshrined in my personal pantheon of C. S. Lewis' great works. But it's a good read, and it's a morally challenging series on a lot of levels.

(Picture, inset: "The Searcher," a statue of C. S. Lewis looking in a wardrobe; Belfast, Northern Ireland; by Ross Wilson. Photo by Genvessel, accessed through the Wikimedia Commons.)

Five Haikus on the Pew Research Poll

Christians in decline
That's what the numbers tell us
Numbers never lie

Did Jesus expect
We would be majority
Or simply faithful?

Numbers never lie
But it's not about numbers
And it never was

We're not called to win
We are called to faithfulness
Just to follow Him

So follow thou Christ
And let Him handle the rest
It's God's reign, not ours

Photo of the Week: Chickadee Flying

"Oh, that I had the wings of a dove!
I would fly away and be at rest...
I would hurry to my place of shelter,
Far from the tempest and storm....
Cast your cares on the Lord
And He will sustain you;
He will never let the righteous be shaken."
     - Psalm 55:6, 8, 22 (NIV)
 

Quote of the Week: Seneca

"If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you're needing is not to be in a different place, but to be a different person."

- Lucius Annaeus Seneca, 1st century AD, Roman statesman and Stoic philosopher

To put the quote in context, this is Seneca's advice to a young man who was wanting to escape his frustrations by getting away for a vacation. He points out that most of our frustrations don't have as much to do with external circumstances as they do with our own inability to manage our emotions. This is true for most of us--what we need most is not a break from ordinary life; rather, we need to learn the virtue with which to thrive in ordinary life.

(Photo: Bust of Seneca in the Berlin Antiquities Collection. Photo by Calidius; shared on the Wikimedia Commons)