Aunt Jane's Hero

This is the introduction to Aunt Jane's Hero, by Elizabeth Prentiss. It seems I am quite taken with her writing, this being the third book of hers I've read.

They were living to themselves: self, with its hopes, promises, and dreams, still had hold of them; but the Lord began to fulfill their prayers. They had asked for contrition, and He sent them sorrow; they had asked for purity, and He sent them thrilling anguish; they had asked to be meek, and He had broken their hearts; they had asked to be dead to the world, and he slew all their living hopes; they had asked to be made like unto Him, and He placed them in the furnace, sitting by "as a refiner of silver," till they should reflect His image; they had asked to lay hold of His cross, and when He had reached it to them, it lacerated their hands. They had asked they knew not what, nor how; but He had taken them at their word, and granted them all their petitions. They were hardly willing to follow on so far, or to draw so nigh to Him. They had upon them an awe and fear, as Jacob at Bethel, or Eliphaz in the night visions, or as of the apostles when they thought had seen a spirit, and knew not that it was Jesus. They could almost pray Him to depart from them, or to hide his awfulness. They found it easier to obey than to suffer - to do than to give up - to bear the cross than to hang upon it: but they cannot go back, for they have come to near the unseen cross, and its virtues have pierced too deeply within them. He is fulfilling to them his promise, "And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me."

But now, at last, their turn is come. Before, they had only heard of the mystery, but now they feel it. He has fastened on them His look of love, as He did on Mary and Peter, and they cannot but choose to follow. Little by little, from time to time, by flitting gleams the mystery of His cross shines upon them. They behold Him lifted up - they gaze on the glory which rays forth from the wounds of His holy passion; and as they gaze, they advance, and are changed into His likeness, and His name shines out through them, for he dwells in them. They live alone with Him above, in unspeakable fellowship; willing to lack what others own, and to be unlike all, so that they are only like him.

"Such are they in all ages who follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth. Had they chosen for themselves, or their friends chosen for them, they would have chosen otherwise. They would have been brighter here, but less glorious in His kingdom. They would have had Lot's portion, not Abraham's. If they had halted anywhere - if He had taken off His hand, and let them stray back - what would they not have lost? What forfeits in the morning of the resurrection? But He stayed them up, even against themselves. Many a time their foot had well-nigh slipped; but He, in mercy, held them up; now, even in this life, they know all he did was done well. It was good for them to suffer here, for they shall reign hereafter - to bear the cross below, for they shall wear the crown above; and that not their will but His was done on them."

Meming

I'm so unobservant.

I was tagged by Suzanne 4 days ago, so to remind everyone she's out there doing quality thinking, I'll play along. :-)

Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more.
(No cheating!) Find Page 123.
Find the first 5 sentences.
Post the next 3 sentences.
Tag 5 people.

The nearest book is still, "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. I decided after enjoying "No Country For Old Men" so much (did anyone see this movie yet? Any thoughts? Some bad thoughts are expected.) to pick up some other of his books and see what I thought.

The Road is an interesting counterpoint to NCfOM. Both books are equally bleak, dark, terrifying, and ugly. But where NCfOM told us that evil is winning the battle for the world, and that we should give up the fight, The Road tells us that love conquers everything, everything. If NCfOM was the ultimate "feel bad" movie, The Road is an incredible "feel sad" book. When you're done, you want to know whether you could bear such a weight, believe so unwaveringly, endure such worry, and hope through such a night. Again, though, it's not a happy book and many people would not enjoy it at all.

The selected three sentences from page 123 are indicative of the whole book:

The water was so clear. He held it to the light. A single bit of sediment coiling in the jar on some slow hydraulic axis.

(I thought I would post part 5 of There and Back Again tonight, but my second edit was too extensive. It needs another look. Maybe tomorrow.)

Stepping Heavenward

I have an hour to call my own, and so many things to do. Well, at least one of those things is writing a little bit here, so let me make a start at that anyway. :-)

Tari recommended to me, Stepping Heavenward, by Elizabeth Prentiss.

I was prepared to say something nice to her about it after I'd read it. I was not prepared to be utterly floored by it, and reduced to tears countless times. I don't believe there's a single book of doctrine or Christian experience on any of my shelves that could not be profitably replaced by this thin little story of Katherine Mortimer. Every element of life and of Christian life is captured in little Katherine's journal. Every tear, joy and disappointment rang true for me, and most of all her constant disappointment with herself.

There are so many levels at which I recommend Mrs Prentiss' book (here or here or elsewhere. The version I read was unabridged, but with a bazillion typos.) to you - now. First, it warmed my heart to read a real Puritan's advice on life. The Puritans receive such a horrific rap in our culture. They were beautiful people with a joyful, vibrant love for Christ Himself. Mrs. Prentiss writes with all the beauty and passion of these dear Christians. Second, every pain the young Miss Mortimer experiences on up through the end of the book is so intense and real. I know those pains. I know those mistakes. I envied her the joys of having escaped some of the pits that swallowed me, and joined her in rejoicing at the salvation of the Lord that came to us both. Third, you have questions about the Christian life. You do. You will find all of them asked and lived through in this book. You won't find answers, but you'll find someone who went there with you and with Him.

Seriously, there should not be a Christian of any age who has not read this book, and read it recently. I will be buying handfuls and giving them away.

May the Lord bless you by it.

Pagan Christianity

I link you to a book review of "Pagan Christianity" by Kruse Kronicle.

I have not read the book. I link it because the review provides a pretty good summary of the content of the book, and is material worthy of discussion in and of itself. I also link it because I have a little history with Frank Viola, and it's just funny to see a review of a book by a guy you know. Not enough history to really guess at the quality of this book, but he tied into the group I left about a year before I quit. We never really met, but we heard about each other and have talked since.

If you read the review, and read the list of pagan elements that have been added to Christianity over the centuries, you are reading my history. These were the things I learned in 1983 that put me off the organized church for a quarter century. As I read the list again, for about the hundredth time, I really don't know what to think. I was willing to do anything to see the church cleansed from those pollutions. I was aching to die on that mountain for decades, and I still see all those additions to the word of God as mistakes. But the passion is gone for me. And that's usually a bad place for me.

I think, this time, it's the right place for me.

The shift started when I took my latest position at work. I was made responsible for coming up with processes that worked for 400 really smart, regular people. Over 4 years of dealing with these folk, I learned that esoterica is completely ineffective. Nobody cares. Nobody. Not one person. Everyone wants to be part of a team that works. They don't care why it works or the hidden subtleties that play out in the background. I have been a high idealist all my life, and have always wanted all the subtleties to come together in a perfect picture of elegance. Learning that most people don't even see the things I treasure was a shock. Learning that they tend to be more successful than me was a crisis. But learn I have.

I'm currently taking a course in ITIL. You don't even care what that means, believe me, but it's a massive framework of subtleties. I should be able to take this back to my job and make all sorts of tweaks and tunings, but I cannot. No one could. If I'm going to introduce new ITIL concepts at work, I need to prove that they'll work. Nothing else matters.

Pagan Christianity seeks to tear down a bunch of stuff that is working for people.

I sought to tear down a bunch of stuff that was working for people.

Neither Frank nor I is going to have much luck.

I'm sure Frank has his eyes wide open to that fact. I know I did. But it didn't matter, because that was the hill I was tasked with taking. I had these truths, so I was responsible to shout them from the rooftops - the watcher who sounds no alarm, and all that stuff. I was looking forward to dying on that hill. (You know how it is - I was young.)

Then, about 2 months ago, I had this radical change of perspective. All we need to do is bloom where we're planted. Leave the pastors and the sermons and the church buildings where they are, and focus on fellowshipping deeply with those closest to us. The idea is radical to most of you, because it means being of one mind with a church with which you may not completely agree. It's radical to me because it means leaving behind years of ranting against everything those churches stand for.

This may or may not make sense to you, but seeing Frank charging up that hill spurs a little soul-searching. It's more than nostalgic, but less than melancholic. I've given up exactly the fight Frank is carrying forward with this book. And it's impossible to see that without questioning whether I've made the right decision.

Sally-Jane says I have.

Sally-Jane wants to love her Lord and serve Him successfully. I will always believe she would be best served to do so in the way Frank is presenting, but Sally-Jane cannot make that jump. She cannot. She cannot imagine a Christianity without buildings, sermons and services and every time I try to describe it to her she battens down the hatches and waits for the storm to blow over.

Frank's Christianity necessarily becomes elitist. It becomes a gathering of people who are curious about esoterica. It becomes a disorganization in opposition to the organized religion around it.

And in the end, who cares? The bible does not forbid church buildings, sermons, and sacramentalism (yes, I know some of you hold that it explicitly orders all these things - that's fine.) So, why spend time fighting them? I can make the smart people at work start doing ITIL if I can show them that their current methods are not successful, and my new methods will be. I need both a stick and a carrot. Frank believes he has both. I have to disagree.

The home church movement elevates the practice of gathering to a division-level doctrine. This has to be a step in the wrong direction.

This was way more than I meant to write on this subject, and it is more disjointed than I like but I'm not going to edit it. I hope it makes sense.

Trapped - A Book Review

I saw a mosquito tonight. It will be a little hard to describe where I saw him, but let's give it a shot.

Above my sink is a bright light. And to the left of that light, I hang a hand mixer for protien drinks. On the mixer, my son hangs a cup. The cup is clear plastic. So, picture a little to the left and below my sink light, an inverted, clear cup.

The mosquito was hopelessly trapped inside this cup.

He was pulling a "moth" and flying toward the bright light, when he stumbled into a clear plastic prison. He immediately set to work trying to get on with his life, I imagine, though I was not there to see his first actions. When I arrived, he seemed to vary his path a little bit flying first to the left, then up, then down, then right and mixing the pattern up creatively, in hopes of finding a hole through which he might escape from the prison he could not even see.

The 4 inch hole at the bottom of the cup never figured into his escape plans.

I watched him for a minute before I walked away and finished cooking dinner. (For those of you keeping score, yeah he's still alive somewhere in my house.)

He was trapped by nothing but his own wiring. In order to free himself, he would need to travel 120 degrees away from the bright light and in the right direction - down. I never saw his path drift more than 60 degrees from the light, and I never saw him go down much at all.

--

In related news, I finished reading "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden" today. It's the true autobiography of a 16 year old girl in the 50's who was committed to an insane asylum for schizophrenia. The book had the same effect upon me as did watching "A Beautiful Mind." It left me a jibbering idiot for a little over an hour. Every time I read about schizophrenia, I lose a touch with reality for a little while. It's quite unsettling.

I was still suffering from that straightjacketed thinking when I saw the mosquito.

The parallels are far too obvious to draw, but I'll do it anyway. Insanity arrives when our hard wiring comes in conflict with an invisible trap. People who think they're pithy say foolish things like, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result each time." These pithy, cruel people cannot see the trap. They sit outside the cup telling the victim to "Just fly straight up. Watch, I'll show you how it's done."

They say brilliant things like, "With the right drugs, you can live a normal life." Maybe with the right drugs the tormented quit bouncing their heads off the top of the cup, instead of sitting there half-asleep on the side of their invisible trap, but it's no normal life. Either way, the cruel don't know that and shoot their mouths off none the wiser for their pith, and none the kinder for their helpfulness.

---

So with this post, let my recommendations be 2:
1) If you find yourself beating your head against an invisible trap, seek competent help and ignore foolish helpers. They're everywhere.

2) If you want to know what it's like to be helplessly tormented by your own mind, and if you would like to cry repeatedly for pure tragedy, pick up a copy of the book, "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden." It is a brilliant self-portrait of one girl's journey through the darkest hell earth offers, and of the people she learned to appreciate along the way. The book will freeze your heart with its portrayal of insanity, and melt it with the story of those who endure it - themselves, their parents, and their doctors.

NT Wright: The Resurrection of the Son of God

The Jews experienced a number of changes in their basic beliefs about resurrection over the centuries. By the time of the second temple, they had quite a fragmented set of ideas on the subject. The Pharisees believed that there would be a general resurrection of believers at the end of time (and often did not believe unbelievers would rise at all). The Saducees believed there was no resurrection. Other Jews had brought in the Platonic belief that the body was inferior and was best shucked off to live as eternal spirits.

The pagans also had changed their beliefs on the subject. Before ending up at the Platonic solution, they went through centuries of believing the dead were at best half-spiritually alive, and that they would never rise again. The dead forgot everything they ever knew, and lived comatose lives of spiritual misery forever. Plato did come along, and he did change all that. He taught that the dead were forevermore spiritual, and that they were infinitely happier than they had ever been while trapped in their mortal bodies.

Given this matrix of Jewish conflict on the subject, and complete pagan denunciation of the mere idea of resurrection, how Christianity come to embrace the idea of resurrection with one voice and in complete agreement? Why did they alter the Judaism from which they emerged such that the resurrection would be of two parts (first Christ, and later all His brothers and sisters) and such that it encompassed the whole idea of the triumphant kingdom?

NT Wright's answer in The Resurrection of the Son of God is, because Christ actually, eternally rose from the dead.

Wright makes a number of points. Most emphatically, he declares that resurrection is not life-after-death. There is definitely life after death, though most gospel writers are fuzzy at best about what that life is like, but that is not resurrection. Resurrection is life after life-after-death. Resurrection is when a formerly alive person dies, goes on to experience life-after-death, and then is brought back to live again on this planet with a new body - a body that is both physical and yet transcends the abilities of the former body and is somehow spiritual too. Heaven, he states, is not where we spend our eternity. Heaven is a realm unimaginably near to our own, and that intersects with our own in a number of ways, and our resurrected bodies will be comfortable interacting with heaven even while they live here on earth.

Wright explores every pertinent ancient source on the subject of resurrection in general, and on Christ's resurrection in particular. When he has completed his argument, you have insight into the beliefs of first temple Jews, second temple Jews, intertestamental apocryphal books, ancient pagan philosophers, later pagan philosophers, Paul, other writers of epistles, gospel writers, extra-canonical gospels, other Christian aprocryphal books, classical heretics, and finally the gospels' easter accounts. His historical analysis concludes with a thorough exploration of "necessary and sufficient" cause. He demonstrates that Christ's resurrection is sufficient to cause a movement like Christianity to emerge, and furthermore that an event like the resurrection actually happening as described is most probably necessary for the Christian doctrine of resurrection to emerge.

Throughout the entire book he maintains a consistent level-headedness that is a delight to read, and grants his opponents reasonable dignity, even as he tweaks their noses from time to time.

I won't kid you. At 730 pages, this book is probably not going to float everyone's boat, but if you've ever wanted to make a serious argument that the resurrection proved Christ as God's Son, you need this book. Wright defines the argument much more closely than anyone else I've ever read. He will keep you from over-promising on the meaning of the resurrection while arming you beautifully to defend the points you actually end up staking out.

Enjoy.

Book Recommendation: Simply Christian

I have figured out why so many people don't appreciate NT Wright as a theologian.

He agrees with me about too many things. :-)

Seriously, as I am reading him, I keep being blown away by little things I didn't think I'd ever read a theologian saying. He is dead on the money, so far as I am concerned. He is who I'd like to imagine I could have grown up to be.

The one thing I have not figured out is why so few people appreciate me as a theologian. ;-)

Anyway, I'm in the middle of my 4th and 5th of his books. I cannot finish either of them, because I'm enjoying them both too much. One of them is an 800 page monster, and not a great introduction. The other, though .... ah, the other.

Simply Christian is NT Wright's highly persuasive explanation of why Christianity makes sense. Everyone is fond of pointing out that this is Wright's Mere Christianity, and as much as I'd love to top that statement, it's straight up accurate. If you liked Mere Christianity, Simply Christian should wind straight into your heart.

Wright looks at the world we all see, and finds 4 core wonders to it:
Justice
Spirituality
Relationship
Beauty

He then follows these four threads through a discussion of Israel, the Messiah Who came from Israel and God, and the church.

Along the way, he avoids minefield after minefield while still throwing sweet, sweet bombs. Let me offer just one example. I don't believe there is a single line in this book that agrees or disagrees with "the rapture" as has been popularized recently, but he make countless comments that implicitly reject it. I all but drooled on myself when I heard him start talking about the kingdom of God. The whispers of Wright's thought on the end times smuggled into this book are enough to justify the price.

[None of you should probably have noticed that I have never spoken of the end
times on this blog. Now that I point it out, you should be wondering whether
that's an oversight. It's not even close to an oversight. I have been waiting until
the right moment, and I'm pretty sure it is nearing. In fact, getting to that
subject is one of the things that brought me back after my month haiatus. First,
Gaia, though.]

I will give you another example. Wright is an Anglican. That is to say that his church lives and breathes liturgy. Liturgy has no part in my life. There is nothing I do that is remotely structured or stable, except my three meals a day, and even they are only liturgical for convenience' sake. I love it when something makes me stay up past my bedtime. I hate liturgically knowing that on 15 Oct I will worship God for His amazing works in Numbers 23:12 - just like I did last year. (Don't look for that - it's pulled out of the air.) I will spend 5 hours putting together a 1/2 hour lesson and be tickled when the class goes so far afield it never happens.

I didn't even have to wrinkle my nose when Wright talked about worship.

Wow.

I REALLY didn't think that would EVER happen. Oh, he said a couple things I think were bogus and self-serving, but even I have to grudgingly admit that I would profit from listening to those things. An Anglican impressed me on the subject of worship. I'm still amazed.

In all honesty, I have not quite finished the book yet, but only because I'm too busy in his other book. I'm reading Simply Christian at work and my lunch breaks are all higgley-piggley these days. I just could not wait any longer to tell everyone about it.

What do I think of the book? At $26 a pop, I bought 5 extra copies two weeks ago, and will give away the fourth on Sunday and the fifth probably before that. (Kirk doesn't know it yet, but he NEEDS this book.) If you want to know why Christianity makes good old fashioned common sense, or know someone who needs to know, then this is the best.