Hieropraxis

Miscellany 21

2012-02-04T19:23:16Z

It’s been a while since I’ve done a genuinely miscellaneous Miscellany. Here goes!

John Mark Reynolds writes about grown-up clothing, and why it’s worth making a stand for a more formal style of attire: “I noted that here on the West Coast the goal of most men my age was to dress as informally as possible. The reason for this was apparently comfort, but athletic clothing is not particularly comfortable on a non-athlete if it fits or it is simply sloppy looking if it is not. Do we really want to look like boys gone to seed instead of gentlemen?”

Gentlemen who buck the Peter Pan trend and dress like grown-ups: I salute you, and affirm that you look very nice. I thoroughly endorse jackets (or blazers, which is what I want to call them as a New Englander; not sure if that’s a widely used term), waistcoats, and hats. We need more men wearing hats.

Have you ever seen a reference to “cross-written letters” in a Jane Austen or Charles Dickens novel? Ever wondered what they look like? Here you go.

Speaking of writing, what about writing in the margins of books? This New Yorker article raises the interesting question of whether annotation-sharing online, via e-readers, fulfills the same personal and social function as writing in physical books. Is the writing of marginalia a public activity, or do “readers value annotations precisely because they are a private exchange between themselves and whatever book they happen to be talking back to”?

“There are people who love to eat food, people who love to make food, and people who love to talk about food.” I fall into the first category only, but for everyone who hits two or three out of three, this delicious short essay from Image Journal is for you.

And to sum up, seven concise, sharp, spot-on insights about writing from Kelly Belmonte.

One last note: Hieropraxis now has a Facebook page. If you ‘like’ it, you can get a small e-book collection of my poetry. More to the point, I would invite you to come visit and chat with fellow readers. It’s a lot more interactive than blog comments (although I welcome those!) Thoughts on any of these Miscellany links? Come start a conversation!

Reflecting with God: Under the Weight of Sin

2012-01-28T05:34:36Z

Saturday, November 05, 2011

Recently walking on campus was a little more challenging than usual. A late October storm surprised us with over a foot of heavy wet snow. The view of campus in the early morning hours the next day was amazing! There were scenes of beauty, each branch loaded down with clean sparkling snow and there were scenes of destruction as many limbs laden with the burden of all of this early snow could not bear the weight and had come crashing down to the earth to rest there in the snow…broken.

The trees that had already shed their summer leaves in preparation for winter weathered the storm unscathed while those trees still grasping tightly to their leaves were hit hard. All around campus, even as I walked, loud cracking sounds cut through the air signaling another lost limb falling, crushed under the weight.

This quote by Martin Luther invades my thoughts:

“Either sin is with you, lying on your shoulders, or it is lying on Christ the Lamb of God. Now if it is lying on your back, you are lost; but if it is resting on Christ, you are free, and you will be saved. Now choose what you want.”

What if all of those leaves are representative of the sins we choose to carry, the ones we hold onto so tightly…they allow life to pile up on us and soon, we are crushed under the burden of their weight. We do have the choice to drop those sins, confess them, delivering them to Christ that we may be free from the burden.

Jesus tells us in Matthew 11:29-30:

“Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

As I sit in my quiet time I feel Jesus begging me to let go of the burden of my sins. The sins that weigh me down and keep me covered, hindered, or broken. I can never be good enough for you. I can never be funny enough, smart enough, talented enough, pretty enough, attentive enough. I can never be enough for you but I can be enough for Christ and His love, right now, today in this moment…I am enough for Jesus…and so are you.

The Artist: A Film Review and Reflection

2012-01-30T04:19:35Z

Self-reflective storytelling can be clever and effective, or it can become self-conscious and overly serious. The Artist (2012), a silent film set in 1927 and focusing on the career of a silent-film star confronted with the new wave of ‘talkies’, is a marvelous example of self-reflection done right. As I write this, it’s an Academy Award contender for Best Film, and deservedly so (Michel Hazanavicius has also been nominated for Best Director and Best Screenplay).

The ‘silent film’ choice is more than a conceit; The Artist does some very clever and interesting things with the form. For one thing, the absence of spoken dialogue brings the role of the musical score to the forefront: one of the things that struck me about the film was that, although the score served in the place of dialogue much of the time, it felt much less manipulative than many of the musical scores for films with spoken dialogue.

The need to use title cards for key lines of dialogue heightens the impact of those chosen words and draws the audience’s attention to the acting, movement, and visuals as consciously chosen elements of the story. Thematically, there’s also an interesting use of silence within the story: the characters too often find themselves unable to find the right words to say what needs to be said. And throughout the film, there are some surprising tweaks with the use of sound and the conventions of the genre… I won’t spoil any of them, but suffice it to say that The Artist is self-aware enough to be funny and clever at times, without over-doing it.

What I want to talk about now, though, is how The Artist has another layer to it. Over and above being a well done film, it shows forth the truth about God’s grace in a powerful way.

I don’t know if the filmmakers are Christian or not, but that doesn’t matter anyway. What matters is that, without showing a single explicitly religious image, and without making any reference to faith whatsoever, The Artist gives a clear and compelling vision of sin and grace.

In fact, I would argue that the very absence of conventionally Christian imagery is precisely what allows the film to speak so powerfully. (“Speak” being even more of a metaphor than usual here!)

The Artist traces the career of George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a silent-film star who is on top of the world for a while, only to find that with the rise of ‘talkies,’ his style of film is no longer in demand. As a new starlet, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), rises to fame, Valentin sinks into obscurity, all the while clinging to his own vision of what a film should be. I won’t give away the ending, but suffice it to say that he gets all the way to the bottom, losing his marriage and his home… and is confronted with the choice of how to respond to the generosity of Miller, who is determined to do her best to help him.

One of the things that makes The Artist notable is that it shows Valentin’s failings at a deeper level than we might expect. Valentin may be tempted to have an affair with Miller at the very beginning, and certainly there is a tension between them born out of attraction, but — this is important — he never acts on it, nor even allows himself to be put more in the way of temptation by seeking her out or calling her. Valentin ends up powerfully in the grip of sin, but not the sin we are conditioned to expect from Hollywood celebrities.

Indeed his marriage ends, but it is worth noting that he and his wife are both responsible for its decay. She is jealous, resentful, and cold; as things get worse, he is depressed, withdrawn, and bitter. He broods over his fall from fame, and she tells him “I am unhappy.” What we see is a depiction of two selfish people unable and unwilling to reach out: neither of them can see a ‘we’ past their individual, miserable ‘I.’ That’s not the sensational breakup that we might expect in a film about Hollywood – but it’s far more likely to strike home for viewers. Certainly it did for me.

We might reasonably ask whether we should care whether Valentin succeeds or not. Isn’t he just chasing the fleeting favor of the crowd? Certainly his acting might not have the same merit as finding a cure for cancer, but it has its place: after all, even cancer researchers need relaxation and stress relief, and a film might be just the thing after a long day in the lab. George Valentin’s problem is not in the value of his work, but in his attitude: his fall begins when he starts thinking it’s all about him.

Rather than thinking how he can best serve his audience as an entertainer, Valentin demands that the audience adore him on his own terms. It’s pride, not artistic integrity, that drives him to keep making silent films — but he dresses it up as integrity, and so hides his own sin from himself.

So Valentin continues to decline. He is, at a certain point in the film, a pathetic figure. He’s not particularly likable. He has blown his chances, failed repeatedly by his own fault.

And yet the film has a happy ending.

It’s possible to see this ending as undeserved; to say that Valentin did not merit the persistent efforts of Peppy Miller to save him, that by rights he should have died miserable and alone, since after all it was his own fault that he ended up where he was, and even after his rescue he’s never going to do anything particularly worthwhile in absolute terms.

That’s the point.

Is there any better illustration of God’s grace?

Valentin could be me. He could be any one of us – all the more so because he doesn’t do anything wrong by the standards of the world. He doesn’t have an affair, or steal from the company, or kill anyone. He just clings to his miserable pride and tries to save himself by his own efforts – in this case, by financing his own silent film. At a certain point, he even sees quite clearly that pride is destroying him – and he still cannot let it go.

That’s a clear picture of trying to live without grace. It’s a picture of our need for salvation, shown in a way that hits home and gets past the mental filters that mark certain concepts as ‘religious’ and thus separate in some way from actually living one’s life.

George Valentin is not quite Everyman, but he’s close. And Peppy Miller is not quite Grace, but she’s close. Close enough for me to think that The Artist might be the best Christian film I’ve seen in a long time.

Even if it’s not trying to be Christian.

Broceliande: A Poem of Old and New England

2012-01-29T00:59:25Z

“Broceliande” is the last of three poems I wrote this winter that were inspired by the landscape of Oxford, England and by staying at The Kilns, C.S. Lewis’s home.

One of the images here comes from my reading of Charles Williams’ poetry cycle, Taliessin Through Logres, in which the forest Broceliande mystically connects all times and places. One of the things that reading Williams has done is to push me to reconsider my assumptions about time and space.

God, after all, is not bound by time as we are; the celebration of the Eucharist transcends time and space, bringing heaven and earth together so that we are present at the Marriage Supper of the Lamb; and God uses and responds to prayer in ways that are not limited by the forward-pointing arrow of time, nor by limitations of local space.

Walking in the woods in the Lewis Reserve, I felt a bone-deep connection to the land, as real as if I had lived there all my life – and perhaps that was a recognition of truth at a level deeper than I realized. When I got back to the States and was talking with my dad (the genealogy expert of the family), I learned that several strands of the family came not just from England in general (which I knew) but from southeastern England in particular (which I didn’t know).

In contemporary America, it’s easy to lose track of one’s roots. We move so easily; I’ve lived in eight different states in my life, as well as traveling to many more. But perhaps we ought to pay more attention to our connection to home and kin, to the ways in which, as children of Adam, we are connected to the land and nourished by it.

Here is the poem, written in terza rima, that came out of these reflections. You can listen to my reading of it by clicking on the link in the title.

Broceliande
(walking the Lewis Reserve, January 2012)

Today I walked in woods that Jack once knew

And loved. I thought I was a stranger here,

That this was just a visit, passing through.

Not so. In blood and bone I feel the near

And lively presence of the well-loved past.

The woods of my New England childhood, clear

In memory, bright but far, are here. The forest

Intersects each time and place: this is

Broceliande. I feel a joy unguessed

To walk these strange familiar paths, and with

The joy, the ache of sudden love. I know

These tangled ferns, this squelchy trodden path,

The whisper-crunch of leaves, the fallen boughs

Green-furred with moss; this steeply rising hill

Is Oxford with New England’s granite bones.

The wood is thick with holly, green and tall:

A tree not native to my native land,

But rooted here for me, my namesake still.

Reflecting with God: Suffering To Know Him

2012-01-28T05:28:16Z

Wednesday, October 05, 2011

As I walk to the Cottage this morning, the air is crisp as fall has arrived once again to herald in the long, frozen nights of winter to come. I love fall! Everything just seems so much more vivid to me…the snap in the air so fresh and clean, the colors of the leaves pop against the sharp blue sky, and somehow the grass seems so much greener in contrast to it all! Someone I know, however, has spoken out his dismay at the arrival of fall. He dislikes fall because he knows what comes next…winter…and he really dislikes the dark, frigid doldrums of the winter months. He dislikes fall and all its wonder because of what is to follow.

My mind shifts onto thoughts of Job. Job, Job, Job, and Job again. For several weeks now God has been giving me Scripture from the book of Job. Actually, everywhere I turn…there is Job! I recently listened to a message given regarding a few verses in the first chapter and it was incredible!

Right at the very beginning of the book, messenger after messenger come to him to share all he has lost. Oxen, sheep, camels, so many servants, and his children all lost. His reaction is to cry out to God and worship. He tears off his clothes in his anguish and worships God after getting this news! And even better, he doesn’t sin. He doesn’t curse God, he doesn’t blame God for all he has just lost, he worships God. I have cried over the loss of far less.

I experienced abuse as a little girl and believed for many years that God let it all happen because He didn’t love me or because I wasn’t a good girl. What God teaches us in the book of Job is that couldn’t be further from the truth. Job was “blameless and upright” and he “feared God and turned away from evil”, but yet he comes to suffer great pain at the loss of so much. Job was blameless…these sufferings were not brought upon him due to bad behavior! We can walk right into the path of great suffering through no fault of our own.

But how do we turn that great pain towards God in worship as Job did? How can we fall to our knees KNOWING that God has allowed this suffering we are smack in the midst of in an effort to draw us near?

Jesus, the only person to ever know what it is like to be forsaken by God, believed the Father loved him. Always. We too must always believe in the love of the Father and return that love no matter the depth of pain we feel. Jesus is not a piñata…we can’t beat on Him in prayer expecting to get everything we want, when we want it, in order to be happy. He truly has to be enough…no matter what! We don’t have to go without God as Jesus did. We have the Holy Spirit within us always.

Suffering is allowed by God that we may learn to love Him more, know Him more, and trust Him more. God wants nothing; no thing, no person, nothing, to be between us and Him. We must choose to love God and not just how He blesses us. We must choose to love God and not just all the good times. We must choose to love God and not just all the possessions we have. We must choose to love God for WHO He is! We must come to love God for Himself!

Are You a St Paul or a St Peter?

2012-01-25T16:19:38Z

Saints Peter and Paul – the steady fisherman and the fiery Pharisee, the devoted disciple and the persecutor-turned-apostle. Every congregation is filled with Peters and Pauls – which one are you?

In Peter we see the Christian who has been raised in the church. Peter has no dramatic conversion experience, no abrupt shift from darkness to light; rather, he has spent a long time in the company of those who follow the Lord, and he has come to know that Jesus is the Messiah, the Anointed One of God. Peter’s faith is not dramatic, but it is solid – so much so that our Lord declares that the faith he shows, the acknowledgement that Jesus is the Christ, will be the rock upon which he will build the Church.

Not that the path has always been straight – definitely not! For only moments after he declares his faith, he tries to dissuade Jesus from the way of the Cross, only to be sternly rebuked. And though his protestations of eternal loyalty are loud, he fails Jesus in the end, and as our Lord goes to his death on the cross, Peter denies that he even knows him.

Peter follows, and stumbles, but he gets back up again, always with his eyes on our Lord. Better than any of the saints, perhaps, he knows the full experience of Christ’s forgiving grace.

I have friends who are almost wistful about not having a dramatic “conversion story.” Their journey seems almost boring: lots of ordinary faithfulness, mixed in with falling away and coming back, and carrying on. But wait! St Peter shows us that this “ordinary faithfulness” is anything but ordinary. It is to Peter that Jesus gives the great task of ministry: “Feed my sheep.”

In Paul we see those Christians who had a “Damascus Road” experience. Perhaps they were rebels against God, or contemptuous or hateful toward Christians (like me), embracing atheism with the zeal that Paul persecuted the early Christians. Or perhaps they were simply mired in indifference and apathy – until the season in their life when everything changed. Like Paul, headed to Damascus with other plans, until our Lord made an appearance and everything, absolutely everything changed.

Paul’s conversion is so sudden that the other Christians don’t even trust him at first; isn’t this the guy who was ordering us to be thrown into jail, or killed? But the same zeal that made him the greatest enemy of the faith also, when re-oriented by our Lord, made him its greatest missionary and theologian.

When it comes to the way that we came to our faith, each of us is either a Peter or a Paul… which makes me appreciate the wisdom of the Church in honoring these two saints equally. Their key moments of faith – the Confession of St Peter, and the Conversion of St Paul – are celebrated a week apart, on January 18 and January 25, respectively.

If we look ahead a little bit in the Church calendar, we are reminded of another great truth about these two aspects of the Christian life.

There is no separate day for St Peter and a different one for St Paul. Instead, June 29th is the combined Feast of St Peter and St Paul – always together, the two sides of the coin.

Because we are, all of us, both Peter and Paul.

Even a Peter, who has grown up in a Christian family and gone to church from the very beginning, must at some point make a conscious decision to accept Christ. No one inherits Christian faith; it is a personal choice. Do I follow Christ, or do I follow my own will? That moment is a Paul moment.

Even a Paul, who has made a clear, dramatic choice to follow Christ, must then learn what it means to actually live that out. The Damascus Road moment is just that – a moment. Following that is a lifetime of listening, learning, praying, obeying – making mistakes, repenting, being forgiven. Every Christian life is Peter’s life.

I am a Paul – learning how to be a Peter, with God’s help.

Walking Shotover Hill: A CS Lewis-Inspired Sonnet

2012-01-21T16:22:06Z

The Kilns with morning sun and frost

“The very air here calls my heart to dance…” I wrote this sonnet while staying as a Scholar in Residence at the Kilns, C.S. Lewis’ home. During my stay, I realized that Oxford, and the Kilns and surrounding woods and fields in particular, is a ‘thin place’ for me: a place where what one might call the further dimensions of reality, the spiritual dimensions, were perceptible more vividly and consistently than usual.

I’ve tried to bring that out a little bit here. I also tried to capture my own sense of the connection of landscape and language, with references to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Narnia, Till We Have Faces, and “Meditation in a Toolshed”.

You can click on the title of the poem to hear my reading of it.

Walking up to Shotover Hill, I look along the beam...

Walking Shotover Hill

The hedge is green and silver with the frost,
The garden’s bare brown stems are furred with ice.
A weed becomes a Faerie scepter, lost
In midnight revel; every blade of grass
Is ornamented with the heraldry
Of winter, standing stiff to meet my step
As I set out to walk Shotover Hill.
The hollies stand as sentinel, but let
This walker pass: I give my thanks. The sun
Now gilds the path: I look along the beam,
And see the trees and stones and fence at once
As deeply real and being what they mean.
The very air here calls my heart to dance,
And so it does: this beauty’s not by chance.

Miscellany 20: Rejoicing in Books

2012-01-13T19:53:08Z

This Miscellany is all about rejoicing in books.

Here is a splendid reminder of the importance of books in the home: a study indicating that “Regular access to books has a direct impact on pupils’ results, irrespective of parents’ own education, occupation and social class.”

One of the things I’m most grateful for, in my childhood, is that my parents always made sure I was exposed to books. Some of my earliest memories are of my dad reading aloud to me from the stories of Thornton Burgess (often from copies of the books that my mom had read as a child), and we had loads of books just lying around the house, waiting to be picked up at any moment. I remember Beatrix Potter’s wonderful stories, and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, and Graham Oakley’s wonderful Church Mouse picture-books (so clever and funny that I love to re-read them as an adult), and books of myths and fairy tales, and somewhere along the line (I don’t quite remember when), the Chronicles of Narnia (when they were still published in the original order, which is the proper order to read them for the first time, I might add). And we went to the library as a family perhaps once a week, an outing I always looked forward to. And when I got a little older, my mom and I would have “used-bookstore outings”, packing a picnic lunch and spending the afternoon puttering around dusty shops.

Yes, I’ve loved books as long as I can remember, and I give thanks to my mom and dad for helping to cultivate that.

From the Rabbit Room, here is a nice piece on How Stories Do Their Work on Us. Read the whole piece, but here’s an important thought: “Whatever the moral of the story, reading sharpens the skills of empathy… Readers, you might say, are habitual understanders. A story allows a reader to join in the inner lives of its characters. Readers aren’t mere spectators or audience members. A well-written book allows them to experience what it’s like to be another person. And isn’t that the very basis of empathy and kindness? Isn’t it a key component of love?”

And here is one reader’s defense of keeping a physical library of print books. I do quite a lot of reading online these days, and it’s a very good thing; I have books readily available (for free!) that otherwise I’d never find. Just the other day I got GK Chesterton’ Tremendous Trifles in electronic format, for free. Yet I would firmly agree with the author here, who notes that “The books in my library are objects with temporal and spatial dimensions—they are connected to times and places of creation, acquisition, and consumption.”

A book that a friend has given me, or one that I’ve taken with me on my travels, not to mention one that I’ve dog-eared and written in as part of a writing project, are all more than just the text. And I think this attachment to the physical book is important: it’s not mere sentimentality (and anyway, what’s wrong with that?). It’s a reminder that we live in an incarnational world. Both bodies and minds, both heavens and earth, are created and sustained by God; and all will be redeemed. It’s not just the ideas, or the minds, or the souls that matter: the physical book, the body, the created world that we live in, matters too. Let us rejoice in all of it. And let’s rejoice on the way to the library or the bookstore!

If Life Is a Story

2012-01-11T11:02:45Z

Shakespeare has his character Jaques in As You Like It declare that “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players”. Those lines are sometimes quoted out of context with a kind of blind enthusiasm for drama as a source of meaning in life, but in the play, Jaques mercilessly goes through the seven ages of man, concluding with “Last scene of all, / That ends this strange eventful history, / Is second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” Bleak enough for the New Atheists, even.

Or here is Macbeth, contemplating his wife’s death even as his own plans for greatness crumble around him:

Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.

We might say the same for stories. If our life is a story, what happens when the final page is turned? Reflecting on that question, I wrote this sonnet. You can click on the title to hear my reading of it.

The Turning of the Page

This story had a black beginning, filled

With doubt and pain. The villains had their way

When heroes failed and fell; and some were killed

Before they even had a part to play.

It’s true the story had its gleams of light:

The comedies that started rough and finished

In a wedding; scenes of laughter, bright

With love. Yet even these are all diminished

By the ceaseless turning of the page.

All the threads of plot run short and end.

All characters must die, though some may rage

And rail against that final stroke of pen.

Nothing in the story sets this right:

Unless the Author yet has more to write.

The Top Seven Posts from 2011

2012-01-07T16:46:53Z

Here is a selection of seven of the most-read posts of 2011. In the (hopeful) presumption people liked them on the first go-round, I’ve listed them here, so that if there’s something interesting that you missed, you can read it now. (I am pleased to note that several of the most-read post are also particular favorites of mine!)

The Spiritual Journey in Dante’s Divine Comedy. This is a collection of five podcasts taking the listener through Dante’s Divine Comedy. It’s intended mainly for those who have not read the Divine Comedy. I hope that listening to some, or all, of this podcast series will inspire you to read Dante’s great poem for yourselves.

Imaginative Apologetics: A Reflective and Analytical Review. This essay collection is one of the most important books I read in 2011. It sets out key concepts for a new (and badly needed) way of doing apologetics. Here’s another bit of good news: an American edition is coming out in May. You can pre-order it here on Amazon.

Why Story Matters: Reuniting Reason and Imagination. This short piece outlines the importance of the work I’m doing now. “Even when we’re completely wrong about the way the world works, with our lives completely out of touch with the living God, we are drawn to narrative, imagery, characters – story. Such is the power of storytelling. Rightly used, Story can help re-connect Reason and Imagination – and in so doing, help re-orient us toward Truth.”

Accessible Apologetics: Curriculum Review. Another popular post was my review of Mikel Del Rosario’s excellent apologetics curriculum. Check out his website: Apologetics Guy.

A Visit to the Future C.S. Lewis College. Last winter, I took a trip to visit the Northfield site of the future C.S. Lewis College, and wrote this post about it. Little did I know at that time that I’d be drawn into more and more work with the C.S. Lewis Foundation – returning to the campus for Vacation with a Purpose, attending the Summer Institute at Oxbridge, serving as faculty for the Southwest Regional Retreat, and now writing at the Kilns as a Scholar in Residence for a couple of weeks… Check out the CS Lewis Foundation website for more information!

Planet Narnia by Michael Ward – Book Review. Did CS Lewis really have an over-arching theme for the Chronicles of Narnia, drawing on the medieval imagery of the seven heavens? And after more than fifty years, did scholar Michael Ward really figure out the secret? I started reading Planet Narnia with a great deal of skepticism… and ended up convinced. If there’s one book of Narnia scholarship that you should get right now, it’s this one (or, if you prefer the less academic, more lay-reader version, try The Narnia Code.)

Literary Apologetics: Faith, Hope and Poetry by Malcolm Guite: An Extended Review. This review, which originally appeared at Apologetics 315, gives an in-depth discussion of the single most important book I read in 2011; Malcolm Guite lays the groundwork (and sets the standard) for poetry as a mode of apologetics and a way to think through questions of faith. Get the book here, and go visit Malcolm Guite’s blog as well, for poetry and all sorts of good things.