It's Not About Me

What Are You Reading?

"Education is the process of selling someone on books."  - more Wilson

Last Lines

World Magazine just published their annual book issue. In it they included a reader's contest for favorite last lines of books. I had thought I would like to enter, but I remembered a lot more opening lines than closing. Now this doesn't mean that I start a lot more books than I finish, but it does say something about my memory. Hands down my favorite opening is from Norman Maclean's "A River Runs Through It", and I believe that I have quoted it early in the publication of this blog. (Complete with me in the middle of the Imnaha River, fly rod in hand.) One World magazine reader also liked its closing enough for a nomination.

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's greatest flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time... Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.

There were of course the well-known conclusions of "Huckleberry Finn" and "A Christmas Carol", as well as many I had never heard before. Below are some of my favorites from the contest.

"'You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!'  'Thank goodness!' said Bilbo laughing, and handed him the tobacco jar."  - J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

"'Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?'  'No,' I answered, 'but I served in a company of heroes'".  - Sgt. Mike Ranney, Easy Company,  - Stephen Ambrose, Band Of Brothers

"You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out it was the other way around all the time."  - Jim Bouton, Ball Four

"Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgement, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil."  - King Solomon, Ecclesiastes

"Whether or not they lived happily ever after is not easily decided."  - C.S. Forester, The African Queen

There are so many beautiful words in this world it is hard for me to name a favorite. However, reading the ending from C.S. Lewis' "The Last Battle" brought tears to my eyes - not only when I finished the book, but even just reading it in this magazine contest.

"The term has now ended and the holiday has begun."  "All their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."

No Muse, Little News

The muse has been on strike. No inspiration to write, no stories to tell. SO, I’ll plagiarize today’s format from my original (and on-going) blogspiration – “Livingloud - The Bowmanblog" http://livingloud.typepad.com.

What I’m Reading: The Kindle has definitely increased my reading time, not to mention decreasing my attention span. I find I’m jumping back and forth from one book to another, reading a chapter or two here and another there. Part of that may however be what I’m reading. Spiritual topics seem best chewed off in little chunks and slowly digested, as opposed to novels and stories whose landscapes are better to be lost in for longer periods of time.

My Travels In Alaska by John Muir  
     I think I must have just been out of college when I bought the anthology, “The Wilderness Writings Of John Muir”. I didn’t know much about the man, but was immediately captivated by both his writing style and the stories he told of wandering around America before it was packaged and shrink wrapped. After moving to California I learned that there are more places in that state named after him than any other person.  He would easily find a place in my top 5 “Greatest Americans” (even though he was born a Scot).
     Travels to Alaska is not known as his greatest book, but I was only a few pages in when I came across this delightful passage from his San Francisco to Portland passage on the Pacific. Read it slowly and let it roll across your tongue like a Willamette Valley Pinot Gris.

“And yonder, glistening amid the irised spray is still more striking revelation of warm life in the so-called howling waste – a half-dozen whales, their broad backs like glaciated bosses of granite heaving aloft in near view, spouting lustily, drawing a long breath and plunging down home in colossal health and comfort. A merry school of porpoises, a square mile of them, suddenly appear, tossing themselves into the air in abounding strength and hilarity, adding foam to the waves and making all the wilderness wilder. One cannot but feel sympathy with and be proud of these brave neighbors, fellow citizens in the commonwealth of the world, making a living like the rest of us. Our good ship also seemed like a thing of life, its great iron heart beating on through calm and storm, a truly noble spectacle. But think of the hearts of these whales, beating warm against the sea, day and night, through dark and light, on and on for centuries, how the red blood must rush and gurgle in and out, bucketfuls, barrelfuls at a beat!"

Quarterly Book Change

Time to refresh "Into Me Eyes". Anyone enjoyed, or hated, these books?

Shackleton - Home Safe

Finished up “Endurance” this week. The book is beyond amazing. If the Pixar people had gotten together and story-boarded this tale, they couldn’t have put together so many occurrences of near-but-not-quite-disaster. The author, Alfred Lansing, told his story well, but at the same time there was only one thought that I find quotable. Being a landlubber I’m sure the depth of my understanding is a shallow beach, but I liked it:

“Unlike the land, where courage and the simple will to endure can often see a man through, the struggle against the sea is an act of physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which man never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated.”

Rambo Was A Pansy

I have considered (and rejected) for some time the notion of the electronic book. There is something innately satisfying in holding a well-bound, sturdy-papered text in your hands. Even better is the ability to take your pen and underline insightful quotes or bits of wisdom for the benefit of some yet-to-be-encountered problem. Never the less, I succumbed to the flurry and hype surrounding the launch of Kindle 2. The idea of being able to carry around hundreds of books in practically no space or the ability to have the Wall Street Journal delivered totally eco-friendly was just too much to pass up. I mean you can even highlight with this device, have those clippings stored in a separate folder, do word searches, dog-ear a page, change font size and if you can deal with a somewhat robotic female voice, the thing will read to you.

After a few weeks of using Kindle 2 I think it will be part of my reading habit from here on out. The device is definitely better than a prototype, but it is immediately obvious that it needs color capability, back lighting for night reading, improved text-to-speech quality and a visually smoother transition between pages. I expect to see Kindle 3 within the next two years. I also expect that that the electronic book will transform the lives of students who will be able to carry everything they need in a little day pack - a laptop for computing needs and ALL their textbooks on a Kindle-like device for easy reading. No more 25# loads on the back and hopefully significantly lower textbook costs.

Of course once you buy a Kindle you then have to buy books. Ever the bargain hunter I found a copy of the ESV Bible on Amazon for free. I also found a couple of websites that make texts available gratis that are in the public domain. I downloaded Chesterton's "Orthodoxy" which I quickly abandoned as boring and then got "My First Summer In The Sierra" by John Muir. However, the first book I payed for was one I've been meaning to read for years, "Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage" by Alfred Lansing.

If I was going to summarize this book in a sentence it would either have to be, "All the best stories are true.", or, "Rambo was a pansy." I'm only half-way through this saga, but I must say that this tale of human perseverance makes even my finest moments look like a yawn. If you don't know the story, it is of British polar explorers who get stuck in the ice of the Waddell Sea and spend a couple of years exposed to constant life-threatening danger, temperatures most always below 10 degrees (F) which are made all the worse by the unceasing wetness of being on ship or ice. There is no radio, no 911. They save themselves or perish.  

Read this book. You will be the better for it. Oh yes, I'm going to give Chesterton another try.

"The Shack" (Second of 2)

In my first post I shared my problems with "The Shack". There was plenty I loved as well.

DELIGHTS IN "THE SHACK":

1) This outstanding paragraph draws from all over the Bible, but especially from the early chapters of Genesis as well as the Gospel and epistles of John.

     “Mackenzie, evil is a word we use to describe the absence of Good, just as we use the word darkness to describe the absence of Light or death to describe the absence of Life. Both evil and darkness can only be understood in relation to Light and Good; they do not have any actual existence. I am Light and I am Good. I am Love and there is no darkness in me. Light and Good actually exist. So removing yourself from me will plunge you into darkness. Declaring independence will result in evil because apart from me, you can only draw on yourself. That is death because you have separated yourself from me: Life.”

2) There are many times that Young seems to have been living inside my head. He got me on this one.

     “I do not dwell in the future you visualize or imagine. Mack, do you realize that your imagination of the future, which is almost always dictated by fear of some kind, rarely, if ever, pictures me there with you.”

3) I enjoyed the author’s wrestling with the concepts of maleness and femaleness in God and the human expression of those characteristics, since we are created in His image. Others find the concept of God the Father being represented as a black woman sacrilegious – especially during these times of the battle over gender inclusive language in the Bible. I’m not sure I’m with the critics on this one, but I understand their discomfort.  I think the important thing here is to see God as the archetype and our sexual identities as the reflection of that image. We are the diversity, He is the unity.

4)  The endearments in this book more than warmed my heart, they also wetted my eyes.. Just as Jesus taught his people to call God, “Abba”, the author pulls that into English. In “The Shack”,  God is addressed as “Papa”, in both his male and female appearances.  

I also loved Papa’s endearment both to the other members of the Godhead and to each one of His people, repeatedly stating, “I’m especially fond of you.”, or “I’m especially fond of that one.” What more could a child of God want to hear than this take on, “Well done, good and faithful servant”.

 

Overall I would recommend this book with the caveat that there is plenty here to positively stir the emotions, as well as illuminate the words of Scripture., but that the head, guided by Scripture, needs to direct those emotions.  The warm, imminence of God in this story could lead many to take the words of the God that William Young has created as inspired and then judge the Bible by Young's theology and not as they should be - the other way around.
 

Wallowa County

Since I'm commenting on "The Shack", here are a few photos:

 

 

Finley Butte Panorama 2006

 

 

Imnaha Post Office 2004

 

 

Ditch Swimming 2004

 

Boys At Wallowa Lake 2006

"The Shack" (First of Two)

Well, I just recently finished reading “The Shack”, by William Young.  In a nutshell, this book is wrestling match with the problem of evil and the nature of God, set in a murder mystery. It is also set in my favorite place and old home, Wallowa County, Oregon.  Installment #1 - Problems. Installment #2 - Delights.

MY PROBLEMS WITH  “THE SHACK”:

1) There are no stop lights in Joseph, Oregon - in fact the nearest stop light is about 70 miles away, so it would be difficult to have the critical accident at the end of the book.

2) Reading about such a great evil (even if fictional) that occurred in places that I both love and frequent, gave me the creeps.

3) More seriously, I am unsettled reading any extra-biblical book where the author purports to speak for God. Some do this masterfully, such as CS Lewis in “The Chronicles…”, or “Dinner With A Perfect Stranger” by David Gregory.  Others, such as Frances Roberts in “Come Away My Beloved” fall on their face. I personally could never write in such a genre, utterly lacking the courage to put words in God’s mouth. If it is done with orthodoxy and broad strokes it may be appropriate, but when unorthodox, or speaking on controversial details, it seems to be treading on dangerous (ie. holy) ground.

4) The transitions of the book are quick and stilted making the conversations with God seem preachy. The wonders and pleasures of being in the presence of God are not as skillfully woven as other authors.

5) The author apparently goes off the rails into universalism on pg. 182, but then partly recovers in this exchange:

     “Does that mean,” asked Mack, “that all roads will lead to you?”
     “Not at all,” smiled Jesus as he reached for the door handle to the shop. “Most roads don’t lead anywhere. What it does mean is that I will travel any road to find you.”

I much preferred a similar exchange in “Dinner With A Perfect Stranger” where the skeptic asks his dinner host, Jesus, if all roads lead to God.  The response in this book - “There are no paths to God.”, the point being similar that it is God who reaches out to man and not the reverse.

6)  One of the major and recurring themes in this book is the predestinating decrees of God.

     “Mack, just because I work incredible good out of unspeakable tragedies doesn’t mean I orchestrate the tragedies. Don’t ever assume that my using something means I caused it or that I need it to accomplish my purposes. That will only lead you to false notions about me. Grace doesn’t depend on suffering to exist, but where there is suffering you will find grace in many facets and colors.”

The Westminster Confession of Faith summarizes what has become the Presbyterian position on this topic. A portion from Chapter 3, “Of God’s Eternal Decrees”.

“God from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.”
“Although God knows whatsoever may or can come to pass upon all supposed conditions; yet has He not decreed anything because He foresaw it as future, or as that which would come to pass upon such conditions.”

There isn’t room in a blog post to go through all the Scripture proof texts that were used to support this position. If you are curious, go to this link and head to chapter 3.      http://reformed.org/documents/wcf_with_proofs/

The author of “The Shack” does not seem comfortable with this degree of God’s involvement in the affairs of men. Instead he settles for the position that God has foreknowledge of man’s sinful choices, but they are not His choice, yet he is able to turn all of them for good.  This position is certainly more comfortable, in that it avoids the difficulty of explaining how God is then not the author of evil. Do I have an answer that is satisfying? No. Do I purport to know the secret counsels of God? No.  Young captured many of the nuances of this argument and does a better job than most limp wristed modern theologians, yet he still needs to wrestle with passages like Amos 3:  “Does a bird fall into a trap on the ground where no snare has been set? Does a trap spring up from the earth when there is nothing to catch? When a trumpet sounds in a city, do not the people tremble? When disaster comes to a city, has not the LORD caused it?”  

Both Scripture and William Young have a lot more to say on this topic than I can cover here. The Bible most famously confronts the problem of evil in the book of Job. Job suffered much more than Mackenzie. He too confronts God. The answer to Job's charges is not an answer, but a question:

“Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me. Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?”

In the end Job is forced to the same place that Young finally arrives – trusting in the person of God.