Pastor Yusef: spritual tests

Many attempt to flee from their spiritual tests, and they have to face those same tests in a more difficult manner, because no one will be victorious by escaping from them, but with patience and humility he will be able to overcome all the tests, and gain victory.

Yusef Nadarkhani
Lakan Prison in Rasht
2/June/2010
(currently facing possible execution in Iran)

Quick-review: Love Wins

I have written a much longer thing about this book for other purposes, but really just want to make a few much briefer comments here.  This is partly because it won't be a "quick" review if I don't, and partly because of Jon Dyer's timely article "Let not many of you presume to be bloggers" which was posted at the height of the blogging frenzy about 'Love Wins'.

What is Bell trying to do with this book?  I think it's this: soften the edges of the 'traditional' view of judgment so as to make the Christian faith more appealing to non-Christians and less problematic to Bible-believers.  And if we're honest, who has not been tempted to do so?  We're all looking for the way to make it more...well, comfortable.  But from an evangelical position, such a wish cannot be the dominant force in how we look at what the Bible has to say.  Which leads to a number of concerns about the book - all of which I give as provisional, in that it is possible I have not read the text closely enough, and perhaps were Rob Bell here to comment he would show me how I have erred.  However, as it stands right now, what bothers me is this:

1. It's pretty dull.  It promises to deal with the biggest question facing humanity, but manages (for me) to make that unexciting.
2. Contra Tim Keller's maxim that we should present the opposing view as well as we possibly can, Bell presents the 'traditional view' as something incoherent, positing concepts that are complementary or held in tension as competing and irreconcilable.
3. On the plus side he does ask some useful questions which probably many Christians struggle with and we need to develop better answers for them.
4. The most infuriating thing is how checking out his argument is routinely obscured: no footnotes, no interaction with other interpretations, not even complete Bible references.  This is very worrying when bearing in mind younger Christians who might struggle to followup many of his (controversial and sometimes tenuous) claims...
5. ...which is very important for when he fires off a magazine of verses to prove a point but without context - eg.in pulling together many texts to show God's justice is always corrective (p.85ff) he largely draws on verses promising restoration after the Exile: texts which neither refer to eternal punishment nor even, by and large, to individuals who were corrected, as most of them died in Babylon.
6. Is he a universalist?  Maybe, but having given several reasons for presuming most people will be saved (ie.  hell is an offputting idea, God's love beats any other criteria for deciding how God might react to sin, God's judgments are always restorative) he then leaves the door wide open to assume pretty much everyone will be saved, maybe even post-mortem (p.76).   Or maybe not (p.115) as, having led us up to edge of universalism, he basically says "But who knows?  And we don't have to decide".
7. There are also, sadly, many unqualified assumptions and interpetations of Biblical texts (pp.26, 51, 85 for example) that are occasionally quite odd.
8. Again, on the plus side, he does eventually emphasise the cross - but even here in a way that suffers from vagueness.

I'm really loathe, in light of the outrage its publication caused, to be harsh - and indeed have cautioned against hard responses to Rob Bell on several occasions.  But it really isn't a great book.

Interestingly, my wife pointed out a paragraph in an unrelated blog written by someone who has moved away from the 'traditional' view.  It's interesting because of its gut-reaction factor: the writer was concerned about the apparent kidnapping of a small child that had just occurred:

And I cried in the kitchen, pouring out cereal, and (my husband) quietly admitted that it is in these times that he really, really wishes there was eternal, conscious punishment, the worst of any hell, for men like this because anything else seems not-enough for what that poor boy might be going through, for even the act of making a child ask for his mama and then keeping him from her is a sin beyond any I can fathom.

Hell is a hard thing to contemplate, and like CS Lewis many of us would remove the doctrine if it lay in our power to do so.  But that is hardly the last word or the only deeply felt and authentic response to it, as that quote shows.  And it certainly isn't the way to govern how we interpret the Bible.

Spiritual father

In Christianity Today Brett McCracken writes, "In order to remain relevant in this new landscape, many evangelical pastors and church leaders are following the lead of the hipster trendsetters, making sure their churches can check off all the important items on the hipster checklist." Including:

"Show clips from R-rated Coen Brothers films (No Country for Old Men, Fargo) during services.

"Sponsor church outings to microbreweries.

"Put a worship pastor onstage decked in clothes from American Apparel.

"Be okay with cussing."

I'm not against cultural awareness and engagement. For most people today, pop culture is their culture, so it can be an act of love to learn it. But to be a spiritual father means you are definitely not Wholly Relevant. Dads are, by definition, older and not hip. This one hurts. I spent much of my forties not wanting to accept my age, not wanting to lose my place among the popular and the trendsetting.

However, to pursue relevance is to lose your spiritual power. When all you read, watch, and listen to is what everyone else is reading, watching, and listening to, you have nothing to say.

Chris, a young guy in my church who moved to Manhattan for grad school, explained to me: "The highly relevant pastor is bro'. There's certainly a place for pastors to be in tune with culture and to be relatable. But where do I find a man of God who will nurture my spiritual life? That's what's I need. Relevance is easy to find. But when I stumble in that same old sin that I keep slipping in, I need someone with wisdom and maturity to go to. It's fine if that person also happens to know about some great new indie bands, but in those moments, I need something else. I need depth."

Leadership

Quick-review: Cry the Beloved Country

Standing in a century-long line between Uncle Tom and To Kill a Mockingbird, Cry the Beloved Country explores similar territory but with a distinctive voice.  Unlike Mockingbird, it does not leave a warm glow as was generated by the way Harper Lee communicates a Southern childhood in spite of the harsh reality of racism.  This is not a failure of writing, but a necessary effect of a different kind of book.  Here there are real, fallible, loveable characters (Kumalo, Msimangu, Jarvis) but the canvas upon which they are painted is vast; it is the size of a nation.  And the tragedy of that nation's peoples is too complex and great for a 'happy ending'.  Alan Paton was writing soon after WWII and the solution to South Africa's problems were still half a century away, and so there is no sweetening of the tragedy encapsulated in the novel.  But for all that, it is suffused with hope, even though its fruition is admitted to be so far off as to be unknowable.

In 1948 an ageing Zulu parson travels to Johannesburg to search for his sister and his son who, like millions of others, left the devastated countryside and crumbling tribal culture (both victims of complex factors, but predominantly exploitation by the white minority) to find a new life.  His journey of discovery reveals perhaps the most significant character in the book, South Africa itself, and the complexities of a divided nation, with a fearful minority in control, and a devastated majority looking for hope.

A truly profound and moving book, written in a style which initially takes some getting used to, but also helps to produce an immediacy of effect.

Wangerin: pay attention! (the blessings of affliction)

Surely it's high time -  isn't it? - that we pay as much attention to the blessings of a long affliction as we do to the pain for which we curse it.  Please: it's not a man's peculiar interpretation or a woman's particular gift for a long-suffering patience which enables each to live the sickness better than another person does.  It's a faith available to everyone.  (Though there always is, of course, a learning curve.)

Pay attention!

In the Lakota tongue:  wachinksapa yo! - which meaning is closer to "Be attentive" than to something we do sporadically.  Be ever in a state of attention.

Wangerin, Letters,  p196-7

Wangerin: no longer rushing into the future

I don't look forward so much any more, dashing to grasp the future.  I look left and right.  I've the Time, you see, to scrutinise all that is. And what is companions me.  The trees can't list their roots and move.  A single motion fills a season.  Well then: let me abide by them awhile.  My toes, my roots.  A good rain can linger almost forever.

The shorter the time, the vaster my scope.

Wangerin,  Letters, p.195

Wangerin: little krill and death

I find myself somewhat sorrowful to lose the riveting focus which death;s likelihood provides a sick old man.  Now, together with my resprouting hairs, there rushes back a sea-tide of all the little things that hector daily living - the krill that clouds and crowds the waters once the whale is gone.  Perhaps that indicates another benefaction which I ought to draw from the previous seven months: stick, Wally, to the sense of the proximity of death in order to recognise (at some spiritual and perdurable level) how little are the little krill - even as little as dying (always, always) is near. Here.

Letters from the Land of Cancer, p.124

Wangerin: Robert Siegel's Rinsed with Gold

I'm very old fashioned (actually, Milton would take issue with this and accuse me of being modern a cheap) but I do prefer it when a poet has spent a long time working in rhyme to the finished item.  So it has to be really striking for me when he doesn't.  Robert Siegel hasn't hear, but his imagery has such rhyme I found this wonderful:


Let this day’s air praise the Lord—
Rinsed with gold, endless, walking the fields,
Blue and bearing the clouds like censers,
Holding the sun like a single note
Running through all things, a basso profundo
Rousing the birds to an endless chorus.


Let the river throw itself down before him,
The rapids laugh and flash with his praise,
Let the lake tremble about its edges
And gather itself in one clear thought
To mirror the heavens and the reckless gulls
That swoop and rise on its glittering shores.



Let the lawn burn continually before him
A green flame, and the tree’s shadow
Sweep over it like the baton of a conductor,
Let winds hug the housecorners and woodsmoke
Sweeten the world with her invisible dress,
Let the cricket wind his heartspring
And draw the night by like a child’s toy.

Let the tree stand and thoughtfully consider
His presence as its leaves dip and row
The long sea of winds, as sun and moon
Unfurl and decline like contending flags.

Let blackbirds quick as knives praise the Lord,
Let the sparrow line the moon for her nest
And pick the early sun for her cherry,
Let her slide on the outgoing breath of evening,
Telling of raven and dove,
The quick flutters, homings to the green houses.

Let the worm climb a winding stair,
Let the mole offer no sad explanation
As he paddles aside the dark from his nose,
Let the dog tug on the leash of his bark
The startled cat electrically hiss,
And the snake sign her name in the dust

In joy. For it is he who underlies
The rock from its liquid foundation,
The sharp contraries of the giddy atom,
The unimaginable curve of space,
Time pulling like a patient string,
And gravity, fiercest of natural loves.

At his laughter, splendor riddles the night,
Galaxies swarm from a secret hive,
Mountains split and crawl for aeons
To huddle again, and planets melt
In the last tantrum of a dying star.

At his least signal spring shifts
Its green patina over half the earth,
Deserts whisper themselves over the cities,
Polar caps widen and wither like flowers.

In his stillness rock shifts, root probes,
The spider tenses her geometrical ego,
The larva dreams in the heart of the peachwood,
The child’s pencil makes a shaky line,
The dog sighs and settles deeper,
And a smile takes hold like the feet of a bird.
Sit straight, let the air ride down your backbone,
Let your lungs unfold like a field of roses,
Your eyes hang the sun and moon between them,
Your hands weigh the sky in even balance,
Your tongue, swiftest of members, release a word
Spoken at conception to the sanctum of genes,
And each breath rise sinuous with praise.

Let your feet move to the rhythm of your pulse
(Your joints like pearls and rubies he has hidden),
And your hands float high on the tide of your feelings.
Now, shout from the stomach, hoarse with music,
Give gladness and joy back to the Lord,
Who, sly as a milkweed, takes root in your heart.

Quick-review: Letters from the Land of Cancer

In 2005 well-known Christian author (and professor and pastor) Walter Wangerin was diagnosed with cancer.  And complex, difficult to treat, no-cure cancer.  He did what, I suppose, many of us who think through our pens, would do: he started writing.  So he wrote letters to friends and family periodically, from diagnosis through treatment, declining strength and ultimately to the point when the tumours stopped getting worse.

This realism, the real-time reflections and Wangerin's genuine ability to write (face it, not all Christian writers can write) give the book a revealing, thoughtful and yet calm ability to explore cancer, life, death, hope, the medical system, the past...and to see from inside a man's head what I have had to watch, in my 'professional' capacity, from outside on far too many occasions.

What do I take away from this book?
- how communicating with those who care about you, to know they are there and listening, is a vast help in horrendous times
- the importance of living in the now and how imminent death restores that childlike ability to dwell in the moment
- and that when the moment comes, when we are now facing what we at least believe to be the end, what we feared we would fear, how we feared our faith might fail, that we might dwell with constant panic - does not necessarily have to be the case at all.

Word-clouds

My friend told me of word-clouds
So I went outside to look:
The sky was crinkled with pages,
Wallpapered with a book.

The light fled and rain fell from
the Gutenberg dome aloft,
so I waded back to my house
through commas and full stops.


(composed today in 5minutes, so excuse any corner-cutting)