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Response to Simone Weil's "Human Personality."

From Simone Weil: An Anthology

"The chief danger does not lie in the Collectivity's tendency to circumscribe the Person, but in the Person's tendency to immolate himself in the Collective."

In this essay, Simone Weil, an early twentieth-century French thinker, deals with the place of the "person" within larger "collectives." I capitalized both nouns in the quote because the English word "person" is an unattractive cousin to the French personne, which can mean "anyone" as well as "that individual." It is not as synonymous with "individual" as is the English word. Capitalizing it may not quite do the trick, but maybe we can tweak it thereby into a Bigger Idea.

"Collective" is Weil's word for the group to which a Person attaches oneself, such as a political entity, corporation, church, union, etc. I capitalized it, too, to give it the same level of emphasis.

To put the quote into slightly more understandable terms, Weil is saying that it is less dangerous for a group (community, church, labor union, political party) to restrict (or ultimately silence) individual expression and freedom than it is for Persons to so completely devote themselves to the will of a group that they surrender their voice--and will--to that of the group. She goes on to say that the two errors are doubtless connected. In other words, the suppression of the Person by the group may be related to some level of voluntary self-supression in the Person. Either way, It is that self-supression that worries Weil so much.

With good reason. The statement of Weil's caught my eye because of her use of the term "immolation." The word is old, iderived from a Latin term for sprinkling meal on meat about to be sacrificed. In French, as in Latin, the word became synonymous with sacrifice. But because Weil, who died in 1943, did not live to see the Vietnam War, she would not have been familiar with the English connotation of the term as "self-sacrifice by fire." One particular Buddhist monk, protesting government policy in the war, poured fuel on himself and lit a match, burning hiimself alive. I remember seeing a photo of this self-immolation as a teenager and being horrified by it. Apparently I wasn't the only one. Malcolm Browne's award-winning photo may have single-handedly shifted our understanding of a word.


Self Immolation of Thic Quang Duc, photo by Malcolm Browne

I had this photo in mind when I was writing my dissertation in 1994 and included the term "self-immolation" as a way of describing an extreme level of self-censorship in social and public interaction.

All of us self-censor in social settings. Those who lack the ability of self-censorship in public are either small children (with horrendous questions or commentary in the checkout line) or have Tourette Syndrome, whose afflictees cannot always control what they say. But the rest of us have a lot of things going on internally at any given moment, much of which gets set aside when we engage in conversation or when we find ourselves speaking or performing in a public setting. Sometimes we might be shutting off the never-ending flow of inner psychological drama. And at other times, we may just choose not to say something we're thinking. The other day during commencement festivities, I was speaking with a person whose nose was flaming red. It was so red it was impossible to ignore. And all the while this person and I were speaking, a little monologue was going on inside my head: "Does he know? How can he not know? Why didn't he do something about it? Does he care? Good grief, that's red!"

Often when I am teaching a class or speaking in a larger venue, I see things going on in the audience, many of whom are under the impression that they are invisible, that beggar some sort of comment. But to tell someone to wake up or to put away the cell phone or stop doing homework for another class would have a negative impact entailing ripple effects that, to me, aren't worth the momentarily satisfying assertion of authority. Therefore, I self-censor.

But there is another level of self-censorhip that has more to do with Weil's statement than the normal social maintenance I've just talked about. We also self-censor in order to show our allegiance to certain ideas, ideals and groups. Whenever we become part of a group, whether it be as an employee, a disciple, an amateur enthusiast, an artist, or even as the natural result of a shift in status (the Country Club as opposed to the YMCA), we naturally learn the Language of the Tribe the better to fit in with that group. In learning the new lingo, two things happen. We acquire new terms, so that we can be perceived as using them smoothly and knowingly "I pwned you, freakin' newb!" And, conversely, we begin to shed, to prune, to self-censor terms that don't harmonize with the Tribal Tongue. In church, we sing "Wonderful Words of Life," not, "Your Body is a Wonderland."

All of which gives rise to a question: Is it truly a thing to be feared when someone self-censors to such a degree that they have, for all intents and purposes, eliminated themselves? To what extent was/is this happening for those adherents of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in El Dorado, TX (think uni-brow and antebellum peasant fashions)? Or to what extent is this happening with suicide bombers in Baghdad?


FLDS Yearning for Zion--

Certainly ideological self-immolation creates these extreme cases. But Weil's question, and mine, is concerned more with those who do not perhaps belong to some extremist sect in the middle of nowhere or in some terrorist training camp, but those who live and breathe among us who have allowed some Voice of Authority to silence their thinking, their reason and their ability to see beyond the confines of some mental prison they have created for themselves. Would this describe, for instance, the people who let their 11-yr-old daughter die of treatable diabetes last year because they thought God was going to heal her? Does this describe the senior citizen who sends her life-savings, pension checks and social security to a complete stranger who has persuaded her that this TV ministry is God's best hope for humanity?

Does it describe people on the political fringe who seem to live on the intellectual equivalent of a liquid diet--consuming only the kind of news, opinion and information that affirms a pre-selected point of view, right or left?

The answer to that last question, though it might surprise some, is no. While subsisting on the impoverished dogmas on the fringe does involve a harmful level of self-negation, it is not as absolute a condition as immolation. There is something inherently destructive and even deadly about immolating oneself for a Collectivity. The consequences are always catastrophic for someone.

But the fringe-dwellers, though heavily "negated," can and do function quite well in society, though typically flocking in groups around mega-personalities or ego-saturated agenda-setters. Yes, I am speaking of the likes of Rush Limbaugh on one side and Michael Moore on the other, both of whom left their senses years ago but whose ardent fans have failed to see the vacancy signs. The devotees of Limbaugh fail to realize he is neither conservative (nor Christian), and the disciples of Moore fail to see he is neither liberal (nor socialist). They are both super-inflated grand-standers carried along by the inertia of their bloated personalities, with no safe harbor in sight. Their adherents, while deceived, are in no real danger of capsizing their own lives by bombing clinics or getting handcuffed for civil disobedience. Most of their biggest fans are fully functioning members of society whose personal lives represent the best and worst of living in an affluent, unreflective culture. It is only their intellects they have chosen to deprive.

Nevertheless, the specter of intellectual and spiritual self-immolation looms--not that rank and file hard-liners such as those I just mentioned are susceptible. I doubt seriously that they are. Those trapped in an immolators' fate got there by other means, usually involving either an involuntary or semi-voluntary stripping down of their persons and psyches brought on by want or need. The benefit of affluent middle-class life is that, while it doesn't guarantee against a near-fictitious understanding of the world, it does tend to insulate against radical extremism. Be that as it may, we find ourselves compelled to deal with the immolators. They have a tendency to crop up from time to time, whether it's Jim Jones or Branch Davidians or FLDS in our backyard--or people who come over and commandeer or airlines. We cannot afford to ignore them.

Photo by Obama campaign

So it's a "historic" election.

The adjective is lame in this context. Every election is "historic," in that it happened in history. And in this case, calling something as monumental and memorable as the 2008 Presidential election merely "historic" is like describing Niagara Falls as "misty." It's an accurate description, but it doesn't quite get there.

I don't think I need to go into the broader reasons why minorities in particular wept openly for joy at Barak Obama's election. To paraphrase from Geico, even a caveman could get it.

What I want to address is a particular demographic that didn't get it before the election, and that is in danger of not getting it afterwards: white evangelical Christians. That means the majority of people I know and call my friends. I'm an evangelical--half Latino at that. But I voted for Obama. Perhaps it was the Latino half that made me do it.

As one demographic category after another logged in with sweeping gains for the Democratic presidential nominee, only three groups did not shift even a smidgen in Obama's favor: Working class white men, white women over 30 and... drum-roll, please...white evangelical Christians. This is all according to the accursed New York Times, of course. Check out Politico as well.

The Democrat managed to garner huge gains among minority evangelicals. He won the Catholic vote by a significant majority. And he took the under-30 white vote (male and female) by just as large a margin. But "older" evangelical whites voted the other way by a staggering 75%-25%.

That's three-quarters of the people riding around with fish symbols on their vehicles.

The Democratic candidate also made huge gains in all but two states in the Union. Those were Arkansas and Tennessee. I live in Tennessee. Lots of white evangelicals and working class white males in Tennessee.

I do know why these folks could not vote for Obama. I was on the receiving end of dozens of email forwards from several friends, all of which either (1) predicted Apocalypse with Obama's election (2) identified Obama as the Anti-Christ or (3) said he was best friends or had vital business dealings with the Anti-Christ.

Do not take those Anti-Christ references literally. I only mean them to indicate the extreme negativity of the content.

Other emails and personal pleadings all but said that a Christian could not, in good conscience, vote Democrat, much less vote for Obama. The day before the election, I heard radio declarations by pastors who said, "Pray for God's mercy, pray for God's will, pray that John McCain will be elected."

Good and honest people allowed themselves to be carried along a crest of dishonest and brutal character assassination--and thought they were doing God's will, much as the Crusaders did who slaughtered Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem a millennium ago. There was little anyone could say to persuade these good folks that what they were doing was actually un-Christian and wrong. And it's highly unlikely they would see it as wrong even now. They are more likely to wonder why everyone else couldn't see the burning truth contained in these forwards. They are wondering what in heck is wrong with the rest of the world.

The white evangelicals have something to fall back on, however. They are used to the rest of the world being wrong. Many of them, in the aftermath of this astonishing electoral result, will hunker down in their roles as a persecuted minority, much as they were doing in the 1960s as the birth of civil rights and fears of the cold war submerged the nation in turmoil.

I feel very deeply for my evangelical friends, especially those who are feeling bitterly disappointed and wondering, perhaps, if God hasn't pulled a fast one somehow. I have been there and I understand fully the emotions with which many are wrestling today.

It's hard not to feel hampered by the knowledge that there is little one can do to shake the conviction that abortion and homosexuality are the most vital issues confronting our nation. Trying to inform people that those two issues form a miniscule part of the policy and legislative issues facing us only makes them more upset. Trying to encourage them to embrace pro-active evangelical involvement in issues surrounding peace, the environment, poverty, health, human rights and even race gets one labeled as a liberal--even though the Bible clearly emphasizes them.

But younger evangelicals are leading the way. I'm humbled by the passion of these teen and college-age people, many of whom are still politically conservative, but find themselves working with shelters for battered women, boys and girls clubs, urban outreach centers, relief organizations and countless other places that put a human face on the issues.

With the election of Barak Obama, evangelicals of every stripe have a rare opportunity to be directly involved in redemption, restoration and reconciliation. A door has been opened that has been locked for as long as this nation has existed. This man is no messiah, but the act of electing him has shattered the lock on the door, the lock of senseless ethnic division. It would be tragic if, when all is said and done, evangelicals do not have the courage to walk through that door, even if it's in the company of some people they consider unholy. Those who sit back with a damning attitude this time may just damn us all.

One does not have to agree with the Democrats or with this president-elect to recognize the opportunities this election has created for evangelicals to fulfill their calling as salt and light rather than down-trodden malcontents. I really hope those who consider themselves God's people will begin to think that God's plan goes beyond making things so bad in this country that some Republican Reagan Messiah will come back to save us. It would be the most exciting thing to see evangelicals roll up their sleeves and pitch in to work with their neighbors.

At the very least, we could give it a chance.

Brand new video from an unmanned Japanese lunar mission called Selene (moon). Yeah--that's us. The Earth. All of us. Watch it through to the setting and think about how big we really are.

Everyone gets their fifteen minutes of fame, and Union University got more than that last week with the demolition of its campus by tornadoes. The news frolics on like a spoiled child, with stories about primaries, baseball scandals and Brittany. But the students and their families are still picking up the pieces at Union. Being at a similar institution makes me feel for them on the one hand and grateful on the other that the winds passed us over, though my eleven-year-old son spent an hour huddled in the hallway of his middle school.



Union has set up a Disaster Relief Fund if anyone would like to give.

Please keep them in your prayers. My father's five sisters and their families live in the area, but all of them were safe.

A couple of weeks ago, at the LAX airport, I was passing through security, all nonchalance. I had my shoes off, my belt off and all my loose change in a pocket of my valise. I've traveled enough to have a nice, tight little drill. I have a place for everything, all planned to a "T," including jacket, shoes, laptop, carry ons, etc. It works like a charm every time.

Only this time, it didn't.

"Bag check!" the security guy at the screening station yelled.

I sailed through the metal detector, no problem.

"Who's bag is this?" a security lady said, hand waving over my smallish piece of luggage, the one I carry with everything in it so I don't have to wait for baggage claim.

"That's mine," I said, curious. I had deliberately taken everything out of it of a bladed nature--even nail clippers.

"Grab your shoes and follow me," she said.

I followed her. As I was tying my shoes, she was going through my stuff. In no time, she had located and pulled out every liquid item among my toiletries--shaving cream, hair gel, deodorant, after-shave, even my contact lens solution--all the makings of that bomb I had been planning over the last 30 years. Busted.

"I'm going to have to take all these," she said to my stunned ears. What kind of absolute bull manure was this? This is someone's idea of keeping the nation safe, confiscating some academic fart's extra-hold orange hair gel? I could feel the heat rising along my hackles, wherever they are.

"Really?"

"Yes. You have to have transparent 3 oz. containers all in a transparent plastic bag separate from everything else."

Is that so they will make a better Molotov cocktail? I wanted to ask, but decided to keep quiet. I shrugged my shoulders. "Okay," I said. She dumped them all unceremoniously into a trash can while I zipped up my now empty kit and took my luggage back, a little lighter than before. I zipped up my fury with it.

And as I walked away, I said to myself, "Someone is going to pay. I'm voting straight Democrat on election night."

A few hundred years before Christ, Aristotle noted that man is a political animal. He was not being unduly sexist. The "master of all those who know" lived in a time when women didn't figure into the process much. Nancy Pelosi will be the first woman in American History to rise so high in the system. That's a lot of pressure.

But it's not the "man" part of Aristotle's claim that is of interest, but the "animal" part. Last night, we walked with the animals and talked with the animals, from CNN to FoxNews to the dried up local stations trying to look like CNN and FoxNews. It was a night unlike any in a very, very long parade of long nights. Last night there was a jailbreak at the national zoo.

Now, I'm not disparaging anyone here. I can't remember when I was so thrilled by the political process. Well, I can. It was 1980, the first time I ever voted. Last night was the first night since that time that I felt my vote really counted for something. Those of you who find politics boring, I'm sorry. Whatever anti-civic parasite got slipped into your brain by the "Dukes of Hazzard" when you were young, you need to be deloused.

Last night something magical happened. As the results from district after district came in, I could see the encrusted walls of a corrupt and bloated regime begin to peel, then to crumble, finally to come down like the one in Berlin. You might ask whether it hurt me, a lifelong Republican, to see this. You bet. But there's hope. The GOP juggernaut, grown hopelessly fat, abusive and greedy in its last decade, needed an enema in the worst possible way. Enemas hurt. Or so I'm led to believe.

As I voted the Democratic ticket, I wasn't voting for anyone in particular. I was voting my anger. As I punched the red button, it had "Eject" written on it.

And "Eject" is exactly what we (yes "we") did. Well done by you, America. You can wake up when you need to. I'm proud of you.

With Rummie finally gone and the followers of Abrahamoff and the teen molesters running for the hills, we are also witnessing a monumental change in the Democratic Party, one that, with the proper encouragement, could actually see an influx of genuine, caring Christians pouring into a vacuum of need. Rejected by the radical right wing of the party, these believers have wandered without a political home. They have reached out finally to the Democrats, and it will be very interesting to see what becomes of men like Jim Webb and Heath Shuler, strong believers whose political menu includes the idea that ethics, social justice and hard work are virtues to be encouraged through legislation, not paid mere lip service to or ridiculed as "liberal."

It will be interesting to see whether the entrenched Democratic leadership, the rabid warriors like Pelosi, Reid, Rangle, Conyers and others, will survive their success. Here's the first prediction that they will not.

Nevertheless, after years of disillusionment, it's just great to see revolution again. Let's just hope we don't repeat the lament of Simon Bolivar and find that, in the end, we have "plowed the sea."

Thanks for the comments here and elsewhere from the last blog. Rather than reply individually, I'll use this entry to add my own thoughts on the poem "The Future of Forestry" by C.S. Lewis. Thanks again to Insometry for bringing the poem to my attention.

Tolkien and Lewis (and other colleagues) were dismayed by the destructive advance of technology. Tolkien voiced his antipathy to this a lot louder than did Lewis. Both of them loved to take walking holidays out in the countryside (how I wish we had something like that today!) The scene in "Shadowlands" in which Jack Lewis didn't seem to know how to handle a phone at a country inn is so far removed from the truth, it was distressing (that was among the least of alterations to Jack Lewis exercised in the film).

Like many who responded, I love those last lines: "So shall a homeless time, though dimly/Catch from afar (for soul is watchfull)/A sight of tree-delighted Eden." Very powerful, I think. And I agree that those lines may contain the key to what Lewis may be saying--emphasize "may" since poetic interpretation is often subjective. Some argue that a poet's interpretation of their own work is not necessarily more vaild than someone else's. I wouldn't go that far, but forgive me if I use Lewis' imagination to prompt my own.

I think Lewis may have been suggesting that "contraceptive tarmac" has already stretched over our world--not so much literally as in our consciousness. We are so urban-suburban-techno-obsessed that we don't even realize that the Divine Creation is still there, surrounding us. We are so into our own creations--the things we are busy making and the things that someone else made but that frame and shape our daily lives--that the very concept of the Divine creation has become has sunk to the leve of an old story, a fairy-tale-like reality.

On a more cynical note, the Creation (that shrinking part that is independent of the human intervention derided by Agent Smith in "Matrix") has become merely recreational for us. This is not either implicit or explicit in the poem, it's my addendum). It has been placed in our calendar when we can fit it in, part of the machinery of our existence, no longer the compelling partners of our lives. We engage it on our own terms when we go for a hike or a picnic. And sometimes even then we corrupt it with our machines, taking our I-Pods and radios to blank out the untamed fact of nature.

Maybe I've read too much into it, but the imagery in this poem resonated very deelpy with me because of the many times when I have taken a walk or even gotten out of the car on the way to work and I've been taken by surprise, literally, by the sound of the wind in the trees, by the angle of the sunlight on the flowers or by the song of a bird on the concrete curb. The surprise so so palpable because it's like an invasion into the very fabric of my life which has drifted so far from seeing the hand of God around me, the Life that teems in every nook and crevice. And I feel ashamed for a moment or two that I don't see these things all the time. The shame lasts as long as it takes me to get into the elevator and push the button for my floor. By the time I unlock my office door and fire up the computer, the trail of my sincere and well-meaning thoughts has vanished like the exhaust from my Nissan Frontier.

I really don't mean to sound like a rabid conservationist here. That's not the path I want to take, nor is it where Lewis was going. It's a matter of perception, I think--how we see. I feel the need to have my eyes opened again, like the blind man referenced subtly in the poem. We all stand in need of divine dirt and spittle touching our eyelid so that, when we look again, we can see men as trees walking.

These thoughts are made more profound for me this weekend. I'm writing this from the campus of Pepperdine University, where I am attending the Reel Spirituality Christian film festival and conference. Film has the power to help us see differently. It's sad, in a way, that we use it so rarely for what it may have been created for in the first place.

Insometry quoted part of a poem by C.S. Lewis with the title above, but did not have the whole poem. It is reprinted in Poems (one of Walter Hooper's many editing jobs). I am posting it here because, as Insometry says, the poem probably comments on more than just the prospective loss of trees. And so I'd be interested in hearing what people think. Once again, this is C.S. Lewis, and not me--especially since people seem too frightened (or kind) to comment on my poetry, feel free to comment on Jack's, as he is gone and won't be offended. Actually, this is a terrific piece by him, when not all his poetry is terribly good, in spite of his aching desire to be thought of as a poet. He was jealous of T.S. Eliot in this regard, some say.

The Future of Forestry

How will the legend of the age of trees
Feel, when the last tree falls in England?
When the concrete spreads and the town conquers
The country's heart; when contraceptive
Tarmac's laid where farm has faded,
Tramline flows where slept a hamlet,
And shop-fronts, blazing without a stop from
Dover to Wrath, have glazed us over?
Simplest tales will then bewilder
The questioning children, "What was a chestnut?
Say what it means to climb a Beanstalk,
Tell me, grandfather, what an elm is.
What was Autumn? They never taught us."
Then, told by teachers how once from mould
Came growing creatures of lower nature
Able to live and die, though neither
Beast nor man, and around them wreathing
Excellent clothing, breathing sunlight--
Half understanding, their ill-acquainted
Fancy will tint their wonder-paintings
--Trees as men walking, wood-romances
Of goblins stalking in silky green,
Of milk-sheen froth upon the lace of hawthorn's
Collar, pallor in the face of birchgirl.
So shall a homeless time, though dimly
Catch from afar (for soul is watchfull)
A sight of tree-delighted Eden.

I have a little theory about this poem, but I'll wait to hear from others. For the curious, apparently a band has named themselves after the title. See Insometry and The Future of Forestry. I don't know anything about them, though.

Pop culture shifts like desert sand. The dunes are always changing but somehow seem the same.

At the Outback (the sad American-Aussie imitation, not the real thing) the other night, our family sat in a snug corner booth. We were dining on the bread and real butter, waiting for the food, and Nicholas, our ten-year-old, said or did something, I don't remember what it was, that prompted his mother to declare, "You must have learned that from your father."

Nicholas denied the influence.

"Ah," I said (in my best faux Master Po voice). "But you have learned many things from me, Grasshopper."

Nicholas, adding his own faux to my faux, fired back, "I don't think I've learned much at all from you, Cricket."

Leslie and I dissolved into helpless laughter. "You so deserved that," Leslie said when she came up for air, wiping tears.

"I don't get it!" Nicholas protested.

Some moments, as we know from our Master Card ads, are priceless.

"Okay," said the Immigration Official, looking over the desk at the bedraggled would-be illegal immigrant sitting in front of him. "Your name, please."

"John Smith."

"Yeah, right. Like I haven't heard that one before. "

"Really! I mean it! It's John Smith, I swear!"

"No need to swear, son. John Smith it is. What's in a name anyway?"

The prisoner looked only slightly relieved by this. The hulking guard was still appraising him as if he were picking out meat cuts.

"Okay," the IO said again. "The form here says you crossed over and entered this nation without permission, passport or permit. It says you resisted arrest. What exactly did you hope to achieve by this kind of behavior, Mr. Smith?"

"I just want to make a new life for myself, sir. Honest. Times are hard back home."

"Hard, eh?"

"Yes, sir! In the town I come from, you can only get ahead if you belong to a prominent family or if you have money already. But I kept hearing that over here I could make my own way, achieve my own fortune, and even worship the way I feel is right."

"Who told you all this?"

"Well, to be honest, it was the people who put the trip together."

"I see. Sounds like the sort of thing those money-grubbers would do. Tight-fisted skinflints, they sell you a bill of goods, take all your money and leave poor gullible souls like you out to dry. I wish I could get my hands on them!"

"I'm sorry sir. It just seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up."

"I believe you, kid. I wish I had a sack of corn for every Tom who thinks the same as you. I'd have a whole warehouse by now."

"Are you going to let me go?"

The IO looked at his guard, standing beside Mr. Smith with his big arms crossed. The guard shook his head slowly. The IO scratched absently at his chest for a minute or two, thinking.

"If I let you go, will you sign on the dotted line and promise not to be any trouble and not to come back?"

The illegal immigrant brightened with a huge smile. "You bet!"

"I'm gonna trust you on this, now. You won't screw me over, right?"

"No way!"

"Okay then. Sign right here."

The man, trembling with gratitude, stood to his feet and signed, in scrawling letters, "John Smith."

"Thank you, thank you, thank you!" he cried. "You won't be sorry!"

The IO nodded briefly to the guard, who snarled and showed the illegal out.

"That was a mistake," the guard growled when he came back.

"Nah," said the IO, pulling the form over to his side of the desk. "He looked pretty harmless to me. I think he was sincere. I think I scared him pretty good. Did you see his face?" And he laughed.

The guard just kept shaking his head as the IO pulled out his pen and signed, with a little satisfied flourish:

CHIEF POWHATAN

Got my I-Pod. Got my PDA slash Cell Phone slash Word Processor slash Video Camera slash Still Camera slash Computer. I am Plugged IN! Are you?

This wonderful device is an icon of the New Age—the Digital Age, the dawn of an era of connectedness, the sign of Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men. You know, the truly sad thing about when the angels sang about the birth of Christ was that one of the shepherds didn’t have one of these beauties. He could have recorded the moment then and there and podcast it on the Net … and then the world would have BELIEVED!

The really sad thing is that this device is not an icon of a New Age. It is the symbol of a New Dark Ages, the herald of a new form of servile oppression, the subjugation of precious liberty to new forms of tyranny—all of us here are sitting square in the middle of these things and we think that, on the contrary, we are enlightened and we are free.

Here’s an interesting story: In the seventh century after Christ, when Europe was in the throes of what we normally call the Dark Ages, an Irish monk name Columba was forced into exile as punishment for having waged war over, of all things, a copy of a book. Times have changed. It’s recorded that 3000 people perished in Columba’s battle. His judges told him not to return to Ireland until he had brought 3000 souls to Christ. In the course of his exile on the windswept island of Iona, history tells us that he and his brethren would bring many more than 3000 souls into the Kingdom of Heaven. But he never returned to Ireland.

In Thomas Cahill’s popular if not always accurate book, How the Irish Saved Civilization, he tells Columba’s story and that of many other Irish monks who worked hard at the conversion of barbaric peoples, bringing them the grace of Christ mixed with the native rock and moss of the British Isles. In the beautiful prayer of St. Patrick, we hear the strands of this Celtic Gospel, the first time since the Psalms of David that the rocks and trees cried out in worship to God:

I arise today Through the strength of heaven, Light of sun, Radiance of moon, Splendor of fire, Speed of lightning, Swiftness of wind, Depth of sea, Stability of earth, Firmness of rock.

I arise today Through God's strength to pilot me: God's might to uphold me, God's wisdom to guide me, God's eye to look before me, God's ear to hear me, God's word to speak for me, God's hand to guard me, God's way to lie before me, God's shield to protect me, God's host to save me From snares of devils, From temptations of vices, From everyone who shall wish me ill, Afar and anear, Alone and in multitude.

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise, Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.

I arise today Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity, Through belief in the threeness, Through confession of the oneness, Of the Creator of Creation. Amen.

The Celtic Church did far more than save souls. In one of the most remarkable happy accidents of all time, they also helped to save Western Civilization, the works of historians, poets, philosophers, theologians, astronomers, and mathematicians—the progenitors of what we do here at Lee University today. For while they were busy sharing a religion of the word, they became masters of words, and as masters of words, they craved more and more words for their exploration and understanding. They found the words they sought in copies of works that had been saved somehow from the wreck of the barbarian invasions of Europe. The very typefaces we use on our computers today are part of the heritage of those frozen monks shivering with their brushes and quills in front of their folios.

A mere hundred and fifty years ago, the advent of the telegraph led people to believe that the Golden Age was upon them. New information technologies would bring the peoples of the earth together. Peace would become more convenient than war in an era when far-distant cultures could communicate with one another anytime, any day. No one dreamed that the first massive practical use of rail transit and wired communication would be in a rash of nineteenth century wars that would use these new technologies to deliver destruction faster and smarter than had ever been done before.

Since the advent of radio at the turn of the last century, the rapid pace of information technologies has outpaced our ability to stay current. Only ten years ago, analysts were discussing models of sweeping technological change, allowing 30 years for what they called market saturation. Not so anymore. The almost complete triumph of digital technologies simply ignored all the new models and swept away the previous generation of electronic toys in a third of the time predicted. Now the adage is, if you bought it, it’s obsolete. In a matter of a few months, you won’t be able to give away your current Xboxes or Play Stations. No one wants yesterday’s technology.

And now, to paraphrase Greek philosopher Heraclitus, you cannot step twice into the same data stream. Since Tim Berners-Lee’s launched the World Wide Web, free to the world, information has become a commodity as commonplace as the condiments at McDonalds. The world of the web rejoiced. The Internet has ushered breathless masses into the new era of globalization, making billions of individuals a part of what Tom Friedman calls the “electronic herd.” Every person jacked into the Net, with or without wires, is now a stockholder in the welfare of the world, a newly empowered member of the kind of community Marshall McCluhan could only dream of.

And it is a dream, but to its underbelly clings a nightmare that no one anticipated. Who would have thought that the exponential proliferation of information would have the opposite effect from what was intended? Rather than sharing the rewards of accelerated enlightenment, the glut of knowledge unleashed on the world by the Net has turned what was once important knowledge into mostly irrelevant knowledge. Watch out—we have been Wikified. Ideas that were once as precious as gold are now like the little ketchup packets we collect in glove compartments, desk drawers and mini-fridges. It seems a shame to throw them away, so they’ll just sit there until they become rancid. Worthy ideas that once merited lengthy deliberation and studious contemplation are swallowed whole, digitized and reconstituted as cute quotes on Xanga and Facebook.

We are awash in a sea of trivia. But far from being a calm sea, the face of the trivial world confronts us every day with newer and more tempestuous manipulations created for our endless amusement by a trillion dollar digital entertainment media. Who wants to wrestle with the thorny implications of stem cell research when you can have NFL Sunday Ticket on a wide-screen liquid high definition TV display? Who wants to deal with the Middle East when you can become a Jedi Knight in near real-time adventures online with hundreds of thousands of others in a global gaming community complete with artificial economies, cultures and personalities? Who wants to hold local officials accountable when you can spend countless hours managing almost limitless music files, paring down several thousand selections to the essential several hundred you absolutely need to have on your multi-gig I-Pod? Who wants to deal with difficult relational issues when you can function on a whole new level of personality profile management by creating customized interactive space on the web where you can meet hundreds of new faces every day on your own best self-edited terms?

As mass media becomes more and more massive every day, in new and more user-friendly permutations of print and audio and video, the sheer work and time required to juggle one’s personal data becomes an ever more daunting challenge. In this room alone we represent countless unpurged emails, thousands of digital images, tens of thousands of music files, and an equal number of digital documents, all the flotsam and jetsam of this grand digital revolution. I myself have a link to a news service that affords me more than five hundred fresh news items every morning when I boot up my computer. It’s cool. There’s no way I could go through all of those in the course of a day, but somehow the sheer size of the selection makes me feel empowered. So we have all become hoarders, sitting on mountains of personalized data, and rather than sift through it for quality and beauty, we pile on more and more until that one item that may once have been precious to us becomes just another meaningless bulletin point on MySpace.

And where in all this shoreless ocean of data may we find the landmarks of the old knowledge once so carefully nurtured by the Celtic monks and powerfully unleashed by the printing press? No, the landmarks are not entirely gone. They have only descended far beneath the surface, like the legendary lost city of Atlantis. The canon of Western Civilization, including Homer and Cicero, Aristotle and Augustine, and even the Bible, has not been destroyed as it was in the old Dark Ages; they haven’t been burned with the libraries that housed them. No, they have simply been moved to someone’s hard drive, stored among countless other bytes of data that includes everything from where to get an airline ticket to how to self-diagnose whatever it is that’s ailing you.

The Canon suffers from a variety of negative weights, however. First of all, it’s so…yesterday, most of it a lot longer ago than the end of Classic Rock, and is therefore obsolete. Secondly, it is not interactive. It is not rated “E” for Everybody. Thirdly, it’s not inherently progressive, as is the technology we deal with every day. So we won’t be seeing The Western Canon II or III or X. No automatic upgrade is forthcoming. Fourthly, the questions raised in the Canon remain largely unanswered and demand serious contemplation and earnest, informed discussion. There is no instant replay to help us get the call right. And finally, the canon is very much tied to antiquated books employing languages that disappeared many long years ago or words with which we are no longer familiar. Shakespeare’s vocabulary of 20,000 words dwarfs our much more efficient current average of 2500 or so. A few abortive efforts have been made to bring elements of the canon onto film. But most everyone agrees that the book was better.

And lest one think I am bemoaning a culture-centric problem, anthropologists tell us that the advent of the Internet, with all its golden opportunities worldwide, has driven cultures everywhere to seek its beneficent provision and therefore to speak its language: Business English. The blessings of commerce bestowed by the Internet with one hand have partnered with the curse of culture-loss on the other. Long-isolated regions with rare languages and customs have to pay a heavy toll to be brought to the global marketplace—the fare is typically the loss of language and cultural differences. Many cultures are now preserved entirely in their souvenirs. Recent research has indicated that dozens of languages are dying out every year. Is this a bad thing? Some people say it’s the necessary price to pay to secure the Holy Grail of globalization. One person from India told me you can’t stop cultural change. It’s best just to let it happen.

So the shameless attention-getting metaphor with which we began, that of a New Dark Ages, isn’t strictly accurate, is it? Rather than less knowledge and information, we have a near infinity of more knowledge and information. Rather than less business and commerce, we see prosperity coming to the nether regions of the world. The backward portions of the planet have gained access to the rest of the globe, an access denied them for centuries. Surely these good things outweigh the bad? Perhaps they do.

So rather than dealing with a darkness upon which we might shine a light, our problem is more like that of Indiana Jones in the scene from The Temple of Doom where a priceless diamond is kicked onto a floor covered with hundreds of pieces of ice. Which is the ice and which the diamond? The Internet unfortunately doesn’t come with a pop-up guru to help us discern the gems from the garbage. The Internet is simply there, like a riverbed is there. And where oh where is the digital guide who will help us pan through the gigabytes to find the gold?

I could spend a lot of time talking about how the digital montage makes your life at college infinitely more difficult than it should be. The sad fact is that classes are an interruption in the otherwise surging daily data flow. College classes have become like annoying infomercials inserted into a perfectly good movie. College would be great if it weren’t for these annoying academic interruptions, right? The problem is that our classes just don’t carry any of the relevant qualities that would make them important to us. An instructor, unfortunately, is not just someone on a cell phone for whom you can pretend you are driving through a tunnel.

Some people have found a way to minimize the interruption. With snazzy new laptops that allow up to four screens to run at the same time, you can actually have Facebook, MySpace, your personal blog or email and a page for your notes about the Power Point lecture. With a little practice, you can switch in and out of these so deftly that the academic material is nothing more than a ticker running at the bottom of your life screen, like those on CNN and FoxNews, something you can check now and again if something important flickers by, like something that might end up on the test.

More importantly, what effect is the digital era having on our spirituality? Some churches, in an attempt to stay current and relevant, are offering larger auditoriums with theater style seating, musical numbers with full choir and orchestra, staged dramatic productions and a host of other amenities to bring in the seeker—including Starbucks. It costs a lot of money to compete with the rapid flow of mass culture. But many believe the money is well spent as mega-churches like Joel Osteen’s in Houston and Rick Warren’s in Los Angeles redefine what it means to go to church.

Did you know you can go to church on the Internet now? That’s right. Just visit http://www.worshiponline.com/ or http://www.virtualchurch.com/ and you can customize your very own worship experience in the comfort of your own laptop. No worries about getting up early on Sunday, no packed parking lot to negotiate, no fear of being late, no glares from fussy ushers, no whispers at your lack of church fashion sense. Just grab a cup of joe, slum around in your grubbies, belly up to your computer and let the blessing soak right in. Let’s just hope the Holy Spirit got the email to be there.

Here’s an interesting quote from an enthusiastic supporter:

As a renewed, vital church, we can go out into the byways of the Internet and invite these online seekers into fellowship with us, via church-sponsored chat rooms or electronic forums. We can equip them with electronic Bible studies to help them nurture a more vital faith in this virtual realm. The online church is unfettered by time or space. At any time, across the time zones, two or more Christians can gather in Christ’s name in a chat room and have church. One participant may be in his pajamas and munching on a breakfast bagel, while the other, several time zones away, may be logging on at the end of a long day. With the Net, it doesn’t matter. The boundaries of time and space are transcended. Church on the Net is not a weekly or twice-weekly occurrence. Church can occur at any time, at any place. (Andrew Careaga is the author of E-vangelism: Sharing the Gospel in Cyberspace)
http://www.next-wave.org/dec99/embracing_the_cyberchurch.htm

Christian pollster George Barna has predicted, very controversially of course, that the digital impact on the traditional church will be cataclysmic. In his recent book Revolution, he claims that upwards of 50 percent of traditional churchgoers will find alternative kinds of worship experiences in the next 20 years. Many current pastors fiercely dispute Barna’s claims, not surprisingly, even as they podcast their church services, spruce up their websites and develop sophisticated marketing strategies to keep their numbers up. While Barna’s prophecies may or may not be fulfilled, one thing is certain—if the church 20 years from now looks as different as today’s church does from how it looked 20 years ago, it won’t be your daddy’s church anymore.

But let’s bring all this down to a more important level, to you and me today, to what it all means. Only ten years ago when I first came to Lee, we actually communicated by hard copy memo, a relatively small percentage of faculty had computers in their offices, cell phones were pretty exotic, with antennae sticking out of them. I-pods were a dream not yet realized. When you left class, you actually talked to the people in the hallway and when you walked across the campus, you said hello to people on the sidewalk, who either said hello back or, if they were introverts, walked past you stiffly pretending you weren’t there.

Look at us today. As we leave chapel, look around and count how many people whip out their cell phones, walking relatively blindly along, rendering that little nod and non-smile of a smile when you try to greet them. How many others will have those wonderful white cords growing out of their ears? How many will have their laptops cracked open within fifteen minutes, checking their MySpace and Facebook?

Is all this bad? The research is not all agreed. Some are saying that all the new forms of connection weaken our traditional relationships and create a host of shallow, surface relationships. In other words, as we have digitized our music, our photos and our videos, we have digitized our friends and we have found a way to store them in databases with their names and faces and a nice link to their page where we can drop in a nice little “love ya, thinkin’ about ya” message to stay in touch before me we move on to the next dozen or so who merit similar attention.

Other research says its great—that the quality of some relationships is actually improving, that people who tend toward shallow relationships now have the benefit of stronger ties.

I won’t pretend to tell you I know the answer, though I do, of course, have my suspicions. What we do know, without needing a big research project to tell us, is that a world in which data flows ceaselessly and indiscriminately is a world full of noise. It’s like trying to have an intimate conversation in a room where music is blaring or where other people are chattering loudly. How many of your conversations this week have been interrupted by a cell phone?

How does this affect our most important relationships? Yes, the relationship with God and the relationship with ourselves?

I want to leave you today with three startling and revolutionary recommendations. They are startling because they go against the flow of the culture. And they are revolutionary because that’s a great marketing term and it just sounds better. Here they are: No.1 – Take Time to Unplug. No. 2 – Listen to the Silence. And No. 3 – Let’s get Carnal Again.

Okay. 1. Take Time to Unplug. The Bible talks about a variety of fasts—where you deny yourself food, disciplining your body so you can focus on God. I strongly believe that Electronic Media has become a much greater distraction for us today than food. It’s certainly a whole lot more pervasive and demanding on our time and energy. So I recommend that we find ways to take regular electronic media fasts. We do this in our home every so often, when things get frenetic and tempers are flaring and people are saying ugly things to one another. You’d be surprised the calming effect that takes place when you just turn off a few things, especially the TV and the video games. Somehow the constant noise has a way of rubbing against your psyche, like a splinter under your nail. Turning it off can allow you to breathe and relax.

Now don’t get all alarmed. Some of you are actually terrified by this thought. The delirium tremens are actually kicking in as I speak. But you can take small steps, baby steps, at first. Take a few hours, for instance, and just turn down the volume of your digital life enough to realize that there are trees and flowers and birds and wow!—even people around you. Trust me when I say the effects of this kind of self-denial are positive.

The best thing about pulling the plug for a while is that it places you in the drivers seat. You are in control of your Media and not the other way around. Believe me when I say that this makes a real difference. It can help you build muscles for keeping yourself from passive, useless consumption—a subject for a whole different sermon.

Secondly, Listen to the silence. There’s a wonderful quote in Chaim Potok’s The Chosen. In it, one of the characters, Danny, tells his friend Reuven: "You can listen to silence, Reuven. I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I hear it."

One of my favorite passages of scripture since the time I was a teenager is found in Isaiah 32:

2 A man shall be as a hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the storm, as streams of water in a dry place, as the shade of a large rock in a weary land.
3 The eyes of those who see will not be dim, and the ears of those who hear will listen.
4 The heart of the rash will understand knowledge, and the tongue of the stammerers will be ready to speak plainly.
15 Until the Spirit is poured on us from on high, and the wilderness becomes a fruitful field, and the fruitful field is considered a forest.
16 Then justice will dwell in the wilderness; and righteousness will remain in the fruitful field.
17 The work of righteousness will be peace; and the effect of righteousness, quietness and confidence forever.
18 My people will abide in a peaceful habitation, in safe dwellings, and in quiet resting places.

I think it is still true, as it was with Isaiah, as it was with Elijah and as it was with Jesus himself, that we find God in the quiet places, in the silence, where that still small voice can finally break through all the mess of information clutter that assaults us day in and day out. And so I encourage all of us to try to find that silence, to do what we can, not only to remove ourselves occasionally from all the noise, but to take advantage of quietness to make contact with the most important person of all, with God. There’s nothing like it to restore a thirsty soul.

Finally, let’s get carnal again. What do I mean by that? We are used to thinking of carnality as having to do with our flesh natures, with the natural man that is opposed to the Spirit of God. That’s all true. But in a literal sense, the word carnal is related to the same word as Incarnation. We are physical beings. We were not meant to be these cerebral entities floating in solution with wires coming out all over the place sending our thoughts here and there to other cerebral beings floating in solution. And when God decided to redeem us, he didn’t send a broadcast or an Instant Message. He sent His Son, in the flesh, to suffer and die.

What does the Incarnation mean for us in the Digital Age? It means we have to be more intentional about face-to-face dialog with people. You may find this idea laughable, but it wasn’t funny when a man in Korea literally played himself to death at an Internet café last year. It’s not funny when people allow themselves to be snared into Internet affairs or caught in the web of a whole new crop of Internet addictions. It’s not funny when a corporation as reputable as Radio Shack decides it’s okay to lay off 400 employees—by email.

Another way of being the Master of the Medium rather than the other way around is to talk to flesh and blood people, to let them know they are important by not taking that cell phone call or by not staring at your computer screen when they are talking to you. I know someone who broke up with a guy in part because he wouldn’t take time away from his video games.

So get carnal. Don’t go all cyber on the rest of the world around you. Let people on the other end of the cell phone know they have to wait in line behind the people right in front of you. And let the people right in front of you know that they matter—that includes your instructors as well as your fellow students.

In closing, think for a moment whether or not the Medium is the Master in your life. If it is, then chances are that God is on call waiting for you.

Jennifer politely disagreed with some of my comments on Waking the Dead so, in the spirit of inquiry, I thought I would dedicate a blog to my response to her response.

Jennifer: "I think the main thing I get from John Eldredge is that impassioned existence is the point, or it's at least good." I have no argument with impassioned existence. And I agree that people who have dropped into the trap of a grindingly boring and unhappy life need to find a way to look up. But this is one of those American things that I'm on about. Most of the world population finds itself in hopelessly disadvantaged situations. For them the message of living an impassioned existence is a little beside the point. I've been in the homes of people who make less than a tithe of my middle class income and watched rats scurrying around on the sidewalk between their unpainted cinder blocks and those of their neighbors. And yet they spent more than they should have to serve me and my wife as honored guests in their home. They were the ones who taught me that Christianity is not so much about finding a way to get juiced up about my daily walk with God. It's about finding God in the little, mundane things that I despise. That may spell a passionate existence in the end, but its source differs pretty radically from Eldredge's.

Jennifer: "Why is it "selfistic" to affirm human goodness? Are human goodness and God's glory mutually exclusive?" These two questions are straight arrows. Jennifer also mentioned traditional Augustinian theology, which looms over us as one of the sources for the doctrines of original sin and predestination. Eldredge goes to great lengths to prove that the human heart is good, that God created it to be good, and that an understanding of this concept can revolutionize our thinking. While I certainly agree that God created us in His Image and created our hearts to be good, I also have to agree with Aug. and so many other orthodox theologians that the Fall did something radical to the human as a being. We are now selfistic creatures--self preoccupied, self-obsessed and self-indulgent. Even our goodness is self-pleasing. Eldredge wants to work from that fallen condition, essentially denying that the fall has blighted us to the extent that it has, and find a source of inner strength and encouragement for us there. A full response on this point would fill a book in itself, but to me Scripture is both clear and adamant, from Genesis throughout, that the first thing that must happen in Redemption is the death of Self. Christ's death is not our death, as Eldredge claims. It is the model for our death, a death that we must still enact. Nothing in the New Testament frees us from that awful and difficult responsibility. Are human goodness and God's glory mutually exclusive? Unfortunately, yes. Human goodness is the sacrifice of Cain. The sacrifice of Abel understands where we truly stand.

But once that sacrifice is made, the age-old evangelical concept of the New Creature is one that is brimming with hope. Is it just that people are tired of old truth, like the old brand of Corn Flakes? I'm not sure.

Jennifer: "What do you mean by attitude adjustment Christianity? How does Eldredge advocate that?" A Christianity that makes its focal point a shift in attitude about one's adequacy is what I call "attitude adjustment." A lot of what we call worship choruses are in the same genre. A boat load of inspirational preaching on television does the same thing. It's about concepts like "getting the victory," "taking back what the devil stole," It's Joel Osteen. It's positive psychology. I don't want to suggest for a minute that positive psychology is bad. Some of it is pretty great and helpful stuff. It's a hand up in a hard place. But it's not the heart of Christianity, and it shouldn't be made to seem as though it is.

Jennifer, "From what I know, the purpose of myth is basically to paint a portrait of the world we find ourselves in, and to illuminate the human role in it." Another wonderful point, about which multiple volumes have been written. The best single book on it is Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces. One one level, what myth does is provide narrative frameworks for our deepest questions and most fundamental shared experiences, both natural and supernatural. On another level, myth is where the transcendent reaches out of the distant past and touches us, like a mysterious hand playing our heartstrings and letting us know in a deeply intuitive way that we are not alone. Myth is like "deep calling unto deep." Because of that, the concept of "living mythically" is on a par with putting on a Spiderman costume. If Spiderman inspires me, that's all well and good. But the mythic appeal of Spiderman is much broader than that. If I reduce it to my personal situation, it is no longer mythic, it is, well, my little Spiderman party. I once spoke with a man who thought he was Batman. People kept stealing his utility belt, he said. He was much closer to a mythic personality than any of us will ever be.

I hope this was helpful and in no way condescending.

Have you ever actually listened to the lyrics for REM's "Losing My Religion?" I was listening to the car radio the other day and a few of the words stuck out to me and it occurred to me that the dozens of times I have heard this song and/or seen the video I never actually listened the words, which is by itself an alarming indicator of what we allow media to do to us. However, I found the lyrics to be startlingly true to life--remembering, of course, that the expression "losing my religion" does not mean losing one's faith, it is a Southern colloquialism that means "losing my composure". I heard an interview with Michael Stipe where he thought it was funny how so many people thought the song was about loss of faith. Anyway, in case you are interested, here are the lyrics. I hate to say it, but the song says more than a lot of Christian ones I've heard. I know I have been in this very spot more times than I care to remember:

"Losing My Religion"
by REM

Life is bigger
It's bigger than you
And you are not me
The lengths that I will go to
The distance in your eyes
Oh no I've said too much
I set it up

That's me in the corner
That's me in the spotlight
Losing my religion
Trying to keep up with you
And I don't know if I can do it
Oh no I've said too much
I haven't said enough
I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try

Every whisper
Of every waking hour I'm
Choosing my confessions
Trying to keep an eye on you
Like a hurt lost and blinded fool
Oh no I've said too much
I set it up

Consider this
The hint of the century
Consider this
The slip that brought me
To my knees failed
What if all these fantasies
Come flailing around
Now I've said too much
I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try

But that was just a dream
That was just a dream

I just finished reading Waking the Dead by John Eldredge. Actually, I listened to it. My father sent me the unabridged audio book for my birthday this summer and I just got around to popping it into the CD player in my vehicle.

I have to emphasize "unabridged," for, while I know my father loves me, listening through the whole nine hours was, in a word, agony.

Now please don't go off on me here. I am sure there is a legitimate audience for this sort of thing--a needy, suffering, self-obsessive, low-self-esteem audience. And while I may also be all of those things, I am not part of the audience.

What disappointed me about this book is that it fails to rise above the hundreds of thousands of pages of other "Christian" self-help books for whom the greatest aspiration in life it to be "set free" or "liberated" into some sort of "deeper restoration" or deeper something or other. I hate to say it but it's so hard for me to take these books seriously. And it's a shame, because it is evident from the gushing sincerity of the prose that while Eldredge may be making a nice living at this sort of thing, he seems to be doing so with the best of intentions.

But it's all rot. Well, maybe not all of it, but the "heart" of it, if I can play with the word Eldredge uses about a thousand times. The book's "theology" focuses on attitude adjustment Christianity. And sadly, it reeks of the sort of American synchretism that subjects the sweeping, grand scope of Christendom to a narrow, selfistic and even materialistic worldview patented by middle-class, middle-aged, morosely bored Americans.

The book is liberally padded with the use of extensive, and I mean extensive, quotes from "mythic" stories like Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, Phantastes, The Matrix, The Wizard of Oz and many others. As I listened, I began to get the feeling that the true audience for this book was the jaded mid-life crisis man who has never read a book and whose friends thought this would be a good place to start.

I really do hate to be so hard on this important work. It's important because it's faddish in the American church. Two things bother me about it. One is the message that our heart is good and that the impulse to sin is not really from us, but from "the enemy." While I would agree that we bear the beautiful image of God, I would flatly disagree that this concept of image is synonymous with our "heart." Redemption is not so much about finding the God-goodness already within us. It is about coming out of our selfistic paradigm and into His. I don't see that Eldredge's formula does anything more than keep us where we are while helping us feel a whole lot better about it.

Secondly, Eldredge talks about connecting with your "mythic" self. As a mythic scholar, I have to shudder at the manner in which he first correctly defines the term and then proceeds to hijack it for alarmingly anti-mythic ends. Ultimately, we are to fantasize (my term) the heroic figure with whom we identify (there's a ridiculous session in which a small group encourages each other by calling one another Aragorn and Arwen and Joan of Arc, etc.) Eldredge feels he is God's WIlliam Wallace.

I love movies and epic and myth as much as anyone, but the direction these things go in this book, while they may work as great emotional bandaids, are not really redemptive. They are enabling, and to me that spells cheap grace.

What Eldredge does not do, as so many others have also failed to do, is take his pain head on and realize that it is not an aberration, it is an integral part of the redeemed life. This is the part of the Gospel that has been buried--not any nonsense about finding one's true heart--but the gritty, responsible dawning of an understanding that Christ's wounds are real, and they didn't disappear after the resurrection. The test of faith for Thomas was to touch those wounds, the pain that says that Christ is Victor, Christ is Risen, but his stripes were a very real part of the journey. What makes us think that "taking up your cross" means that we get to carry a cardboard facsimile?

Anyway--I did like what he had to say about mega-churches.

Take me on, people. I await your reactions.

Chaim Potok has got me thinking again. A stunning line toward the end of The Chosen caught my attention: "You can listen to silence, Reuven. I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I hear it."

The passage rocked me because I thought the whole thing about silence was my secret. A foolish conceit, obviously, but Potok put it so precisely and so beautifully it brought tears to my eyes.

What in the world is he talking about?

I was walking in such a silence the other morning, moaning for the upteenth time about God and His Great Distance. Forgive me for being honest here. I know this sort of thing doesn't bother everybody and I'm not out to shake anyone's faith, but since I was a small child I've been plagued by this besetting preoccupation with God's apparent (I must emphasize apparent as a subjective idea) removal from so much in life. The lament is similar to that of many characters in Potok's novels who cry, "Master of the Universe, where are you now?"

And then I read The Chosen again, after more than 10 years, with its startling account of a rabbi who chooses to raise his brilliant son "in silence." In other words, in order to tame the boy's cocky intellect and help him find his soul, he removes his fellowship from his son. That way, through suffering, the boy would come to understand other people's suffering and reach out to others rather than become utterly preoccupied with himself.

Some of the characters in the novel find the treatment tyrannical and inhumane, but in the end, Danny Saunders nods his head when asked if he will do the same for his children. "If I can't find another way," he says.

And as I was walking and lamenting to myself, I had to pause and wonder whether or not God is raising his children in the same kind of silence and for some of the same reasons. Bear with me, all ye who see yourselves as lambs in the arms of the Good Shepherd. Just give it a moment's thought.

Okay. Maybe it's not the same for everybody. But I do truly understand the quote at the beginning of this blog. My greatest epiphanies have come from listening to silence. I don't do it as often as I should, of course, but I can't think of a time when I have stopped to listen that I haven't heard something remarkable and/or life changing. I began hearing it when I was four years old. Please don't think I'm insane because I'm not (I hope not!) Nor am I a Buddha or Lao Tse. I'm not sure that there is anything particularly special about hearing the silence.

But it does give me hope, because if I am right, and if this is how God does choose to operate with people like me, then I'm okay with that. Mystery solved and no more lamentation. I know that the thing for me is to engage the silence more often and more intentionally. And I'm okay with that, too.

If this means nothing to most of my readers, I do apologize, but if it means something to anyone, let me know.

Disclaimer: I'm one of those nerdy freaks who read the King Arthur stories in at least three versions before the age of 16. I've since read the Mabinogion, original stories by Nennius and Gilgas, stuff by Geoffrey of Monmouth and just about anything I could get my hands that goes back as far as the 5th century.

Having said that, I have longed for a film that captured either the magic or the historicity of the legends--either go for the fairy tale side of things or strip it down to its historic roots.

Some brave efforts have been made. Excalibur from the late '70s still stands as the best of the film versions. That's not saying much, unfortunately. The two fantastic roles in that film are Merlin and Morgana, played brilliantly by Nicol Williamson and Helen Mirren . But all the other roles are negligible.

Other films have been absolutely hopeless or have done too much violence to the original stories to be called genuinely Arthurian. They represent more someone's view of how they wish the stories had been, which I find foolish.

So, the television miniseries from Britain and the U.S. have been okay, but nothing to write home about. The British did a historical Arthur back in the late 80s, but it was far too low-budget. They also did a Holy Grail miniseries, but it was horrifically boring. Recent Merlin dramas and the Mists of Avalon, based on novels, have been too revisionistic. (None of this includes the animated stories or the excellent Python comedy.)

Two travesties--First Knight and the more recent King Arthur need hardly be mentioned. I did not expect much from Richard Gere (gag). But the second one surprised me. One of the most published Arthurians on the planet had been consultant (John Matthews) and simply helped them botch it badly.

So I refused to go to the theater for Tristan and Isolde. fearing another mindless rip off. Nevertheless, I got it on Netflix and was surprised to see a movie that actually treated the original story with some respect. The tale of Tristan and Isolde is as old or older than many of the Arthurian stories and stood independently of them well into the 12th century, when the French got hold of it and packaged it with the Aurthur legend, making Tristan a knight of the Table, even though he wasn't really.

In the oldest available Celtic tale, Tristan, King Mark's nephew, meets Isolde when she heals him from his wounds after a duel with Malfort. They do not fall in love (as they do in the film). Tristan goes back to win her hand for King Mark of Cornwall, succeeding in the effort, knowing full well what he is doing, though in that story he fights a dragon for the King of Ireland. In the original story, they accidentally drink a love potion and so begin their affair. Later versions of the story would turn Mark into a villainous coward who sneaks up behind Tristan and murders him out of vengeance. But in the original, Mark lets them go. The ironic twist in the oldest version is that Tristan and Isolde can't make things work, so he sends her back to Mark! He then goes off and marries another woman, something he comes to regret. In the end he is mortally wounded in battle, Isolde comes to save him but arrives too late. She dies of grief. Lovely ending.

The film pieces together a fairly faithful rendering of the original story, which I find impressive on its own. They decide to make King Mark a sort of Arthur stand-in, however, and so make the Tristan-Isolde pairing on a par with the Lancelot-Guenevere romance, which is a serious plot flaw. They did it to lend greater consequence to their sin, which was a good idea, but poorly executed. Mark was only ever king of a tiny fragment of Britain, as the so-called "King of Ireland" was only ruler of a piratical tribe of western Irish. All the stuff about uniting "England"--a name that didn't exist at the time, was both anachronistic and unnecessarily grandiose.

So, while the film actually does respect the legend, by tying in too closely with an already well worn Arthurian motif it squandered its chance to be original. The historical perspective is ridiculously off, but the historical setting, costuming, set design and other details are actually quite good. If James Franco had looked a little less like he was on drugs and a little more testosterone charged his role might have had more punch. Sophia Myles does a fine job and Rufus Sewell is, as always, fantastic.

If you like sad romances (emphasis on the sad) with a little swordplay and intrigue, you could do worse than Tristan and Isolde.

Here we go, back to the ever popular movie reviews.

Cars
The most recent Disney-Pixar release didn't look like much to write home about from the trailers. The whole talking car concept just didn't grab me like The Incredibles, a film which remains one of my all-time favorites. I believe it should have got Best Picture over Crash. Crash was a great film, if transparent, but The Incredibles was, well, greatness itself.

So Cars took me by surprise. A number of reviewers have looked down their noses at the clichés and predictability. All films use clichés, as does most art. Aristotle said as much in the Poetics. What makes an artwork different is whether or not it finds a fresh way to hash over the same old stuff. What, the themes in Star Wars were original?

You'll have to decide for yourself whether you think Cars succeeds in lending a fresh perspective. James Bond has a magnificent chase scene in every film. It must. It's part of the franchise. One doesn't go to a Bond film wondering, "Will it have a chase scene?" One goes to a Bond film wondering, "What is going to be chasing what and how loony is it going to get?" It's part of the fun.

That being said, not all hammerings of clichés are equal.

Nevertheless, it wasn't the story that was surprising, though I found it stood up to scrutiny. No, it was the song by Randy Newman, "Our Town," which one critic needled was one of the whiniest songs he had ever heard. The lyrics, which I cannot find, were a pretty faithful rendition of those prophets who have been screaming all along that progress often leaves disaster in its wake.

Ivan Illich, in Tools for Conviviality, noted that multilane highways and interstate systems were inherently destructive to community and to the very notion of people living together in harmony. That book, which I read in grad school, had a profound effect on me. It seemed to echo Tolkien's cry against the onset of machines. Miyazaki has been making the same protest in his art.

Anyway, I did not expect to have such a gem sitting at the heart of a fun kids movie. I'm not sure how many people caught just how profound the message was (and is), but here's hoping that some progress can be made with progress itself.

I also thought the division of auto racing into its "good" boys and "bad" boys with their concurrent fans and sponsors was interesting. And cheers to the wonderful cameo by the guys from NPR's "Car Talk," Tom and Ray (the rusty sponsors). That was a great stroke. Paul Newman, an amateur racer himself, made a fantastic Obi Wan. And the veiled reference to the immortal Steve McQueen was a nice touch as well.

Superman
It's a bird. It's a plane. No--it's Jesus Christ. Or some other Messiah, anyway. People are making a lot of the apparent Christological references in the film, but hang on, people. It's just art.

Byran Singer is a talented individual with many fine credits, including X2 and the Usual Suspects, not to mention a host of other popular projects. He is not, however, though some have claimed it, a Christian. He is Jewish and he's gay.

The original creators of the Superman character were Jewish. Their idea came from their own messianic Judaic tradition. Many Christians forget that the Messianic concept is actually Jewish. The mythological super hero is as old as Gilgamesh, however. Or older, which means it's been with humans for about as long as there have been humans to think about it.

I have a personal theory that the whole Super Hero concept, the ancient one, came from memories of great kings who perished in the worldwide natural disasters we sometimes refer to as the Noahic Flood. When the near-extinct human race emerged from those disasters, they remembered their former days of glory with tales of gods and mighty heroes that would form the basis of mythologies and crystallize into Homer's epics. The Super Hero part of Superman derives from that strain.

The messianic side derives from Judaism, plain and simple. And since Christ has become the Western cultural metaphor for the messiah, it makes a lot of sense to marry some of his attributes to the Super Hero mythos of old. The result captures subconscious strains with which millions of people worldwide can identify without really knowing why.

As I mentioned in my research on Mel Gibson's Passion, the suffering hero who triumphs in the end is a well-worn filmic trope. The irony in Gibson's film was that the Christ-figure was Christ himself rather than a substitute hero, as it is in so many other movies from Billy Budd to The Matrix.

Singer brings the themes together sensitively in this latest digital incarnation. He does something visually with the character in his blue and burgundy suit that makes him look less real--an interesting touch that may or may not have been intentional. The obligatory thrashing the hero takes--a theme so common now it's not questioned--is completed by a resurrection reminiscent of the old Jesus movies. Balance that with the romance between the hero and Lois Lane and you have the likes of Dan Brown jumping up and down screaming, "I told you so!" (The whole Jesus and Magdalene thing--though if Magdalene looked like the sultry Italian Monica Belucci, more people might be scratching their heads).

All of this is so much fun because people take it so dang seriously, but the truth is that good art uses good metaphors. Singer's approach is almost good--the film gets bogged down some on the romance bits. The action sequences are pretty intense, if not always believable. And Spacey as Lex Luthor was an inspired choice. Since Suspects I have always thought Spacey played his villains best.

A great moment, however, is the brief bar scene, created solely for the purpose of showcasing the bartender, played by Jack Larson, who played the young Jimmy Olsen in the old TV Superman with George Reeves. Moments like that make movies so much more fun. Pulling Eva Marie Saint out of mothballs to play the supe's mother was also a nice touch.

In the novel Gilead, old preacher John Ames says, "A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.” I have heard a very few men refer to their fathers as a best friend. I have spoken to far more who found their fathers to be both a role model and a stranger. And many others have indicated that the word “father” carries no warm feelings for them at all.

I almost lost my father recently. Contemporary medical knowledge saved him from what would have been certain death a mere generation ago.

I got the frightening news while I was still in Austria. Mom sent a hurried email that said something to the effect that she had taken Dad to the emergency room with some internal bleeding. The doctors were running tests. She made it sound as if it were nothing serious, but I know my folks pretty well and I could tell the off-handed tone glazed over something much more troubling. I called from Salzburg.

Mom’s voice was trembling. She was struggling to put a brave face on things, but the news was pretty dire. Dad had lost half his blood supply and they had already given him four units with more to come to keep him alive while they tried to figure out what was going on. In my mind’s eye I could see my Dad lying on some hospital bed, tubes plugged in everywhere, eyes closed as he drifted in and out of consciousness.

“You want to talk to him?” Mom asked, intruding into the cloud of my fears.

“Is he conscious?”

“Oh, yeah, sure. Here he is.”

“Dad?”

“Hey there,” Dad said, his voice strong, his tone easy. You would have thought he’d just walked in from changing the oil in his Saturn.

“How do you feel?”

“Oh, I feel okay. I’m a little weak, but I’m not feeling any pain. The doctor says I sprang some kind of leak, so they’re going to see what they can do about patching me up.”

I swallowed hard, laughing at Dad’s nonchalance. I knew darn well you don’t trickle four units of blood into someone who’s got a minor cut.

“Well, we’ll be heading out there as soon as I get back to Atlanta tomorrow,” I said. “So don’t go anywhere, okay?”

He didn’t. By the time we made it to the Dallas area, driving as fast as we dared, he had been given ten units of blood. Dr. Shovelin finally performed surgery, (Surgery is evil!” he told us) removing an inflamed piece of intestine, and Dad was even able to make it home for Father’s Day.

The episode—and its timing—put me in mind of the quote from the old preacher in Gilead. Dad spent most of my childhood on aircraft carriers in the Pacific and “the Med” as the sailors called the Mediterranean Sea. He wasn't able to see me until I was six months old.

Over the years, Dad and I have fought manfully through the fog of incomprehension our early distance created. We’ve had our good days and our not-so-good days. I try to understand him. He does the same for me. There was a time when neither of us tried, when we played a bitter, sharp-edged game familiar to many fathers and sons. Those were unhappy days.

But as I sat at the computer in far away Salzburg and caught the barely hidden distress in mother’s message, the thousands of miles vanished and the carefully spackled holes in our relationship simply lost their relevance. I am my father’s son. That fundamental elemental aspect took over. And I was very afraid. It was a fear over which I had no control. Nothing I could tell myself would help. I could only strive to drive it all out of my skull, almost betraying the fact that my father was struggling to live, until I could be there and see him for myself.

And when I did see him, it was hard to hold it together, especially when surgery finally happened. After surgery, I saw him the way I had imagined him before—helpless on a hospital bed, hoses everywhere, his mouth dragging open, his eyes fluttering. My heart started pounding and I wrapped my arms around myself and prayed desperately.

Then as he recovered, more rapidly than anticipated, the fears drained slowly away, like Draino working its way through the pipes. And as I sat in the room with him, we talked of this and that, nothing too serious, as is the way of men. No great magical shift took place, at least on the surface. But beneath the banter and the obligatory awkward pauses, I prayed a prayer of thanks.

On this Fathers’ Day, God granted the gift of life. Nothing else could come close.

thank you india
thank you terror
thank you disillusionment
thank you frailty
thank you consequence
thank you thank you silence

Yeah, that's Alannis Morrisette. The refrain has been going through my head the entire week we've been here at Salzburg. It's random and it's stupid, but I thought you should know. Oh, you thought I was going somewhere profound with that? Ha. Nope.

I need to wrap up the Salzburg experience because we are leaving at the very crack of dawn tomorrow, as in 5 am, to catch a plane to Frankfurt and then to Altanta. It will be good to be home again. 

I was asked to provide a response to the seminar and here, in a nutshell, is what I said:

"In 1492 Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue. He set out to prove that the world was not flat. Actually, that's not true. Every educated person of Columbus' day knew the world was round. In fact, a Greek named Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth to within a few miles 250 years before Christ. The flat earth thing is one of those unfortunate myths that get perpetuated by the educational system. Columbus actually set out to prove that the planet was a lot smaller than Eratosthenes thought and that he could sail west for a few days and hit India.

I think Columbus' voyage is a good analogy for what we have experienced at the Salzburg Seminar. There are two kinds of ignorance. There are things that we know we don't know. And there are things we don't know that we don't know. Columbus knew that he didn't know exactly where India was. But he didn't know that on the way to India there was something else in the way. And when he hit that Something Else, a whole new continent, he didn't want to process the new information, so he called it India and called the inhabitants Indians.

Here at the Seminar we've been given the chance to discover altogether new things. Some of it was stuff we knew we didn't know about. But some of it was stuff that we never dreamed we didn't know about, and as a result it has changed us.

I'm fond of the writings of Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. He spoke of something he called 'The Narrow Ridge.' It's the place where strangers meet and try to understand one another, a place where they balance their ideas against each other, being willing to take risks, to lose something in the exchange even.

The Narrow Ridge is not a comfortable place. And Salzburg has been wonderful, but it hasn't been comfortable. But it's only on the Narrow Ridge where the grandson of someone who died in Auschwitz can be friends with the daughter of a Wehrmacht soldier who fought on the Eastern Front. And that's just one of the things we have seen here.

At first we were too swift to look at the new material we confronted and say, 'That's India!' But we need to take time to be quiet rather than to comment, to absorb the new things and let them happen to us before we happen to them.

So where do we go from here? How do we become global citizens? Is it by being more politically active or is it by being more thoughtful, more contemplative. It's all of these things. A great quote from this seminar by Michael Dexnar was, 'Being a citizen means that you have the ability to interfere with the course of history.'

Thanks to everyone for a wonderful seminar."

When I get home in another week or so, I will post some pics. Thanks to all of you who have read these interminable blogs so patiently and have commented here or on my other forums. I know I have some regular silent readers in faraway places. Don't be a stranger. Come to the Narrow Ridge. I'd love to hear from you.

So.

I just finished reading My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok. I was reviewing it as a possible freshman reading for the fall term.

Chaim Potok was the author of The Chosen, the celebrated book about the two Jewish boys from different cultural backgrounds who come to understand one another's worlds. Asher Lev has a similar theme, but sounds a more anguished note in its attempt to answer the question of how--or whether--one can be deeply religious and passionately artistic at the same time.

As young Asher enters the world of art from the sheltered Hasidic environment in which he has grown, his mentor Jacob Kahn asks him, "Do you have any idea what you are doing? You are entering the world of the goy (non-Jewish)." Hasid and goy don't mix, Kahn tells him. "You had better become a great artist," he says. "Because that is the only way to make up for all the pain you are about to cause."

Asher's father, a man sold out to the work of rescuing observant Jews from Soviet persecution, cannot understand his son's compulsion to create art. The rift between them grows as the two of them become more immersed in their separate spheres of existence. When they try to talk about it, they find they cannot because they no longer share a common vocabulary. The only thing that continues to bind them is traditional prayer.

Asher's art eventually takes him to a point of no return as an observant Jew who is sent into exile by those who feel he has crossed boundaries beyond which they cannot go.

The parallels between Asher's experience of Hasidic Judaism and my personal experience of conservative Christianity are unnerving, but I won't go into any detail on that right now. The larger issue I want to discuss is that many Christians face this same tension between what is perceived as the "work of the Kingdom" as I've heard it called and the work of the world, or anything that isn't strictly ministry. The dichotomy is a conservative Christian version of Hasidim and goyim. The Christian who wants to be an artist faces the stigma of having his or her entire reason for existing defined as "foolishness," just as Asher Lev did in Potok's novel.

In one telling passage, Asher's artistic mentor shakes his head at the young prodigy's faithful adherence to Sabbath and daily prayers. "I talk to God in my art," Jacob Kahn says. "Then that is also prayer," Asher replies. Kahn scoffs and says it's not the same.

But isn't it? May we not address God in our creative work, whether it be with images or music or word-art? Is not the creative work of a Christian a sweet-smelling sacrifice to the Creator Himself? And does it cease to be so when it breaks through into the real and the dark and the dangerous and strays beyond the boundaries of Sunday School faith?

What of those who adhere to an emerging trend, what I like to call Bohemian faith? Many Christians I know are reaching back 40 years to a "Jesus People" retro-fit, a kind of tee-shirt and ripped jeans faith, or a fixation with Christ for the Young and Restless. It's harmless as far as it goes. Doubtless they'll all wake up when they hit 35 and realize that life is about something entirely different than they thought it was and they'll get some serious redefinition. In the meantime, they'll do a lot of hit-or-miss art trying to express the Truth About the World.

Like Asher Lev, I want Art to be about Truth, to be obsessed with it, steeped in it, reeking of it. Asher's mentor encouraged his student to guard himself against being a whore, a sycophant or an artistic liar. This, to me, is the real locus of the tightrope for the Christian artist. The issue is not really whether or not one can be a devoted Christian and a great artist. The issue is really whether one can be both and keep one's hands from idols.

As Kierkegaard notes in his Journal, I have had so many thoughts chasing each other through my skull and so little time to capture them in writing that it seems they are vanishing before I can wring any good from them.

Oh for Dumbledore's Pensieve!

Mortality is a theme that drifts my way often. Several notable deaths, including that of our business professor Frank Walker, tipped me in that direction for a couple of weeks. I'll keep those thoughts to myself for now. Most of those who read my stuff aren't as interested in this topic as I seem to be.

I got a chance recently to stop everything and be in silence for a solid hour in nature's lap. I had not realized until then how devastating the hell-for-leather pace of busy-ness had become. Stopping for that one hour allowed me to breathe regularly and listen to the drum of my heartbeat as it gradually slowed down from its frenetic riot.

The last time I could remember being silent was three years ago in Italy, on the rocky hillside overlooking Assisi. I was waiting alone at 5 a.m. for the Tuscan sunrise. As I sat on a spot St. Francis himself must have prayed from many times, a couple of stray Persian cats came and sat a few feet from me. They didn't let me touch them, but they didn't run away, either. I named them Chastity and Poverty, after two of the three Franciscan vows, and considered them to be messengers from the spirit of the saint.


A couple of days later I got the rare chance to sit alone in the Florentine chapel where Dante met Beatrice. This tiny, all-but forgotten sanctuary sits off an obscure alley. No one came in the entire time I sat on the old wooden pew and soaked in the soft glow of the candles. Beatrice, who died young and became Dante's literary muse, is buried there.

My rushed journal from the time doesn't record any profound thoughts from either experience, but I do remember how each left me feeling whole again.

The same can be said for this last experience outside Kingston, TN, at Whitestone, a lovely bed and breakfast tucked away in the east Tennessee wilderness. I walked slowly along the white picket fence and admired the rain-washed scenery as low gray clouds scudded overhead. Round droplets clung to the clover as I picked my way over it. Swallows made me envious of the ease with which they spun around on the chilly wet air.

I came over a hillside and surveyed the broad open face of Watts Bar Lake. About a quarter-mile from the shoreline sat a little island. Instantly there came over me that sensation that C.S. Lewis called Sehnsucht, that intense longing for something Beyond, that flirtation with the Divine that drew him on toward redemption.

The feeling dated from my childhood whenever I would see an island like the one at Watts Bar. I would wish I had a canoe or a boat to row out and explore the island, to revel in its unknown mysteries. The sweet intensity of the desire would be almost overpowering, probably proportionate to the unreachable nature of the goal.

Now my silent wanderings had left the door open for a rushing return of that feeling, a stranger to me for so many years. And now, as an adult, I could greet my old friend and actually see her for who she is: Sophia, the echo of God's spoken Word, the Logos of creation.

As Lewis noted, it was the longing itself that was precious, not the fulfillment. The attempt at fulfillment could only disappoint because the work of trying to grasp that which cannot be grasped will inevitably miss the mark and soil it with fallen sweat. Taking a boat and going over to the island would actually be the best way for all its unreachable mysteries to dissipate, like the vapor that curls up from the lake at sunrise.

I'm sure this has application elsewhere, but I don't want to hurt my brain thinking of exactly where.

This time, I savored that ache and celebrated the truth of what it represented, the hint of my little hand buried in God's as he whispers, "What have I wrought?" And by simply accepting that moment, I reached a point I had never reached before, a sense that what I thought I was missing had been given back to me a hundredfold.

And somehow, I'm not sure just how, it set something free inside me.