Tag Archives: hope

Inside Story

Posted on August 23, 2015 | Leave a comment

young-woman-readingPerhaps it is the border between summer and fall, those dangling days at August’s end and September’s beginning, that brings to mind the way we crossover, emigrate into a story as we turn the pages or swipe a screen.

A story invites us to cross a border and enter a magical mystical land, a promising, tantalizing world worthy of exploration and delight. It is a private estate, a personal place, intimate, shared at most with one other voice – the author, maybe also a reader reading aloud. A good story creates what John Gardner called “a vivid and continuous dream.” Novelists are urged by their coaches, instructors, and mentors to avoid at all costs waking the reader, pulling her to the surface of the dream. We want to draw her deeper and deeper into the dream of story, into its heart, to feel its heartbeat.

Those who write stories (authors), those who make those stories available (publishers), and those who promote those stories (critics, media), control our culture. So in the twentieth century, in the postwar euphoria of peace and the explosion of pharmaceuticals, with the resulting sexual revolution and its triumph of narcissism over sacrificial love, stories embraced the worldview of self, filling the vacuum left with the fading of faith and the dilution of belief.

Such despair lived in earlier fiction to be sure, but postwar peace and rising living standards pushed the need for God to the boundaries of our culture, banning religion in art and academia. Somewhere in the sixties and seventies Christians lost the culture, primarily, it appears, because they lost their creative voice in the public square. Christians no longer offered “a vivid and continuous dream,” a hopeful story for the present day. The dream had been replaced by a nightmare or, at the least, sleeplessness haunted by ghouls.

Today memories of that good dream are (almost) only memories. Even so, it is never too late to redeem the time, to recognize story’s power. For in a story, particularly one set in the present, we can create a dream not only vivid and continuous, but one we can breathe life into. And only when Christian story writers – novelists for the most part – return, crossing the border into our culture and bringing with them the culture’s rightful inheritance, its faith-full characters and plots of hope, only then, will our public square sing once again.

And so as I watch Christian faith and practice pushed to the borders of society by an overweening Supreme Court or other misguided fiat, I see a clear and present danger to churches and their related institutions (hospitals and schools) as faith is expelled from the public square. It is a world that countenances the selling of baby parts, that traffics in pornography, that is drugged by violence and sexual deviancy. It is a world that silences speech and poisons academia. It is a world that pushes propaganda.

Let us embrace stories of hope, stories that remind us of the definitions of love, marriage, and family, of our humanity, of who we are as creatures of the Creator. Let’s encourage authors to create heroes who challenge us to be brave and selfless, characters we can emulate, and character we can demand from our leaders. Let us call lies lies and truth true when we see and hear them. In such stories we can live for a time, waking from the dream as better men and women, people with a clearer vision.

As Christian writers, let us infuse the goodness and love of Christ into our culture. Let us rebirth our world, through story’s power. Today, we are nearly aliens in our own land, nearing the borders.  It’s not too late for publishers and promoters to lead us back into our nation’s heart. Authors cannot do this alone. All we can do is create the dream, the vivid and continuous dream of heaven, and invite readers in, one at a time, into the magical mystical land of story to turn the page or swipe the screen, to dwell happily for a time.

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Civilizing Civilization

Posted on August 16, 2015 | Leave a comment

booksThis last week I packaged my latest version of The Fire Trail, my sixth novel, and put it in the mail to one of several publishers. It felt like sending a child out into the great wide world. 

Much of my work has revolved around the idea of truth, how we find it, how we recognize it, how we know it’s opposite, falsity. And so the search for what is real and true is a theme of The Fire Trail. It is a search that many have made before me, explorations recorded in the literature of mankind, going back to the first scrolls. 

The mind of man has long journeyed into and through the great questions: What is right and what is wrong? What is love? What is goodness and beauty? How do we live together peaceably, respecting one another’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? We call the result, our effort at creating a civilized culture, a civilization. We have come to realize that man is not born civil or civilized, but must be taught and trained and encouraged in the art of selfless love for his neighbor. He must proffer this hope to his world, offer a way forward. 

With the ebbing of religious faith and thus the ebbing of hope in a future, a tsunami of despair has flooded our culture. We are doomed, many say. So it was with great satisfaction that I noticed this last week several optimists, those hope-sayers, who countered the pessimists, those doomsayers. 

Lord Lawson, Chairman of the Global Warming Foundation, writes encouragingly in his recent review in the Wall Street Journal of Ronald Bailey’s The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century. He describes Mr. Bailey’s list of current scares: overpopulation, the end of natural resources, global warming, genetic modification. Mr. Bailey challenges such scares by pointing out that global living standards are higher than ever and population trends will actually be reversing; genetically modified grain (a GMO), produced by a better breeding technique, feeds the hungry worldwide; fossil fuels are far better for the poor than wood fires, and the contribution to climate change minimal. These visions of hope have triumphed, he notes, because of free market capitalism. 

Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, weighs in with “The Green Scare Problem” (Wall Street Journal): “Making dire predictions is what environmental groups do for a living… they exaggerate… Pesticides were not causing a cancer epidemic…, acid rain was not devastating German forests…, the ozone hole was not making rabbits and salmon blind.” Remedies for scares can be costly and lethal, particularly in regards to GMOs, climate change, and nuclear power, the current fears. 

The truth is that mankind throughout the Western tradition has been inspired and driven to solve problems as they arise. We have used our minds to help one another live better lives, to survive poverty and cure disease. The fears of doomsayers Paul Ehrlich (over-population) and Al Gore (global warming) are without substance and even harmful with their necessary policies, especially hurting the world’s poor. We have every reason to believe that we may be hopeful about the future, not only of the planet, but of human survival. 

That is, if we continue to be inspired and driven to solve problems, if we continue to search for truth and recognize it when we see and hear it, if we continue to teach the rich tapestry of the history of the Western world to the next generation, that tradition of civilizing inquiry. But with the loss of this “civil” education in high schools and colleges, we may have every reason for unease. With the loss of religious faith – and mystery and wonder – we may have reason to lose faith in mankind. We must equip the next generation with what works and what doesn’t (history) and with inspiration to create (the arts). 

John Agresto writes in the Journal about “The Suicide of the Liberal Arts.” While he recognizes the value of an education that will train the student for the workplace, he believes the student must also be trained to think, to ponder the meaning of life, the pursuit of truth, the definitions of beauty and goodness. The classic liberal arts curricula aimed to do this, to inspire us and “teach us how to marvel.” And when we marvel, we admit we are less than marvel-ous, we are not gods, that we have something to reach for outside ourselves. We become creative. We use our minds to help others. Mr. Agresto writes: 

“Some (literature) holds up mirrors labeled ‘courage’ or ‘friendship’ or ‘smallness of soul’ to see if we can see ourselves there… books… can show us and lead us to examine creativity and desire, love and treachery, giddiness and joy, hope and fear, and facing death… (we) ponder law and justice, the nature of innocence and causes of moral culpability, forms of government and the ordering of societies that can preserve and refine our civilization.”

And so as I handed my weighty manuscript, sleeping in its slick Priority envelope, to the postal clerk, I said goodbye and wished it well. I prayed it would find a home, that it would be midwifed into the world of readers, birthed onto white pages or tablet screens. I prayed that my little novel, a (suspenseful) love story set in Berkeley in September 2014, would be my small offering to our culture of despair, a way forward on a path to a more civilized society, one of truth, beauty, and goodness, and one of safety and sanity.

I prayed that we keep well tended that fire trail protecting civilization from the wilderness.

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Saints and Heroes

Posted on April 27, 2014 | Leave a comment

With the canonization of Popes John Paul II and John XXIII this Sunday morning, many have written about sanctity and what it means not only to the Church but to the world, both secular and sacred.

As Peggy Noonan wrote in her Saturday “Declarations” (Wall Street Journal, April 26-27, 2014):

Saints are not perfect, they’re human. A saint is recognized for heroic virtue in the service of Christ, but saints have flaws, failings and eccentricities. It is because they are not perfect that they are inspiring (italics mine). They remind you what you could become.

So these two priests, elevated to the papacy, had their failings like all of us. But they impacted our world in powerful ways, good ways, ways that made the world safer, better. Pope John presided over Vatican II, saying he “wanted to throw open the windows of the Church,” and soon reform followed, freshening spirits and opening hearts. Pope John Paul presided over the fall of communism embodied in the Soviet regime responsible for the slaughter of over twenty million people of faith and freedom.

Daniel Henninger, also in the Wall Street Journal, observed that institutions are the pillars of society, holding the parts together. These institutions, I would add, such as the Catholic Church, are able to raise up and nurture heroes, men and women who become the face of social goodness, cultural cohesion. We ordinary folks need tangible images, icons, to understand our world and our place in it, who we are, who we are meant to be. The Church gives us those images in her saints. We learn through the saints how to practice our faith, how to be truly human.

Other institutions – governments and schools – once gave us heroes to emulate; not so much today with the decline of the study of history, the decline in the ideal of charity, the decline in giving of oneself for another. Despair works to replace hope, nihilism tries to destroy faith, selfishness seeks to banish selflessness. Anarchy threatens the rule of law as every man looks out for number one and the resulting disorder trumps order. When we lose the stories of goodness, these good icons, these holy heroes, these great men and women of the past, we become smaller for it, we slowly lose ourselves. As W. B. Yeats wrote after the horrors of World War I, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” What would this great poet write today?

This is not to say that there are not islands of faith and practice, of law and order, communities of belief where heroes sacrifice for others.  It is good when our world recognizes these lives of love, and even better when we do not forget these saints as we travel in our own journeys through time.

And so history holds civilization in its palm, protecting it by telling its stories again and again to its children, stories about who we are and who we are meant to be. It is difficult but hopefully not impossible to put things back together in a world disdainful of Judeo-Christian belief, faith, and freedom. It is difficult but hopefully not impossible to create a public square where the pillars of civilization may once again hold things together, may once again rise from strong historical foundations to build a house not of sand but of stone, build a strong future together as a free and good society.

So I am so very thankful for the sanctity of these two popes. I am thankful for their heroic contributions to our time and culture. I am thankful that millions streamed into St. Peter’s Square this morning to witness this event, to this island of sanity in Rome, in Italy, in Europe, in the world. I am thankful that the center is still  holding.

To see some ring-side photos of the canonization, visit the Facebook page of my friend in Rome, Sister Emanuela of the Missionaries of Divine Revelation: https://www.facebook.com/missionariesdivine.revelation?fref=photo

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Darkness no Darkness

Posted on March 2, 2014 | 3 comments

It has struck me lately how separate we human beings are from other creation. And we are so small. The world was here before I came, and it will be here after I leave. We have little impact upon nature, although we like to think we control it and even harm it. In the end nature shall have the last word, and we can see its random and unfeeling power in hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, drought, fire, tornadoes. But man is proud and self-deceiving.

We anthropomorphize the natural world  giving flora and fauna human qualities. We think of a lion as a big sweet cat, yet he mauls and destroys. Nature gives us joy; we love the mountains and the seas, and we want our love to be returned. But it isn’t, except for, of course, by some domesticated animals, and it is uncertain what sort of love they have for us.

That I find myself in this world, so foreign and so lovely and so dangerous, points to a master of design. That I delight in its beauty and power, its awe-fullness, is not by chance. That I long to walk its forest paths and sleep under its stars and feel the sun on my skin is not by random design. I think we love creation as a reflection of the Creator. We are drawn to him through his works; we yearn, we long for him, and thus his world. The good news is, of course, with the coming of God the Son among us, we know that our Creator loves us in return; he yearns and longs for us.

Sometimes I sense another, an “other,” world alongside ours, as though separated by a sheet of glass. St. Paul writes that he sees God “through a glass darkly,” glass thought to be more a mirror or reflection as well as a window to God – not our kind of glass window. We do see, sense, God around us, if we have eyes to see. We are children, and when we grow up we shall see clearly. But for now, God is here, present, and I know that his spirit, through my Baptism, dwells within me.

But he is not just a God within, an idea that grew into heresy in the last century. He is outside us as well, working in our world. He exists apart from me. He is not conjured by my imagination, my desires, although he has planted such desires in my heart. 

But seeing and knowing isn’t everything, and the Epistle for today, St. Paul’s definition of love, says it perfectly, poetically. I tried to shorten it, but just couldn’t, every word being of immense importance and beauty:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. (I Corinthians 13)

St. Paul brings me back to the heart of the matter: love. We long to know, to see, but we are nothing without love.

Today’s Gospel, on this Sunday before Ash Wednesday, Quinquagesima, tells how Christ healed a blind man who was begging on the side of the road. The man had great faith, and he cried out to Jesus to have mercy upon him. Jesus healed him because of his faith.

There is a link between faith and seeing through the glass, seeing the reflection of God in the world around us. In Raymond Raynes’ Darkness no Darkness, hopefully our next American Church Union release, he speaks of giving oneself up to Christ, allowing him to remold and redirect us. It is this kind of free-fall faith that allows us to be healed. We stand with the blind man on the side of the road and we cry, Lord have mercy upon me. Our Lord turns and heals us because of our faith. When our eyes are opened, what do we see? We see love.

The title of Father Raynes’ book of meditations, Darkness no Darkness, comes from Psalm 139, one of my favorite memory passages: 

O Lord, thou hast searched me out, and known me. Thou knowest my down-sitting, and mine up-rising; thou understandest my thoughts long before.
2   Thou art about my path, and about my bed; and art acquainted with all my ways.
3   For lo, there is not a word in my tongue, but thou, O Lord, knowest it altogether.
4   Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me.
5   Such knowledge is too wonderful and excellent for me; I cannot attain unto it.
6   Whither shall I go then from thy Spirit? or whither shall I go then from thy presence?
7   If I climb up into heaven, thou art there; if I go down to hell, thou art there also.
8   If I take the wings of the morning, and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea;
9   Even there also shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.
10 If I say, Peradventure the darkness shall cover me; then shall my night be turned to day.
11 Yea, the darkness is no darkness with thee, but the night is as clear as the day; the darkness and light to thee are both alike.
12 For my reins are thine; thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.
13 I will give thanks unto thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well.
14 My bones are not hid from thee, though I be made secretly, and fashioned beneath in the earth.
15 Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect; and in thy book were all my members written;
16 Which day by day were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.
 

Again, I could not condense this, for here the Psalmist so long ago saw that knowing and loving are linked together by God in his love for us, in his intimate knowledge of each of us. He knows and loves us in the womb. He sees our hearts. Darkness is no darkness, for the night is as clear as the day. And we see. We see Love.

We approach the ashes of Lent, the burning of the Palm Sunday palms and the marking of the charred cross upon our foreheads, a cross that will burn our minds and hearts for forty days. We recall that our flesh came from dust and will return to dust.

This Lent 2014 I shall try to memorize Corinthians 13, engrafting the words onto my mind and heart. Hopefully, faithfully, I shall sound less like a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. Hopefully, faithfully, I shall see through the glass to Our Lord himself. Hopefully, faithfully, I shall be healed and shall see… God.

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Great Expectations

Posted on December 22, 2013 | 1 comment

Much has been written about holiday stress. I think it’s largely the excitement of great expectations.

America was founded as a Christian culture, and so Americans celebrated through the centuries the great festival of Jesus the Christ’s birth, the historic story of God becoming man. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries enhanced Christmas with many rich traditions and glorious music, and it is this European Christmas (particularly from Germany and England) that provided us with wreathes, Christmas trees, and Saint Nicholas. When, in 1823, an American named Clement Clarke Moore wrote a poem called “The Night Before Christmas,” Saint Nicholas became a marketing opportunity not to be missed. The Santa spin-offs are familiar to us today as gift-giving required gift-buying, a boon to the December economy.

It is also true that in our American religious melting pot, the Christian story became diluted, nudged gently into the background, to be increasingly adapted to other beliefs so that folks from other traditions could join our celebration of Christmas. The story of the holy child born in Bethlehem, the fearsome angels who sang to the shepherds, the bright star that led the wise men to the manger-cave, became replaced by Rudolf and Santa and other elfin tales, but Christmas was still a time of excitement. Hollywood helped keep this altered  (and stunted) version alive, to be sure. Sleigh bells rang, jingle bells jangled, and Frosty the Snowman took center stage. The Grinch stole Christmas. Even the charming Dickens story of Scrooge, while focusing on brotherly love and remorse of past deeds, didn’t tell the story of God becoming man in Bethlehem. Charlie Brown and his Peanuts insisted that even scraggly Christmas trees are valued, a true morality tale, even if the Christ story wasn’t actually mentioned. Santa received his mail in the North Pole; letters were carefully scribbled by hopeful children. Sometimes the Christian story – this story of God coming among us, revealing his love so tangibly and historically, almost too good to be true – is simply sidetracked with an emphasis on a children’s pageant gone wrong or right, or stories focusing on the rituals themselves, as though these symbols and mysterious behaviors appeared from nowhere.

My generation, those baby-boomers who grew up in the fifties, lived and breathed these traditions and all the excitement of waiting those twenty-five days in the cold of winter. We loved Christmas, and still do. We waited and we watched, and we wondered if we would get even one thing on our careful list. On my tenth Christmas Eve, I peeked out my bedroom window and saw my father carry a bicycle from the garage, into the living room. I grew up a little that night, but even so I still believed in the God of Bethlehem, being a pastor’s child. And even after the Santa let-down, we continued to love Christmas – the colors, the songs, the smell of fir and pine and apple and cinnamon. We loved the garlands and the glitter and joining with others from church to sing carols to the aged and the ill. It was magical. It was mysterious. It was holy.

In fact, we invested a great deal of ourselves into this holiday, unlike any other holiday during the year. Sure, Christmas marketing added to the hype over the last few decades. But every year we wanted Christmas to be, well, Christmas. We had and have today great expectations. 

Now grown-up with children of our own and grandchildren too, we bake and we buy and we decorate our homes. Our “to do” list has nearly buried some of us with deadlines and time challenges, and we say we are stressed. We buy more, wrap more, and eat more, borne on this powerful desire, or perhaps a needy greed, to make the joy of Christmas Day meet our great expectations. Even Christians find it difficult to find time to go to church, to visit the needy, to say their prayers. Even Christians forget the true meaning of Christmas, so distracted we are by meeting our own expectations.

It is no wonder folks feel stressed. But I think such stress, such excitement, such looking forward, is also a reflection of the huge importance of this holy day and of the looking forward to Heaven. God cannot be forgotten. The story of Bethlehem will not be buried by reindeer and sleighs. Indeed, the traditions and the seemingly secular stories reflect the Christian God-story. They remind us of this historic event, ask us to recall and re-member the hope of Heaven we are given in this child, Jesus, Christ the Lord. Candles burning are lights in the darkness. The tree is new life shimmering with the light of heaven and the color of joy in the ornaments and tinsel. Santa flying through the sky demanding we be nice not naughty reflects the God of the Ten Commandments, of the Second Coming and the Judgment, and Santa giving magical gifts reflects the God of mercy, love, forgiveness. He is a Santa who, as a reflection of God, lands on each individual roof, goes down each chimney, arriving inside the heart of the house, the hearth. Like God the Son, he comes to earth to give us gifts. He wants us to be with him in eternity, to climb onto his sleigh and soar into the sky. He wants us to know how much he loves each one of us, holding us in his huge heart, calling us by our Christ-ian names.

All of these rituals create mystery and miracle. All of these help us re-call God among us. We know in our hearts that God is Emmanuel, God-with-us. We know even in this fallen world of suffering and sickness and sin, that God will and does redeem us, if we want him to.

We have great expectations of Heaven. At Christmas we desire to recreate a little of that Heaven on earth, in our homes and gatherings. We open the doors of our homes to guests bringing in cheer, coming in from the cold dark into the warm light. We open the doors of our hearts to loving each other a little more. We open all these doors to God the Son, the Christ Child in Bethlehem, the one who makes Christmas for each of us come true.

And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.   (John 1:14)

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