October 2008 Reading and Re-reading

Mary Slessor: The Barefoot Missionary, by Elizabeth Robertson. I previously did not know much about this remarkable Scotswoman, instrumental in part of what is now Nigeria. May look for other books about her. Anybody got one? (This book was one Deb picked up at a museum shop on her trip to Scotland, so I don’t think it’s widely available.)

Re-read (for umpteenth time) the book from which I get my blog title, Telling Secrets, by Fredrick Buechner, after recommending to someone else. Ever do that, re-read something you’ve recommended (or written), through someone else’s eyes, trying to see how it might “read,” to them?

A Tangled Web, by L.M. Montgomery, the author of Anne of Green Gables and lots of other stuff. Had not read this one before. Wouldn’t classify it with her best. Emily is my girl. And I like Jane of Lantern Hill… and The Blue Castle! Hope you don’t think I’m childish. Although it could be I am… (and this particular book is more for adults than children.)

Re-read, in preparation for returning it to the library, Ruby Slippers, by Jonalyn Grace Fincher. Very good. I appreciate her call for a “roomier definition” of femininity. So I returned the book, then logged onto Amazon and bought a copy for myself.

Muslims, Christians, and Jesus, by Carl Medearis. After conning him out of a complimentary copy so I could read it before promoting it in our ezine (though I ended up using text in my blurb which I could have simply pulled from the website) I had to do so! Good stuff. Carl just points everybody to Jesus, trying to keep religion (especially his own) out of the way. He’s been in and out of Lebanon for years, tells great stories about the place.

Books like this one are rather common now, though – I was just perusing a 20-page annotated bibliography on books published since 9/11 about the Muslim world - and that was primarily the ones the composer of the list would recommend. I’m more keen to read Carl’s next book when it comes out. It’s supposed to be called “Tea with the Hezbollah” and details a series of meetings he and another writer (whose name is more well known) set up with leading “terrorists” to build relationships with them (which is something I heartily approve of).

Serious Times: Making Your Life Matter in an Urgent Day, by James Emery White. I borrowed this from a friend who received a free copy from her seminary, Gordon-Conwell (of which White was president for a brief period). Initially I was disappointed; should have known from the cover copy (“As the modern era transitions into postmodern turbulence…”) that it was going to be a bit too reactionary for my taste. (See Douglas Adams quote, here.) Personally, I see so many ways that postmodernism is better than modernism! But that was really only the first 75 pages and the conclusion. Between, it contained a lot of good thinking about developing a deeper life. I’ll probably include some of that in a different posting.

Also read: Um, lots of stuff that would qualify as slightly superior trash. If I were just reading to relax, it might be OK, but since I often find myself reading to be taken miles away (you know, ‘there is no frigate like a book’) and give many hours to such journeys, I think I would do better to raise my standards a bit. After all, good books can take me away as well as bad ones. I am going to try to be a bit more selective what I put in my head this next season.

See other posts about reading, here.

Halloween Advice from a C&E Pagan

Guess I'm a lapsed pagan. In my youth I was fairly superstitious, developed rituals, and had a friend who thought she might be a witch. Now it's all sort of gone by the wayside for me. Oh, I am still afraid of the dark and I hold onto the pagan holidays of Christmas and Easter, but in other respects I'm pretty nominal.

So maybe my advice about good ol' Halloween is not to be regarded. But this is my blog, so I'll give it anyway.

This Friday night, if you plan to stay home to give out candy to the neighborhood children (a grand Halloween tradition), watch the 1944 movie Arsenic and Old Lace starring Cary Grant. It's a scream.

City on a Hill

When I lecture on The Expansion of the World Christian Movement (as I did half a dozen times this fall) I usually draw a couple of sly parallels between the Roman Empire - particularly at the time of its "fall" - and today's America.

Christians in Rome considered the resources, influence, and power with which their empire had been endowed sure signs that God was with them and had in fact raised them up and blessed them to be a light to the nations. As time went on they found this dream turned to ashes, and themselves citizens in a state that no longer represented (and exported) their values, but something else entirely.

The church and state (intertwined at this point) were plagued by both external pressures and corruption within. Roman Christians were horrified. As the greatness of their empire was threatened, they wondered if it was all over for Christendom.

Well, it wasn't, of course. Yes, there was a lot of brutality, a lot of suffering. But the fifth century also saw the biggest expansion of Christianity that would come for the next thousand years, and this time without the resources that had seemed so integral to its expansion to date. One of the points I try to illustrate throughout my talk is that neither suffering nor prosperity has a corner on the market for producing the best conditions for Christianity to flourish. God seems to use either.

"Has anyone written a book comparing America and Rome?" someone asked, as I kept alluding to similarities.

I did not know the answer - I didn't get this from one source I could point to and say, that's it. Any of you know someone who has written about this? I think a lot of it was from my "History of Christianity" professor in college. But as I looked through my background files I did find a printout of this article, which covers some of that territory. Here's a taste...

Theology for an Age of Terror: Augustine's words after the 'barbarian' destruction of Rome have a remarkably contemporary ring.

By Timothy George | posted 9/01/2006 12:00AM

September 11, 2001, is frequently compared to December 7, 1941, as a day that will "live in infamy." But a more appropriate analogy might be August 24, 410, when the city of Rome was besieged and pillaged by an army of 40,000 "barbarians" led by the Osama bin Laden of late antiquity, a wily warrior named Alaric. One can still see the effects of this cataclysmic event when walking through the ruins of the Roman Forum today. The Basilica Aemilia was the Wall Street of ancient Rome, a beautiful structure in the Forum with a marble portico. One can still see the green stains of copper coins melted into the stone from the conflagrations set by Alaric and his marauders.

Before then, Roman coins bore the legend Invicta Roma Aeterna eternal, unconquerable Rome. It had been more than 800 years since the Eternal City had fallen to an enemy's attack. In many ways, Rome was like America prior to 9/11, the world's only superpower. But in 410, Rome's military power could not prevent its walls being breached, its women raped, and its sacred precincts burned and sacked.

When Jerome heard about the fall of Rome in faraway Bethlehem, he put aside his Commentary on Ezekiel and sat stupefied in total silence for three days. "Rome was besieged," Jerome wrote to a friend. "The city to which the whole world fell has fallen. If Rome can perish, what can be safe?" The British monk Pelagius, who was in Rome when the attack occurred, gave this report: "Every household had its grief, and an all-pervading terror gripped us."

Not Again...

Some things just keep coming back around. This week I've been running into this again. It's just so darn frustrating.

I am also feeling sorry for myself that so little of my regular interaction is with people who really get me, "my kind" of people. Soul mates, life-long friends. I have quite a few, but they aren't part of my daily life, so - with so many of the other kinds of relationships requiring so much energy - I don't reach out much to the people with whom I feel a true connection. Small touches like through blogging and social networking help a lot; so would the phone, if I could manage to pick it up! The people I'm physically around, though, day in and day out, at work, church, home? They are not "best friend" material, for me, at least I don't think so. But they are decent comrades. I don't have much to complain about.

A few of them, while still not "like me," are ones with whom I've been through enough that it's almost as good. Those relationships are sort of like my friendship with E., whom I met in junior high; we're not much alike, but have been friends so long she's more like a sister or cousin. We've spent so much time together that the differences are never dissonant. We have a deep sense of sympathy for one another. I think we're going to take a vacation together next year.

So I have a couple of those kind of relationships in my daily life: people I really care about and love enough to be their advocate and champion, enjoy spending time together, etc. even though we don't really "get" each other that much. We love each other; we're willing to work at it, and not just because we "have to," we really like and care about each other. Even if I long for friends with whom I have deep, natural chemistry, I'm blessed with some friendships that are nearly as fruitful. "A lot of times I don't 'get' you, but I love you!" they say to me, I say to them.

I did have an enemy, I'll confess - and the situation was serious enough that there seemed no fixing it; it was probably my largest cause of stress this last year or so. Maybe the fact that he was suddenly and mercifully removed from my life is part of my current level of disappointment, strangely - things are so much better now that I notice the other disappointments, more?

I guess being understood, truly, and appreciated as well, is a rare thing for everyone - working at it, and navigating the hurt feelings, frustrations, disappointments, etc. is much more the norm - so why do I feel so let down?

On a lighter note, SM (a coworker) and I were chatting one day about the scan/fax/copy machine, with which he was having some trouble. "Why can't it read my mind?" he said. It took only a moment for both of us to realize that it was one office machine we wouldn't want to be able to do that. (Just imagine the fax machine sending out your actual thoughts to everyone you know! At least on a blog there's some editing!)

As Buechner says in Telling Secrets, being "known" is simultaneously the object of our greatest longing and our greatest fear.

But think of this, what a blessing it is to have a relationship with someone who actually CAN read our minds - and still embrace us warmly - and still protect us - and pull us out of our slumps - and able to walk alongside and help untangle any mess! His perspective is completely trustworthy (he's never wrong), his approach, his tone, exactly what they ought to be. Where could I find all that in any other friend?

So, we'll wrap up this little counseling session on loneliness with a trip back to the Psalms...

Psalm 147

1 Praise the LORD.
How good it is to sing praises to our God,
how pleasant and fitting to praise him!

2 The LORD builds up Jerusalem;
he gathers the exiles of Israel.

3 He heals the brokenhearted
and binds up their wounds.

4 He determines the number of the stars
and calls them each by name.

5 Great is our Lord and mighty in power;
his understanding has no limit.

The Bible as One Book

National Geographic gave this picture an honorable mention in its list of "Best Science Images of 2008."

Here's the explanatory text:

A colorful rainbow brings to light the interconnected nature of one of the world's most familiar books.

The Bible's 1,189 chapters are plotted along the horizontal axis at the bottom of the image, with each bar's length determined by the number of verses.

The arcs above the graph show the 63,779 cross-references between each chapter. [Meaning, I believe, places where one book quotes or cites another. mks].

"It almost looks like one monolithic volume," said Carnegie Mellon's Chris Harrison, who - along with Christoph Romhild of North Elbian Evangelical Lutheran Church in Hamburg, Germany - won an honorable mention for illustrations in the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.

(Image courtesy Chris Harrison, Carnegie Mellon University; Christoph Romhild, North Elbian Evangelical Lutheran Church/Science)

Source here. First saw this on Matt's blog, here.

File This Under "Situations Best Avoided"

(I found this photo on someone else's site when I was putting together this week's edition of Missions Catalyst. Hmmm... not sure what the original source may have been; they didn't say).

Place, Patriotism, Politics (and The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency)

Note: Yes, I edited this one. I think when I wrote it I was fed up with simplistic politics. I feel more generous now, so I've removed the potentially offensive bit. 1-12-09

When my book club met recently to discuss The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency I enjoyed hearing from my friend S., whose roots are in Kansas but who spent much of her adult life in Texas (a place she never cared for much, she mentions). For all her down-to-earth Midwesterner-ness, S. has traveled the world. She’s been many more places than I have. All 50 of the United States, for example. And at least six continents, now that she made it to Antarctica. I may not share her love of travel but I love to hear her stories. And one of the themes in our book which S. pointed out was that of patriotism and “home.” S. has a strong sense of roots, of home.

I may not be a huge patriot, but I have fond feelings towards my homeland - particularly, Mom and Mount Rainier and blackberry brambles and Puget Sound. And, like S., I can appreciate these sentiments from Obed Ramotswe (the late father of our hero, Precious):

“Why should I want to go to Zululand? Why should I ever want anything but to live in Botswana, and to marry a Tswana girl? I said to him that Zululand sounded fine, but that every man has a map in his heart of his own country, and that the heart will never allow you to forget this map. I told him that in Botswana we did not have the green hills that he had in his place, nor the sea, but we had the Kalahari and land that stretched farther than one could imagine. I told him that if a man is born in a dry place, then although he may dream of rain, he does not want too much, that that he will not mind the sun that beats down and down. So I never went with him to Zululand and I never saw the sea, ever. But that has not made me unhappy, not once.” (TNOLDA, p. 18)

And how about this sly dig on politics:

“…The British ran our country, to protect us from the Boers (or that is what they said.) There was a Commissioner down in Mafikent, over the border into South Africa, and he would come up the road and ask to speak to the chiefs. He would say, ‘You do this thing; you do that thing.’ And all the chiefs obeyed him because they knew that if they did not he would have them deposed. But some of them were clever, and while the British said, ‘You do this,’ they would say, ‘Yes, yes, sir, I will do that’ and all the time, behind their backs, they did the other thing or they just pretend to do something. So for many years, nothing at all happened. It was a good system of government, because most people want nothing to happen. That is the problem with governments these days. They want to do things all the time; they are always very busy thinking of what things they can do next. That is not what people want. People want to be left alone to look after their cattle.” (TNOLDA, pp. 20-21)

Do you think that’s true? I suppose it depends. I found myself wondering, reading the (much less palatable) voter’s guide this afternoon, what things really should be legislated, and what things shouldn’t? How much government would I choose to have? How much (or how little) would I consider dangerous or disastrous, should the balance of the electorate choose differently than I do?

Well, if I do not know what is best, at least I can pray for and try to love my fellow American taxpayers (an amusing way to think of ourselves, I think) and, as possible, the many others with whom we share this planet.

Obed’s daughter, our hero Mma Ramotswe, says,

“I love all the people whom God made, but I especially know how to love the people who live in this place. They are my people, my brothers and sisters. It is my duty to help them to solve the mysteries in their lives. That is what I am called to do.” (TNOLDA, p. 4)