A friend

After I Samuel 18:1-5 

He hears the words

spoken to his father,

simple words that

identify, and he is

so struck by what

he hears that his soul

knits to the speaker’s.

They become as one,

not two. They make

a covenant, a pledge,

a promise of friendship

and faithfulness with

each other. He gives

him his robe, he gives

him his armor, he gives

him his sword and bow

and belt. The son 

of the king turned

from his father

to his friend.

 

Photograph by Mohammad Mardani via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

“Abraham and the Binding of Isaac” and “A Far, Far Better Thing” – poems by Brian Yapko at The Society of Classical Poets.

 

Archangel Explains – Poem by Pamela Mordecai at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin).

 

Tribes, Trolls, and the Power of Technology – Jason Thacker.

 

The Good Riddle, poem by G.K. Chesterton – Malcolm Guite.

 

Ghosts Come and Go – three poems by Kerry O’Connor at Skylover. 

Finding Poetry: An Interview with Poet Rick Maxson -- Tweetspeak Poetry.

He sent the best

After Philippians 2:19-30

When he sent his friend,

he sent the best,

his right arm, alter ego,

his brother, not counting

the cost, or accounting

for it, he sent the one

needed no matter

the consequence 

to himself, and it would

likely hurt. He sent more

than the best available;

he sent the man 

with the right heart,

the man who would move

and act, the man

he considered a son.

He was writing the book

of his friend’s life.

He was writing his own.

Photograph by Thiago Barletta via Unsplash. Used with permission.

How to describe a friend

After Philippians 2:19-30

How he said it, describing

the friend he was sending

to help: my brother,

my fellow worker,

my fellow soldier,

your messenger,

your minister to my need.

My brother: someone as close

   to me as one sharing

   the same parents.

My fellow worker: toiling

   with me in the vineyard,

   on the farm.

My fellow soldier: fighting

   alongside me, for this is

   a battle, this is a war.

Your messenger: he comes

   from you, is sent by you,

   to communicate with me.

Your minister: he was

   appointed by you to come

   to help where needed.

And more: the one who

   almost died.

Photograph by Tyler Nix via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Literary Friends: Peter Pan Meets Sherlock Holmes

I first saw the Walt Disney production of Peter Pan when I was seven years old. It had been originally released in 1953, and then re-released five additional times, in 1958, 1969, 1976, 1982, and 1989. Disney has been interested in an animated version of the book by J.M. Barrie (1860-1937) since 1935, but World War II delayed the project until the 1950s. Barrie’s story was first produced for the London stage in 1904.

I was a few decades older than seven when I was standing in the gift shop at St. Martin-in-the-Field in London, holding a small, Collector’s Library edition of the book. I realized I’d never read it. The church made a sale that day and the book found its way into my suitcase home. The story is different from the movie, but Disney stayed true to the basic outline.

From about the age of 10, I’ve been reading the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). I’m not sure what to call them; legends, perhaps, or the great myths of detective fiction? A Study in Scarlet, the novel and the first appearance of Holmes, was published in 1887. Doyle was rather ambivalent about Holmes and at one point killed him off; the reading public was not impressed, and 10 years later, Doyle resurrected him, going on to write more stories and the novels The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear. Despite their relatively short run, the stories of Holmes and Dr. John Watson have never let go of the world’s imagination.

In late 1891, four months after the first Sherlock Holmes short story, a parody was published in Speaker Magazine, entitled “My Evening with Sherlock Holmes.” The anonymous author turned out to be one J.M. Barrie.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Illustrations: James M. Barrie (left) and Arthur Conan Doyle (right).

“Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship” by Colin Duriez

It is perhaps the most famous friendship of the 20^th century. The impact it had on both literature and popular Christianity was enormous, and its influence continues today, reflected in the movies, books, biographies, and derivative writings published decades after their deaths.

J.R.R. Tolkien (1982-1973) and C.S. Lewis (1898-1963).

Without their friendship, there likely would have been no Hobbit, no Lord of the Rings, no Narnia, no Screwtape Letters. While it waxed and waned, the friendship between the two Oxford teachers, the two writers, the two members of the Inklings, and the two avid students of the Norse legends and myths left an immeasurable blessing and legacy.

The story of that friendship is examined and detailed in Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship by Colin Duriez, first published in 2003.

Tolkien and Lewis met at Oxford. They had much in common: both had fought in World War I, both were intrigued by medieval language and Norse mythology, both had lost their mothers at a young age. But there were significant differences as well. Tolkien was married and raising a family, while Lewis was a bachelor (although living in a rather unconventional arrangement with his brother Warren, and Mrs. Moore and her daughter, the mother and sister of a friend killed in the war). And Tolkien was a devout Catholic, while Lewis was in his late atheist phase, moving toward a kind of agnosticism.

Good friends they became. And the friendship was solidified during a stroll on Addison’s Walk in Oxford, in the early morning hours of a Sunday morning in 1931, when Tolkien, with the help of a mutual friend, Hugo Dyson, convinced Lewis that Jesus Christ was a “true myth.”

Addison's Walk in Oxford

Duriez pays special attention to the impact each had on the other’s writing. At the time, there was no literary genre of “fantasy for adults.” Fantasy, like fairy tales, was considered to be in the province of childhood. Tolkien was self-conscious about what would become The Hobbit, and it was Lewis who almost singlehandedly kept encouraging him to continue that story (published in 1937) and then the “second Hobbit,” which became The Lord of the Rings and was published in the 1950s.

Similarly, Tolkien encouraged Lewis. Their friendship expanded to include others in what became known as the Inklings, which met in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College and the Eagle and Child pub. Out of those meetings, readings, discussions, and occasional debates would come The Chronicles of Narnia.

The friendship between the two men, Duriez notes, would warm and cool, especially after Lewis accepted a position at Cambridge (with Tolkien’s help and support) and Lewis’s marriage to Joy Davidman. Tolkien was also not comfortable with how Lewis “popularized” Christianity. But it endured.

Colin Duriez

Duriez is a writer and lecturer who has written extensively about Tolkien, Lewis, and the Inklings. His works include The C.S. Lewis Handbook (1990), The C.S. Lewis Encyclopedia (2000), The Inklings Handbook (2001; co-authored), Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings: A Guide to Middle Earth (2001), The J.R.R. Tolkien Handbook (2002), A Field Guide to Narnia (2004), The C.S. Lewis Chronicles (2005), J.R.R. Tolkien: The Making of a Legend (2012), and The Oxford Inklings (2015). He is also the author of A.D. 33: The Year That Changed the World (2007), Field Guide to Harry Potter (2007), The Poetic Bible (2001), and Francis Schaeffer: An Authentic Life (2008).

Tolkien and C.S. Lewis tells the story of a friendship that became a remarkable friendship, and helped change the world.

Related:

The Desiring God web site has a number of lectures by and interviews with Colin Duriez, covering the Origins of The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings movies, C.S. Lewis, the friendship between Lewis and Tolkien, and related subjects.

J.R.R. Tolkien Convinces C.S. Lewis That Christ is the True Myth – Justin Taylor at The Gospel Coalition.

The Qualities of a Good Friend

In our weekly discussion of The Cure: What if God Isn’t Who You Think He Is and Neither Are You, by John Lynch, Bruce McNichol and Bill Thrall, we’ve reached a chapter entitled “Two Friends.” It’s about the positive and negative influences in your life, and what the differences are between them, especially when the differences may not be immediately apparent. 

My mind began to drift. I asked myself, who are the influences in my life, aside from family? Who are the people I consider friends? Not just casual acquaintances, but real friends, people you feel you can trust, go to advice for, stand by you, and who know they can expect the same from you? 

I have to admit my list is rather small. 

Five years ago, I could name several people at work, where I spend most of each waking day. But retirement has claimed some; others have left for better opportunities, including one in just the last few weeks. The individual asked me for advice about whether to accept a job offer from another company; I listened more than I talked, but it was obvious the offer was better than the existing job at our company. This was a leaving that hurt; I think I’m down to one close friend at work now. 

I consider friends at church. The situation is complicated by the question of which church – the one we attended for 15 years and poured a lot of ourselves into, or the one we attend now where we’re both have been rather “gun shy.” One couple whom we were particularly close to moved away; another went to another church; others drifted away with the change in churches (we went in one direction, they in another).  

We have neighbors we have great regard for, but I can’t say we see them on a social basis except once or twice a year for neighborhood get-togethers. And there are virtual friends, people I have met online, some of whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting face-to-face but many, perhaps most, I have not. I will say this – for those virtual friends whom I have actually met face-to-face, I have not been disappointed – they were the same in person as they were online. One day I hope to meet an online friend who lives in another part of the world; we missed meeting each other in London in October by a few short hours. 

The question in all of these examples is, what makes a good friend? What makes another person a good influence? The Cure has some answers that resonate with me. 

A good influence, a good friend, the authors write, is one who asks permission to earn trust, to be let in to your confidence. 

A good friend sees you as a saint – a saint who still fails. They see behind the façade and love you anyway. 

A good friend wants to see you grow more, and give love more. They’re not interested in changing your behavior as much as they are in seeing you love more. They’re don’t try to “fix” you, or correct some behavior or thinking they believe needs fixing. You feel accepted. This doesn’t mean you won’t need occasional reproving, but when they do it, they do it in love, and you know it. 

A good friend is something we all hunger for, and something we all need.

 

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing The Cure. To see more posts on this chapter, “Two Friends,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines. 

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The friendship of faith

We don’t speak regularly. In fact, it’s only three of four times a year, thanks to Facebook. He lives in the South, and I live in the Midwest. He’s retired, and I’m still working. He’s 10 to 12 years older than I am.

Because he took the time to talk with someone he didn’t know (a desperately confused college student), he changed the lives of countless people.

I was that desperately confused college student. I’d achieved every goal I’d set for myself, and found only emptiness. He helped me understand why I would only find the same emptiness no matter what I did, because I didn’t understand what the real goal was.

We stood in a hallway. He was silent as I prayed like he told me to. No belles sounded. No fireworks exploded. No angels sang that I could hear. But life changed profoundly.

He had been a businessman, a diehard loyalist of the University of Alabama, and here he was, living a significant sacrifice – working as staff director for Campus Crusade for Christ at SEC rival LSU (at least it wasn’t Auburn).

That night, after I prayed, and he became nearly hysterical (I’m not making this up; I was an eyewitness) to the point that the building janitors got concerned, he drove me to the CCC office and gave me a copy of the Living Bible (I still have it). He inscribed a reference to a verse on the inside cover (I had never seen anyone write in a Bible before, except for family records). He had me start reading the Gospel of St. John, and met with me to discuss what I was reading. He got me into a student Bible study. He took me with him to a spring break outreach at Fort Walton Beach, Florida – and it was then that I learned that he had angels protecting him, because he drove like a maniac.

I graduated, and he and his family moved to Dallas, where he was worked for Campus Crusade at SMU. My wife and I stayed with them one weekend and attended their church – seating was on the floor. He attended seminary and got his degree, and then he moved back to his hometown of Birmingham, to care for aging parents. He needed something to do, so he founded a ministry for students at the University of Alabama medical and dental schools.

He “retired” a few years ago. In 2005, I had to represent my company at a weekend event in a town near Birmingham – a meeting that included a tour of a chemical waste site (I go for the glamour jobs). We met for dinner on Saturday night. It was the first time I had seen him face-to-face in almost 30 years – and we didn’t miss a beat.

I am one of hundreds if not thousands of his spiritual children. He remembers every single one of us, and treats each one of us like an only child. He’s influenced thousands of people’s lives.

Time, distance and the busy-ness of life hasn’t diminished the impact that this man – and a 60-minute conversation – had on my life.

The verse that he gave me on Jan. 26, 1973, the one he inscribed in that Bible, was Philippians 1:6, “Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”

At Faith Barista today, Bonnie Gray is hosting a blog carnival on faith and friendship. To see other posts, please visit Bonnie's site.

Chinatown and Memory

I’ve been in San Francisco most of this week, attending a conference. I've been to the city six or seven times, and every I go, I eat a dinner at Kan’s Chinese Restaurant on Grant Street, right in the heart of Chinatown.

The food is good, but that’s not why I eat there. I’m okay with Chinese food, but I’m not a major fan.

The area is steeped in history, but that’s not why I eat there, either. Most of that history is gone, hidden behind storefronts for cheap touristy things (“Good quality t-shirts for $1.99!”).

I eat there because the first time I ate there, somewhere back in the 1980s, I ate dinner with a good friend. We knew each other through the work we did – we were both in communications, but in different parts of the country. We'd met a conference years before, and with a couple of other people had talked late one evening (or early the next morning) about communications, employers and journalists – the things PR people usually talk about.

Later, we were both in San Francisco for a communications convention, he because he was a big wheel in the association and me to pick up an award for speechwriting. He'd been born and raised in Detroit but had lived a long time in Oakland before moving back east, and he knew the family that had owned Kan’s for generations, back in the days of the real Chinatown and Dashiell Hammett and the Pinkerton Detective Agency and the tong wars and all that stuff that makes up the legend of the place.

That first time we met, he told me something that rather startled me. “If you’re going to be a speechwriter,” he said, “you might as well be a great speechwriter. And if you’re going to be a great speechwriter, you better get real familiar with the poets.” And by “the poets” he meant three of the moderns – T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens. He was so adamant about it that over a period of about a year he sent me a volume of the complete poems of each of the three.

I read them. I knew he liked Dylan Thomas the best. I liked Eliot, but I really liked Wallace Stevens. And from those three I started reading more.

He taught me something else: don’t settle for mediocrity. Take the risk. Do it. Strive for something great. I’d come up with something I thought innovative, and he’d say “Exactly!” because he had already done it. Eventually, he stopped saying “Exactly!” He started saying “Wow!” And he meant it.

We lived in different cities; we worked for different employers. Long months would pass before we might talk again, but we’d pick up right where we left off. I knew he was essentially a lonely person, filling his life with work and the association he loved so deeply.

Then, in the late 1990s, he told me he had gone to Brazil for a business trip, got sick and nearly died, spending months in the hospital from some major tropical assault on his immune system. But he recovered, even though he looked thin and wan the next time I saw him.

About a decade ago, I was reading a communications magazine, and I turned a page and found his obituary. I didn’t know, but then there wouldn’t have been anyone to tell me. The obituary was rather cryptic. And then I understood. But it didn't matter. He was my friend.

So on Monday night I was in Kan’s, with its clientele of tourists, locals who like Chinese food, a scattering of business people, several families, some students and a couple of construction workers. You have to walk up a flight of stairs from the street; it sits above what used to be a Chinese souvenir store but is now the Floating Sushi Boat Restaurant. Behind the hostess’ counter are autographed pictures of Kenny Rogers and Sandra Bullock. The main dining room has a 16-foot ceiling and nine crystal chandeliers. Red and white tablecloths alternate on the tables. Lots of Chinese artifacts decorate the walls.

I wasn’t there for the food or the atmosphere; I was there out of memory for my friend. I miss his acerbic wit, his passion for communications, his impatience with mediocrity, and his love for poetry.

I sat there at Kan’s, and could still hear him reciting lines from Dylan Thomas.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light…