F.C. Etier’s “The Tourist Killer”

Claudia Barry is thinking about retirement. She’s had a successful and rather lucrative career, but she’s thinking now about beaches and painting. She’s not married, has no family, and few friends. Her job requires considerable travel.

Claudia Barry is a hired assassin.

She has 37 projects to her credit, and is working on No. 38.

In F.C. Etier’s The Tourist Killer, Barry is planning what she hopes will be her last assignment – the killing of Brian Farrell, the head of the London-based ITTA Corporation and one generally unsavory character. (It helps plot credibility that Farrell is so ruthless – he needs something to happen to him.)

Complications arise. Barry is involved with retired FBI agent John Hixon, who’s hired by Julian Thibaut, a man Farrell is trying to have killed because he stands in the way of Farrell joining an elite council of corporate chieftains. Everything is building toward a meeting of that group in Atlanta. Both Thibaut and Farrell will be attending – and both may well be targets of assassins.

The Tourist Killer is fast-paced and one wild rollercoaster of a ride – shootings and ambushes on mountain roads alternate with flashbacks of events that have helped shape the main characters and what will happen in Atlanta.

The story centers on Barry. She is a kind of anti-heroine – likeable, sympathetic, and yet coldly calculating about her chosen profession. She’s an expert at disguises and plans each one meticulously. What makes her human – and keeps her from sliding into a killing machine – is her own understanding of how she has to function – carefully compartmentalizing who she is, what she does, and how she thinks. In that sense, she is very much the modernist, segmenting different parts of her life so that she can continue to do what she does.

Etier has written a fascinating suspense novel, using unlikely and potentially off-putting protagonists. Yet he manages to pull off what is ultimately a believable story.

An Element of the Sacred

What strikes any visitor to Laity Lodge is first, the remoteness, and second, the beauty of the landscape.

How remote? Cell phones don’t work. How beautiful? The photograph above was taken while I was standing on the balcony of the main lodge building, early on Sunday morning. For three mornings straight, I got up at five, showered and dressed, walked to lodge and scrounged for coffee.

And then I inhaled the quiet, and the solitude. I’d write some. I’d watch the sun rise over the bluff – a magnificent thing to see.

I was there for the online staff retreat for The High Calling. We came from all over the United States and even from Australia. We arrived on Thursday in San Antonio, congregated in Kerrville (about an hour or so west of San Antonio), had dinner in Hunt, Texas, a few miles out of Kerrville, and then went on to Laity Lodge.

And it’s still reachable only by driving through a river for about four blocks. Like I said, it’s remote.

It’s also something else. The word, I believe, is sacred, but not because of anything spiritual that attaches to the landscape but rather what happens within that landscape.

Worship. Reflection. Teaching. Writing. Art. Music.

And for us with The High Calling, meetings and discussions and planning. Those, too, had an element of the sacred about them.

For most of the weekend, we joined with a group from Westlake Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, there for their retreat. Together we heard a series of four messages from Robert Mulholland, a retired professor from Asbury Theological Seminary, and music from Jeff Johnson. And on behalf of The High Calling, I livetweeted Mulholland’s talks, except for the Eucharist service on Sunday.

I’ve already written a little bit about what I heard from Mulholland. There’s more, much more. His words prompted me to ask a question that I’m still answering: how many of my own career conflicts have been part of God conforming me to Christlikeness?

All of them, I suspect.

On Saturday afternoon, a group of us hiked the Circle Bluff Trail, which ends atop the bluff with a vista stretching for miles. I had hiked this trail two years ago. Once we reached the top, Marcus Goodyear, our tour guide and editor of The High Calling, asked who wanted to continue on. Two the group returned; four of us went on with Marcus. “Continuing on” included wading the Frio River, making our way to the Fencepost Trail, and then a descent into Box Canyon.

The descent included the use of ropes. But it was relatively short and not very strenuous.

If you were a mountain goat.

I survived just fine.

So we listened and talked, presented and pondered. We learned. We shared and encouraged. We sat quietly and we laughed. We walked and hiked and waded.

We spent some time at Laity Lodge. Good time.

Sacred time.

The stone of canyon walls

rests in stacks, layers in color:

tan, gray, blue-gray; limed

with the waters, living waters

pouring in their trickles, flowing

down to the river,

down to the sea,

to launch a thousand ships.

“There’s Not a Thing You Can Do About It”

Last Thursday, I flew to San Antonio to meet up with the editorial staff of The High Calling. We gathered in Kerrville (about an hour west) and then had dinner in the town of Hunt, Texas, before going on to Laity Lodge.

We had meetings (more on that tomorrow), and then joined with a group from Westlake Presbyterian Church in Austin for a series of devotions, messages, music and a Eucharist service. The speaker for the weekend was Robert Mulholland, a retired professor from Asbury Theological Seminary in Maine. Through a series of four messages, he spoke quietly and forcefully about “the false self.”

I paid close attention to what he had to say, because I was livetweeting it for The High Calling. (If you want to see the stream of tweets, search for the #THCretreat hashtag on Twitter.) At several points, I was both tweeting and taking notes, and once I simply stopped to listen and concentrate.

And this is what I wrote:

“God loves you,” Mulholland said, “and there’s not a thing you can do about it.” The issue is always, always God’s steadfast love, he said; God maintains relationship even when we break it.

I wrote that statement, and then wrote this short poem next to it:

I carried a stone, rubbing

its rough edges smooth,

chipping away all points

of sharpness until it fit

in my palm with no abrasion,

no roughness,

heart-shaped.

In The Pursuit of God, A.W. Tozer says this: “God was our original habitat and our hearts cannot but feel at home when they enter again that ancient and beautiful abode.”

Listening to Mulholland in a place like Laity Lodge evokes a sense of “coming home,” of finding that home again.

I think I am that stone in my poem.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. Today we finish our discussion of chapter 8, “Restoring the Creator-creature relation.” To see more posts on this chapter, please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Bluff at sunrise

The sunrise edges across

the bluff, a slow tear

emerging from the clouds,

clouds like smoke, smoke

rushing, failing to stop

the tear, cast aside

like yesterday’s war,

the beauty stark

in the desolation

of a thousand days,

a thousand years.

This poem is submitted to the Open Link Night at dVerse Poets. The links will be live at 2 p.m. Central time today.

Photograph: Sunrise, Saturday, Nov. 10, viewed from the balcony of the main building at Laity Lodge in the Texas hill country.

Poetry as Work Therapy

Few jobs today are stress-free or even low-stress: not enough resources, not enough people, normal organizational politics and conflicts, reorganizations and layoffs, clashes between work and family demands, the speed and volume of information (and how it’s delivered). Workplace stress has been the new normal for at least the last two decades (I’m old enough to know it wasn’t always this way).

We relieve stress in different ways. We exercise. We pursue unusual hobbies or avocations. We travel (involving its own kind of stress, especially at airports). We quit organizational work life. And we drink, overeat, get sick and sometimes die from stress. Recently, I had the painful experience of a ruptured disk in my back; my doctor connected it directly to stress in my job.

We cope as best we can. One way I’ve found that helps is poetry, and in five specific ways.

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

 Photograph by Frits Ahlefeldt via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Does It Always Have to Be an Amish Romance?

I recently read Robin Parrish’s novel Offworld, the story of a group of astronauts returning from Mars who discover that the world’s 10 billion people, or almost all of them, have disappeared. The novel was published by Bethany House, a well known and well respected Christian publisher. The author is a Christian. And the novel is, well, the novel is not an Amish romance.

It’s not even overtly Christian. No big gospel message. No struggles with faith. And an incredibly riveting and well-written story.

I didn’t think this was a big deal, until a few weeks later, someone commented on a blog about the novel: “I didn’t like it. Offworld didn’t edify me.”

I have all kinds of problems with that statement, not the least of which was the assumption that the novel’s purpose was to “edify me,” both an arrogance and a self-centeredness that the commenter likely didn’t intend.

A debate rages off and on about what is, and isn’t, “Christian” fiction. Some have offered these qualifications: written by a Christian author; published by a Christian publishing house; absence of cursing, sex, raw violence; some moral lesson; explicit goaspel message; good always wins in the end. Some go much farther than this. Novelist Ted Dekker ripped on the content guidelines of Christian romance publisher Steeple Hill; some pointed out that under those guidelines, even the Bible wouldn’t be published. Dekker eventually apologized, and everyone agreed to “move on,” a euphemism for acknowledging that the parties don’t, and probably won’t, agree. Another way to look at it, though, is to say Mr. Dekker knows his art and Steeple Hill knows its market. Publishing is a business, after all.

Suspense writer Mike Dellosso and writer Mike Duran have both written in the past about “Christian fiction,” to raise questions and invite discussion. Both go beyond the “defining guidelines” kind of controversy, and ask more pointed questions. What is “Christian” fiction? Is there such a thing? Can there be? For those who say that some write from a “Christian worldview,” what does that mean? And the audience question: what is the purpose of “Christian” fiction – to evangelize or build up the church? Who do Christians write for? Who should we write for? If we’re writing only for other Christians, are we keeping ourselves not of this world and out of it?

The discussion, even with the occasional outrage, is healthy. And it’s important. It begins to get at the purpose of writing and fiction, of creation and art. It leads us to this “separate but equal” life and lifestyle we Christians often live in today’s world.

And it can point us in a different direction. Switchfoot singer Jon Foreman, writing in The Huffington Post, called the artist “the bridge between hope and despair” (read the whole article). I think Foreman is right.

I’d add that this bridge, this essential function, happens most effectively when we Christian writers understand we are that bridge.

This article was originally published by The Christian Manifesto, but the site was redesigned and the archive (with all of my posts) disappeared. So I’m occasionally reposting some of the articles I wrote for the publication.

The stones

A place of terrible heat,

heat bleeding the skin;

a place of terrible cold,

cold snapping the bone;

a place of no relief,

of no belief,

until the stones

themselves cry out.

Photograph: Desert Boulders by Ronald Carlson via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.