Saturday Good Reads

Mike Duran takes up a favorite theme at Novel Rocket – the unstated do’s and don’ts of Christian fiction. David Rupert meets the families of the martyred. Tom Good takes his camera for an early morning walk. Matt Appling discovers that we have a new national religion (food). And Seth Haines learns something about video games.

Faith

10 Disciplines of a Godly Man – Jason Vana.

What’s Your Leadership Made Of – Steel or Straw? – Margaret Feinberg.

How to Read the Bible and Love It – April Yamasaki.

A question of prayer – Billy Coffey at What I Learned Today.

Unsettled: Face to face with families of the martyred – David Rupert at Red-Letter Believers.

Art and Photography

Canyon Pool and Other New Watermedia – Randall David Tipton at Painter’s Progress.

Early in the Morning – Tim Good at Photography by Tiwago.

Writing

No Zombies Allowed (in Christian Fiction) – Mike Duran at Novel Rocket.

Glimmers of Possibility – Travis Thrasher at The Journey is Everything.

Poetry

Broken Flowers – Robbie Pruitt.

What the Beloved Heard – John Blase at The Beautiful Due.

I Thirst – Martha Orlando at Moments and Musings.

Holocaust Poems: Interview with Poet and Filmmaker Jean Kirchheimer (Part 1) – Maureen Doallas at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Sustainability – Paul Willis at Curator Magazine.

Culture

Purging Baltimore and The Unraveling of the Common Good – Rod Dreher at The American Conservative.

On Pimps, Pushers and Five Nights at Freddy’s – Seth Haines.

Sexist Assumptions and the Difficult, Dirty Work of Grace – Tania Runyan at Image Journal.

How Junk Food and Health Food Made a New National Religion – Matt Appling.

Painting: Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, oil on canvas by George Caleb Bingham (1845); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. The painting is part of the exhibition “George Caleb Bingham and the River” currently on display at the St. Louis Art Museum. 

An Umbrella and a Bible

I look around my office at work, and all that’s left is an umbrella and a Bible.

Today is my last day of work at the day job. It’s a strange feeling to be looking straight in the face of retirement.

We’ve been planning this for more than a year. It takes a lot of work to retire – all of the things that have to be lined up, including at least some thoughts as to what I’ll be doing after tomorrow. Retirement is a cultural concept, not a biblical one. Abraham tended flocks until he couldn’t tend them any more.

I will continue to work. It will just be different. Less structured. Less routine. Less hectic. Less crazy. Less crisis-ridden. The article I wrote for The High Calling this week summed up what my working life has been like.

I told the company last June. I nailed down the date in January. The planning and work have been intense at times. This is where my ask-every-question-and-then-some wife steps to the fore. We’re able to take this major step in our lives because she is a wise, capable woman who planned for our future. My wisdom came solely in heeding what she said.

I had planned to work longer, but a number of different things happened, and by last March, the path forwarded became a lot clearer than it had been.

My office has slowly been stripped rather bare. It helped that our offices were reconstructed, and I moved from an office to a half-office and then to a cubicle. Files have been sorted. The computer has been largely emptied. Documents have been transferred. I have two messages left in my email inbox, both reminders to do something. Personal items have been taken home.

Left on the walls are two posters for Tweetspeak Poetry’s Poetry-at-Work Day (one for 2014 and one for 2015) and a poster for National Poetry Month. I’ve turned in my iPad, stripped back to factory standards, with my phone and computer to follow shortly.

I will miss the people. I work with good people on our Digital Team. I have two good people reporting to me. I’m leaving our social media channels in good, competent hands. I’ve also arranged for ongoing management of the corporate archives – a small part of my job but one that’s interesting and often important. (I’ve often joked about being responsible for the “alpha and omega” of the company – the social media channels and the archives.)

Do I have plans? Yes, absolutely. It will be a different life, but it will still be a full one. I’ll continue to work with The High Calling and Tweetspeak Poetry. I will likely find myself doing some babysitting with the grandsons. I will continue to write fiction and poetry, and I want to do some volunteer work. I may even do some freelancing.

So it’s not exactly retirement as commonly perceived. (And I don’t play golf.)

So today I will attend a few scheduled meetings and have lunch with the digital team. At some point in the afternoon, I will get my Bible and my umbrella, and walk to my car.

It will be good.

Rod Dreher’s “How Dante Can Save Your Life”

You’re standing in the poetry section of a Barnes & Noble bookstore. You don’t usually read poetry, or fiction either, for that matter. But a book caught your eye; you pull it from the shelf, open it and begin to read.

Without realizing it, a random act of browsing in a bookstore leads to you changing your life.

The “you’ in question here was writer Rod Dreher, author of The Little Way of Ruthie Leming and Crunchy Cons and a writer for The American Conservative. The Barnes & Noble was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And the book was Dante’s The Divine Comedy.

Dreher describes what happened in How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem.

And what a story it is.

What a fascinating story it is. If you love poetry, and even if you don’t, this is a remarkable book.

It’s a story about how Dreher worked through serious physical illness brought on by his family, himself, his and his family’s history, and the sense of place. He tells it so well that the reader beings to see in Dante what Dreher found, and more – the reader begins to recognize himself in the journey.

Of all the things I expected from this book, that turned out to be the most surprising, although in retrospect, it shouldn’t have been. That’s what good writing does. And it says something about both Dante and Dreher, and Dreher’s candor, openness and vulnerability in telling a story that is often painful.

With Dreher and reader for the journey is Dante, himself guided by the Roman poet Virgil.

Dreher takes the scenes and lines that connected most with himself and the situation he was trying, and largely failing, to deal with. Along with his Orthodox priest and his therapist, he works his way through his own personal Inferno and Purgatorio. He doesn’t necessarily reach Paradiso (Dante does, however), but he does find healing.

How Dante Can Save Your Life is a much larger story than one man’s journey. Dante is one of those writers not studied much any more – a dead, white, European male. While he often criticizes the church and the popes, he is very much in the Roman Catholic tradition. The Divine Comedy is a profoundly religious book – and that alone might be sufficient eliminate it from the curriculum.

Rod Dreher

That is criminal. It’s one of the great works of Western literature. It will still be read and treasured long after the more contemporary and trendy stuff is forgotten. What Dreher does in his book is to explain how meaningful and important Dante is for many of the same things that bedeviled us in late medieval and early Renaissance times that still bedevil us today. For that is the genius of Dante and The Divine Comedy – the poet and his great work still speak to the human condition.

The Divine Comedy has been translated by numerous authors and writers over the years, including Dorothy Sayers, Clive James, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and many others (and that’s just a few of the English translations; there are many others in other languages). Dreher prefers the translations by Robert and Jean Hollander and Mark Musa; the only translation I’ve read myself is by John Ciardi.

Read How Dante Can Save Your Life, and you will read of how a great work literature helped guide one man on what was at times a harrowing, life-threatening journey.

Painting: Dante Illuminating Florence with His Poem, fresco by Domenico de Michelino; circa 1465.

Joy Happens – Unplanned

I’ve been reading Margaret Feinberg’s Fight Back With Joy: Celebrate More. Regret Less. Stare Down Your Greatest Fears, and I find this:

“Joy flows out of unsuspecting, and often daunting, places,” she writes. “It’s illogical, irrational, downright crazypants to think that great adversity could possibly lead to a fuller life. Yet that’s what I’ve discovered over many months of being poisoned, burned, injected, sliced, and diced.”

I pay attention to what Feinberg says, because she is writing as a breast cancer patient and survivor. She has been through the “cure is worse than the disease” treatment, and she pointedly says she does not consider cancer to be a gift.

But she finds joy, sometimes in the very belly of the cancer beast. Like when she handed out red balloons to other cancer patients and their families.

Joy is a word that we Christians often associate with their faith. Both we as children sang and with our own children sing “I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart / Where? / down in my heart / down in my heart.”

The fact is that joy is something that we can’t plan for. It’s something that happens as a result, often the unintended result, of something else.

Standing in silence Canterbury Cathedral in 2013 for the 3 p.m. prayer time, I was nearly overwhelmed with joy by saying the Lord’s Prayer with 27 Japanese tourists.

Sitting in a church in Erfurt, Germany, interviewing a young pastor in 2002, joy flooded me, the pastor and the video cameraman to the point of tears.

At a church service at London’s Westminster Chapel, the time of “silent prayer” was replaced by speaking individual prayers out loud at the same time, and the church felt washed by joy as the voices rose and fused upward.

Or the first time I heard my first grandchild say something that sounded remotely like “Grandpa.”

Or during a particularly dark time, receiving an unexpected note that said simply, “I’m praying for you.”

Joy comes unexpected and unplanned, often sneaking in and upending you.

I can remember years ago, sitting next to my young wife and mother of my five-month-old son while she awakened from surgery to remover a possibly cancerous thyroid. When she awoke, her first words were, “Am I OK?” And the joy I experienced telling her YES! was a wonder, for both of us.

Feinberg is right. We find joy in often daunting places. It arrives unplanned. It brings with it the ability to bear often great hardship.

It is a gift.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Fight Back with Joy. To see more posts on this chapter, “Where I Never Expected to Find Joy,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph: Westminster Chapel in London, where the spoken aloud prayers went up and the joy came down. 

Faith at the Firing Line

At the end of this week, I’ll be retiring from my day job, and I’ve been looking back at some thirty-seven years in corporate communications.

Most of my work has centered in the oil, chemical, and agriculture industries; none of them lack controversy or crisis. My career has largely been spent on the firing line.

At times, it felt like the firing squad.

Government and regulatory issues. Environmental problems. Product crises. Transportation accidents. Public protests. “He said/she said” litigation. Even the short time I worked in a non-corporate environment for the St. Louis Public Schools, it was much the same. There, I dealt with restructurings, school closings, layoffs, protests at school board meetings, and teacher sick-outs.

To continue reading, please see my post today at The High Calling.

Photograph by Any Bay via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Poetic Voices: Karen Paul Holmes and Claire Trevien

When is a marriage like a knot? And those bumps under the carpet in the living room – could they be whales, like the ones who live under your shipwrecked house?

Karen Paul Holmes is the author of Untying the Knot: Poems, a collection of 49 poems published in 2014 addressing a range of relationships but focused on the crumbling and dissolution of a marriage. These poems speak to deep pain, the emotional anguish that strikes at one’s very being when what one accepted as the given in one’s life becomes the taken away. The title poem, placed about halfway in the collection, talks of recriminations and the personal guilt that the victim in a failed marriage can experience.

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

Against the Flow: Athens and/or Jerusalem

When I was working on a Masters at Washington University in St. Louis, I took a seminar entitled “Athens and Jerusalem.” It was taught by a member of the faculty of the Classics Department, Dr. George Pepe, who is still teaching some 30 years after I took the course.  Pepe is a specialist in Greek and Roman philosophy and Latin prose, and he took the name of the course from a quotation: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem, or the Academy with the Church?”

The quotation is from the early Church father Tertullian (circa 155 to 240 A.D.), one of the first to write in Latin as opposed to Greek. He was an apologist for the Christian faith, writing work after work making logical mincemeat of the arguments of the pagan writers and the official policies of the Roman Empire. (One of his best known observations, still quoted today, is “The blood of the martyrs is seed.”)

In our seminar, we had a number of assigned readings in Tertullian. Since this was pre-Amazon and few if any bookstores carried the writings of the early Church fathers, the assignments meant I spent a lot of time in the Washington University library, in a study carrel tucked among rows of very dusty old books. Few students were enrolled in Classics courses, but the books on the shelves didn’t seem to mind my intrusions.

Reading Tertullian was a revelation. Even in English translation and some 1800 years after his death, the passion and the mind of the man were clear. In his arguments against the pagans, Tertullian took no prisoners. He pointed out all of the inconsistencies and contradictions of classical beliefs and practices, including all of the less-than-admirable traits and personal histories of the Greek and Roman gods. Yet he was more than an apologist; he was also one of the first theologians to tackle the question of the Trinity. Eighty-five years after his death, his works influenced the Council of Nicea and St. Augustine even later.

Aside from his passion, what struck me most about Tertullian was how contemporary his arguments sounded. Substitute “science and technology” for “Classical thought” or “The Academy,” and you have a very similar debate, a similar clash of worldviews. And in the 30 years that I’ve read, that debate has come only more to the fore.

The debate between worldviews is older than Tertullian, of course. Eight-hundred years before him, the prophet Daniel and his three friends Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego faced a very similar clash but in more severe circumstances. The church in Tertullian’s time faced on-again, off-again persecution; Daniel and his friends existed solely at the sufferance of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. Despite what they faced in their day-to-day life in a sometimes viciously polytheistic culture, the four remained faithful.

In Against the Flow: The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism, John Lennox describes that faithfulness. And he draws a parallel to contemporary society.

“Babylon’s philosophy,” Lennox says, “resonates with the scientism to today that encourages us to look for both meaning and salvation in science and technology. But scientific analysis and explanation does not yield to us the meaning for which we as persons long. Babylon will leave you empty.” This was the argument against classical culture that Tertullian made as well.

Tertullian, despite his influence, was never canonized. It’s believed he became associated with the Montanists, considered heretical by the Church for their emphasis upon the continuing influence of the Holy Spirit (some scholars suggest that the Montanists have a spiritual descendant in pentacostalism).

But what he argued for is as important today as it was in his own time. Our culture, too, has embraced gods with clay feet, gods who cannot answer the truly important human questions or needs. “Athens or Jerusalem?” remains a vital question for all of us.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been discussing John Lennox’s Against the Flow. It is so packed with insight that I can only highlight a few things in each post, but it is well worth reading and re-reading.

Illustration: A 16^th century representation of Tertullian. We really don’t know what he looked like.