Justin Cartwright’s “Lion Heart”

If you like English history, and especially the history of the Plantagents and the Crusades, a novel is waiting for you.

 Justin Cartwright’s Lion Heart is about memory, history, generational influence, and love, all wrapped together in an intriguing story.

Richard Cathar didn’t speak to his father for the last ten years of his father’s life.  His father, Alaric, was something of a career hippie (drugs and all), who became addicted to the story of the Crusades and Richard the Lionhearted. When Richard’s live-in girlfriend Emily leaves him (she says she needs her space but her space is with an English professor), he begins to poke around Richard the Lionhearted’s story, and the Plantagenet king’s fixation on recovering the true cross of Christ from Saladin. The cross, discovered by Helena the mother of Constantine in the 300s, had fallen into Saladin’s hands with the capture of Jerusalem.

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Richard’s research takes him to Oxford, where he earned his degree, to Jerusalem and back again. In Jerusalem, he meets and falls in love with a Canadian journalist, who is something other than a journalist. She travels to Cairo, ostensibly to report on the Arab spring, but is kidnapped. Richard manages to stay barely sane by continuing his research. He finds a letter, which suggests Saladin gave Richard the cross. But where did it go?

The novel is essentially three stories in one: Richard and his research, and how the ghost of his father lingers well into the present; Richard the Lionhearted, his battles, and what night have happened to the cross; and Richard’s love affair with the journalist. What author Cartwright does is to merge three stories into one story.

Justin Cartwright

Cartwright, a native of South Africa who makes his home in Britain, is an accomplished author of some 15 previous novels and three non-fiction works. Educated at Trinity College, Oxford, his novels have received numerous awards and been shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and Whitbread Novel Award. This latest novel was first published in Britain in 2013.

Lion Heart tackles questions of memory and history, how they connect and how they shape each other. The historical accounts are every bit as good as the contemporary accounts. Cartwright uses both to explain how a son comes to understand the father he barely knew and, by extension, himself.

Illustration: An image of Saladin and Richard in single combat, via Wikimedia.

This day you will be

We heard the soldiers

before we saw them

the sounds, explosions

at the edge moving

steadily center

boots thudding, tires

squealing, doors accepting

pounding, splintering

rifle shots, staccato

of machine guns

we kneel, hands folded

listening to words

flowing from Word

words attempting

to overpower the sounds

outside, failing

I am with you

Sounds of soldiers, closer

screams, shouting grows

louder, closer I look

to the bowed heads

of the children listening

to the words flowing

from Word, trembling

my hands shaking

The shouting, pounding

arrives at the door

I am with you always

this day you will be

Photograph of the Holocaust Monument - Moscow by Lynn Greyling via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Fighting Back with Joy

For several weeks, we’ve been reading Fight Back With Joy: Celebrate More. Regret Less. Stare Down Your Greatest Fears by Margaret Feinberg, and we’ve reached the end of the discussion. But not the end of the book, because this is a book that stays with you.

It finishes with “Bonus Tracks” – “5 Things to Say When You Don’t Know What to Say,” applicable not only to a cancer patient but also to any serious situation; “8 Things Those Facing Crisis Can’t Tell You (But Wish They Could);” “6 Lessons I Learned from Crisis;” “A Letter from Leif,” Feinberg’s husband and chief caregiver; and a playlist of music to accompany each chapter.

Each of the tracks (well, perhaps not the playlist) could have been books. Instead, they’re short, succinct summaries, wisdom learned the very hardest way – the wisdom that comes from living an experience that at many points could have ended in death.

It was the bonus tracks, in fact, that punched home something I knew from the beginning of the book but which I don’t think I acknowledged. Books are objects, yes, objects you hold in your hands or view on an e-reader like Kindle. You enjoy them or you don’t; you learn from them or you don’t. Good books become part of you; the best books change your life.

Fight Back with Joy is a giving book. Feinberg gives away a good part of herself in this book. One of the lessons she learned from her fight with breast cancer is that serious illness changes you. She may have been a giving person before it; she is a different giving person after it, a person who gives with God’s sense of giving.

It is a generous book. That’s not a redundant statement. Feinberg is lavish with her giving in this book. Little is excluded. If you want to know what experimental chemotherapy is like, or what to expect when you first look in the mirror after a double mastectomy, you will find it here. Or what you experience when you hair falls out in clumps.You want to know how difficult a cancer fight is for the primary caregiver, you will find that, too.

It is an honest book. Feinberg gets angry. She gets angry with God, with friends who don’t know what to say so they stop coming around, with her family, and with herself. There were days and times when she wanted to curl up in a ball and die.

Margaret Feinberg

It is a courageous book. Even being on the other side of the cancer experience, and having survived the cancer, its treatment, and related surgeries, it is clear that Feinberg never quit, although there were times when she wanted to. She fought, she fought with everything she had, everything her husband had, what friends and family had. She fought, too, with what God had, and what He had from the beginning was no guarantee she would survive. She fought with faith.

And Fight Back with Joy is a profoundly human book. Feinberg made a choice early on in dealing with the disease. She would fight with joy. There were days when there was no joy left, and yet it was still there. One of those days, when she found despair, led her to give away red balloons to fellow cancer patients and their families. She discovered the joy again, enough to continue the fight. And it is often the joy of a child, an adult who learns the joy of being a child of God.

This is a book for those who suffer a serious illness, and those who don’t. This is a book for caregivers to learn what to expect, and for those who are never called upon to be caregivers. This is a book for women and for men. It is about shock, and fear, and joy, and depression, and despair, and faith, and giving in, and fighting on when there’s little left to fight with.

This is a book that will change you.

Jason Stasyszn and Sarah Salter have been leading us in a discussion on Fight Back with Joy. Today concludes the book. To see more posts on the “Bonus Tracks,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph by Yiting Liu via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

He became the river

He became the river

the river stretching

stretching from the mountains down

down to the sea he became

the drops, the flows, the currents,

the eddys, the gallons rushing

countless as the stones underneath

the grains of sand alongside

the river flowed past history

the river flowed down to the sea

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

Poetic Voices: Susan Lewis and Katherine Hoerth

The two poetic voices featured today come at poetry from decidedly different directions. Susan Lewis, in How to be Another, exclusively uses the prose poem form, while Katharine Hoerth centers her poems in Goddess Wears Cowboy Boots in a specific geographic region.

Lewis is the author of several other collections of poetry, including Animal Husbandry (2008), State of the Union (2013), and This Visit (2014). In How to be Another, her exclusive use of the prose poem form for the 70 poems in the collection gives the volume an almost news documentary feel, as she considers all of the facets of relationships.

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

Against the Flow: Retreat or Remain?

This week, as I read Against the Flow: The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism  by John Lennox, I came upon this observation, which set in motion a chain of thoughts:

“They (Daniel and his friends) sought the wellbeing of Babylon by living in that city as salt and light for God. That stance involved sticking their heads above the parapet and protesting against the world-view that underlay the Babylonian system – and taking the consequences of doing so.”

That “Babylonian system,” Lennox says, was remarkably similar to the cultural system that now is in place in what we think of as Western culture – scientism and materialism, or science as religion and materialism in the sense of everything is material in the here and now and there is nothing after the here and now.

A child in the suburbs of New Orleans in the 1950s, I grew up in a time and culture strongly influenced by surging and often conflicting changes.

The post-World War II Baby Boom was continuing to explode, straining hospital and school services alike. The civil rights movement was gathering steam throughout the decade. The national religious revival associated with Christian leaders like Billy Graham and Carl F.H. Henry was ongoing. An almost religious reverence for science was created by the advent of the polio vaccine. And then I had the more immediate influences of family and what it meant to live in what was then (and now) what is perhaps the most different city in the United States, more an outpost of the Caribbean than an American city.

The 1960s were different: the civil rights movement; Vietnam and the antiwar movement; the proliferation of a lifestyle and philosophy summed up in almost a single word, “hippie;” the assassinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy; the broadening sweep of the drug culture.

By the time I entered college in 1969, it seemed to my parents that there were two Americas existing side by side, and one of them had become unrecognizable.

Billy Graham remained popular and the counsel of presidents; the hippie movement along with the growth of para-church organizations like Campus Crusade for Christ fed into the stream of what had become known as the Jesus Movement. I became a Christian in 1973 at the height of the Jesus Movement, directly through the influence of Campus Crusade for Christ. That was the same year the Supreme Court issued its decision on abortion in Roe v. Wade.

One thing I understood from the beginning of my Christian faith: Christianity was, at its most basic, countercultural. That point was driven home with a video series my wife and I saw at the church we attended in Houston in the mid 1970s – How Shall We Then Live by Francis Schaeffer.

The films, and Schaeffer’s books, were a revelation to me. First, they emphasized the importance of Christians being in the culture – not only for the growth of the Gospel message but also for the good of the culture. Hiding from the culture in figurative fortresses and Christian “ghettos” was bad for both the Church and the culture. Second, Schaeffer described over and over again how much of what is good about the culture has come from generations of the Church.

Over the years, I took Schaeffer’s message to heart, and found myself involved in a number of programs and efforts (and a controversy or two) that aimed at being salt and the light in the culture (including work).

Francis Schaeffer

Over the course of my lifetime, the United States has moved from a culture of shared Christian belief to what some charitably describe as “more pluralistic” and others less charitably as “increasingly pagan.” There’s no doubt that the Church’s influence in the United States has declined. And there’s no doubt that the culture has become more coarsened, violent and polarized. Christians might place the blame for this on the decline of the Church’s influence and the growing hostility of those espousing progressive politics. The opposite perspective increasingly points the finger at “evangelicals” for being the last roadblock for freedom and equality for all.

The debate is going to get worse. The hostility is increasing. Christians are becoming increasingly “objectified” by our political, cultural and media elites. This isn’t going to end well for Christians or for the country.

The temptation for Christians will be to retreat. I don’t believe that is an option any more. It’s certainly not a solution. We no longer enjoy the de facto protection of shared belief.

So what do we do? Lennox argues that we do what the Church has always done – give reasoned arguments, engage, answer questions, and “defend the Christian message against misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and vilification.” And he says this: “It was (and is) part of the convincing power of the Christian message that it gave credible answers.”

We have our work cut out for us.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been discussing Against the Flow. This post is based upon chapter 6, “The World-View of Babylon.”

Painting: St. Paul preaching to the philosophers at the Areopagus in Athens by Raphael (1515).

We are the ten

After Matthew 25:1-13

We are the ten

ten who follow

who believe

worship

serve

we are the ten

working, living

to meet the one

ten

we are the five

with oil sufficient

we are the five

without

we are ten who wait

for when he comes

we are the five who are ready

we are the five

who are not

we are the five

inside

we are the five

shut out

the door closed

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