Posts filed under 'Books'
I have two somewhat unrelated topics for today’s blog entry: (1) the new Animal Planet “reality” show “Meerkat Manor” and (2) the even stranger territorial behavior of fellow residents in our townhome association.
First of all, the meerkats. As much as I love animals—actually, because I love animals—I’m becoming increasingly intolerant of animal documentaries. They seem to be becoming even more anthropomorphic than they used to be, and they thrive on stuffing their programs with as many threats as possible to their cute little protagonists’ existence. Mink and I have already discussed the pornographic titillation involved in animal documentaries, but “Meerkat Manor” is honestly one of the worst I’ve seen.
Narrated by Sean “I wish I could act” Astin, the half-hour episodes always end on a cliff-hanger involving the near-death of some meerkat or another. Will Shakespeare survive his deadly puff adder bite? Well, now that Shakespeare made it through the night, will he starve to death? Will Flower, the dominant female of the clan, be so upset that her daughters had litters of pups (without her permission) that she will kill her own grand-meerkats? You get the idea.
You’d think that the people who watch soap operas wouldn’t be the same people who watch nature shows. But maybe I’m wrong. In “Meerkat Manor,” despite the fact that the footage is taken from a scientific study by Cambridge University, the script constantly assigns human characteristics to its meerkat subjects: (I paraphrase) “The courageous Shakespeare, left behind at the burrow, is watched over by his caring sister Mozart. These two have a very close bond. Mozart’s presence is probably the only thing keeping Shakespeare going at this point.” As if they know that.
Anyway, I’m obviously guilty of a fair amount of anthropomorphizing on a daily basis. I, however, am not making a documentary, so I’m excused. But it’s strange to me that the documentarians think audiences will only be interested in animals if we’re constantly told how much they’re like us. I can see some appeal there, but part of the reason I’m so fascinated by animals is that they’re also very different.
Animals, for example, have a biological advantage to marking and defending their territory, as the meerkat family in “Meerkat Manor” does. Humans do not. And yet certain members of our townhome association are intent upon making sure that children from outside this complex can’t play here. Twice Porpoise has heard a man who lives here (we’ll call him Mr. Defender of the Complex) tell a kid—who, as far as we could tell, was doing no harm—that he couldn’t play in the area in front of our row of townhouses unless he were specifically invited. And get this: he said it was because “those are the rules.” What rules? Where?
Well, yesterday was the second time the child got this lecture, and apparently he went home and told his parents what had happened. Then his mom came over to talk to Mr. Defender of the Complex, and apparently that didn’t work, because the kid’s father soon appeared. Things seem to have escalated, because at one point, Porpoise looked out and saw that there was a policeman arbitrating the dispute, as Mr. Defender waved around a deed, voicing the phrase “private property” quite a few times.
Sheesh. I’ve rarely been so embarrassed to live somewhere. Don’t get me wrong—I love our house, and I certainly never imagined I’d be a homeowner this early in my life. It does sometimes strike me as strange that the house I live in now, with two people and a cat, is larger than the house I grew up in, with three people, two dogs, two cats, and a hamster. But, since Porpoise and I both work primarily from home, and since we’re both independent, persnickety individuals, the extra space helps us out immensely. I just feel guilty at times about having so much private property.
I thought the whole townhome association might actually be a bit of a remedy for that: you know, a sort of communal living. But it’s hard to live communally with people who seem to only care about leaves, mulch, and keeping “those” kids off our property. Especially when they keep “forgetting” to tell us about association meetings.
I saw Mr. Defender pacing the rear perimeter of the complex this morning. After watching the meerkat documentary, I could swear that he was marking his territory. Maybe if I think about my fellow townhome residents as meerkats, I’ll be more charitable towards them.
I should end the post on that cute note, but I’ll just add a little but more, since I recently saw a Lauren Winner article about the spiritual consequences of living in suburbia. The books Winner reviews seem too mild for my taste: I want to see a whole-hearted condemnation of the lifestyle in which I to some degree partake. Ron Sider’s classic Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger is more the harsh scolding I crave. But I’ve always been better at judgment than at actually helping people change. It’s my tendency to further retreat into the privacy of our house—yes, I recognize the irony—rather than to confront my neighbors’ ideas about private property.
Some battles aren’t worth the energy, and this may be one of them. I don’t know yet. We’ll see. And, in the meantime, I won’t be watching any more of “Meerkat Manor.”
June 17th, 2006
*Apologies to readers either too young or too old to recognize Ren and Stimpy’s “Log” song.
Imagine my joy today when I saw that Alan Jacobs—skilled essayist, fellow Shetland Sheepdog fan, and all-around delightful person—has just published an essay on the topic of blogs in Books and Culture.
Jacobs relates his own experience reading in the blogosphere, with its attendant thrills and frustrations. The main feature defining blogs, he argues, is their immediacy: they present ideas and news items quickly and then move on. Therefore, he concludes, “Blogs remain great for news: political, technological, artistic, whatever. And they provide a very rich environment in which news (or rather “news”) can be tested and evaluated and revised. . . .But as vehicles for the development of ideas they are woefully deficient and will necessarily remain so unless they develop an architecture that is less bound by the demands of urgency—or unless more smart people refuse the dominant architecture.”
Now, I’m still learning the architecture of the blog genre. Porpoise is continually pointing out that the length of my posts exceeds that of most bloggers’ posts—and I might conclude that my blog readers are an unusual breed, too, since some of you (Ahem, Pop Otter. Ahem, Possum.) write responses even longer than my original posts. In my case, I certainly won’t equate length with depth of idea development. But I have to say that, for me, relative brevity and urgency are the two most appealing differences about blog-writing, as compared to any other kind of writing I do. I have an immediate audience who immediately responds, so I feel like my writing actually impacts people, albeit in miniscule ways. Furthermore, I get to express half-baked ideas that would never make it to paper if I had to back them up with extensive proofs and examples. The evidence may be out there, but if I had to find it, I would lose motivation.
But, on the flip side, I do feel the time pressure Jacobs mentions. What if I only see a movie after everyone else has finished talking about it? It’s as if relevance suddenly has an expiration date.
However, expiration date or not, I enjoy my blog snacks (reading as well as writing). They’re not full meals, but, as I think Jacobs would agree, they fill an important function in the contemporary exchange of information. As Porpoise knows, I like my meals, but I can get awfully grumpy if I have to wait too long in between them. Thus, the instant gratification of snacks.
But I’ll be very happy when I get to feast on the next volume of Jacobs’ essays (If you haven’t read his latest collection, Shaming the Devil, shame on you. Get thee to a library.)
P.S. I should also mention that my blogging experience has been unusually positive so far mostly because I have a small cadre of intelligent, informed, and courteous (if argumentative) readers. I’ve only had one “troll” since I began The Ottery, and since this troll was trying to argue that he was the Messiah (I’m not kidding), I could pretty easily dismiss him.
June 13th, 2006
Dormouse just called my attention to Slate’s Blogging the Bible project (subtitled “What Happens When an Ignoramus Reads the Good Book?”). It’s not biblical scholarship, just the honest reactions and questions of a man reading the Hebrew scriptures closely for the first time. AND he invites reader responses. Pop Otter, calm yourself. You can’t spend all your time posting ten-page answers to his questions.
Now seems like as good a time as any to reflect upon a life surrounded by Bible-philes. Let’s start off with a little illustrative anecdote. I think it was maybe the second or third time I brought Porpoise—then my boyfriend—home from college to visit my family. On a lazy Saturday morning, Mama Chipmunk*, Porpoise, and I were relaxing after breakfast when Pop Otter bounded into the living room, dropped a stack of books on the coffee table, and asked, “Want to help me review commentaries on Leviticus?”
I’m not sure about this, but somehow I don’t think that’s the question most girls fear their fathers will ask when they bring a boy home.
We were each to select a passage from Leviticus, so that we could compare how it was explicated in the various commentaries. Mama Chipmunk immediately piped up, “I want the passage about mildew regulations! Can I have mildew regulations?”
Well, stunningly, despite this experience, Porpoise married me anyway and is now part of the whole insane crew—and, trust me, he has his own brand of insanity, too.
Recently, he’s begun playing with my interlinear Bible and my basic biblical Greek textbook. It’s partly for work, but he is enjoying what he’s learning. So is the Cherub. Look—here she is sitting next to the interlinear Bible, looking very scholarly.
In short, I am surrounded by people who love reading the Bible. Yet I do not like reading the Bible. I make myself read it anyway (well, I try), and I think, for me, part of faith is trusting that this will somehow help me know God better, even if I don’t “feel” anything. I do appreciate learning things about the original languages and literary forms, things that have often been obscured in translation. But most of the time I feel like I learn more about God’s nature and the Christian journey obliquely—through other books that I read (particularly, of course, The Lord of the Rings).
And then I realize that I wouldn’t be able to see God in fiction and poetry—at least not in the same way—if I hadn’t already read about God in the scriptures.
Anyway, for someone who’s read the Bible enough that she’s bored with it and yet still has so much to learn about it, it’s interesting to read the questions of a self-proclaimed “ignoramus.” I think I’ll be following the Blogging the Bible project—maybe it will be a good balance with looking at the scriptures in light of their original context, which is what I usually try to do (along with lectio divina, which I really like but have a hard time settling down for). If nothing else, it will at least provide a few good chuckles.
*Mom hasn’t chosen her own moniker for the blog, but, when I was two, I informed everyone that she was a chipmunk. Don’t know why—maybe because she hoards sunflower seeds. So Mama Chipmunk she is.
June 7th, 2006
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a long time, as it’s one of my little stump speeches, but I am just now getting around to it. More than the historical errors, more than the silly conspiracy theories, what drives me nuts about The Da Vinci Code (the book) is its veneer of the “sacred feminine,” under which lies the deep philosophy of “sex is all about what men get out of it.”
For example, here’s the passage that makes me stomp around and kick things. Langdon is lecturing his adoring students at Harvard (yeah, right) when he veers slightly off topic and offers to give them “this bit of advice about your sex lives”:
All the men in the audience leaned forward, listening intently.
‘The next time you find yourself with a woman, look in your heart and see if you cannot approach sex as a mystical, spiritual act. Challenge yourself to find that spark of divinity that man can only achieve through union with the sacred feminine.’
The women smiled knowingly, nodding.
Blechhh! If this is feminist, then, well . . . the world is even more depressing than I thought it was. Granted, Langdon is talking to the male students at this point, but, even so, I’ve never read anything so male-centered trying to pass itself off as being enlightened toward women. And, if women exist so that you can get access to the divine through them, what the heck are women (heterosexual women, anyway, which I think are the only kind that exist in Dan Brown’s world) supposed to do to have a spiritual experience? Oh, I forgot. We don’t have to. We’re just naturally more in touch with the divine. Which is why we were supposed to be “the angels in the house” back in the 19th century, imparting our naturally superior religious virtues to our offspring. Don’t you love it when Victorian gender ideals get recycled in contemporary bestsellers?
And then there’s the whole chalice-and-blade symbolism thing, which just goes to reinforce the whole “all men are like this, and all women are like that” sort of view that characterizes the novel. Women, represented by the V-shape of the chalice, are thus reduced to being represented by their uteruses, which, may I remind everyone, are not really involved in sex itself. Let’s just randomly pick an organ to represent men sexually, like, say, the epididymis, which as far as I know, is just a passageway and has nothing to do with pleasure. Anyway, uteruses are of course receptacles, which seems to be the main role for women in The Da Vinci Code. Mary Magdalene receives Jesus’ sperm and thus becomes the “Holy Grail” continuing his bloodline; Sophie, as a character, seems to exist mainly to receive Langdon’s superior wisdom.
And this is supposed to be an improvement on the Catholic Church’s treatment of women? It actually sounds rather similar to the view once traditionally taken by the Church: women’s primary role is reproduction, and sex is not about pleasure (at least, not for women). Now, I’ll be first to say that both Catholics and Protestants have a lot to atone for in their historical attitudes towards women and sex. But viewing women as vessels is hardly progress.
Neither is reducing men OR women to their sexual (or reproductive, as the case may be) organs. In incarnational Christianity, sex does indeed have spiritual significance, as a celebration of the body’s created goodness. And that’s why, if there were actually any historical proof that Jesus were married, Christians should have no problem with it. It would have been one more way that Jesus lived out human life with us. I can’t offer any explanation as to why Jesus was single and celibate, rather than married with children. But I have my own little idea, and it goes like this:
Many particulars of Jesus’ life align him with the oppressed, the social outcasts. Though Dan Brown is absolutely wrong in his assertion that no Jewish man in Jesus’ day would have been single (Hey, Dan, you know those Dead Sea Scroll thingies that you reference? Do you actually know anything about the Essenes who produced them?), he is right that men or women without children were looked down upon, perhaps even considered cursed by God. If you were a barren woman in the 1st century, think how much hope you would find in the fact that your Messiah had no children, either. Or if you were, say, a male eunuch. I’ve always found the story of the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 9: 26-40) one of the most moving in the New Testament. Here’s a man considered by his culture to be incomplete, and he finds himself (by no coincidence, I’m sure), reading over a passage from Isaiah:
“He was led like a sheep to the slaughter,
And as a lamb before its shearer is silent,
So he did not open his mouth.
In his humiliation he was deprived of justice.
Who can speak of his descendants?
For his life was taken from the earth.”
Then Philip comes along and explains how this passage can be applied to Jesus’ life. And the eunuch learns that God, when God became a human, didn’t have any children either. And yet Jesus was as whole as any human has ever been. And you are whole, too. Good news indeed.
Human sex can play a role in showing God’s goodness and glory, but humans, according to God, are not defined by their sexual organs—which ones they have, or whether they have them or not. I find that a whole lot more liberating than pseudo-feminist “sacred feminine” bushwah.
June 3rd, 2006
That’s w-e-l-t-s-c-h-m-e-r-z. Weltschmerz. German origin (no kidding). And I am feeling weltschmerz-y about the prime-timing of the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee last night.
When I first heard that ABC was going to show the bee finals, I was overjoyed. The bee’s been on ESPN for years, but now it would be available for non-cable subscribers. And, as a spelling junkie, I was ready to get my fix.
Of course I have to say something here about the recent mainstreaming of the spelling bee, which has surprised and, admittedly, puzzled me. First there was the superb documentary Spellbound (2002), which primarily treated the kids with respect, while showing off the foolishness of their parents, teachers, and neighbors. There were a few psychotically competitive kids, but you also got glimpses of those who competed out of the sheer joy of playing with words. There was also the to-be-expected “look how much this kid has overcome to get this far” angle, also the emphasis of the recent Starbucks-promoted film Akeelah and the Bee (which I was desperate to see, but which only stayed in the movie theaters of my benighted town for a week). I haven’t seen last fall’s Bee Season, but, if it’s anything like Myra Goldberg’s novel (on which it’s based), I think I might find it too depressing. It’s more about family angst than about spelling.
Anyway, why are spelling bees suddenly so popular? Is it because most people, reliant on Microsoft Word, can’t spell anymore? In the broadcast last night, the young competitors seemed to be treated like rather exotic pets—or, sometimes, like Olympic athletes, which, considering how annoying Olympics commentary can be, is not much of an improvement. Indeed, the commentators said things just as idiotic and cutting as Dick Button’s narration of Olympic figure skating events.
These are children, people. Extremely gifted children, but children nonetheless. I was aghast when I discovered that the bee was being broadcast live, between 8 and 10: 15 p.m. last night. This also meant that the competitors had to sit, waiting, letting their anxiety build, as ABC took commercial breaks. As a former speller, I know that’s got to be mental torture.
All things considered, as much as I love spelling competitions, after last night, I wholeheartedly wish that the bee would never be broadcast again. I fear that continuing this trend might make competitive parents push their kids even harder. Relegate the bee to relative obscurity and let it be fun again. Establish an adult spelling bee and broadcast that. Adults can determine for themselves how competitive they want to be. If they become warped, it’s their own faults.
I am, I confess, biased by my own experiences with spelling. I never got further than a third in state, and, even in my day, I think the national spelling bee would have been too competitive for me. But I loved spelling. The adrenaline of competition was nerve-racking—but, before all that, there were the hours of fun preparing. Now a professional coach seems to be a prerequisite for competition, but, back then, I had my dad. He read words, and I spelled them back, but not before we laughed at the definition or traded several puns back and forth. My mom, hearing all the giggling, had a hard time believing that we were actually studying. We were otters, playing with words.
And that’s what I wish for today’s young spellers.
On a side note, I was happy that, for the first time since Nupur Lala (Nupur Lala!) in 1999, a girl won the bee. I was, however, rooting for the runner-up, Finola Hackett. One of her hobbies is Irish dance, so how could I not support her? Sadly, she misspelled “weltschmerz,” which seemed odd, since she clearly knew German spelling rules, and she had correctly spelled many more difficult words (any speller knows that the hardest words are not necessarily the long ones, but those with lots of schwas). Must have been a nervous mental blip. Anyway, I liked her because her face registered expressions (unlike some of the other spellers, who I feared might have been robots), and she didn’t seem devastated when she was eliminated. She’ll be okay. And I hope she keeps dancing.
By the way, you can view online the complete list of words used in the bee. Note that the “championship words” (those used once there are two competitors left) are actually much, much easier than the ones in previous rounds. Odd.
June 2nd, 2006
. . . you know you’re in for some silliness. Such is the case with the recent movie adaptation of The Da Vinci Code.
Yes, Porpoise and I are back from Hawaii, and I plan to recount some of our adventures on The Ottery. But first I have to blog about Da Vinci, because I’ve been holding it in for almost a week now. Plus, we’re going to see X-Men 3 (yay! another movie featuring Ian McKellen acting silly!) tomorrow, and I can’t juggle two movie blog entries in my head simultaneously.
So, yes, we saw The Da Vinci Code in Hawaii, which normally I would have considered a waste of valuable hiking time. However, we had been badly roasted by the sun the previous day, and nothing sounded better than sitting in a cool, dark place for a couple of hours and laughing our heads off. Which is what we did.
Anyway, back to the Council of Nicea. I don’t know whose idea it was to attempt to render Leigh Teabing’s monologue about suppression of the “sacred feminine” less boring by interspersing it with historical flashbacks, but whoever thought of it has about as much storytelling sense as Dan Brown, which is to say, about as much storytelling sense as the dead muskrat perched atop Tom Hanks’ head.
The “Council of Nicea” scene features a room evenly divided down the middle, with white-bearded men in togas yelling and gesticulating threateningly at each other. You almost expect one of them to leap across the room and start beating a representative from the other side, à la Brooks’ caning of Sumner in the U.S. Senate. Either that, or you hope that it’ll somehow turn out to be a Monty Python-esque sketch, complete with singing and dancing.
Alas, The Da Vinci Code ‘tis a silly place, but it doesn’t know it. If Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman weren’t so darn earnest, they could have taken the unintentional camp of the novel and run with it. Instead, they stick reverently to the high-blown cheesiness of the original.
Take another moment from the Teabing monologue (which, in the book, is a Dan Brown monologue divided between Teabing and Langdon—more on that change later), when he recites the “proof” that Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ had a romantic relationship. The book quotes the Gospel of Philip thus: “Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on her mouth.” In the movie, Teabing quotes thus: “Christ loved her more than all the other disciples and used to kiss her often on her—,” at which point Sophie breaks in with another question. Now, the movie version is actually more accurate, as Goldsman must know: in the manuscript of the Gospel of Philip, the object of the preposition is illegible, which creates some pretty funny possibilities. If you know that, it makes you laugh at the line’s movie treatment. But if you don’t know that, it makes no sense.
There’s actually one aspect in which the novel is even superior to the movie—which really does not speak well for the movie. Brown, in spite of his horrific prose, does keep you hooked with cheap tricks and mysterious escapes that aren’t explained until the next chapter. It’s manipulative and lazy on the author’s part, but it works. The movie couldn’t even provide that kind of cheap thrill—the action sequences simply come off as flat.
That said, I am intrigued with some of the changes the movie made to the character of Robert Langdon, the Harvard “symbologist.” I spent most of the novel wanting to kick him, because he’s this suave know-it-all who is quite obviously Dan Brown’s image of himself. Tom Hanks’ Langdon is more unsure (perhaps because of his hairdo) and more humble. And, poor thing, he had a traumatic childhood experience that left him claustrophobic. When Teabing declares something to be fact, Hanks’ Langdon inserts, “It’s merely a theory”—a change perhaps intended to pacify the book’s critics, but one that also seems in tune with Langdon’s character as presented in the movie. Langdon’s doubts about Teabing’s assertions turn the film into something of a conversion narrative for Langdon. Though Teabing, as interpreted by Ian McKellen, is mad, Langdon and Sophie gradually come to accept the theory as truth.
Or do they? By the end of the movie, as Langdon and Sophie are discussing the impossibility of proving that she is descended from Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, Langdon makes a statement something along the lines of “Faith is whatever you choose to believe.” Though it’s a pretty insipid message, I was fascinated with how the movie’s ending made room for mystery and doubt as part of faith. In contrast, Dan Brown presents his account of Jesus and Mary Magdalene as gospel truth, his gospel truth. The one true story, which has only one interpretation. In short, Dan Brown is a fundamentalist. He just happens to preach different fundamentals from the Christian fundamentalists he decries.
Yet what the film gives with one hand, it takes away with the other. It gives us a portrait of faith as mysterious, but then, at the end, when Langdon kneels at what the clues suggest might be the tomb of Mary Magdalene, instead of leaving us with his unproved and yet newly held belief, the camera takes us down and shows us what he can’t see, that Mary’s sarcophagus really is down there. Blah. So inconsistent with what the film was, at times, trying halfheartedly to make its theme.
Again, in Langdon’s and Sophie’s conversation about faith, Langdon asks, referring to Jesus’ nature, “Why does it have to be human or divine?” Um, well, it doesn’t, which is kind of the point of Christianity. The paradox of Jesus being human and divine is the central paradox of the Christian faith, one that, if accepted, has to be accepted as a mystery that we will never fully understand in this life. But the film can’t leave it there. Instead, Langdon has to tidy things up, to tie up loose ends in a nice little aphorism, by saying “Maybe human is divine.” Well, ladies and gentlemen, there you go. No more worries to boggle your mind.
Both the novel and the movie of The Da Vinci Code, I would argue, underestimate their readers/viewers and condescend to them. However, I’m glad for both, because they’ve opened up room for some intelligent discussion (and some stupid discussion, too, of course) about faith and religious history—and art, too, I suppose. People, if given access to information, are smarter than Brown and Howard and Co. give them credit for. They can handle facts, and they can handle mystery. And they can also have fun with both, which is more than I can say for the pomposity of The Da Vinci Code.
May 26th, 2006
So says Jesus in the recently republished manuscript of the Gospel of Judas. Let me tell you, that ain’t my Jesus.
I was at a party last night when a few key words signaling “religion discussion alert!” reached my ears. Naturally, I lunged for that side of the room, found out that the conversation was about the Gospel of Judas, and ended up delivering a mini-rant about why Gnosticism annoys me. A friend (let’s call him “Subcomandante Possum”) then asked if I was going to report this discussion on my blog. “No!” I replied indignantly. “I don’t mine daily conversation for blog material.”
So . . . I lied. I really wasn’t going to write about the Gospel of Judas, because plenty of people already have (check out Philip Jenkins’ article on Beliefnet—it’s a good one), and I’m not sure I’m adding anything. But then I woke up in the middle of the night and found myself composing the entry in my head, so I figure I’d better write it for the sake of my own sleep, if nothing else. So here we go. Subcomandante Possum, as last night’s assistant in slamming Gnosticism, this one goes out to you.
I’m not going to talk much about the details of the canonization process, about how the early church selected the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, while rejecting other contenders. Experts can tell you a lot more about that than I can. All I’m going to say is that it was not, as Dan Brown and others have implied, a top-down, hierarchical decision made at the Council of Nicea by Constantine or anyone else. A consistent, de facto canon had already been formed by the early Christians who passed around the texts that are now part of the Bible. As Bible scholar Craig Evans explains, “Those early Christian groups were generally poor; they couldn’t afford to have more than a few books copied, so the members would say, ‘I want the Apostle John’s gospel, and so on. The canonical Gospels are the ones that they themselves considered the most authentic.”
And that’s part of what makes me believe the canonical Gospels, as opposed to the Gnostic ones. It was the people, ordinary people in communities of faith, who recognized the authenticity of the canonical Gospels; the Gnostic Gospels, on the other hand, were the ones promoted by those who wanted to be the elite, those who wanted to view themselves as more enlightened than others—specifically, more enlightened than poor Jewish believers.
Several religion scholars have claimed that the discovery of the Gospel of Judas will help to combat anti-Semitic trends in Christianity (by explaining that Judas wasn’t really a traitor; he was simply doing what Jesus instructed him to do). Now, I heartily agree that anti-Semitism is a problem that needs to be addressed—and I believe that Gnosticism one of the last places on earth to look for a remedy, for, in its origins, practices, and beliefs, Gnosticism was thoroughly anti-Jewish. It was a way for the Greeks to reject all that offended them about the Jewish roots of Christianity and to separate themselves from those “primitive” people with their strangely concrete beliefs.
And what was most offensive about Jewish Christianity? Its emphasis on the goodness of the material world, especially the body. For Gnostics, the material world was evil, and so they ascribed its creation not to God but to an evil demi-urge. To become truly enlightened and divine, you had to cast off the body, which was separate from the soul (in contrast, consider the Hebrew word nephesh, meaning one’s whole being, body and soul wrapped up together). To the Gnostics, it was unconscionable that God would come in the form of a human, because human bodies were evil. Thus, the Gnostic Jesus of the Gospel of Judas tells Judas, “you will sacrifice the man that clothes me,” thus freeing Jesus to transcend the body and become divine—just as the Gnostics believed they, too, would become, if they gained access to the special secret knowledge hidden from everyone else.
The Jesus I know and love would never tell a disciple, “Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom.” If you look at Jesus’ life and teachings in the canonical Gospels, it’s pretty clear that there’s no chance of understanding the mysteries of the kingdom apart from others. There are no secrets. Plenty of weirdness, yes. The Bible is a pretty weird book, and Jesus is a pretty weird guy, so I can’t dismiss the Gospel of Judas on the grounds of weirdness alone. But the Gospel of Judas is precisely the sort of weirdness that I would expect people to come up with, because it sets up those hierarchies and divisions that we tend to crave. Jesus, on the other hand? As W.H. Auden wrote, “I believe because He fulfills none of my dreams, because He is in every respect the opposite of what He would be if I could have made Him in my own image.”
And yet the mystery (a very public mystery, not a secret one) of Jesus, according to Christianity, is that we are made in his image. Jesus’ incarnation as a human is a signal flare flashing out that God actually kind of likes these bodies God created, as well as the particular environments in which those bodies live. Here’s an experiment: take a look at the Gospel of Judas and observe how no specific places are mentioned—for the Gnostics, specifics would get in the way of enlightened abstraction. Now take a look at the canonical Gospels. Place names abound. Jesus gets hungry and tired and irritated and amused, and fully embraces the messy goodness of the human body.
So I guess I could say that the beauty of the Incarnation is the reason I get ticked off at Gnosticism. And I really can’t think of a better expression of incarnational beauty than my favorite Gerard Manley Hopkins poem:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
I say more: the just man justices,
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Christ—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
Ha! In your face, Gnostics!
I do also have to mention that today, as we were picking up a pizza, a little boy in the parking lot looked up at Porpoise and said “Hello, Jesus.” Or maybe it was “Hello, pizza.” One of the two.
May 14th, 2006
Those readers present at the Porpoise-Otter wedding a few months ago know that we’re probably the only couple in the world who chose the story of Balaam’s donkey (Numbers 22:22-35) as one of our ceremony readings. Why? Well, it’s always been one of my favorite Bible stories (it has a talking donkey—what more could you ask?), and Porpoise thought it might at least be entertaining for friends and family who aren’t so familiar with the Bible. And it sure gave people something to talk about at the reception.
Then, of course, there’s Jesus choosing a donkey for his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. That, combined with the fact that the donkey is the symbol of the Democratic Party, must mean that Democrats are God’s favorites. (Okay, okay, sorry to readers who don’t share my political views—I just get a bit snarky with rhetoric implying that Republicans are somehow more Christian than Democrats. In truth, I side with Jim Wallis’s “God Is Not a Republican or a Democrat”–though I certainly have my own preferences!)
Back to my main subject, which is the adorableness of donkeys.
As far as hagiographic accounts of donkeys, St. Francis refers to his own body as “Brother Ass”: something to be fenced in occasionally, but also something to be cared for and loved (which Francis didn’t always do that well; on his deathbed, he apologized to “Brother Ass” for mistreating him). If you think of the respect St. Francis had for animals, that’s no insult.
My new favorite donkey-and-saint story doesn’t have much to do with the donkey itself, but I love it anyway. It’s about Teresa of Ávila, and I found it recounted in Dorothy Day’s spiritual autobiography The Long Loneliness:
“Once when she [Teresa] was traveling from one part of Spain to another with some other nuns and a priest to start a convent, and their way took them over a stream, she was thrown from her donkey. The story goes that the Lord said to her, ‘That is how I treat my friends.’ And she replied, ‘And that is why you have so few of them.’”
To paraphrase Animal of The Muppets, “That my kind of saint.” She knew God well enough to sass him and serve him—perhaps rather like a donkey.
May 10th, 2006
I’ve always loved the character of Lucy Pevensie from The Chronicles of Narnia—how she’s brave and curious and tender-hearted and sees things that others don’t. When I was ten or eleven and my church youth group played around with the idea of putting on a play of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I knew I was destined to play Lucy. But we never actually did. And I never got through the back of my closet, even though I kept an emergency bag (filled with string, a flashlight, and crackers) there just in case.
So I knew I would be particularly anxious about who played Lucy in the recent movie adaptation. I need not have worried. The film as a whole has some faults (though it’s way better than my worst fears, and overall pretty good), young Georgie Henley captured my heart from the beginning.
I should clarify that I usually don’t like children much. I read lots of children’s books, but I’m not fond of the stickiness and noisiness of real kids. But Porpoise and I decided that a small, clean, intelligent—and let’s not forget cute—ten-year-old wouldn’t be that bad. We could read to it. Porpoise has suggested that I inquire about whether Georgie Henley is available for rental.
She’s even more endearing now that we’ve listened to the director’s and four-kids’ commentary on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe DVD. She’s actually a little imp. She gets things off to a good start when she says, “You look like a monkey! Your ears stick out!” to her costar Skandar Keynes (Edmund) the first time he appears on screen. Apparently she also introduced the “potty-mouth bucket” to the set during filming, and insisted that any cast and crew who swore in her presence had to pay money to the bucket. Creative child.
Listening to the commentary, you do get the impression that she’s a bit of a chatterbox, but she’s so excited about everything that you don’t really mind. She’s very tickled by the memory of the day she ate a pencil on set. Why? It’s kind of hard to hear her explanation amidst all the giggles, but it seems to have had something to do with being in the Beavers’ house.
One of my favorite Georgie Henley stories is about how, when director Andrew Adamson gave an iPod as a thank-you gift to each of the four children, Georgie thanked him profusely. She then turned to her mother and whispered, “What is it?” Yes! Not only is she adorable, but she has Luddite potential!
Hey, Georgie, if you ever read this, you can come live with us. We have an extra room in our basement. We’ll feed you pencils. And we’ll read to you.
May 6th, 2006
I just finished two fascinating nonfiction books that fed my current region-and-religion obsession: Dennis Covington’s Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia and Timothy K. Beal’s Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith.
Both had some topical connection to Lee Smith’s Saving Grace (see previous post): Salvation on Sand Mountain is an account of a journalist’s time among Appalachian snake handlers, and Roadside Religion features a chapter on “biblical mini-golf” courses with great names like “Golgotha Fun Park.” Only in the South, I said to myself, only in the South.
Both Covington and Beal are remarkable for the credit they, as fairly mainstream Christian believers, give to these somewhat eccentric—sometimes dangerous, sometimes merely kitschy—expressions of faith. Beal even struggles to acknowledge the spiritual merit of Precious Moments when he visits the Precious Moments Inspiration Park in Carthage, Missouri. That takes far more graciousness than I have (we hates them, with their huge, droopy eyes!).
In the process of giving weird practices the benefit of the doubt, each writer finds himself opening to mystery, God’s mystery, and they interweave their spiritual narratives with the tales of the places they visit.
Covington gives some historical and sociological explanations for why some Southern Pentecostals handle snakes: the first documented instance of snake handling was in 1910 in Tennessee, and Covington suggests that it may have had something to do with the hills people feeling powerless at the increasing urbanization of the South. But he doesn’t wholly attribute the phenomenon to sociological circumstance, and he recognizes the mystery of both power and powerlessness involved in charismatic experience.
In one of the many beautiful passages from the book, he writes: “In both sexual and religious ecstasy, the first thing that goes is self. The entrance into ecstasy is surrender. Handlers talk about receiving the Holy Ghost. But when the Holy Ghost is fully come upon someone like Gracie McAllister, the expression on her face reads exactly the opposite—as though someone, or something, were being violently taken from her. The paradox of Christianity, one of many of which Jesus speaks, is that only in losing ourselves do we find ourselves, and perhaps that’s why photos of the handlers so often seem to be portraits of loss.”
As a Flannery O’Connor fan, I found it easier to give credence to snake handlers than to Precious Moments pilgrims. The Precious Moments devotees are seeking comfort, while the snake handlers are living their faith on the edge. Not that I don’t think they’re really, really insane, because they are. But I don’t want to deny that God can actually work through their snake handling, even if God doesn’t really want them to do it. (I suppose, for consistency, I ought to grant the same potential benefit for Precious Moments figurines, but everything in me rebels against that).
Beal’s book is at once more amusing and more academic than Covington’s, while Covington delves deeper into the personal. However, Beal has some important insights. In trying to describe why certain sites appealed to him more than others, he writes, “In these places I experienced a correlation between connectedness to the land, personal authenticity, and openness to others. The more the place was locally grounded, rooted in its particular natural environment, the more uniquely personal it was, and the more hospitable it was to others. Hospitality is always local.” (Thus, Beal finds deep hospitality even in places with signs declaring “Hell is HOT” and “You will burn”). Though he doesn’t name it as such, that’s the mystery of the Incarnation, God self-revealing in particulars (most importantly, the ultimate particular in the person of Jesus Christ).
The last paragraph of Salvation on Sand Mountain is so beautiful that I cried when I read it aloud to Porpoise. While driving through his childhood neighborhood, Covington remembers how his father used to call him in for dinner. Rather than shouting his name or banging a dinner bell, his father would come to find him. “This is how he got me to come home,” Covington writes. “He came to the place I was before he called my name.”
Ooh. Shivers.
So maybe that has something to do with religion and regionalism, as well as Incarnation. God comes to the place we are, to our particular circumstances, before calling our name. And the South (at least for writers of the previous generation—it may now be changing) has a shared history of defeat (a necessary defeat) and post-Civil War poverty. Flannery O’Connor believed that the South was “Christ-haunted,” and that it was “traditionally opposed to the idea of Enlightenment perfectibility” that characterized the Northern states. Southerners shared “a distrust of the abstract, a sense of human dependence on the grace of God, and a knowledge that evil is not simply a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured.” So if there’s something distinctive about Southern Christianity, it may be because God, respecting the particular experience of Southerners, self-reveals in ways that appeal to them.
As I said, though, I believe that the South O’Connor observed is changing, at least to some degree, due to the universalizing influence of various media. Having grown up in pre-Internet Arkansas, I’m now shocked when I return home for a visit and discover that Arkansan churches are singing the same songs, reading the same Rick Warren books, and preaching the same politics that evangelicals across the U.S. are. The evangelical subculture sometimes seems so monolithic. Maybe that’s why I find tales of quirky faith so refreshing. But, God being God, there are no doubt ways that he’ll reveal himself through the particular, peculiar circumstances of today’s strangely universal evangelicalism.
April 23rd, 2006
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