Frequently Avoided Questions

Today’s extract is again from chapter 5 of Frequently Avoided Questions – an uncensored dialogue on faith, by Chuck Smith Jr and Matt Whitlock. The book was published by BakerBooks, 2005 – 252 pp – $29.95

Mike Yaconelli died too soon. For more than thirty years I have known of his ministry, yet I was unprepared for the gentle wisdom and reassurance I found in his book Messy Spirituality, released the year before he died. His book hit a nerve with new-school believers (a quick search on the Internet for blog sites where his book is discussed will reveal not only its popularity but the strong resopnse of young people who fully identify with its theme.) We love Mike’s book because he describes Christian faith in a way that is true to our experience.

In Messy Spirituality, Yaconelli tells stories about himself, others, and his church that sound familiar. People who love God, yet sin; people who take two steps forward in Christ, then slide three steps backward; people who swear, yet demonstrate incredible generosity. Messy Spirituality is unstructured, unpredictable, unstable, like the real life most people know. The Christian experience Yaconelli talks about is transparent regarding its struggles, honest its failures, carried forward by God’s infinite grace, and totally impossible to manage.

I also love Rick Warren’s book The Purpose-Driven Life and have a deep respect for Rick as a Christian leader and trainer. However, I agree with Justin Baeder who on his blog said, ‘I really think its message is pretty good; it’s just that the packaging is not well-suited to the emerging generations…This book was written to get Boomer churchgoers to do more than warm pews; it’s not an evangelistic tract for 20-somethings.’ Here is the difference between old school and new school in regard to spiritual growth. Old school continually simplifies the process, breaking it down into stages, whereas new school sees the process as a complex whole, beyond sorting. Yes, some things you can control, but the demand for continual grace (on God’s part) and faith (on ours) is extremely high.

Mission Mover Part II

The second approach to the spiritual life worked best in the pre-modern, largely illiterate, pagan world of the past…and works best today in the postmodern, image-based, pagan world of the present. This is the world of story, mentoring relationship, irrational experience, and risk-taking entrepreneurship. This approach assumes that people start the spiritual life with non-rational, passionate experiences of the Holy. These experiences may be joyous and/or fearful, and they alter both identity and lifestyle. That these alterations are for the good may in fact only be revealed at a later time. This experience of radical humility drives people to thoughtful reflection in order to sort out the meaning and implication of that confusion of agape and eros that has changed their lives. The compassion that follows completes the process of being swept away by the Holy, as people focus love beyond themselves. In the course of compassion, they meet the incognito Christ among the public again and encounter the Holy.

This unending cycle of experience-thoughtfulness-compassion is the alternate expression of the spiritual life that has lingered at the margins of Christendom and is now once again coming into its own.

Which cycle is a truer description of your spiritual life? Forgive me the history lesson. Let’s make this personal. If you want to assess the authenticity of your calling in Christian ministry, then you must see that calling as emerging from your true spiritual life and not just as a vocational choice.

I know you. We have had a long association. Although you are ‘modern’ enough to be swayed by the bias to higher education, in fact your spiritual life has never depended on it. [After years of confusion and mismanagement of your life] the more you surrendered to God, the more you thought about your destiny; and the more you thought about the fulfilment of life, the more you recognised that fulfilment in loving people beyond yourself and even more than yourself.

Ultimately, your compassionate immersion into the life and well-being of others led you to encounter God all over again. Whether it hurt you or helped you, it swept you off balance and precipitated humility that at times felt more like humiliation. There was no ‘reflection’ here, no intellectual pondering. Instead you felt that original sense of awe all over again. The experience of the Holy left you speechless, helpless and, what is more, thoughtless. Ideas just ran out, like a paved road vanishing into the primordial jungle. Then the brooding thoughtfulness began to kick in, and the compassion, and the cycle repeated itself.

In other words, the core of your spiritual life has been the gospel, not theology. Certainly, you valued expert advice and professional coaching to help you live that spiritual life. My point is that it did not replace that spiritual life. Don’t let your bias for modernity divert you from the spiritual life that you have.

Mission Mover

Today’s extract is again from chapter 2 of Mission Mover – beyond education for church leadership, by Thomas G Bandy. The book was published by Abingdon Press, 2004

Amid all the competing Christian ‘theologies’ available in the world, there are but two approaches to the spiritual life. There is the ‘modern’ approach and the ‘pre-or postmodern’ approach.

The ‘modern’ approach assumes that people start their spiritual journey by doing ‘reflection,’ and that this will lead to such perceptive understanding that they will feel ‘compassion,’ and that this loving sentiment will in turn result in ‘action.’ Action will raise questions that an individual has never asked before, and send them back into ‘reflection.’ This unending circle of reflection-compassion-action has been the dominant spiritual method of Christianity since Constantine institutionalised the church. It accelerated after the invention of the printing press, was embedded in European Protestantism, and became refined through the Age of Enligtenment to be uncritically assumed by North American Christendom.

If only people would really read and study the Bible, they would
understand the true nature of sin. They would have compassion on themselves and
others, and take action to convert the world. In the course of that crusade,
they will undoubtedly ask new questions and return to the Bible for answers.

If only people would raise their consciousness and study demographic
realities about race, gender, and the economy, they would understand the true
nature of oppression. They would have compassion on themselves and others, and
take action to reform society. In the course of that crusade, they will
undoubtedly ask new questions and seek experts for the answers.

This is why literacy guilds are so aggressive and higher education so popular. It is not simply that education will bring career success. It is the deeper, hidden assumption that education is the door to the spiritual life.

It is this perception of the spiritual life that fires seminaries to ‘train theologians’ and denominations to ‘train professionals.’ They really do believe in the spiritual life, and that the door into it is thoughtful reflection. Unfortunately, it rarely works that way in a pagan world.

See more about Thomas Bandy by clicking here.

Dodging Angels on Saturday

From chapter 4 of Dodging Angels on Saturday, by Graeme Garrett.
Published by the Australian Theological Forum in hand with Charles Sturt University, 2005

There is a French philosopher called Gabriel Marcel. He had some fascinating things to say on the difference between big ‘M’ mystery and little ‘m’ mystery as I have called it. Marcel preferred to use the word ‘problem’ for the sorts of mysteries I’ve described with small ‘m’ – stories, flights, lost keys, scientific puzzles and so on. ‘A problem,’ says Marcel, ‘is something which one runs up against, which bars the way. It is before me in its entirety. A mystery, however, is something in which I find myself involved, whose essence therefore, is not to be completely before me.’ A problem (my small ‘m’ mystery) blocks the way. I can’t find the car keys and I have to get to work. It’s urgent that I solve it or trouble will follow. I can’t figure out who the murderer is in the thriller I’m reading, so I am keen to get on with it to find out. We wonder what the other side of the moon is like. So we work to devise a space rocket with appropriate detection equipment on board and send it off in orbit around the moon to find out.

A problem is something that sits there in front of your nose and begs you to find the solution. But Mystery is different. It has this in common with the problem. You don’t know the answer to it. You haven’t ‘solved’ it as we say. But there the similarity ends. A genuine problem has a possible answer which in principle we can ‘find’ even if for the moment we haven’t found it. It might be extremely hard to find. It might take building a rocket to go to the other side of the moon. But it is there to be discovered and by us. Mystery by contrast isn’t ‘in front of us like a void to be filled out. As Marcel puts it, ‘I find myself involved’ with a genuine Mystery. Of course I can be very involved with the problem of finding the car keys, or writing a brief for the barrister, or making sure the auto cue is working for the news read, in the sense that the effort involved to achieve these things is important to me.

But that’s not the sort of involvement that Marcel has in mind. He means that my whole being, myself, as a human person is caught up in and even made possible by the reality he calls Mystery. This reality, the Mystery, isn’t something which I might decided to be interested in, or then again I might not. Rather Mystery is that ‘something’ out of which my whole life, lock, stock and barrel, emerges in the first place. I can be interested (or not) in a problem like the brief or the auto cue because I am already a going concern as a human being. I am a thinking, feeling, deciding person. Btu what is it that enables me to be that? Eventually I might hunt out the conditions under which the car keys become visible. But how can I make visible the conditions that provide for me to be me? Or in your cases, for you to be Catherine and you to be Jane in your respective and unique individualities?

The Daily Writer on holiday....

The Daily Writer has been on holiday....enjoying sunshine and beautiful scenery in Wanaka, New Zealand.

Responding to Challenging Behaviour

Jo and Nigel Pimlott

Many groups debate the best environments to engage with young people. Whether the choice is the church hall, a local community centre, out in the streets through detached work or in a school, different environments are likely to produce different behaviour from the young people. Changing environments can be one way of addressing behaviour issues, either through moving venue or by creating a different ‘feel’ to the venue through the use of décor, posters, furniture, lighting, layout and the like. A sense of ownership can be engendered her by involving young people in decisions and processes of design and decoration. Many visitors to the centre we work in are surprised by the lack of vandalism to the youth drop in interior, but we put this down to the fact that young people were involved in choosing colours, furniture layout and the painting and decorating of the venue.

It is worth mentioning that sometimes things go wrong because the enemy seeks to disrupt and cause problems. It is beyond the scope of this booklet to explore this fully, but the spiritual aspect of problems, whether reflected in an individual, group or project, cannot be underestimated. A prayerful approach to every aspect to every aspect of the work is essential. We have seen significant changes in behaviour occur through targeted prayer and it may be worth seeking to recruit specific prayer backing for groups or individuals where there are consistent ongoing problems. Most churches have numerous people within them who would not engage with face-to-face youth work, but are happy to pray regularly if given the appropriate information and feedback. A prayerful approach helps us to maintain a godly attitude to those who may be causing us significant stress in a particular context. It is important to remember that we are not primarily struggling against ‘flesh and blood’ but seeking to see the kingdom of God advance in our area. Whatever our theology on spiritual warfare, time spent considering a prayer strategy for the work will not be wasted.

From chapter 4 of Responding to Challenging Behaviour, published by Grove 2005

Why a Suffering World Makes Sense

Chris Tiegreen

Mercy requires an object. It can’t be an object that is perfect, because if it were perfect, there would be no need for mercy. No, it requires an object that is fallen, depraved, suffering and in pain. The mercy of God simply cannot be seen without that. This amazing side of God, this dimension of his personality, could have remained hidden, of course, but that would have been a tragedy of a different sort, much worse in the eternal scheme of things. We lament the condition of our world as a horribly tragic condition, and it is. But have we ever considered that the absence of evil would also have lamentable consequences? So many aspects of the character of God – the ones we praise him most highly for, in fact – are aspects that are invisible without a foil. The question was not whether the tragedy of evil could be avoided. The question was which tragedy to avoid – the tragedy of pain or the tragedy of the substantially hidden God. God chose to accept the former. There’s a high cost to revelation. If he is to be revealed in his mercy, there must be evil. The backdrop of imperfection had to be raised.

That’s why suffering in this world means something. It sets up a very real stage on which God is demonstrated. As we have discussed, it is not logically possible to have an unfallen world and a thoroughly revealed God. So the sacred drama has some awful ugly elements. It must.

But the promise of our pain is just as surely embedded in Scripture as the reason for it is. This promise is clearly demonstrated in the parable of the prodigal son: we who return to the Father in humility and repentance will be welcomed and thrown a party that will more than make up for our generally self-inflicted suffering. Something in the whole rebellion-and-return process will enhance our relationship with the Father. We will see him in ways we’ve never seen him before, and so will others – the servants, the big brothers, and the readers of the story in the distant future. The parable of the prodigal son is backed by the truth of the redemption story and its God-honouring themes. It gives us a glimpse into the whole plan. It shows us the God who runs with open arms.

From chapter 5 of Why a Suffering World Makes Sense, published by BakerBooks 2006

Indelible Ink

Walter Wangerin

When books work well, it isn’t just that we memorise them and then, by our will and our personal wisdom, shape our lives to follow them. Rather, when books work for us, we begin to walk beside the mind that created the book. That mind may be so much wiser than ours, but we walk beside it until soon we are walking like that one.

The question becomes, Who is going to teach you both how to interpret the world around you, to see it in small, and to come to a true understanding of it, organising the context in which you live?

A child enters the world and really doesn’t make sense of it but lives in sort of a senselessness of existence. The kid first begins to know her little house and her parents, and they become the whole world to that child. You pull a child apart from that house and that well-ordered nicely-constructed, beloved family, and the kid is lost – literally lost. As the child gets older, it becomes the child’s business to read the events and the details of the universe in such a way that she puts them together so that they make sense.

So the question becomes, Who are you going to allow to become your ‘heaper into heaps’ and your ‘piler into piles [as the old Sanskrit meaning of the word ‘poet’ has it]? Who will shape the world that you enter into and dwell in? Are you going to allow football to do that, so all the world is seen in a contest? Are you going to allow simpleminded understandings – like the cartoons, newspapers or the government – do that for you? Or are you going to enter into the sweet complexity of minds, this living treasure of singers and writers who embrace more details with greater richness of beauty, deeper understanding of what is truly evil, what is good and what is the precession of human experience? You want the minds of those who have created whole cultures of insight. The more complexly we see the world, the more capable we are of admitting many people into that world – people who are not like us. Books open our eyes to the complex truths that simple, mindless stories simply have no names for. So why not pick the best?

I don’t mind the people who read romances, but that’s formula fiction. It repeats the same world over and over again, and it’s a profoundly limited world. And every one of the people who loves romantic fiction has a mind better than the world that it shapes. We call that escapism. Gerard Manley Hopkins offers his poetry as inscapism – to escape into things, truly, not escape from them.

That’s the influence of great books; they teach us how to see the world that is.

From chapter 19 of Indelible Ink – 22 international Christian writers discuss the books that shape their faith, published by CWR 2005

Speaking My Mind

Tony Campolo

The increasingly strained relations between Muslims and Christians have huge implications for the entire world. Samuel P Huntington, in his book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, sets forth the thesis that conflicts between civilizations (which he defines as religions) and the cultures that they generate will dominate world politics in the twenty-first century. Henry Kissinger called Huntington’s book the most important to have emerged sine the end of the Cold War. Foreign Affairs, the most prestigious journal on international relations, says that Huntington’s thesis has generated more discussion than any other in the last sixty years. Zbigniew Brzezinski, one-time national US security advisor, says that this book ‘will revolutionise our understanding of international affairs.’

Assuming that Huntington is right, the years that lie ahead will be marked by armed warfare between followers of the Judeo-Christian religion and followers of Islam. This is already happening. In the Philippines, in Indonesia, in the Sudan and in Serbia, the battle lines already are drawn between Christian cultures and Islamic cultures. The only question remaining is whether evangelical Christianity will add fuel to the growing fires of this warfare or follow the admonition of Jesus, who called us to be peacemakers. Regardless of how the Muslim world positions itself in relationship to us, ought we not to reach out in love and take upon ourselves a ministry of reconciliation?

Think about how a war between Christian and Muslim civilisations would regenerate the ongoing struggles that have been evident since the Crusades. The bitter battles that marked those religious wars so marred the image of Christianity that missionary efforts to Muslim peoples have been dramatically thwarted even up to this present day. What I see happening, starting with September 11th, 2001, and our actions against Iraq, could set back another five hundred years any openness to the gospel in Islamic countries.

At just about every missionary conference I attend, the speakers talk about the need to evangelise those who live within the ’10/40 window.’ This is a reference to that part of the world between 10 degrees and 40 degrees north of the equator, which covers North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The window has in view the areas encompassing most of the world’s greatest physical and spiritual needs, most of the world’s least-reached peoples, and most of the governments that oppose Christianity.

What evangelicals have to recognise is that the majority of the people who live within that 10/40 window are Muslims. And if we really want to evangelise them, we had better find ways to show love to them rather than wage war against them. To that end, we must critique our rhetoric about Muslims, study who they are and what they believe, and seek out common ground for a creative dialogue in which we can tell them about Jesus and his salvation.

A survey reported in USA Today on September 16, 2003, showed frightening declines in favourable attitudes toward the United States in Islamic nations, primarily because of their perception of how we regard Muslim people. In Morocco, the percentage of people holding favourable attitudes toward America dropped from 77 percent in 2001 to 27 percent in 2003. In Jordan, it went form 27 percent to 1 percent; in Indonesia, from 75 percent to 15 percent; and in Turkey, from 52 percent to 15 percent. Americans invented the field of public relations, but it’s obvious that we’ve done a lousy job of it recently, despite the fact that our government spends more than a billion dollars a year on promoting a positive image of America.

From chapter 9 of Speaking My Mind – the radical evangelical prophet tackles the tough issues Christians are afraid to race, published by W Publishing 2004

The Great Giveaway

David E Fitch

Many evangelicals take comfort in the fact that their church preaches the Word because they have expository preaching. Because their preaching follows the text sentence for sentence, this somehow ensures them of a more faithful interpretation of the text. But no expository preaching can escape becoming interpretation no matter how close to the text the preacher follows. And faithful interpretation of the word requires that interpretation be confirmed or worked out over time among a faithful community. Surely expository preaching can be an important aid in leading a congregation further and deeper into the faithful interpretation of God’s Word. But the fact that the preacher follows the text word for word in and of itself does not guarantee that the church preaches the Word.

In fact, the danger exists in expository preaching that preachers, not seeing how their own social habits condition them to read a text in a certain way, dogmatize their own interpretive habits with no recourse to the community. Verse for verse, sentence by sentence, preachers read their own agenda into the text unaware that they even have an agenda, or worse, believing their personal agenda is directly from God. Confident of their expository method, preachers are delinquent in preaching with the necessary humility in submission to the testing of their words before the congregation. And so in the name of preaching the Word, the expository preacher inserts unawares habits of interpretation learned from other places. Expository preaching thereby hides the giveaway of the preaching of the Word.

Likewise, the same danger exists when the expository preacher is confronted with a new issue of interpretation in the church around which a consensus does not exist. Here again, relying on the expository method, the preacher does not preach in submission to the work of the Spirit in the community to lead that community to a further interpretation. Instead, living under the modernist assumption that the author’s intended meaning is there for all to see, expository preachers interpret selected texts to underwrite their own social agenda, believing that this one meaning of the text should be plain for all to see.

When disagreement occurs, the expository preacher digs in to defend the one meaning, doing harm or causing divisiveness in the congregation. And the congregation, living under the same modernist assumption, knows only how to accept that all they hear from the preacher is truly God’s Word or else it is heresy, and they must surely leave the church. Both preacher and congregation miss how preaching the Scriptures is necessarily the outworking of a politics that is always answering the question, How are we going to live? And so the church that is so confident that ‘our church preaches the Word’ may completely miss its own unfaithfulness because of its premature confidence in the modernist method of expository preaching.

From chapter 5 of The Great Giveaway, reclaiming the mission of the church from modern maladies, published by BakerBooks 2005

Perspectives

Colin Creel

[Relating to Boredom with the Spiritual Life]

Failure to see God’s blessings on a daily basis results in boredom with life, or belief that God is not as ‘real’ in society today. For many years I followed a practice, which I still occasionally repeat. Bill Hybels, in Too Busy Not to Pray, advocates a prayer method, which I’ve found is excellent in seeing God’s blessing in your life. Hybels writes out his prayers daily on one sheet of paper under the ACTS method - Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication; one page forces brevity and focus of thoughts. Systematically every few weeks, I would flip through the pages and place a star next to all the answered prayers. Oftentimes, we pray for one thing and then the next, without giving thanks for the prayers that have been answered.

Scripture memory is an excellent way to keep your mind focused on godly things: ‘I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.’ Our thought life can be extremely damaging to our relationship with God, thus, ‘We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.’

Switch up your quiet times. Try something new and different. For those of you who know me or have lived with me, I love to sing. Singing praises to the Lord brings me extreme joy. Another friend of mine walks around in order to keep himself from falling asleep. Be creative. God wired each person differently for a reason.

Finally, I think boredom with life in general can creep in if you are not careful. A friend of mine talks about how too many young people are concerned with having ‘exciting’ jobs, when in reality they need to bring excitement to their jobs. Unfortunately, dashed dreams and unrealised expectations are a part of life, but over time dwelling on ‘what could have been’ leaves you lonely and depressed.

What do you do when you just don’t feel like spending time with God? Much like an athlete in training, you push through the pain: ‘No, I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.’

From chapter 12 of Perspectives – a spiritual life guide for twentysomethings, published by Relevant 2005

By the Renewing of Your Minds

Ellen Chary

Anselm used love and discipline (in that order) as the instruments of choice in character-training. The point was to win the pupil’s trust and loyalty before imposing discipline. And he taught others to do so as well. Eadmer tells how Anselm corrected a brother abbot who misguidely preferred rigorous discipline to love. The abbot complained to Anselm that he was at the end of his tether with the ‘incorrigible ruffians, the stupid brutes’ entrusted to his care, because repeated beatings did nothing to cure them. Anselm observed that the abbot had succeeded in raising beasts instead of men and helped his peer to understand why through the use of analogy:

"’Now tell me, my lord abbot, if you plant a tree-shoot in your garden, and straightway shut it in on every side so that it has no space to put out its branches, what kind of tree will you have in years after when you let it out of its confinement?’

‘A useless one, certainly, with its branches all twisted and knotted.’

‘And whose fault would this be, except your own for shutting it in so unnaturally? Without doubt, this is what you do with your boys. At their oblation they are planted in the garden of the Church, to grow and bring forth fruit for God. But you so terrify them and hem them in on all sides with threats and blows that they are utterly deprived of their liberty. And being thus injudiciously oppressed, they harbour and welcome and nurse within themselves evil ad crooked thoughts like thorns, and cherish these thoughts so passionately that they doggedly reject everything which could minister to their correction. Hence, feeling no love or pity, good-will or tenderness in your attitude towards them, they have in future no faith in your goodness but believe that all your actions proceed from hatred and malice against them. The deplorable result is that as they grow in body so their hatred increases, together with their apprehension of evil, and they are forward in all crookedness and vice. They have been brought up in no true charity towards anyone, so they regard everyone with suspicion and jealousy.’"

Seeing that the abbot still did not grasp the point, Anselm spelled out his own educational philosophy: ‘the weak soul, which is still inexperienced in the service of God, needs milk – gentleness from others, kindness, compassion, cheerful encouragement, loving forbearance, and much else of the same kind.’

From chapter 7 of By the Renewing of Your Minds – the pastoral function of Christian Doctrine, published by Oxford 1997

Through Painted Deserts

Donald Miller

I tend to think life is about security, that when you have a full year’s rent, you can rest. I worry about things too much, I worry about whether or not my ideas are right, I worry about whether or not people like me, I worry about whether or not I am going to get married, and then I worry about whether or not my girl will leave me if I do get married.

Lately I found myself worrying about whether or not my car was fashionable, whether I sounded like an idiot when I spoke in public, whether or not my hair was going to fall out, and all of it, perhaps because I bought into Houston, one thousand square miles of concrete and strip malls and megachurches and cineplexes, none of it real. I mean it is there, it is made of matter, but it is all hype. None of the messages are true or have anything to do with the fact we are spinning around on a planet in a galaxy set somewhere in a cosmos that doesn’t have any edges to it. There doesn’t seem to be any science saying any of this ‘stuff’ matters at all. But it feels like ‘it’ matters, whatever ‘it’ is; it feels like we are supposed to be panicking about things.

I remember driving down I-45 a few months ago and suddenly realising the number of signs that were screaming at me, signs wanting me to buy waterbeds, signs wanting me to watch girls take off their clothes, signs wanting me to eat Mexican food, to eat barbeque, backlit, scrolling signs wanting me to come to church, to join this gym, to see this movie, to finance a car, even if I have no money. And it hit me that amid the screaming noise, amid the messages that said buy this product and I will be made complete, I could hardly know the life that life was meant to be.

….We stood out in the desert this morning, and the chemicals in my brain poured soothingly through the grey matter, as if to massage with fingers the most tender part of my mind, as if to say, this is what a human is supposed to feel. This is what we were made for, to watch the beauty of light fill up the earth’s canvas, to make dirt come alive; like fairy dust, making trees and cacti and humans from the magic of its propulsion. It makes me wonder, now, how easily the brain can be tricked out of what it was supposed to feel, how easily the brain can be tricked by somebody who has a used car to sell, a new perfume, whatever. ‘You will feel what you were made to feel if you buy this thing I am selling.’

But could the thing you and I were supposed to feel, the thing you and I were supposed to be, cost nothing? Paul [my friend] seems to think so, or at least he acts as if this is true. He doesn’t want to stay in a hotel room and catch up on the news. He doesn’t want to rifle through the sports pages and make sure the team he has associated his ego with is doing well. I don’t think he is trying to win anything at all. I just think he is trying to feel what a human is supposed to feel when he stops believing lies.

And maybe when a person doesn’t buy the lies anymore, when a human stops long enough to realise the stuff people say to get us to part with our money often isn’t true, we can finally see the sunrise, smell the wetness in a Gulf breeze, stand in awe at a downpour no less magnificent than a twenty-thousand-foot waterfall, wonder at the physics of a duck paddling itself across the surface of a pond, enjoy the reflection of the sun on the face of the moon, and know ‘This is what I was made to do. This is who I was made to be,’ that life is being given to me as a gift, that light is a metaphor, and God is doing these things to dazzle us.

From chapter 7 of Through Painted Deserts – light, God and beauty on the open road, published by Nelson 2005 [This book is a slightly revised edition of Miller’s first book: Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance. ]

The Narnian

Alan Jacobs

Armed with this sound theology of pleasure, Lewis’s perpetual task both as a defender of Christianity and as an advocate of medieval literature is to call people to delight – and delight even in old books. Yes, those were written by people different than ourselves – but not radically different. They are still recognisably human; they inhabit a world that is sometimes strange to us but not wholly alien. In fact, they are just different enough to be valuable to us as instructors in virtues we have neglected. We cannot go back in time and teach them to be more compassionate, but if we read them with care and sympathy they can instruct us in courage and chastity. We will not, however, read them with care and sympathy unless there is some reward for us in it: it is for this reason that Lewis emphasises the delight that can come from them. He wants us to know that it is indeed possible for a twentieth-century man to enjoy reading four-hundred-year-old books just for the sheer pleasure of it. And any book that delights us may more readily teach us its wisdom.

In The Lord of the Rings, the wise and ancient Elf Celeborn counsels the Company, in response to a gibe from Boromir about "old wives’ tales," "Do not despise the lore that has come down from distant years; for oft it may chance that old wives keep in memory word of things that were once needful for the wise to know." Several of the plots of the Narnia books turn on the forgetting of the old lore by some and its remembering by others. In Prince Caspian, Doctor Cornelius, Caspian’s tutor, is primarily a historian, and his passionate remembrance of ‘Old Narnia’ – "my old heart has carried these secret memories so long that it aches with them" – is key to the return of the Talking Beasts and the restoration of the great kingdom that Caspian’s Telmarine ancestors ruined. The confusion and discord sown by Shift and Ape in The Last Battle is possible because Aslan is only a name to the people of Narnia: they know nothing of his history, or of his character, so they can easily be made to believe that he has commanded deeds (for instance, the destruction of the forest) that are incompatible with his care for Narnia.

Among the ‘old lore’ of our world there is one tradition that Lewis found especially fascinating, and that turns up repeatedly in his fiction. Most of us have heard the phrase ‘the music of the spheres’ - the spheres being, in medieval astronomy, the abodes of the planets. These spheres surround the earth, moving outward from us in concentric circles; beyond them is the Empyrean, the Heaven of Heavens, where God’s presence dwells most fully. But what is their ‘music?’ That music is made by the friction of their contact as they ceremoniously rotate at their various speeds: it is of extraordinary beauty, and the contrasting stillness of the Earth is ‘the point at which all the light, heat and movement descending from the nobler spheres finally died out into darkness, coldness and passivity.’ But what makes the spheres move? That is the task of their governing spirits: ‘Each sphere, or something resident in each sphere, is a conscious and intellectual being, moved by the ‘intellectual love of God…These lofty creatures are called Intelligences.’ It was usually thought that an Intelligence was a very particular kind of angel – a ‘creature,’ but not embodied, and with the single function of being the mover of the sphere.

These are the Oyarsa of Lewis’s space trilogy…

From chapter 8 of The Narnian – the life and imagination of C S Lewis, published by HarperSanFrancisco 2005

The Bible or the Axe

William O Levi

Shari’a came suddenly, though not unexpectedly. One day we had some illusion of freedom, and the next day we had none. It was almost funny how the new military leadership put a positive spin on the whole thing. They accused the Christian leaders from the free government of being ‘soft on crime.’ The Shari’a, they explained, would rid the people of the scourges of alcohol, prostitution, immorality, and all sorts of petty crimes. Christians, they insisted, were hypocrites who failed to enforce the moral code that they claimed to believe in.
The fundamental principle of Shari’a is that freedom disturbs the moral order and fosters crimes against Islam Therefore, freedom must be ended, along with the permissive Christian philosophy of government. And both were summarily eliminated.

It didn’t take long to see the results of Shari’a. There was a sudden rise in the number of amputees, as petty thievery was met with machete justice. A man’s hand for a loaf of bread seemed a price too high to pay. But who would dare to say so? The pain of the new law was felt by Muslims and Christians alike. Most of the Muslims [in the Sudan] were moderates who didn’t particularly welcome the religious police into their lives. But they were cowed by the pressure to conform to the Shari’a, because the edicts came from their own mosques. At least the Christians had some reason to expect that some of the laws would not apply to them.

Through the early days of the Shari’a, Pastor Ben kept up his evangelistic efforts. He had developed a program of street preaching that he took to down-town Juba’s business district. People from the congregation would accompany him to a street corner, singing songs in Arabic and attracting groups of onlookers. After the singing, Pastor Ben would deliver a gospel message and an invitation to attend the local church. It was a popular ministry, and I enjoyed going along and singing songs for the people who stopped to listen. But it soon became apparent that the military rulers were going to apply the law across the board, and we found that we were bound by the rules of the religious police just as our Muslim friends and neighbours were. We realised that we would be forced to protest the Shari’a if we hoped to retain some measure of our religious freedom

But protest was a dangerous thing.

From chapter 9 of The Bible or the Axe – one man’s dramatic escape from persecution in the Sudan, published by Moody Press 2005