Farewell, Ray's Summer

On Tuesday of the week just passed, Ray Bradbury died at age 91. Being one of my favourite authors and one of the most significant writers of the last century, I feel that he deserves something to be said about him. Much has, I'm sure, been said already, the web being what it is, but perhaps a personal voice needs to be added, as someone who was touched and influenced deeply by his vision and his words.

I first heard of Bradbury when my brother watched Truffaut's film of Fahrenheit 451 in class. He was about 11 and I was about 8 at the time. It would not be until I was at University that I would actually read Bradbury, first picking up a copy of Dandelion Wine in the Carlton library in 2005 and being instantly entranced by its opening lines:

It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.

There was something intoxicating about Bradbury's description that I had never expected of a man I had, admittedly, boxed into my mind as a writer of mere "genre fiction". How wrong I was. There was an inventiveness about Bradbury's way with words that came closest, I think, to echoing Dylan Thomas of any other late-twentieth century writer. In an authorial note to Dandelion Wine which my edition does not contain, I remember Bradbury commenting that the novel was written initially through a process of word association, and certainly its language has that magical quality to it that seems as if Bradbury has simply let all the floating impressions of a childhood summer waft and ferment in his mind, to produce something marvellously like the word equivalent of the wine the title alludes to.

Later, I would discover what a remarkable prophet of his and our age Bradbury also was. No-one reading Fahrenheit 451 today can, I think, avoid the prescience of Bradbury's predictions: teenagers wandering disaffectedly with shell-pieces in their ears providing constant stimulation and entertainment; wall-high screens allowing us to escape our lives and enter the sensory blast of television's virtual hyperreality. And then there is his more chilling work, found in stories like "The Veldt" or passages in The Martian Chronicles, visions of a human savagery which seem, at first, to have nothing to do with the writer who also so wonderfully chronicled the childish magic of summer. How could the Martian House of Usher have anything to do with Douglas Spaulding? But they are both sides to the same vision: the American Dream and its self-implosion through over-reaching itself and ignoring that which mattered most. There is something alarmingly similar between, say, the home-cooking genius of one of Dandelion Wine's episodes who, when forced by well-meaning intruders to cook in a more orderly manner, finds her inspired genius vanishing, and the destruction of Mars imposed on it by the American "colonisers" who want nothing other than to recreate the magic of their lost America in this seemingly virgin planet. Both are impositions on that which is perfect and beautiful; both are attempts to make it better through "ordering it"; both are misguided and destructive.

Then there is Bradbury's remarkable comedy. Sometimes it feels a bit like laughing at the gallows, but at other times the laughter he provokes seems almost to make the gallows flee, a little like Clarisse of Fahrenheit 451 who can escape, for a moment, the oppressiveness of her world through such simple acts as blowing on dandelions or dancing in the rain. Bradbury clearly knew it all, the pain of the world he depicted and the simple acts which, in their simplicity, can go some way towards, if not transforming it, at least making it for a moment more beautiful.

I doubt that Bradbury ever arrived at Christian belief, and, while some may not view this as a weakness, I must admit that I do. Perhaps his bleakest moments could have been alleviated had he relied on something other than the goodness of humanity to transform the world he depicted. Yet there were clear flourishes of some definite understanding of grace and the transforming love of God. One of his early stories, "The Man", was both a remarkable portrait of Christ's humanity and how our world has failed to understand Him. Bradbury noted elsewhere in Fahrenheit 451 that "Christ is one of the 'family' now.

I often wonder if God recognizes his own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down? He's regular peppermint stick now, all sugar crystal and saccharine - when he isn't making veiled references to certain commercial products that every worshiper absolutely needs.

Perhaps Bradbury's reluctance to truly embrace the Christianity he was so often drawn to was the sheer fact that, growing up in a society that had done to the son of God precisely what he described above, he struggled to see another way to approach Jesus except outside the church. But I do not really know enough of his heart to comment on these things. What I do know is that his work had definite glimpses of the hope that Jesus offers, and that hope gave life and wings to work that might otherwise have become bogged down in the despair it quite rightly felt.

And now, having kept on writing until remarkably close to the end (he published a sequel to Dandelion Wine, entitled Farewell Summer, just a few years ago), Bradbury has left us. What can I say here that would conclude this memoir of him without being pat or saccharine, something he himself would have decried? I cannot say anything, in the end, that does justice to the complexity of the man or that avoids glorifying him beyond what he deserves. But I can say this: that every time I return to his work I am amazed at his sight, amazed at the way he drew words together like dancing puppets on magisterial strings, and I am grateful that he lived and wrote the words he wrote. That, in the end, is a wonderful thing to say of any writer, and Bradbury was, at the end of it all, a truly wonderful writer. Bookshelves will hold his books all the more tightly now for the knowledge that there will never be another one to add to them.

It's book spine poem time...

Having recently declared my own leave of absence from this blog, I am now breaking the "temporary silence" I decreed in honour of my friend Erin, who got me onto this fun little thing to do when you feel like doing something, you know, fun.


Winter indoor activity #1: Book spine poetry
(Please forgive the name, Erin. I realise it isn't winter where you are. But it seems just the sort of thing that Melburnians should lap up when stuck inside in the cold.)


The rules are simple.

• Create a book spine poem (examples here).
• Take a picture.
• Post it on your blog.
• Link back to this post.
• Tag another blogger, or two, or ten.

I have to admit, I'm not exactly sure which other bloggers to tag, since I do a fair amount of my blogging in a vacuum, unaware of the blogosphere that I inhabit. So I tag all of you who read this post and have a blog. Make your own. It's fun, and was a wonderful way to start the day.

What fascinated me most about the exercise was the psychological side to it. I'm sure there could be studies done on it to identify what subconscious traits are brought to the fore in this kind of exercise. Somehow, constrained though much of it had to be (book titles had to be somehow related, and I personally rejected too many single-word titles), I ended up with a poem about the troubles of Christian perseverance, a subject almost always in my mind and often in my own writing. How odd. I'm sure there's a PhD study in this somewhere...

The Swelling Year: Watch this space

Having finished my Lent Poems project and finding the challenge of regular, disciplined writing to be of great value, I am now embarking on a more serious challenge, one which will take me a bit over a year to complete. You can read about it here at The Consolations of Writing, where you can also find what I have written so far. It'll be an unusual and difficult project so please feel free to cheer me along and offer thoughts or encouragement along the way as you see fit!

A Year of Writing Liturgically: a project in the making

The Hymn Revolution

You may or may not be aware, but hymns are back. This has been the case in the USA for a while, what with Indelible Grace Music, Red Mountain Music, Sojourn and, most recently, Page CXVI hitting the Christian music scene, along with the various Mars Hill Seattle bands who have helped resurrect "Jesus Paid It All", "What Wondrous Love Is This" and various other hymns which are now standards in churches across the English-speaking world.

Now, the return of hymns to worship services is one thing. Given that the shift has occurred mostly, perhaps exclusively, in evangelical churches, it is not so surprising that this should have happened. Hymns typically had more theologically solid lyrics than much of what has been sung in churches for the last couple of decades, and so a rediscovery of Isaac Watts, John Newton, William Cowper and Charles Wesley, among others, is really only to be expected in churches eager to boost the theology of their worship music. What makes bands like Sojourn so unique is the fact that, as well as helping get hymns back on the church-singing map (Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky is one of the leaders in the movement), they use their studio releases to help turn hymns into a credible musical genre for the twenty-first century.

Does that sound impossible to you? If so, it may seem highly unlikely that two nights ago a group of young Christian guys from Melbourne would have gathered on the stage of the Gershwin Room at the Espy Hotel in St Kilda to play, almost exclusively, eighteenth and nineteenth century hymns revitalised as swirling sixties rock songs. They call themselves The Anti-Fall Movement, a name that has unintentional echoes of now defunct hard-core band Against the Fall, but it would be wrong to think that they in any way resemble the latter band. Their SoundCloud page describes their music as "Gospel Blues Stadium Rock" and this, strange a combination though it might seem, captures their sound quite aptly.

Thursday night saw the launch of their debut album, "Away My Needless Fears", named after the Charles Wesley hymn which concludes the twelve-track album. Aside from Wesley, most of the hymn-writers are unknown today, and only two of the hymns played, "Green Hill" ("There Is a Green Hill Far Away") and "My Life Flows On" (more commonly known as "How Can I Keep From Singing?"), were familiar to me before I heard the album. In this respect, The Anti-Fall Movement stick fairly wisely to the same ploy used by bands like Red Mountain Music and Sojourn - in reviving now-unknown hymns, they avoid the awkwardness of trying to make well-known hymns seem new. (Bands like Page CXVI and King's Kaleidoscope manage fairly well, but it's still a challenging task. Think, for instance, of how the otherwise excellent Indelible Grace Music struggled to make Wesley's "Amazing Love" sound any different to the million other versions out there. And the next band to take on "Come Thou Fount" may as well give up the quest for originality before they even begin.)

In this regard, The Anti-Fall Movement are probably one of the most successful bands in seamlessly shifting hymns into their new form. Front-men Peter Carolane and Paul Davies are such slick song-writers, and so in love with the style they are working in, that the songs sound utterly assured in their new incarnations. In some cases - "When We Cannot See", "Take Them All", "The River" - it's hard to believe that they themselves did not write everything, lyrics and all (excluding, that is, the occasional "thee" or archaisms such as "it is not meet that we should fear"). The band also made the very wise choice of releasing the album on vinyl (it cost only $10 extra on entry to get both a record and CD of the album), a touch which is both in keeping with the retro-charm of the whole enterprise and also a completely sensible move artistically: there is a wonderful warmth to every track that can only fully be captured on vinyl. In the case of most tracks, listening to it on vinyl feels suspiciously like discovering a 60s classic that you never knew existed. I suspect that may have been their thinking.

Knowing most of the members of the band, I'm not without bias. But then I'm also a fan of what we might call the New Hymns Movement (a movement which, interestingly, the Anti-Fall guys seem largely unaware exists; Paul expressed surprise to me when I mentioned to him last year that I knew a few other bands that did something similar). Yet once you've heard enough of the bands that fit into this category it's easy enough to feel like it's hard to do something new in this realm. (See above note on the 7 billion versions of "Come Thou Fount".) The Anti-Fall Movement go beyond what you could possibly expect. You may well forget that you are listening to hymns. You may also forget which decade you are living in. You will probably forget most things other than the music and the wonderful truths that each word will fill your head with. And for that they stand out, not only for being, at present, the main Australian band doing what they do, but for making the form something new and compelling, and something which works so perfectly for them.

Easter Saturday: Stop

For most people, I think the individual days of the Easter weekend tend to blur together. For many of those who aren't believers, the days become a string of indistinguishable public holidays with chocolate. For those who do believe, Good Friday in particular proves a troubling day. Many of us wonder: do we simply make it another day of celebration, or do we dwell so deeply on the agonies of the cross that we end up despairing?

Something that I find helpful to do during the Easter week is to think through the processes that those in the story would have gone through. So Friday, for instance, would have been a day of mourning, even though we now know what they didn't - that Jesus rose again on the Sunday. But what about Easter Saturday? What exactly happened then?

A few years ago, I thought a bit about this and reflected on the fact that the original Easter Saturday was the sabbath day. We know that this was significant for at least some in the Easter story because the Pharisees wanted the body taken down before the Sabbath began. Also, we can imagine that Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea needed to bury Jesus before the day of rest arrived. And the women who were to embalm his body had to wait until Sunday to do so.

What, I wonder, did Peter do that day? There is a significant silence in his story from Thursday night until Sunday morning, and we can only presume that he wasn't feeling too great, either about Jesus or about himself. I wrote a poem about this topic in 2009, which morphed this year into another one that you can find on my writing blog here. The main thing that struck me as I thought about it was the fact that Easter Saturday would have been a day of inactive waiting. It would have been a difficult, in-between time for all involved.

And isn't much of our life like that? Really, if we let Easter Saturday work on us the way that all days of Holy Week can work on us, we might find it to be quite a powerful day. Think of all the in-betweenness in your life; think of all your shattered hopes and painful disappointments; think of all your waiting. Then remember: God bursts forth from every devastating tomb that binds his people in death. Sometimes we just have to wait.

This is why I am fascinated by what Alain de Botton recently tweeted, even though I can't possibly agree with him: that "Christianity would have been truer and nobler as the record of a tragedy rather than of a miracle". Now, Botton tends to be rational on everything except religion, so it shouldn't be surprising for him to say something decidedly odd like this. However, he does have a point, and this is a point which he makes more often than he is perhaps aware. If we don't grasp that, on Friday and Saturday, it did all seem like a horrible tragedy, then we won't grasp how wonderful and extraordinary Easter Sunday was and is still to this day.

Is this what Botton is talking about inadvertently when he also tweets that religion provides an "outward structure to the inner life"? He says it like it's a bad thing, and has elsewhere commented (I'm not sure where) that organised religion makes people only experience the spiritual on set days of the year, suggesting that, for him, the inner life simply can't be structured outwardly. What Botton doesn't seem to grasp is that outward structures which guide our thinking about the inner life are highly valuable. This is why, for instance, it is good to have a day that reminds us to mourn over what Jesus had to do for our sin, because it is not something that we would necessarily choose to dwell on otherwise. We need liturgy, whether formally or informally, because it helps keep us on the right track in areas where we might otherwise stray into self-satisfied complacency.

And this is also why Easter Saturday is a good day - because, while many shops are open again, the day itself is a day of resting for most. Perhaps, in that time of resting, we can reflect on how resting might have felt without the hope of the Resurrection, and can therefore be thankful that we, unlike them, rest now with hope.

Good Friday: Via Dolorosa

I

In the garden you

Sweat in drops of blood, you who

Made the earth blossom

II

And then a kiss

Betrays you with the violence

Of a close friend’s sword

III

By dark, the council

Meets and seals your fate. You let

Your own reject you

IV

While, by firelight,

Your close friend lies, denies you

To keep himself warm

V

In the morning sun,

Amid the screams, the prefect

Washes his hands clean

VI

Scourges eat your flesh

The soldiers taunt you, laugh and

Crown you now with thorns

VII

On your back you bear

The curse of all the world. You

Fall; it crushes you

VIII

A stranger by the way

Shares the weight of the cross, but

Cannot drink the cup

IX

Women weep, lament

But do they cry for you or

For the brown, dead tree?

X

The nails are hammered

You fill your lungs with anguish

While night takes the crowd

XI

But one sees through it:

A thief who sees your kingship

And dwells now with you

XII

Then, last words to she

Who gave you life; the Life, you

Now prepare to leave

XIII

With a cry, you give

Up your spirit; It’s finished,

You proclaim, and die

XIV

Down we take your body,

In the thrall of darkness, to

Its tomb in the garden

Lent #5: Busting Eternity, Breaking Our Minds

This Sunday, something quite amazing will happen. Much of the portion of the world formerly called Christendom, and a good slab of the part that was formerly not, will join together to celebrate an event which defies all logic, science and expectation: the resurrection of the dead.

We will give each other hollow chocolate eggs, or perhaps painted egg shells, representing what? The emoty tomb, and new life. But whose new life? Jesus', of course. And that in itself is problematic, because the resurrection of Jesus is one of the least understood, least examined and least accepted truths in human history. There have been numerous credible works done on why it almost certainly happened, and I have read many of them. But ask me, arme with a lie detector, whether or not I live like it happened, and I will admit, shamefacedly, probably more than a bit anxiously, that I don't. And nor do most of us, Christian or otherwise.

This Sunday, however, we won't just celebrate Jesus' resurrection, though that alone should be challenging enough for us to remember. No, the New Testament made something abundantly clear in how it spoke of Jesus' resurrection: that, if Christ, the true human being, was raised from the dead, then we too would be raised. And, for the early church, this was a deeply transformative belief because it meant that they no longer held on to this life, but to the life that was to come. This is one if the central concepts if the letter to the Hebrews which I am currently reading in my own devotional time: the life to come in Christ is so glorious that we should willingly endure all things in this life in order to make it to the finish line, found in Christ. This idea pervades much of what the Apostle Paul wrote too - and it is something which I am deeply, deeply reluctant to do.

Now, there are multiple reasons people might have for denying that Jesus rose from the dead, most of them variations on the theme that 'the dead simply don't rise from the dead'. Tom Wright has commented in his wonderful work on this topic, 'Surprised By Hope', that this may be a legitimate response but it needs to be made knowingly, consciously, not as a default or passive response.

I personally do not have that option. I have looked at the evidence and have been convinced. I have known the risen Christ and had Him dwell in me. The evidence makes no logical sense of our scientific categories, but it stands there on its own merits, demanding to be heard.

Wright, at the end of his discussion of the topic, issues this challenge:

In so far as I understand scientific method, when something turns up which doesn't fit the paradigm you're working with, one option at least, perhaps when all other have failed, is to change the paradigm - not to exclude everything you've known up to that point, but to include it within a larger whole.

This Easter, confront with me this truth: Jesus rose from the dead, and so will we. Don't dismiss it as blind illogic; a belief which has transformed much of the world at least deserves to be examined on its own merits. So confront it as truth, and see what happens. You'll need a new paradigm to contain what happens, if it even can be contained. It will mess with your head; let it. It will throw your whole life up into the air; let it. The early church, for centuries, let this truth transform them, and they said that the life they gained was far better than the one this paradigm shift forced them to accept. Listen to them. It will hurt, and I will certainly be hurting this Easter. But I'm going to ry and let it run its course in me and see what happens. I may lose everything, but I may also gain so much more in the other side.

Lent #4: What Jesus Wasn't Part 2

#2: Jesus Was Not Harry Houdini

A couple of years ago, I saw young Australian comedian Josh Thomas appearing on "Good News Week", as he does often, and, in the segment where they take news stories that make them angry and throw them into a furnace on the stage, Josh expressed, in his usually demure voice, that he was "sick of hearing about Jesus". Why? "Well, I know that he died for our sins and everything, but really that just meant moving into his father's freaking awesome house. And I've done that three times. Where's my book?"

Now, to most Christians, that brief statement would be intensely offensive. And rightly so, I suppose. But why? Is it because he is ridiculing something that is most precious to us? Well, yes. That much is clear. But I suspect that his words reveal a flaw in our own theology that we ourselves aren't aware of.

You see, to a lot of us, there's an element of truth in what Josh is saying. I know that for years I was troubled by the thought that Jesus' death wasn't such a sacrifice since he knew how it would all end and did, after all, come back to life at the end of it - as if it would only have been a real sacrifice if he himself didn't know what how it would turn out in the end.

Now, this is completely wrong, but I don't think that we're necessarily aware all the time of the reasons why it's wrong. This morning my flatmate and I discussed how this is another example of the latent docetism (see my last post for what this means) in the church today. We think of Jesus floating a little bit above the ground for most of his life, with a halo over his head and his hands lifted about six inches apart on either side of his head, not really feeling or experiencing much and just generally being like a fairly relaxed holy Ninja. Or, to use the analogy of my subheading for this post, being an amazing illusionist who can disappear or saw his wife in half on stage because he knows it's all an illusion and that, after the illusion is revealed, he'll be able to stand up before rapturous applause and say, "Thank you, thank you very much" to it all.

And this is completely wrong, for two reasons that we forget to our peril:

1) Crucifixion was intensely, intensely painful. I remember reading once that the pain was so bad that a new word had to be invented to describe it: excruciating, a word we now misapply to situations that are simply annoying or that cause our selfishness or craving for comfort to rise to the surface in profound ways. ("It was excruciating waiting for that train"; "My wife's/husband's complaining last night was excruciating".) No, excruciating meant the pain that could essentially only be derived from the cross. There are some fairly intense medical accounts out there of the effects that crucifixion had on the body. They are easy enough to find if you haven't come across them before. What they prove is that, regardless of the end result, Jesus had to endure, for several hours, a degree of pain that most of us will never encounter in our lives.

2) Jesus bore the rejection of the Father. Now, when we feel rejected by God, there are several ways that this is different to what Jesus experienced. First of all, we deserve rejection, whereas Jesus didn't. Secondly, we have never known the total unity with the Father which Jesus knew, making the rejection all the more crushing. Thirdly, we are never as deeply rejected as we feel. Jesus truly was. When he prayed, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" he prayed it with an earnestness and intensity that no human before or after could ever pray. He truly was forsaken, because he had, for that moment, become sin itself for us (2 Corinthians 5:21).

And so, the enormity of his sacrifice only makes sense if we grasp the fact that, when Jesus was on that cross, he felt every second of the pain with every bit as much intensity as you or I would, and also that he experienced, that day, the total wrath of the Father in a way that spared any of us who believe from knowing precisely what we most deserve to know. For that moment, the saw went right through Jesus' body, without a second of illusion. It was no magic trick, because he was no magician. He was God in human flesh. And that is why the pain he suffered for us was no glorious hoax, but the beginning of the most glorious truth the world can ever know.

Lent #3: What Jesus Wasn't Part 1

In the early days of the church, there were two major heresies which, at times, nearly ruined orthodox Christianity. They were called "Docetism" and "Gnosticism". Now, for many years I felt that "Gnosticism" must have something to do with those little Italian dumplings made out of potatoes (it doesn't), and "Docetism" - well, that wasn't a term I discovered until quite recently. But it may surprise you to hear that, while these heresies were countered decisively many, many years ago (the Apostles' Creed, which many churches say each week, was one way in which this was done), both are still alive and well in the church, and in the world around us. The shock of "The Da Vinci Code" was because Gnosticism pervades how many people think about our world and God's relationship to it, both in and out of the church. But there are other, subtler ways that we are threatened still by these heresies. Allow me to point out one:

1) Jesus was not a Zen Master

"No," you will almost certainly say, "we knew that. But thanks for telling us." And then you will proceed to look up another blog which specialises slightly less in the bleeding obvious.

But is it so obvious? I remember a few years ago talking to an unusual guy at a party who had come to the conclusion that Jesus went to India (apparently well-documented in a book called Jesus Lived In India) and there learnt to "transcend the physical". Interestingly, he spoke of this process of Jesus transcending the physical as if it were a well-attested fact which even orthodox Christians would have to affirm. At the time I dismissed it, but more recently I have begun to realise that he has a point: not that Jesus did learn to transcend the physical, but that we often, unknowingly, believe He did. And Lent seems as good a time as any to point out that this is a load of unmitigated rubbish.

First, why do we think this? When we think about disciplines like fasting, of which Lent is an extended period, we generally imagine that, at the end of it all, we will gain a kind of hallowed glow around us, rather than, as is more natural, feeling really, really hungry. Now, it might be helpful to point out that, when Jesus fasted for forty days, at the end of it He was so hungry that Satan was able to tempt Him to bow down and worship him, in exchange for food. Obviously Jesus did not give in - the Church would be in a fair amount of trouble if He had. But there's something really important to note here: that Jesus was tempted to do so. And what does this tell us? That there's a fair chance He was hungry, not, I suspect, a sign that, at that moment, He had "transcended the physical".

Now, the Buddha - so the story goes - was troubled by human suffering, and so fasted and fasted until he was barely alive. And then he had an epiphany. That epiphany formed the basis of what is now, in various forms and mutations, a highly popular religion. Let us note a key difference here: Buddhism views the physical as corrupt and needing to be overcome; the Christian God viewed the physical as something worthy of His Son to inhabit.

So, in conclusion: how then should we think of fasting, or self-denial, as we reach the halfway point of Lent? Should we be looking in the mirror for signs of a halo developing? Should we be expecting that we are starting to feel somehow more than human, somehow less dependent upon food? Far from it. Fasting is not, I must admit, something that I factor immensely into my theology, and I'm working on it being more and more something that I tackle. But it strikes me that, if I am to do so, it needs to be with a right view of - to risk a cliché - what it is to be human: not something innately flawed that needs to be overcome (that's the sin nature, not the very fact of being human), but something good which God came to redeem.

Lent #2: Once and For All, To the End

My grand intentions of blogging regularly during Lent have been somewhat taken over by my attempt to write roughly one poem for each day of the season. This has been a difficult enough discipline by itself. I mentioned in my first Lent-related post for the year that I have not felt especially ready for Lent this year, and the feeling continues. Each morning as I work through John's narrative of the Passion, each evening as I work back over past chapters of John's Gospel to guide my poems, I find myself not wanting to think about this story that is at the very heart of my faith. Is this an normal enough experience? Perhaps, though I am grieved that this is the case for me. I wish I felt differently. I really do.

But all this serves to remind me of something that I badly need reminding of: that none of this is about me and what I can bring to God, not emotionally, not spiritually. It isn't about how disciplined or focused I can be during this season; it isn't about how much I grieve, how much I weep, how much I rejoice. It is about Jesus who died and rose again.

I am reminded of the letter to the Hebrews, which speaks of Jesus' death being sufficient in and of itself, with no need to be repeated, unlike the old sacrificial system which needed regular updating: "those sacrifices", the writer notes, "are an annual reminder of sins, because it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins" (Hebrews 10:3-4). But Jesus' death was enough, once for all time; it had the power to take away sins and not let them go back. It was this knowledge of what Jesus' death achieved, I think, that prompted the writer earlier to use the image of crucifying Jesus over and over again by falling away from God and trying to return to Him: "It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age, if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace." (Hebrews 6:4-6). Jesus' death was enough just once for the rest of time; why, then, would we want to receive His death, then give it up, then receive it again?

And I am reminded then of how in some cultures and traditions re-enactments of the crucifixion are a feature of this season, and I wonder how they understand the warnings against re-crucifying Christ, or the writer to the Hebrews' declaration that one crucifixion of Christ was enough for the rest of human history. And I wonder then if there is some vestige of this thinking in the way that I try to enact the right cycle of emotions each time, re-enacting the grief of crucifixion in some attempt to better attain its benefits.

There is rarely enough grief or mourning in how the Western evangelical church thinks about Lent. In some churches, Good Friday is just an awkward Other Easter Sunday; no-one really knows how to be mournful, so it becomes another celebration. But it is no better to swing too vehemently the other way, to make Lent into a sanctifying ritual of mourning. That puts the focus far too much on our own religious observance and far too little on the sufficiency of what Jesus did.

This Lent, I hope to learn to be more balanced. But, thank God, even if I don't succeed, His grace is sufficient for me. For His power is made perfect - amazingly - in our every weakness.

Poetry for Lent

In my last post I mentioned, a little dismissively, that I had considered the possibility of writing 40 poems for Lent this year. It has become a little more than a possibility, and if you look at The Consolations of Writing you can track my progress or, as the case may prove to be, failure at this fairly ambitious project. I'm up to three now, with a few in the wings, so we'll see how it goes. I hope they can be helpful for thoughts/prayers/devotions during this season.

Lent #1: I'm Not Ready

"Every time I read that story again,

I want to run and take the nails out..."

(Mark Nicks, "I'm Not Ready")

I've been a bit slow on the uptake with Lent this year. Perhaps it's just that Easter is very early this year and so I haven't been prepared for Lent to begin in February. Perhaps it's that my church does not pay any attention to these things (we still observe Easter, but Lent and Advent aren't usually big focuses; Pentecost, unsurprisingly, comes and goes unnoticed). But I suspect my mind has also just been in other places. And it's for this very reason that I like to observe Lent: not because the observation of it in any way contributes to my salvation, but because I can't expect that, on Good Friday, I'll be in the right headspace to remember what Jesus has done for me. That'll never happen. We're rarely ready even when we prepare our hearts; it's just too monumental a thing for the human mind to grapple with. Lent, at the very least, gives us 40 days to get the process going.

I see Lent more as a time of reflection than of fasting. Anything I give up, I do so to give myself more space in my thinking. One year I decided to only listen to worship music and hymns for the whole forty days; I didn't want anything other than God's truth to fill my head. It was a wonderfully edifying time. Still, when Easter Sunday came, I felt cold and spiritually dry. Thank God that our emotional state doesn't count for anything in our salvation. But the fact is that the forty days I'd spent focusing on God had still borne fruit; it just hadn't given me emotional elation on Easter Sunday. But is that really the point?

Now, I'd had grand plans for what to do this Lent. I'd enjoyed writing my Advent reflections so much that I was determined to do the same thing for Lent. In fact, I decided that I would write a reflection each day - forty reflections in total. That's obviously not going to happen. Ash Wednesday has been and gone; now it's Saturday. I'd have to write four reflections today just to catch up. I'm not sure if my "40 Poems for Lent" project will be any more successful, but at least I've got a head start on that one: I've already written four poems that could go towards it. Again, it's not the point. My unreadiness, my spiritual flabbiness, my lack of discipline: all these things are reasons why Lent should be a wonderful time of hope and promise for me. The disciples fell asleep in the garden while Jesus sweated blood, their very name "disciples" being an irony that night; and yet still His blood was shed to cleanse them. I am the same. I'm not ready for Lent this year, but that doesn't matter. Lent - the time of remembering Jesus' great love and mercy - is most certainly ready for me.

The ALP and Absalom

So it's all over the Australian newspapers: we're set to have another Labor party leadership challenge, less than two years since the last one, and it's the reverse of the last one, this time with Kevin Rudd challenging Julia Gillard. And the whole thing seems very, very messy. One of my colleagues today expressed that she hasn't been able to look at the newspapers since it all started heating up, she finds it that frustrating. "It must be making us the laughing stock of the world," was how she summed up the situation.

Now, I'm not wanting to evaluate which of Gillard or Rudd was the better, or, as one infamous campaigner once put it, "the least worst", Prime Minister. It's not something I could possibly judge. But one thing does strike me - that, if you're going to challenge your leader, this isn't the way to do it.

This quote from Gillard particularly struck me when I read it paraphrased in The Age today:

Ms Gillard said that she did "everything" she could as deputy prime minister to try and get the Rudd government functional, but it became "manifest" to her that continuing with Mr Rudd as prime minister was not going to work. (Judith Ireland and Michelle Grattan, "Gillard throws down gauntlet", The Age Online, Thurs 23 February 2012)

Well, perhaps she means what she says. Perhaps she really did try. But why, I wonder, did it occur to her that she was the one to replace him? Did someone tap her on the shoulder and suggest to her the idea that would otherwise have been unthinkable, that she was the one for the big job? If so, how did she respond? "Oh, no, not me, don't dream of it..."? (The whole situation seems very reminiscent of Yes, Minister..."If one was asked, one might consider..." Or Mrs Elton in Emma: "I wouldn't call myself a potential prime minister, but my friends say...")

It makes me think of a story from a small kingdom in the ancient Middle East, where the second ever king of that kingdom, a man named David, was being challenged for the leadership of their fledgling nation, Israel, by his son, Absalom. That boy had been approached by the people; they had said to him, "This father of yours, he's treating us all very badly." And Absalom had stood at the gate of the palace and heard all their grievances, nodded, made sympathetic noises, said, "Oh dear, that is bad." And he'd done a very good job, fooling perhaps even himself into thinking that it would be for the good of the country if he were king instead - not because he wanted the job, of course, but because...well, someone had to do it, and the people seemed to want him...

Was he fooling himself? He no doubt believed it. But, in acting the way he did, he showed how unlike his father he really was, though not quite in the good way that he had thought. You see, his father reacted to the leadership challenge with quite an extraordinary attitude, one we rarely see in politicians at the best of times, least of all at the worst: he showed humility.

David had once been the popular young leader. At a time when the first king, Saul, had become a mad tyrant, David was the nation's hero. But he had never stood in a leadership challenge. When given multiple chances to stab his king in the back, he had chosen not even to stab him in the front. When the king had died, David had grieved.

And now, challenged by his own son, David remembered what he had known then: that God was the one who appointed kings, and if He wanted him to be king, then He would make it so. His job while Saul had been king was to submit to Saul's kingship, broken and tyrannical though it was. And now, perhaps this challenge to his leadership was not a threat he had to stand against but an indication that God no longer wanted him to be king.

You can read the whole story in 2 Samuel 13-18. It has also been brilliantly adapted into a parable about leadership by Gene Edwards in his Tale of Three Kings. The moral of the story, according to Edwards, is this: if your superior is a Saul, it is still not your place to overthrow him. Or, if you are a David and you are challenged by an Absalom, approach God with humility. Seek His protection, or accept His judgment. Either way, He is right.

And if you are an Absalom? Woe to you. You may become king, but being king by foul means is never, ever going to be satisfying.

So which, you may wonder, is Kevin Rudd in this parable? And which is Julia Gillard?

I cannot say. But I wish that they both knew that there never comes a time when stabbing in the back is appropriate. And the good of the nation should never be used as an excuse for our own petty power plays.

Perhaps one day 2 Samuel 13-18 will be taught in politics classes, but I doubt it. In the meantime, let it be a voice in the wilderness, showing how things should be done if people had their hearts and minds in the right place.

News: The Consolations of Writing

If you have not yet discovered my new blog, you may want to check out The Consolations of Writing, a site devoted to posting my writing and thoughts about writing. There has not been an enormous amount of activity there yet, but I'm expecting to use it much more in coming weeks, months and hopefully years. Have a look at it if you haven't done so already - and feel free to leave a comment so I know that you've been there!

Time For Us To Leave?

I rediscovered Larry Norman's music for some reason early last year. I don't remember what prompted me to listen to him, except perhaps the fact that I was trying to track down Geoff Moore's version of "UFO" and, failing to do so, settled for the original.

But I wasn't settling at all. Having grown up on a compilation of contemporary versions of Norman's songs - One Way, released by Forefront Records in 1995 - I had been fairly convinced that the originals would be too daggy for words. I was wrong. The years that had interceded had made the 90s pop schtick of most of the covers from "One Way" a little less than ideal for my ears, but I loved folk, and Larry Norman, I discovered, did too. I went from "UFO" to "Why Don't You Look Into Jesus?" and "Righteous Rocker #1" and "The Great American Novel". I didn't like everything I heard, but I liked most of it. Larry was sort of equal parts Bob Dylan and a more rebellious Keith Green. This was, to my mind, a very good thing.

There's only one problem with Larry: his theology of the end-times. Perhaps it was the way people thought in the 1960s - my parents suggest to me that it was - but there is a fairly pervasive sense, in many of his songs, that the end of the world is looming and that Jesus and the rapture are only seconds away. We know, of course, that this wasn't the case, but it's a little hard for a child of the 80s and 90s like myself to really get why he would have thought this way. Songs like "If the Bombs Fall" help, I think; Larry, like everyone else in his day, lived with the semi-regular threat of nuclear war and other similar catastrophes. Global politics seemed, to him and to others, to have gone mad. His most distinctly eschatological song, the famous "I Wish We'd All Been Ready", captures what Larry saw to be the mood of his day with its opening line:

Life was filled with guns and war

And everyone got trampled on the floor.

The song has remained something of an anthem for - generally American - dispensationalist thinking, the sort that made the Left Behind books such an immense success. This video set to Norman's song demonstrates this phenomenon quite well:

Now, I only recently realised that, having grown up in a moderate Brethren church in rural Australia, I was exposed to my fair share of dispensationalist thinking without realising. It shocked me to learn that, for many theologians, the concept of a literal rapture seems both spurious and unbiblical. I suspect that learning the lyrics to "I Wish We'd All Been Ready" and feeling deeply moved by it at a fairly young age also had quite a bit to do with this thinking. I'm not here to critique the theology of such an interpretation, partly because I'm still very early in my thinking about it and partly because I don't think this is the place to do so. Certainly N.T. Wright has done a pretty good job of at least laying the groundwork for a solid theological challenge to it, and I'm not going to try to regurgitate his ideas here.

But it does strike me that, much as I love Larry Norman's music, there's a line of thinking which goes very well with a rapture-oriented perspective, which is the mindset conveyed in the final line of an otherwise very subtle Norman song, "The Outlaw": "And I think we should get ready 'cause it's time for us to leave". What's wrong with this kind of thinking? I suspect it views the world primarily as something we should be seeking to escape from rather than working to redeem. It fails, in fact, to fully grasp what Jesus was praying for His disciples, and for the church, when He said:

"My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one." (John 17:15)

Now, this does not mean at all that Jesus wants us to stay in this fallen world permanently. There is a very real sense in which Jesus will deliver His followers from the pain of separation from Him. But will He snatch us out of this earth and take us to a celestial kingdom, or will He invade and transform the earth, making it what it was always intended to be? Interestingly, I have long believed the latter, but have still not quite grasped what that means for my thinking about the rapture. But I'm open to being challenged in it, and think it might be wise to begin with these questions posed by Wright in his article:

We might begin by asking, What view of the world is sustained, even legitimized, by the Left Behind ideology? How might it be confronted and subverted by genuinely biblical thinking? For a start, is not the Left Behind mentality in thrall to a dualistic view of reality that allows people to pollute God’s world on the grounds that it’s all going to be destroyed soon? Wouldn’t this be overturned if we recaptured Paul’s wholistic [sic] vision of God’s whole creation? (N.T. Wright, "Farewell to the Rapture")

What, I wonder, would be the implications of living like Jesus wanted us to stay here and invest in this place, painful as it is? What would it mean for us if we knew that our home here was being redeemed, not destroyed? I suspect we might start living a lot more like Jesus, because we would have to love this place just as much as He did. We might even have to start dying for it, instead of waiting for our ticket out.

Beatitude #3: Blessed are the meek

"Meek" is one of those wonderfully archaic words which seems only to be used in a Biblical context - much, I suppose, like "blessed". It comes, I understand, from an Old Norse word meaning something like "soft". A Google search of the word, however, is quite informative. Firstly you get the standard array of dictionary definitions and Wikipedia entries. But somewhere down the line your screen will display a website entitled "Blesse'd Are The Meek". Interested, you may click on the link, to find this page - the homepage for an Australian fashion label. Click on "About" and you will read their story, accompanied with fairly raunchy photos of their not-particularly-meek products, and the following opening line, in all its mock-Biblical splendour:

In the beginning, in Melbourne 2003AD a small gathering of obsessed fashion devotees embarked on a quest to create divine and coveted pieces with which to adorn themselves.

And so Bless’ed Are The Meek was born, and it was humbly decreed that they would strive together to push the boundaries of meekdom.

Have they, perhaps, pushed the boundaries a bit far? Have they, in fact, missed the point altogether?

Meekness is wonderfully misunderstood. Friedrich Nietzsche famously criticised this verse because of the "slave morality" it reflected. Others have parodied Matthew 5:5 or simply been fascinated or intrigued by it (Wikipedia boasts a formidable list of musicians, comedians, authors and the like who have referenced the third beatitude, ranging from Eddie Izzard to Frank Zappa to Gorky's Zygotic Mynci). But what exactly does it mean to be meek? Is it the same, as many understand, as being a wuss? It's fairly clear, I think, that it means nothing of the sort. But that isn't very helpful; neither, for that matter, is a quick, unscholarly survey of the Greek, which merely tells me that meek comes from the Greek word "praeis" which means...meek.

Though that isn't half as unhelpful as it seems at first. You see, in Matthew 5:5 Jesus is using the noun form of "meek", a word that should perhaps be rendered "the meek ones". Then, in Matthew 11:29, he uses the same word, as an adjective, to speak of himself:

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle [praos = meek] and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

So here we see something utterly wonderful: that Jesus calls us to be meek, because he himself is meek. He blesses the meek, declaring that they shall inherit the earth, and he leads the way. Meek to the death, he inherits all things as his reward (Philippians 2:9-11). And as for us - well, we are "co-heirs" with him, if we believe (Romans 8:17) - which isn't to say that we receive all that Jesus receives, but it does tell us that, in some manner which we cannot yet fully grasp, we will gain from that to which we have absolutely no right: His glorious inheritance.

So what then does it mean for us to be meek? Well, not to be wusses, that's for sure. Going to the Cross was just about the least wussy thing a human being could do - and that's exactly what Jesus did for us, much as it terrified him. But it was meek. If he had put himself on the pedestal that he deserved, he could have spat in Pilate's face, told Herod where to get off, shown the mocking soldiers who was really in charge. But he didn't.

If we want to know what meekness is, what humility is, let's start with Jesus: God in every way, yet humble; the creator of the universe letting His created subjects mock Him, torture Him, kill Him.

Is that the fruit of a "slave morality"? Look at meek Jesus, risen and exalted, then look at proud Friedrich Nietzsche, dead in despair. Tell me who was the slave.

Blessed are the meek,

for they will inherit the earth.

I don't understand half of what that means. I'm not even beginning to understand it. But I know where to begin it: Jesus, in the Garden of Gethsemane, on the Cross, and now in Heaven, meek but exalted, humble but acknowledged for who He is. And what a place that is to begin.

Why Atticus Finch was not the Messiah

I first read Harper Lee's classic novel thirteen years ago, when I was fourteen. It was the summer before I started Year 10 and I was disappointed to find out that, because I had elected to be in the English Literature class rather than the mainstream class, I would not be studying To Kill a Mockingbird like my brother and sister had done before me. To remedy this omission from my readerly development, I went to the Warragul library that summer and borrowed out the only copy they had.

I remember that I had become a little bored with many books that year. I had outgrown most books aimed for kids my age but did not yet have the maturity to match my reading level. Mockingbird must have been the perfect fit. I devoured it. I do not remember often being as engrossed in a novel as I was that summer. When my English Literature class began that February and we were all asked to name our favourite novel, I said To Kill a Mockingbird. It was soon supplanted by The Outsider, then by Nineteen Eighty-Four and then by many other books, but I have never forgotten the intensity of my joy on reading it for the first time and, over the decade-and-a-bit since I read it, it has remained with me more than some of the novels that replaced it in my affections.

Teaching it this year to my own Year 10 class (some things never change in the curriculum), I have been re-reading it these holidays and doing so has reawakened my old love. I have enjoyed rediscovering old favourite moments - Scout's first day of school, for instance, or the visceral tension of the courtroom scene - and encountering scenes of which I have no memory - the scene, for instance, in which Dill and Scout have to leave the courtroom and encounter Mr Dolphus Raymond, the local vagabond who pretends to be an alcoholic to explain why he prefers to live among the "negroes".

And then, of course, there's Atticus. I don't think twentieth-century literature created a greater hero than him. It was, after all, the century of anti-heroes, in which Literature preferred a Jay Gatsby or a Meursault to a genuinely good man. (Popular Fiction, Tim Keller notes, has the right idea about what makes a hero and a powerful story - heroes who actually accomplish something, in the teeth of almost certain defeat.) Atticus has integrity. He is wise and compassionate. He is full of grace and, surprisingly for a popular novel, an earnest Christian. And in the film he's acted by Gregory Peck. What's there not to love about the man?

But he's not Jesus. This might sound a bit obvious, but this is what I mean: there is something in me that is tempted to almost worship "good men" like Atticus, and all too often we do the same thing to Jesus. We want him to be a good moral teacher whom we can admire. We want him to make stirring courtroom speeches and stand up for good. But we don't want him to be God, and we don't want him to supplant our other earthly heroes. Now, I might save for another day the question of why we do this, but here are two brief reasons why Atticus is not the Messiah:

1) He cannot, in the end, change the human heart. There is a false perception among many in our world that with enough good, educated people challenging social perceptions, things will get gradually better and better. Well, no century saw more wide-spread democracy and education than the twentieth, and no century saw bloodier wars, and its successor - which, by the logic outlined before, should be better than the last - began with one of the worst acts of terrorism, followed by a horrible, protracted war designed to fix things. Atticus, and other good men, can inspire us, but they can't change us. History has shown that.

2) He can stand up for the defenceless and the oppressed, but he cannot defend the truly indefensible. Our hearts are stirred greatly by stories of injustice, and when Tom Robinson is found guilty something in us rises in vehement protest - and it should. Tom dies for a crime he very clearly did not commit. There is no justice in this. But we need to remember that, before a righteous God, we are all guilty of sins we would much rather hide from everyone, most of all a righteous God. If Atticus can't acquit the innocent, he most certainly can't acquit the irrefutably guilty. Only Jesus can do that.

And so I suspect that To Kill a Mockingbird will remain on my list of greatest novels for a long, long time. But for my heroes, for someone to lay down my life for, I'm banking on Jesus Christ, not Atticus.

Beatitude #2: Blessed are those who mourn

I remember a minister friend of my parents once shared a story with us from a family devotional book that dealt chiefly in stories of martyrs. This story was about a so-called "eccentric" preacher who seemed to be famous for spontaneously calling out "Glory!" at inappropriate moments. One such moment was when he was told the news that his wife had died and he responded with, "Glory! My wife has gone to be with the glorious ones," or something to that effect. He may not have said "glorious". That might have been overkill. But you get the idea.

Now, being only about fifteen at the time, I wasn't aware of just how unhelpful that story was. It really just sounded quite silly to me, but on reflection I feel that it gave a very false view of how Christians should deal with mourning. While it may be ideal for us to have our hopes fixed so firmly on heaven that we can rejoice to know our loved ones are there, I'm not sure that pure joy is the response that we should expect to feel at such times. That just isn't the reality of life, and one of the most wonderful things that we can discover about the Bible is that it is firmly grounded in the realities of life.

When Jesus first addresses the crowd gathered on the mountain, following up on his promises to the poor in spirit, he declared, as a key feature of his kingdom, that:

Blessed are those who mourn,

for they will be comforted. (Matthew 5:4)

Now, it does not mean that the act of mourning is intrinsically blessed. Far from it. We know from elsewhere in the New Testament that hopeless mourning is not to be a feature of the Christian experience:

Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. (1 Thessalonians 4:12-13)

Note what Paul, the writer of that passage, does not say: he does not say, "do not grieve". But he does say, "do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope". We know for a fact that Christians can grieve. If Jesus is the model of the Christian life, the shortest verse in the Bible tells us that weeping over the death of a loved one, even one we know will be raised from the dead, is natural. But Jesus would not have wept hopelessly; after all, he knew how the death of his friend Lazarus would end: with life.

So why, then, are those who mourn blessed? Not because mourning itself brings blessing, but because mourning is never the final word. Refusing to mourn may seem noble, but Tim Keller has pointed out in a sermon on joy that refusal to mourn is pagan Stoicism far more than it is Christian. But we know for a fact that Jesus came to put an end to mourning: not by denying his followers the right to grieve when they lost those they loved, but by hoping in the life beyond all this mourning.

Is it any coincidence that, in the passage Mark presents as the beginning of his public ministry, Jesus quotes from a famous passage in Isaiah in which the time of mourning is declared to end with him?

The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me,

because the LORD has anointed me

to preach good news to the poor.

He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted...

to comfort all who mourn,

and provide for them a crown of beauty

instead of ashes,

the oil of gladness

instead of mourning,

and a garment of praise

instead of a spirit of despair. (Isaiah 61:1-3)

This is why those who mourn are blessed: because Jesus promises them comfort - more than a pat on the back, more than a shoulder to cry on; the greatest hope a mourner could know. The knowledge that, in Jesus, death is never the final answer.

Song: Aaron Strumpel - Sixty One

Beatitude #1: Blessed are the poor in spirit

When Jesus stood up to declare what some commentators have called the "constitution" of his kingdom, he began with these famous words:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Scholars and writers differ on what the word "blessed" here really means. I remember Philip Yancey saying that the word in the Greek is more along the lines of "Oh you happy person!" I'm not sure about how reliable this rendering is, but it certainly draws attention to the fact that Jesus is saying something extremely irregular and counter-intuitive here: those who seem most downcast and weak are in fact the most blessed. How? And why?

A sermon at my church on the Beatitudes on Sunday got me thinking about this passage, and re-watching Lars von Trier's masterful Melancholia got me thinking even more. The film concerns two sisters, Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and their relationship as it plays out during Justine's increasingly problematic wedding celebration (Part 1) and the arrival of a threatening planet, Melancholia, which is moving ever closer to earth (Part 2). For much of the film, Claire fails to understand Justine's evident depression, and Justine is cautioned to "not say a word" to her husband about the ache that fills every moment of her life. Yet as the film unfolds Justine's depression is shown to be a valid response to the world around her, while Claire and her husband (brilliantly portrayed by an understated Kiefer Sutherland) are shown to be much more naive than you would have thought at the start.

So what is the message of all this? The film suggests at one point that the "poor in spirit" may in fact be gifted. Justine is shown to have almost mystical knowledge that others lack. I'm not so convinced. Justine's knowledge is that the universe is empty and meaningless; this is a fairly common thought for someone with depression, but I'm not convinced that it is the truth. Depression can lead us to feel and think things like this - and I've had my fair share of such thoughts - but we need to remember that, in times like those, it is the depression speaking, not some profound revelation.

But the film does offer something quite interesting in terms of how to deal with "Melancholia". The truth of Justine's condition, like the truth of the planet, is something that characters continually avoid. When John (Kiefer Sutherland) declares that "Melancholia [the planet] will just pass us by" and "will be the most beautiful sight" ever, he is shown to be devastatingly, emphatically wrong. Claire, who is always the strong one, is unable to confront heartbreak when it arrives. Neither is John. And Michael, Justine's erstwhile husband, is never seen again. So much for being strong. So much for "not breathing a word".

If the poor in spirit are blessed, it is not because they have a mystical awareness that life means nothing. It is that they are sometimes forced, in their brokenness, to confront the pain of human existence and, by God's grace, to move closer to Him and find their answer there. The truth is that all of us should recognise ourselves to be poor in spirit, because before God we all are. The answer is not to deny this or try to be strong in ourselves. The answer is to bring all our brokenness to Jesus Christ who was broken for us, and let Him heal us and give us hope.

I pray that Lars von Trier can realise this truth. He has come so close to it, but sadly remains so far.

Petalshower and Windfall

An anthology of my poems written from 2006-2012 is now available from the Kindle store at this link:

Petalshower and Windfall: Poems by Matthew Pullar

If you do not have a Kindle reader, the free Kindle app can be downloaded to iPhones, Android devices or iPads to allow you to read it. Hope you enjoy it!

The Kernel: A Poem

John 12:20-33

An insect buzzed around Andrew’s head

And the words of the Master made a similar sound,

Humming round and round in the noonday bustle,

My countrymen still waiting somewhere in the sidelines,

Our question not really answered,

The issue – as always – made a little less than clear.

Had he heard, or taken in, our request?

They had phrased it so simply –

Sir, we would like to see Jesus –

But protocol had somewhat baffled me;

They had come to me for ease of access: the face of a stranger

Somehow familiar, in a sea of unfamiliarity,

But I did not hold the clout, never did,

And so turned to Andrew who, it seemed to me, did,

But together we got nothing clearer.

Only this made sense: The hour has come

For the Son of Man to be glorified.

Yes, that much was clear.

But with budding fans

In the background, he did as he always did:

Taught us that which we could not see,

In words and figures which we could not grasp:

Unless a kernel of wheat falls to soil,

It remains only a single seed.

The image I knew; I had seen kernels

Sown in the soil, and had seen harvests

Burst forth in vast, bright golden splendour.

But harvests of wheat? This wasn’t the time

For a lesson in wheat-growth. There were some men

In the fields, waiting, ripe to be reaped.

He lost me, I think, after the seeds,

The buzzing insect now down Andrew’s arm,

My new friends in the distance, checking their watches,

The Master pausing, once again, to pray.

Now my heart is troubled, he said; but why he did

I was, myself, too troubled to hear or understand,

And only the voice of thunder above could snap me

From my impatience, the anxiety of waiting,

And the buzz of the fly, or whatever it was –

I have glorified my name; I will glorify it again –

The crowd in hysterics, and the Master aglow

With the glory of the moment and the height of his call

And, his eyes lifted up to the heavenly source

Of the voice that had thundered, they seemed then to shine

With the tears that I had hardly noticed him crying,

And in the glow of the teardrop, I fancied I saw,

Two pieces of wood, crossed one on another,

And the glorious Son lifted up on each one.

Why we should be outraged but not surprised

In the past week, there have been many passionate, decent people expressing outrage via social media, online petitions and the blogosphere regarding porn-themed stationery being stocked in stationery store Typo. The most notorious of the products is a notebook with a naked woman on the cover, with the word "Dirty" printed along with her. And it's pretty clear that this hasn't just been a bad week for Typo or its parent company CottonOn. Their website displays a wide range of products featuring women in provocative poses, slogans like "Let's Get It On", "Do Bad Things To Me" (a Valentine's Day card, apparently) or, perhaps most appallingly, "Believe in Pole Dancing", with an accompanying image as subtle as the slogan.

But, lest the sexual side of things become the sole focus, there's enough here apart from that to be concerned about, including a notebook with the slogan "Keep Calm and Drink Tequila". All of this begs the question: just who is Typo's demographic? I'm fairly sure that primary school kids shop there, but even if they were only aiming at teenagers, it isn't ok. I know I wouldn't accept a student handing in work in a notebook with any of these slogans on the cover. At the very least, there'd be a phone call home asking if the parents were aware of what kind of stationery their child was bringing to school.

It's fairly torrid stuff and a good thing, therefore, that there's enough public outrage over it that, at the very least, CottonOn and Typo will be forced to hear criticism even if they don't respond to it. And thank God for people like Melinda Tankard-Reist and her organisation Collective Shout. We need more people willing to stand up against things like this.

But should we be surprised? Granted, the sexualisation of girls is becoming an increasing public issue, in the sense that the bounds of public decency are being blurred more and more, in a way that many find quite shocking. But public decency often has a way of disguising the real issue. We have agreed standards for what we do or proclaim in the public arena, and in the past pornography has been politely pushed into the margins. Now it's bursting out, and that outward burst is what shocks us, not the revelation that it exists or that the age for people to be included or targeted in it is frighteningly flexible.

We should oppose it, with all that we've got, but there's something perhaps more uncomfortable that we need to admit - that in our own way we are as perverse as any product that CottonOn or Typo stock, that we have secrets locked away inside ourselves that we would hate to see paraded in shopfront windows. The fact is, sexism, exploitation and pornography will exist so long as human sin exists. And, if we know anything about the depths of human sin, nothing that big businesses or advertising executives can come up with should shock us. We shouldn't accept it, not for a moment, but we shouldn't be surprised either.

I think of Jesus' words to His disciples when He sent them out into the world to preach the Gospel:

I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves. (Matthew 10:16)

In other words, we should be wise to sin and its impact on the world but refuse to be corrupted by it. We should speak out against it, and never for a moment accept the excuses that people will make to say that it's okay, "just a bit of fun", that we should all "lighten up" and stop being "wowsers". Those kinds of excuses never cut it. But we should, I think, be willing to look just as regularly at our own hearts and at the skeletons that we have trapped in our own closets, because the problem is broader than Typo, and broader than CottonOn and Kmart. The problem is us, and that includes - to borrow the name of a recent film - me, and you, and everyone we know.

The fight against pornography starts with the fight against sin. And that fight should start with each of us on our knees, praying for forgiveness.

Worth and worship

Yesterday I reflected on the complex proposition that the Bible offers, that we are on one hand totally depraved, corrupted by sin in all areas of our lives, yet also made in the image of God and, in God’s eyes, worth being redeemed. I know that this idea is one which may offend a typical Calvinist position, and I am wary myself of how far we push it. But the alternative position is an odd one: we emphasise how unworthy we are of God’s grace (which we are) to the point that we potentially argue it was idiocy for God to redeem us. God has sacrificed everything for our redemption; surely He would consider this to be worthwhile?

But I want to look more today at what our response should be. Self-esteem teaching would say, “Let’s focus on our worth. Let’s tell ourselves how wonderful we are in God’s eyes.” This, I think, is missing the point. It simply makes an idol of self and uses God’s redemption as a means to further worship that idol. In actual fact, it misses the point altogether of redemption.

So what is the purpose, then, of redemption? Is it forgiveness of sins? Is it payment of the price of our sin? Yes, and yes. But more. Redemption salvages us from the scrap heap, not so that we can feel good about ourselves now, but so that we will never stop praising the one who salvaged us. If I view my redemption purely in terms of what it does for me, I will pretend to worship God but will essentially only be worshipping myself. If I view redemption in terms of the way that it brings me into relationship with my creator, then I either need to fall on my knees worshipping Him or I don’t really get what was so wonderful about redemption in the first place.

God did see us as worth redeeming; but this should be a humbling thing to realise, not a boost to our self-esteem. And, in the end, if we truly get what God has done for us, we will be consumed in adoration of Him.

Tim Keller, who is one of the 21st century’s foremost analysts of misplaced worship, has noted that, in Old English, the word “worship” came from “worth-ship”. That is, when we worship something, we acknowledge its worth and act in response to this. In other words, he says that to worship something is to treasure it.

When I treasure something, I longingly look at it, for example, in the store window and think about how great it would be to own it. I ponder its virtues, talk to my friends about how great it is. Then I go out and buy it.

Worship is treasuring God: I ponder his worth and then do something about it—I give him what he's worth. (Tim Keller, 1995, Changing Lives Through Preaching and Worship)

In the end, what we are worth matters far, far less than what God is worth. And realising that, and responding to it – that is worship.

Totally depraved, wonderfully made

For some time now, my mind has been crunching over the idea of total depravity and its implications for self-esteem, which, at the secular end of the scale, is based on the humanistic belief that "people are fundamentally good" or, in its Christian formulation, is based on the belief that "God does not make junk".

Theologians who have articulated what total depravity means in regards to the love of God will formulate the idea through examples of people loving the utterly unlovable. My theology-student housemate describes the typical Calvinist position in terms of God being like the father of an axe-murderer: though the son is utterly unloveable, the father loves him nonetheless, not at all because of anything that he is or does but because he chooses to love him. This isn't to say that the axe-murderer son has no qualities. But, where secular counselling for instance might emphasise appealing to the son's deeper good, a more theologically reformed view might appeal instead to the radical nature of a love which accepts him despite how reprehensible he is and everything he represents.

For those among us, however, who struggle with self-esteem, we are presented perhaps with a problem. Many will try to cheer up someone who is down on themselves with encouraging words about how good that person is - and I am a little dubious about how appropriate this is as a way of encouraging. Isn't it more powerful to say, "God loves you regardless of your flaws?" On the other hand, as a notorious self-condemner, I know that I buy into a lot of lies about myself. When I condemn myself, it isn't necessarily because of a healthy view of my own sinfulness but because I listen to voices that tell me I am worthless - and, whatever the Bible says about our depravity, it never once says that we are worthless.

Take as an example the master craftsmen who goes into an antique store and buys the thing that everyone else rejected in order to restore it. If he denied that it was damaged or totally in need of repair, he would be having himself on. But this is not the same as saying that it is only worthy of the scrap heap. This is not how God sees us; if it were, He would never have gone to Calvary for us. But He does see that, without His intervention, the scrap heap is the only place we will ultimately be going.

There is a subtle distinction within reformed theology between being totally depraved and utterly depraved, and this distinction might be helpful here. R.C. Sproul articulates it like this:

We must be careful to note the difference between total depravity and "utter" depravity. To be utterly depraved is to be as wicked as one could possibly be. Hitler was extremely depraved, but he could have been worse than he was. I am sinner. Yet I could sin more often and more severely than I actually do. I am not utterly depraved, but I am totally depraved. For total depravity means that I and everyone else are depraved or corrupt in the totality of our being. There is no part of us that is left untouched by sin.

(Sproul, 1992, The Essential Truths of the Christian Faith)

So here the line that "God does not make junk" is perhaps worth reiterating, though it might be better reworded as "God does not redeem junk", or "God does not die to save junk". There may be nothing in me that is not corrupted by sin, but that does not mean that I am not still made in God's image. It does not mean that, when He looks at me, He does not see something worth redeeming.

We would do well to remember, I think, that the same book of the Bible which contains the words "Surely I was sinful at birth" (Psalm 51:5) also later declares, "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139:14). Both are true, and, praise God, in the death of Jesus, the tension that exists between the two is overcome. Like the fallen yet beautiful creation which God will restore, we too are fallen, yet beautiful, and by grace are being restored.

The Devil Inside?

A friend of mine belongs to a Christian off-shoot group who are perhaps most famous for not believing in the Trinity or in the divinity of Jesus. But there are other differences. They don’t believe in hell, for instance, and they don’t believe that there is a personification of evil, or Satan. Now, I’m not wanting to scrutinise these beliefs here in much detail, but there was something I heard the other day about his church’s belief regarding Satan that got me thinking.

My understanding is that my friend would say there is not a single devil, rather that the devil is inside. This is a curious concept. There are ways in which I can understand what he means. I have been in churches where people are very ready to blame Satan for things for which they are themselves responsible. The standard “The devil made me do it” defence is an exceptional alibi, and a wonderful way of pretending that it wasn’t the evil impulses in you that made you act that way.

But in terms of there being no objective, external force of evil, and in terms of evil being indwelling, there are some significant issues. Does evil continue to indwell after one becomes a Christian? And what is the source of that evil?

If, in fact, what is happening inside of us is a battle between Satan and God, then that’s a frightening thing to experience and endure – a “Devil and God are raging inside of me” scenario – and, while God is clearly more powerful, it is difficult to know whose side we are on and if we will, therefore, be able to rejoice in God’s victory or be destroyed in the process. Doesn’t it all depend, in such a case, on which side has the more dominant hold upon us?

People who have experienced anxiety, depression or other forms of mental illness will perhaps relate best to the dread that this kind of proposition can hold for believers who still feel ongoing condemnation and spiritual dread – and I imagine there are far more people in churches today fitting into that category than we might be aware. One of the greatest and most comforting preachers for people with bruised spirits was Charles Spurgeon, and 152 years ago yesterday he preached on this very topic:

I remember a certain narrow and crooked lane in a certain country town, along which I was walking one day while I was seeking the Saviour. On a sudden the most fearful oaths that any of you can conceive rushed through my heart. I put my hand to my mouth to prevent the utterance. I had not, that I know of, ever heard those words; and I am certain that I had never used in my life from my youth up so much as one of them, for I had never been profane. But these things sorely beset me; for half an hour together the most fearful imprecations would dash through my brain. Oh, how I groaned and cried before God! That temptation passed away; but before many days it was renewed again; and when I was in prayer, or when I was reading the Bible, these blasphemous thoughts would pour in upon me more than at any other time.

It was only when Spurgeon had the courage to speak to a wise believer about this problem that he received this encouragement: if he hated those thoughts, and did everything he could to fight them, then he could be confident that they were not his, and he could have the courage to keep fighting them, and to send them to where they belonged.

Evil is within all people, and it is certainly true that our lives as Christians will be an ongoing process of defeating that evil. But for the Christian evil no longer has a hold on us; Christ does. This is something I need to remind myself of, and I hope and pray that others who have these same fears can know the same encouragement that John gave 1900 years ago:

He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. (1 John 4:4b)