No offence intended?

I read these words by the wonderful N.T. Wright recently and they seemed appropriate to put out into the webosphere on this fine, sunny Christmas Eve:

"I was once preaching at a big Christmas service where a well-known historian, famous for his scepticism towards Christianity, had been persuaded to attend by his family. Afterwards, he approached me, all smiles.

'I've finally worked out,' he declared, 'why people like Christmas.'

'Really?' I asked. 'Do tell me.'

'A baby threatens no one,' he said, 'so the whole thing is a happy event which means nothing at all!'

I was dumbfounded. At the heart of the Christmas story in Matthew's gospel is a baby who poses such a threat to the most powerful man around that he kills a whole village full of other babies in order to try to get rid of him...Whatever else you say about Jesus, from birth onwards, people certainly found him a threat. He upset their power-games, and suffered the usual fate of people who do that." (Tom Wright, 2004, Matthew for Everyone Part 1, 13-14)

It's certainly true that we've managed to make the Christmas story quite innocuous. Nativity plays and carols about how "the little Lord Jesus no crying he makes" make it all very demure and comforting, when at the time it was anything but.

Which is not to say that Christmas should suddenly become a deeply unsettling time, and that peace on earth and goodwill to all men should not be encouraged. Any celebration that causes people to come together with their families, to be more loving, generous and charitable than usual, has to have at least some good in it. Yet it seems that, by missing the controversy of Christmas, we also miss the real joy, and the real power. Christmas, grasped fully, is the best news we can imagine. Christmas, grasped fully, makes every day of your life one of generosity and love.

"Only the noble of heart..."

I suppose we can take it as a given that, when beloved books are made into movies, people get offended. Some people are happy, and some are very much not.

My response to seeing the new 3D film version of C.S. Lewis' "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" was not so extreme. I try to avoid giving the standard response of "the book's better". Some might even say that the film was better than the book - those who found the book a bit too imperialistic (the film definitely got rid of the "submission to Narnian authority" bit early on in the story) or fragmented (the film adds a new thread which unifies the narrative, and reorganises the stories to fit that framework better). Some who find the act of reading a bit dull, or find Lewis' distinctly British style of storytelling too ponderous, will probably prefer to have the picture on the wall leak out torrents of water right into their 3D glasses. It was certainly a highlight of the experience. And most people would have to be happy with how the film visualises the frontier into Aslan's country - less hokey than the 1990 BBC version but just as touching and serene.

So I can accept that, when adapting books to films, scenes come and go, and some people might think Eustace should have been fatter while others might think he was perfect as he was. This is all part of the adaptation process. But I noticed one subtle but key omission, and one subtle but key addition. The omission was: grace. The addition was: the gospel of good works and self-esteem.

Yes, the film kept Eustace's conversion experience, but it came much, much later in the story, and only after he had already made himself a hero by saving the ship from many perils, befriending Reepicheep and gaining his respect, and taking a sword for the team. His first act, after becoming a boy again, is not to become a better person (he's done that already, while stuck in a dragon's body) but to save the world. Tick.

The film also tells people to "be themselves" and to "see their own value". These are not, in and of themselves, bad things to tell anyone - they can be very valuable in their place. But they take the place of love and respect for Aslan, something that the original stories placed very highly. In the novel, and the BBC series, when Aslan growls at Lucy for wanting to be Susan, it isn't because she fails to see her own value (though she does), but because she has become envious and despises her sister for her beauty. In the movie, her sin - resentment of a sister; covetousness - becomes the subject of a self-help book. Apparently Lucy needs to learn to value herself, more than she needs to love her sister, and love and trust her creator (for it is distinctly as her creator that Aslan appears to her at that moment in the original story).

And finally the film tells us that "only the noble of heart" can enter Aslan's country and that "no-one deserves it more" than Reepicheep. Deserves it? Whoever said anything about deserving it? Yes Reep is noble, and Aslan values his nobility - perhaps a bit too much for 21st century hipster Christians' comfort - but no-one ever deserves to get into Aslan's country. No-one ever gets there by their own merits. Which, if you're Eustace, or Edmund, is an exceptionally good thing.

More ideas, less north

I visited my old school/workplace last week and was speaking to a student who told me that he had been put onto "my blog" and had read it in its entirety. Assuming he meant the blog I used to keep for my Year 12 Lit class, I thought nothing of it (the student who put him onto the blog was from my old Lit class), until it became apparent that he meant Ideas From the North.

While I was surprised that any of my students would have tracked this site down and/or made the connection to me, I wasn't particularly embarrassed. It's not as if I'm recounting drunken exploits or anything like that. Besides, as he reasonably pointed out, I haven't written here for more than a year anyway, so personal revelations have been few and far between of late. Heck, most things have been few and far between here of late - even spam, which has attacked my Lit blog like a particularly malicious strain of the plague but somehow has spared Blogger.

What all this achieved was that it reminded me that, from time to time, people actually did read my blog, and some people even miss it. So, while the name now seems a bit inappropriate (I'm no longer in the north, unless you count the north of Berwick, which is in the south - see, even I'm already confused), I thought I might as well get the old site dusted off and write the occasional something-or-other here. I don't promise anything regular, but it should be at least more regular than once every 15 months. I'll do my best.

The world's most liveable cities

Well, the posts here have been few and far between, I must admit, but no rarer I suppose than they usually are. Only, this time it's harder to find a computer to sit in front of and procrastinate about whether or not to write a post.

Here, also, there's so much going on that it is quite hard to know what to post about. While some of what I am experiencing here is quite familiar, and prompts the sort of thoughts I could have in Melbourne as much as here, there are some key differences that take a little longer to process but are certainly there.

One thing that has struck me about the trip so far is the key similarities between each of the major cities I have been to - all cities, in fact, with much in common with my home town. They are all cultured, not-too-densely-populated cities, all on the water, all with a strong indie/hipster subculture, all Western...Vancouver, Portland and Melbourne also all rate in those lists of the most liveable cities in the world. And you can see why. All have much to offer their residents, making them interesting cities to visit, because what is most wonderful about them is not necessarily most visible.

Yet the three cities I have been to - Vancouver, Seattle and Portland - all, at a glance, seem to have a greater emphasis on preserving natural beauty than Melbourne. Perhaps they just automatically have much more to start off with than we do, yet what they have they do an amazing job of maintaining - something that we could certainly learn from. And, it may just be an illusion, but I got the real impression that people came together a lot more in Seattle and Portland. They sat together in parks, they shared open-air music, art and culture, something that we have, at best, at Queen Vic Markets, and even then on nothing resembling the scale you see in these places.

I wonder what makes a city agree on having that kind of culture and community. I wonder what it takes to change a city to think and act that way.

You may case the ground from the Cascades to Puget Sound...

Well, it's now the second un-jetlagged day of my trip to the Pacific North-West - something I never got around to announcing at "Ideas From the North". Oh well - here I am now, and ready to blog away.

Only, I'm not exactly sure what to say. I don't think I've ever blogged from another country before, and have always had trouble knowing what to write when I return. Hence, I think, the one fairly uninformative post I wrote after getting back from China this time last year, despite promising more. The floods of tear-filled complaints I received from all my readers were quite chastening and I swore to give you more on this trip, but travel fills your mind with so many complex and wordless impressions that it can be very difficult to distill them into a post on a blog.

I could talk, I suppose, about how travelling by myself for the first time in my life has been a challenge. I could talk about the highs (heading as far as I could from the beaten track of Bainbridge Island, and finding the magnificent, unspoilt part of the waterfront before they threaten to develop it; the incredible beauty of Northern Washington viewed from the Amtrak coach), the lows (being quietly told off for forgetting to tip in a Chinese restaurant in Vancouver's Chinatown - my first meal in the country); the quirky moments (seeing a man talking to his parrot Venus at the rummage table of Pike Place Markets - "That's what I think too, Venus. Just what I was about to say myself"). I could also talk about the cultural differences, the similarities, the ideas it all gives me about culture, and inclusion and exclusion...

But that would be too much to talk about here, and I haven't had enough time to think it through. I'll do my best to say more as it comes to me, but for now I think I'll just say that, highs, lows and quirks all considered, I'm happy to be here.