Meditations from the Garden

A garden contains a myriad of spiritual lessons which may be gleaned by the contemplative soul. She who reflects on the subtle metaphors of preparing and nourishing the soil and carefully removing the unwanted plants which compete for light and food will benefit in applying these lesson to her own inner life. I love to meditate on spiritual matters as I work in garden. It is a peaceful, profitable effort, one which rewards me with vivid insights into the needs of my spirit.

I have recently begun a community garden project at my church, and so have been spending a great deal of time tending this little plot. I often listen to sermons or audio books with an mp3 player while I work, and have found this to be an extremely pleasant method of making tedious work more enjoyable. I most recently listened to The Life and Diary of David Brainerd by Jonathan Edwards, one of the best books I have ever read. I can easily recommend it as most beneficial for stirring up conviction and inspiring a more serious and attentive attitude towards prayer and seeking the divine presence of God in daily life.

Brainerd was a profoundly watchful man regarding the state of his own soul, and at times I found the reading difficult because of the shame that would rise up in me, due to the great contrast between his approach to spiritual things and my own. But after I reflected on it and considered it, this shame would transform into a kind of inspiration, and I desired to emulate him in some way. He truly found all his pleasure in the Lord, and had come to a place in his own heart, such that all his satisfaction was in the enjoyment and contemplation of and communion with God. It was a very sweet read.

This book, especially, was well suited to being enjoyed while working in the garden. One of the more edifying lessons I have learned recently arose while I was tending the summer squash plants. These are some of the most luxuriant and lush of all the plants in the garden, but they are prey to a certain pest, which, in larvae form, enters the base of the stem and begins to eat its way upwards, devouring all the vascular tissue of the inner stem. The plant will continue to grow, because the larvae begins quite small, but as it grows, the plant is slowly weakened, so that suddenly on a very hot day, the plant seems to wilt, and no amount of water will revive it. If the gardener has not been watchful, the plant will most likely die unexpectedly, within a matter of days.

How like the state of the soul! How manifold at the ways in which our own soul is vulnerable to just such a subtle, imperceptible assault! The harmful worm escapes our notice, and enters our heart as something too small and uninteresting to catch our attention. There is begins to feed and as its strength grows, our own diminishes, until we suddenly find ourselves weakened unexpectedly, and quite unable to cope with more powerful conflicts raging within. How needful it is to be watchful, informed, and anxious for the safety and health of our own souls, that we may perceive what is noxious and corrupting, root it out, and nourish our spirits with true food and true drink. May we be like a tree planted by streams of living water, bearing fruit in season, to the glory of the name of our Father and to the praise of our Redeemer forever.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

As the summer months were beginning to assert themselves, Sasha had received an invitation to interview with a somewhat prestigious school for a position instructing eighth and ninth graders in the nuances of their own language and literature.  She was to live a part of her happy life as a single stone tossed earnestly into the pond of English literacy.  Her interview went very well and her presentation was innovative.  I was proud of her.  Yet, there were little clues that something was wrong and a bit imbalanced on the more polished end of the negotiating table.

Some weeks later, I picked up a copy of an award winning book I had heard a lot about and which settled nicely, as I thought, into my recent diversion down the path of fiction.  It was on sale and a quick read and promised to hold a few nuggets of insight into elements I thought I might include in my own book.  So I picked up The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time — it even sported a great title taken from the Sherlock Holmes mystery, Silver Blaze — and I coursed through it in a couple of days.

The main character, Christopher, is strikingly autistic and a savant with exceptional mathematical abilities.  He tells the story from the point of view of his own curious and indiscriminate perspective on life, which I found somewhat intriguing though, ultimately, rather sad and misguided, even if it was clear that the author (Mark Haddon) apparently wished his readers to appreciate the “logic” of Christopher’s life.  However, he handled the story clumsily, abusing a tragic and sympathetic character to lend a child’s voice to a transparent effort to convince other children to adopt a rather ill-conceived atheism.  There was even a chapter devoted to explaining the reason that it is so very silly to believe in GOD in which an inept attempt at addressing the so-called anthropic cosmological principle was played out to its embarrassing conclusion.

But, if that didn’t work, the author was determined at least to make use of the naïvete of his main character to numb his youthful audience to the random depravity and awkwardly sexualized and detachedly self-centered environment of a depiction of life in Swindon, Wiltshire, which is a small town situated in southern England.  The fifteen year old Christopher has a rather self-absorbed mother who doesn’t seem capable of loving anyone inconvenient to her “happiness” and an inept father who seems to cherish his difficult son, albeit fumblingly, but continues to suffer the effects of the choices he makes out of a frustrated philosophy of life.  In the end, the father goes unwanted and unloved yet he remains determined to hang on to whatever place he has in his son’s life while Christopher’s (somewhat excusable) egocentrism makes it hard to see him as very likeable.  Vulgar expressions and descriptions pop up on occasion in the book without warning and without reason.  I shall say no more than this.

Like the proverbial serpent, the story bit down too hard and offered much too little in return.  What saddened me most of all, however, was that Sasha told me afterward that the school I mentioned before had recently decided to introduce this book as a prize selection for the teenaged “Honors English II” students in their care… nestled among other such works as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Antigone and The Hobbit.  One wonders why while at the same time sensing that the chilling answer is all too obvious.

The Shack

For years, I have resisted the advice of those closest to me to write a book. I still think that they should thank me for this spot of self-discipline, but I know that they would probably not agree. For years, as I continued working through various teaching opportunities and responsibilities, it was my intention to put together a work of quality in the field of theology or Christian philosophy. But this takes time, years of crouching in endless libraries and wearying one’s eyes in ample research, and I always felt (in spite of the insistence of some to the contrary) that I had really only begun. But perhaps in some small measure like Socrates, the more I gained in wisdom — assuming that is, in fact, what I have gained and not something else altogether — the less prepared I felt myself to be. The questions were growing larger and the answers more complicated and I had forgotten somewhere along the way what it was like not to be me, which makes it difficult to write for those at a very different level than I am comfortable with.

For various reasons both pragmatic and ideological, my thoughts turned more and more to the dialogue as the best medium for expressing my ideas. It is especially so these days, given the way I approach the nature and the teaching of logic and theology. Of course, it was not a surprising step from this into the realm of serious fiction and, as I sit here, I have on my desktop the outlines of a curious and subtly allegorical novel which lends a face to my philosophy. As my father always taught me, good illustration is a fundamental of good teaching (or preaching), and I have only recently absorbed the immensities of this lesson.

Nevertheless, I have had for as long as I can remember something of a love-hate relationship with fiction. I rarely discover any prize examples of it these days and doubted for quite some time that I could produce it myself. I still wonder about this, but wonder I suppose is only the beginning of real learning. At some point, there has to come the great test. After weighing it carefully, I have decided that this shall be mine.

As part of my preparations, I chose to read both from the classic and the immensely popular, which of course are not at all necessarily the same thing. One contribution to the latter category which has recently drawn a good deal of attention while upsetting the pop-apologetical dog dish was an apparent Conversations with God spin-off entitled simply, The Shack. When I first heard of this novel in passing, I thought it had been written by Stephen King. It probably would have turned out better if it had. For those of you who know my opinion of Stephen King, that should not fill you with a longing to purchase this book.

To be fair, I do think that some of the critics of The Shack have taken great strides in order to miss the point of the author, even while engaging his woeful attempts at representing a dialogue with someone he imagined was very much like Yahweh. Those who support Mr. Young should admit that it is, after all, inevitable that an author attempting to represent our LORD in these novel contexts must come short of the mark by an incalculable measure. They simply play the hypocrite when they make the defense that this is unavoidable while, in the same breath, appealing to us to recognize that an inescapably demeaning caricature was still extremely helpful in understanding the heart and character of GOD. If we agree that it is utterly hopeless to adequately pen the script for GOD in conversation, then it follows obviously that anyone who tries to do so cannot have succeeded at enlightening us about who He really is.

Having said this, no matter what the merits of a book might otherwise possess, no one can object to the transparent fact that a great deal of criticism is already deserved at the outset of so presumptuous an undertaking. That’s just the nature of the beast. However, we can at least ask whether the author of this book, in imagining both sides of a dialogue with GOD, tried to restrain himself by the description that our LORD already gave of Himself in His Word. And the simple answer to that question is: only negligibly at best.

Paul Young (he prefers Paul to William) would be the first, no doubt, to admit that he is no theologian. However, he has left the responsibility to those of us who adore our Christ to observe that he is not even a poor student of theology. He is more of an anti-theologian. I get the feeling that this would be for him a perfectly acceptable description. He does after all, with no small sense of irony, take the trouble to instruct his readers through the mouths of the various characters of alternating gender meant to represent members of the Godhead, that God would rather we didn’t think of him according to the stale stereotypes of theological scholarship. Rather, we must come to grips with the fact that God is not even interested in converting people to Christianity (or to any religion, for that matter). We also learn that none of us are “lost” and that He (or She) has never desired anything from us save that we be fulfilled and fully human. Furthermore, the intriguing statistic is revealed that the word “responsibility” is not actually to be found anywhere in the Bible (at least in the KJV), that God is “especially fond” of every person (and all the diverse products of their creativity) to the same degree and is not upset with anyone but wants simply to have a renewed relationship with each of His (or Her) “children.” There seems to be no hell because everyone, no matter how drunk and sadistically violent they were in this life, is precious and heaven-bound. God just bides His (or Her) time and laughs away every irreverence aimed in His (or Her) direction while being playfully adept at self-deprecating humor between the members of the Godhead.

To anyone the least bit interested in faithfulness to Christ, this will not sit well and they will not idly play along at Young’s game of mocking the Holy One of Israel. Perhaps it is not so very shocking that this has not been the response the book has received from the majority of those professing to be “Christian.”  Rather, they say it has been to them an “inspiration” and an answer to prayer and many popular “Christian” authors have rushed to endorse a continual best-seller. I prayerfully hope, with every ounce of sincerity within me, that they would from now on take Young’s apparent advice and drop the religious nomenclature they’ve outgrown.  I think that kind of honesty, far more than this book, would do the rest of us a great deal of good.

A New Direction…

My wife and I have had mixed feelings for some time about the right level and tone of intimacy to strike when blogging, as well as the most edifying and compatible focus of so public a narrative. As we’ve mused on the right balance of obligations this blog must always have to our LORD, to His people and to all others, we have been very satisfied in deciding together to narrow our focus to a source for sharing with everyone what we are reading and contemplating. This will be a place to review the works we have given some part of ourselves to and to offer everyone glimpses into our simple existence as these seem to flow naturally from our thoughts on various topics. Those we love can keep up perhaps more consistently with the expansion of our mental and emotional horizons and, hopefully, gain some useful recommendations (or warnings) about certain ideas prevalent in those fields most important to us. This is, to a large degree, what our lives consist of anyway.

We hope that this will be enough for most of you as it will allow us to connect with you at an angle we’re more comfortable with as well as adapt  more  creatively to the ebb and flow of life.