The Dark Knight

Apparently I was one of the few people on earth who did not see this movie until it just came out on DVD. I found it fascinating and troubling. One especially thoughtful review I found was "Batman's War on Terror" by Benjamin Kerstein writing in Azure. Read it all, but for a taste, this is its remarkable conclusion:

In this sense, The Dark Knight is a perfect mirror of the society which is watching it: a society so divided on the issues of terror and how to fight it that, for the first time in decades, an American mainstream no longer exists. Perhaps this is why the film has struck such a responsive chord with audiences: The ambivalence it expresses is the same ambivalence with which most Americans—consciously or unconsciously—regard their current predicament. Americans want to defeat terrorism, but they want to defeat it without upsetting the basic ideals of a free society. They want terror to be fought by any means necessary, but without any of the attendant horrors and compromises of war. And The Dark Knight may well be correct in positing that the only possible resolution of such a dilemma is not to resolve it at all, but to live in a society based, in some manner, on a lie. Because society, in order to be society, needs the lie. It is a noble lie, perhaps, but a lie all the same. The alternative, the film seems to say, is to become a society of Harvey Dents or, worse still, Jokers. It is, ironically, not a particularly happy or optimistic message, but it is one which a great many Americans appear ready, and even strangely gratified, to hear.

Lord have mercy

The Holy Land Experience.

Prayer request

Prayers requested for Martha.

Martha was scheduled to serve as eucharistic minister at the 5:00 p.m. early mass for Christmas Eve. She was not there - not so unusual for people to forget but unusual for her. We tried calling around to see if anyone knew if she decided to go out of town to visit family or if anyone knew anything. One of her daughters came to midnight mass, and when asked about her mother, she shook her head and went off to go check up on her.

Martha fell in her home on Sunday afternoon and had been lying on the floor with a chair on top of her, unable to reach a phone or otherwise call for help. She was badly bruised and dehydrated but does not appear to have broken any bones. She is lucid and in the hospital in critical care at the moment, but she is not sure exactly what happened. She may have had a stroke. The rector has visited her twice and says she seems weaker today than yesterday. Please add Martha to your prayers. Hold her up to the light.

(photo © Lukasz Jernas for openphoto.net)

Santa Baby - Eartha Kitt R.I.P.

Listen to Eartha talk about "Santa Baby" ("No one owns me but me") and other thoughts in this NPR radio tribute from this morning's news. Go to the same link for a written biography, as well. I suspect her speaking up about the Vietnam War at a White House would entitle her at least a posthumous "Brick of the Day" award from Mad Priest.

Press clipping

Well, our midnight mass on Christmas Eve made the front page of the local newspaper, December 25, 2008 edition. Kind of nice given that most of the reporting of religious news and holidays around here invariably focuses on the Roman Catholics (the vast majority of the religious of the local residents here with the many people of Italian, German, and Polish descent). Nothing against the Romans, but it's nice to be noticed for a change.

Il est né le Divin Enfant

Adrian Worsfold has some excellent reflections on "A Meaning of Christmas" - the divinity of the Universal Baby. I often find the emphasis on the baby in Christmas somewhat puzzling and, at times, a bit cloying, especially when our church music includes lullabies and bouncy, childlike melodies. This video, featuring a decent recording of one of my favorite Christmas songs along with sentimental pictures, reflects something of the schizophrenic feelings I sometimes have, torn between the hope and wonder (in the music) and all the kitsch (in the pictures). Anyway, Adrian did a fine job of giving a cross-cultural perspective which, for me at least, restores a bit of sanity.

In the bleak midwinter

Once in Royal David's City

I pray God, rid me of God

I've been mulling some time over Father Terry's latest essay on "Christians as Atheists" as well as the videos and Peter Rollins' websites he points to. It hits home in many respects, especially this from Ikon's Evangelism Project:

An analysis of human interaction over history teaches us that there are two dangerous temptations each of us face when confronted by a stranger, i.e. by one who thinks and acts in a way that is foreign to our cultural or religious practices. The first is a desire to transform that stranger into our own image, endeavouring to eclipse and replace their cultural and religious practices with our own. The second is to exclude and reject the stranger entirely, viewing them as a threat which must be guarded against. In one the stranger is rendered into a clone while in the other they are made into an enemy.

But even more compelling is the testimony of someone who is living this out, Kirstin, who continues to write more deeply each day at Barefoot and Laughing. Here is a small bit from a recent post, "Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now":

God is not a personified image in my head anymore, at all. I realized that, sometime yesterday. God is, simply, love, interwoven into every fiber of the universe’s being. In what appears as a sterile concrete jungle, flowers. In the last places you'd think to look, grace.

[Which makes "Father" even harder to say, and more ridiculous, when God is "Ground."]

Taken in its full context of what Kirstin has experienced to reach that realization, I suspect that her words reflect the answer to Peter Rollins's prayer: "I pray God, rid me of God." It's not an -ism, an ontological or theological view, it's living in and with God, who has no name, no face, no image but nevertheless who can be found everywhere, among the homeless, the hungry, the forgotten; among friends and enemies; in the darkness, shadowy streets, and blazing light; and in sickness and in health.

Rediscovering Narnia

Watching the snow in the stillness of the middle of the night reminded me of the first time I entered the world of Narnia. It was not until I was well into middle age and decided to pick up the books not long after I was confirmed as an Episcopalian. I knew C.S. Lewis as a literary critic and I had read Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters (which left me cold) a few years earlier at the suggestion of the Lutheran pastor who was trying to help me get past my cold feet about affirming the creeds and renouncing Satan at my son's baptism. But I had yet to read anything from the religious side of C.S. Lewis that I felt compelling. I wondered if I delved into the fantasy world of Narnia whether I would find something of what drew both its author and myself back to religion in later life.

Fortunately, once I entered that world I pretty much put all thoughts of religion behind. I loved the look and feel and smell of the wardrobe, its warm darkness and fur coats, and the forest and the clearing, where everything was dark and still with the dim glow of the gaslight on the snow. That quiet moment of wonder in the still night, the pause before the faun spoke, was something that could only be truly experienced reading the words on the page.

I was intrigued when I read about Laura Miller's desire to examine what it was about Narnia that captured her so as a child, something she felt was spoiled when she later discovered all the Christian elements that C.S. Lewis had quite consciously interjected into the tale. I had gone to Narnia for those elements yet, while I could scarcely not see them the way she first did, they fell to the wayside for me, so much so, that when I got to the crucial scenes in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I wept in part because the "real" version in the Bible and the Tradition was not nearly as good.

I had not thought much about it since. In recent years I have wondered in moments of both self-criticism and disillusionment whether it was the magical elements of Catholicism and later Anglo-Catholicism that drew me "back" to Church, which made Christianity somehow more accessible and acceptable to me, despite my strong antipathy towards the Jesus-Man, the Son, and my inability to imagine God in any form but the Father's loving arms. I haven't been sure what to make of all that psychologically, but I have suspected that if the eucharistic magic were gone, there would not be much left for me, who in the depths of my heart and mind has always been a hard-core skeptic, as well as a mystical seeker.

Laura Miller has brought me back to my first encounter with Narnia and the thoughts and feelings it inspired. I realize now it has not so much been the Father/Son aspect of Christianity that I have often found so off-putting, but rather, despite all the words and images about the Incarnation, Christianity has never given me a God I could touch and feel, only clerics and conflict, stone buildings and pretty music, at its heart lifeless and empty. Father Terry often writes about the story of the boy caught in a thunderstorm who wants a god with a skin on. I wonder if what the child in me has always wanted most is a god with fur on.

Anyway, this is what Laura Miler wrote and quoted from C.S. Lewis that made me recall what it was like to dig into and be enveloped by that fur, to have a god who let not just the children but the girls come close and be the ones who best knew and were touched by him:

Unlike the God I was raised to worship, he [Aslan] is a god you can touch, and a god to asks to be touched in his darkest hour. "Lay your hands on my mane so that I can feel you are there and let us walk like that," he says to Lucy and Susan as he goes to his execution at the stone table. After he has been killed, the weeping girls come to kiss "his cold face" and stroke "his beautiful fur," in a far more raw and tangible evocation of grief than anything in the New Testament. Then, after Aslan has been resurrected, the girls climb onto his "warm, golden back," bury their hands in his mane, and go for a breathless cross-country ride through a Narnia you can almost taste, thanks to one of Lewis's most exhilarating descriptions:

"Have you ever had a gallop on a horse? Think of that; and then take away the heavy noise of the hoofs and the jingle of the bits and imagine instead the almost noiseless padding of the great paws. Then imagine instead of the black or gray or chestnut back of the horse the soft roughness of golden fur, and the mane flying back in the wind. And then imagine you are going about twice as fast as the fastest racehorse. But this is a mount that doesn't need to be buided and never grows tired. He rushes on and on, never missing his footing, never hesitating, threading his way with perfect skill between tree trunks, jumping over brush and briar and the smaller streams, wading the larger, swimming the largest of all. And you are riding not on a road nor in the part nor even on the downs, but right across Narnia, in spring, down solemn avenues of beech and across sunny glades of oak, through wild orchards of snow-white cherry trees, past roaring waterfalls and mossy rocks and echoing caverns, up windy slopes alight with gorse bushes, and across the shoulders of heathery mountains and along giddy ridges and down, down, down again into wild valleys and into acres of blue flowers."

Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia (New York: Little, Brown and Company 2008) at pp. 34-35.

A Skeptic's Adventure in Narnia

The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventure in Narnia
by Laura Miller (Little, Brown & Company 2008)

I just got this book for Christmas. I've only just begun, but already I love it, even though I never read Narnia as a child and only read a few volumes late in adulthood. This is a book for for those who fell head over heels in love with books and the worlds where they transported us, and then... kept reading and reading, sometimes in spite of rather than what we learned later about reading critically and thinking about where an author was leading us.

The entire introduction is marvelous in itself, but here is an excerpt from an excerpt:

There is yet another reason to devote the kind of attention to the Chronicles that critics ordinarily reserve for the works of writers like Flaubert or F. Scott Fitzgerald, and it may be the most persuasive of all. In An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis floats the idea that we can determine how good a book is by how it is read. This was an offbeat notion at a time when most critics judged a book by how it was written, and it would become an irrelevant one a few years later, when deciding how “good” a book was would seem immaterial to most academics. But Lewis — who was, above all else, a passionate, omnivorous and generous reader — thought that this might be the best way to appreciate a book’s worth, especially since he regarded the literary mandarins of his day as slaves to pernicious intellectual fads.

A hater of progress, newfanglement and vulgarity, Lewis was not a notably tolerant man, but reading brought out the populist in him. He worked out a set of criteria for identifying truly “literary” readers; their ranks include people who re-read books, those who savor what they read for more than just the plot, and those for whom the first encounter with a favorite book is an “experience so momentous that only experiences of love, religion, or bereavement can furnish a standard of comparison. Their whole consciousness is changed. They have become what they were not before.”

Nothing on this list dictates what type of book the literary reader ought to prefer; it is the quality of the attention brought to it that matters. There is an uncharacteristic radicalism to Lewis’s further suggestion that if we can find “even one reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the lurid daub on its cover had been a lifelong delight, who had read and reread it, who would notice, and object, if a single word were changed, then, however little we could see in it ourselves and however it was despised by our friends and colleagues, we should not dare to put it beyond the pale.”

He is, among other things, describing the way certain children read certain books, with a fervor that can inspire mystification and awe in their adult counterparts. Such experiences can’t be merely ephemeral, meaningless, but they often seem entirely inaccessible when we look back on them years later. This, at least, is what Clive James felt upon returning to Professor Challenger, and so he was forced to dismiss the whole situation as merely comical. Still, how could he have failed to be formed as a man and as a reader by Doyle’s adventure yarns? We would not expect any other overwhelming emotional experience from his childhood to have left him untouched. Today, James is a gifted, witty critic. Perhaps there is more to Professor Challenger than meets the eye.

The relationship between book and reader is intimate, at best a kind of love affair, and first loves are famously tenacious. A first love teaches you how to be with another human being by choice, rather than out of the imperative of blood ties. If we are lucky, our first love shows us how to negotiate the paradox of entering into a union with someone who remains fundamentally unknowable. First love is a momentous step in our emotional education, and in many ways, it shapes us forever.

From an excerpt printed here. More about the book from the author at Laura Miller and another excerpt, "Talking to the Animals" printed at Salon.