Author: japfth

On Reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz for the First Time

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I do not remember how old I was the first time I watched The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Probably it was before I was twelve, maybe even ten. Maybe earlier still. I remember being scared by the Wicked Witch, and even by the old Wizard himself. Both overwhelmed me. They seemed too big, too powerful. I identified with Dorothy. I longed to return to my own Kansas where, cyclones aside, life was ostensibly safer and certainly simpler.

But to be cast out of one’s known environs, well, that terrified me. And Toto, though Dorothy’s loyal dog, offered no large degree of protection from the dangers awaiting the child-protagonist Dorothy, and her soon-to-be new circle of friends: the Scarecrow (in need of brains/wisdom); the Tin Woodman (in need of a heart/compassion); and the Cowardly Lion (in need of courage).

If you were like I was, the Wicked Witch’s aquiline nose, bony structure, and eerie voice frightened you, too. She was comprised of sharp angles and harsh manners. She dressed in black and hunched over as if from mysterious and malevolent causes.

And cast into a new world of powers and forces to which she had hitherto been unaware was little Dorothy, from the American heartland, Kansas. Uncle Henry, the farmer, and Aunt Em, the farmer’s wife, made their humble way in their little farmhouse on the massive Kansas prairie.

And of course there was Toto, Dorothy’s little faithful black dog, always at her side. (In the novel, he is small and black. In the movie, I think he was a brown Yorkie. But I have not seen the film in many years now.) Having read the novel now, I may watch the film again, just to see if my views may have changed.

I read several reviews of the story by literary types who purported to be experts in fairy tales and/or nursery rhymes. Some reviewers alleged Baum’s story was primarily political allegory. The Tin Woodman, for example, was a symbol for Emperor Wilhelm of Germany and the Cowardly Lion was a symbol for England (Boston Review). I don’t know about all that. Possible … maybe.

When I was reading it, it kept occurring to me that Dorothy and her friends were each missing something. Their shared concern was, in sum, longing. Each longed for something. The Scarecrow longed for brains; the Tin Woodman longed for a heart; the Cowardly Lion longed for courage; and of course Dorothy longed to return home to Kansas to reunite with her family.

But they also shared some things. They were honest with one another. They were trustworthy. They grew to increasingly depend upon one another in their journey down the road paved with yellow bricks to the City of Emeralds, and to hopefully meet the Wizard, who could grant each one’s wish.

I suppose that the novel could have allegorical categories. But as one who read what the author himself said of his novel, that it was a story “in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out,” I take him at his word. I read a delightful story of a girl thrust upon a journey by forces bigger than she understood. She grappled with her familiar surroundings being stripped away. She learned to adapt. Toto, her beloved dog, was her only visible reminder of home. She made new friends. She learned who was trustworthy and who was not. She learned the values of honesty and courage and persistence. She learned the importance of home and hearth. She learned that good and evil are unavoidable categories. She learned how to press on amidst overwhelming odds. And she learned that joy is greater when we have loved ones with whom to share it.

Most of all, I’d say, Dorothy learned that what she wanted now was what she had before but didn’t appreciate. The Tin Woodman had a heart of compassion all along; the Lion had courage in the face of fear; the Scarecrow had a mind throughout. There were no magical spells to instill these qualities; they constituted virtues they had only to use.

Say what you will, but that is no small set of accomplishments for a story most of us encountered first as children. In my view, those accomplishments and ideas are important not just for childhood but all of life.

Joker, Delillo’s novel Falling Man, & the Gospel

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$1.1 billion and counting. That is how much money the movie Joker has earned worldwide so far, at least according to one website. I watched the movie recently with my family. Visually spectacular, psychologically terrifying, and propelled by the superb acting of Joaquin Phoenix, Joker was both hard to watch and hard not to watch.

The amount of violence was almost unbearable at times. Yet the sadness and alienation of the main character made him, at least insofar as the evil done to him, a sympathetic character. He suffered much at the hands of an uncaring and burned-out government counselor, a lady who was in Joker’s life to, ostensibly, help him. But that was not to be. She was a poor listener; she relied on platitudes instead of connection.

And Joker’s employer was not much better. The company suspected Joker rather than giving him the benefit of the doubt, when a backstabbing peer lied about Joker. The result? Joker was dismissed. He was then essentially penniless, too. He was a failure even in his counselor’s eyes; he was now fired from his job as a dancing clown; he could not afford his prescribed medications; he could not support his mentally unstable, old, and frail shut-in mother, who lived with him.

The irony is that his “job” was to make people smile, forget their troubles for a while, and laugh. But Joker’s life was unspeakably sad. At least until he succumbed to a particular worldview wherein he would become his own god, and he would set himself up as ground zero of a violent reign. He would don the mask of Joker—literally and psychologically—and avenge the system that had crushed him. And another irony? Crowds quickly followed, drawn to the charismatic avenger who seemingly smiled via his mask while murdering others in cold blood. Murder, death, carnage, and violence became celebrations for the mobs. Crowds lost any sense of self-discipline and became mobs. Destruction had become fun.

I completed reading Don Delillo’s novel Falling Man recently. He explored a cast of characters in New York–just prior to and following–the 9/11/2001 Islamic terrorist attacks wherein thousands of people were murdered. The characters Delillo follows throughout the book try to piece their lives together in a world where they think—at any moment—another attack may come. One woman leads a group in journaling their lives, as a way of trying to cope. One man has an affair. Another character loses herself in art. An Islamic Jihadist reassures himself he doesn’t have to think anymore in life because he will, he has decided, die a martyr for Allah. And yet another woman tries to explain her life in scattered, disjointed, theological and artistic terms. Below is a passage where Delillo describes the woman’s thought life:

     But isn’t it the world itself that brings you to God? Beauty, grief, terror, the empty desert, the Bach cantatas. Others bring you closer, church brings you closer, the stained glass windows of a church, the pigments inherent in the glass, the metallic oxides fused onto the glass, God in clay and stone, or was she babbling to herself to pass the time? (234)

In Joker we viewers witness the celebration of violence. The moral foundations have been destroyed in Joker’s world. Moral nihilism is the assumed worldview. Destruction is the result.

Yet in Delillo’s novel, the author probes the question of how people can actually live in a world where moral nihilism is the dominant philosophical worldview. Either Islamic terrorists were noble martyrs in the cause of jihad or they were evil, and their murders were wrong. Or, if you are consistently nihilistic, there is no grounds on which to make moral pronouncements; morals are reduced to preferences and wills. But if moral nihilism is to be consistently applied, any objective standard of evaluating morals, values, ethics, and human behavior is unjustifiable. As Dostoyevsky penned it in The Brothers Karamazov, if God is dead, everything is permissible.

When man becomes God, the winner is the most ruthless.

But to posit anything as right or wrong, well, those are judgments that demand an objective standard. Morals, if not rooted in the objective God who is himself eternal, immaterial, transcendent, holy, and unchanging, are up for grabs.

Joker, the movie, celebrates moral nihilism; Falling Man explores the morning after the moral melee and holds forth the hope that man might see the inherent destruction of moral nihilism, and return to the true Author of life wherein God—not man—is the center. If man chooses not to return, he continues to “fall” and forfeits the means of redemption. Joker is about, at least in part, the madness of crowds, how easily they are led by the ruthless. Falling Man, at least in part, is about how crowds camouflage the emptiness their people live with. Crowds–and the mania they enable and often encourage–are often facades that serve poorly as cosmetic for sin sickness. In the gospel of Christianity, there is a Redeemer who is the Author of life, the One who is eternal, the One who is goodness incarnate.

Choices are clear when you see them manifested: Joker and the glorification of mob violence; people muttering to themselves and “falling” on multiple levels in Delillo’s contemporary world of paranoia, crowds, and terror on every side; or the gospel of Christianity, with the righteous Redeemer who became sin so that we unrighteous sinners are remade righteous. How? Through Him we are called, adopted, and blessed in the Beloved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fog, Don Delillo’s White Noise, and Clarity

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Morning. About 8:30. We were in my truck. I was driving. My son was in the front seat beside me. No one else was with us. I drove slowly—very slowly—because of the fog. Thick and dense fail to describe sufficiently that fog. I don’t remember fog that formidable before. The irony is that it was in the fog I saw something clearly. The fog had not just descended upon us; it had taken over. We were its captives. Follow me.

My son was on his phone. He was streaming YouTube videos of piano riffs he likes. After he watched one several times, he said, “Dad, look at this,” and brought his phone towards me. “Goob, I can’t right now. I’m driving.” And he watched the video again and narrated what he thought of as the highlights.

I had spent the week before that morning reading the novel White Noise by American literary fiction writer Don Delillo. It was my first time reading this novel despite its reputation as one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Underworld and Libra are probably the other two of Delillo’s novels that have earned the most critical attention.

Technology affords countless luxuries, for sure. Obviously, I use the internet like millions of others do. However, I am not alone in thinking that we have forfeited something in that exchange. Because we can use the search engine of our choice, if we have a question or just want to get lost in entertainment, we can browse for it online. No matter how inane, insipid, vile, etc. we can find it. There is no end to the distractions. If distraction is your aim, the internet is your weapon.

But there are a few of us who engage in an antiquated means of understanding the world: we read. As some nowadays quip, it’s the old-school way. You know, books. Actual bindings with stories of boys like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn; women like Elizabeth Bennet and Tess and Lady Macbeth; killers like Raskolnikov and Anton Chigurh.

But now we have YouTube and countless other means of distracting ourselves, and we can use these to such a degree that we lose the ability to see, to think, to use our imaginations, to dwell upon the deep things of life that enrich us by way of reading.

I am not blind to the irony: I am using the internet to partly write about the dangers of the internet. But my goal is not to be legalistic here, only to suggest that if we as a culture forego and forsake reading deeply–if we think that surfing the Web is learning, we have lost a lot. Which brings me back around to the fog.

As my son and I descended from our house onto a state highway, the fog had not thinned at all. We could see only a few feet beyond my front bumper. It was so captivating, my son even remarked, “Dad, I need to take a picture of this.” And he did. He used the same phone he was using to formerly watch YouTube videos of piano riffs. But he had noticed something out there—something that he and I were experiencing together that didn’t involve the internet or a video. We were seeing life unfiltered. We were descending the mountain; we were bathed in fog; it was ghostly and ethereal; it was like, well, something from a book. It was like what Delillo was aiming at in White Noise.

It was a moment where I realized that sometimes the most meaningful moments of our lives are not dependent upon the Web. This one came as I drove slowly in the morning fog, a novel about the costs of distraction and the emptiness and shallowness of contemporary life in the back of my mind. My headlights were two white lances laboring to slash through the fog. But my boy noticed. He noticed. He saw the beauty, felt the mystery, lived for a few moments without the artifice of a video.

And yes, he took a picture. But it does not do that morning justice. I guess, in other words, you had to be there. It was so good, so important–well, it was like something you experience in a book. Because of the fog, I saw clearly what I think Delillo explores in White Noise. Because of the fog, my son and I both focused on the strangeness and mystery that fog engenders. Because of the fog, I saw my boy look up and out at the world and our place in it, instead of down at his phone. And I was glad that I had to drive slowly. I was thankful to be there. I was thankful that simple things like foggy mornings, driving through the hills, seeing a boy’s eyes register that this was not just a video to stream but a real moment to live—yes, it was like the beginning of a good story, when there’s fog, mystery, but then clarity.

 

 

Numbering Our Days

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Preparing for festivities? It is New Year’s Eve. Last night I saw a lady load a shopping cart full of liquor and roll her buggy—bottles clinking against one another—up to the cashier at the register and prepare to spend hundreds of dollars on alcohol at one of the shoppettes here on Fort Benning. No one seemed surprised. The lady was just an ordinary customer, I suppose, and this is what is expected as New Year’s Eve arrives, right? No, I’m not sanctimonious about alcohol. That is not my concern here. I am thinking more about time and how we spend it. Do we often think of our amount of time? Do we not sometimes pretend that death is something that happens to other people? Do we not sometimes distract ourselves so that we do not have to face the ultimate issues, at least not right now? But are not ultimate issues called ultimate for a reason?

Unfortunately, I will be separated from my loved ones all this week, so I am not preparing anything festive, unless black coffee qualifies. I may get a bit wild with an espresso later. But earlier today I was reading and thinking through Psalm 90.  It is one of Moses’ writings in the Psalms. Verse 12 reads this way: “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12, ESV). To number our days. In the biblical worldview, this means to live our lives with the conscious awareness that our lives are lived before the face of God, Coram Deo. It is a way of saying, live your life knowing that you are in the presence of God. Wisdom, therefore, involves our dwelling upon ultimate issues. That does not mean that festivities are by any means wrong. Scripture is replete with festivals, parties, fellowships, etc. But they are to have their places within a larger theological framework. They are not to be ends in themselves.

But to number our days, that is no small matter, right? Examples help me to think, and here are a few that stirred some reflections on this theme of numbering our days.

In 2019, I was able to take a trip with some of my family to a place near Destin, FL. The beaches are beautiful there. But to get there, we drove through parts of FL that had been devastated by a hurricane earlier. Mighty trees were reduced to sad-looking twisted and snapped timbers. Their boughs were gone. Leaves had been stripped from them during the deluge. Some roads had washed away. Entire restaurants had been washed out to sea. Just like that, as the saying goes, all was gone. And I thought, Do I have a heart of wisdom? Am I numbering my days?

A second weather-related catastrophe got me thinking, too. In the small town where my family and I lived for years, a town where I taught English and pastored, a tornado had recently struck. I viewed pictures online of the devastation. Again, trees were ripped from the earth or left bent into ghastly contortions. Rooftops had been sucked up into the sky. Just like that, gone. And I thought, Do I have a heart of wisdom? Am I numbering my days?

I saw a friend of mine undergo multiple surgeries, and still press on with his responsibilities. I saw another friend run off (that is, he was run off by an oligarchy within the congregation) from a church because of unregenerate church members, small town politics, and power struggles. I watched my wife have to raise our children while I was away in Iraq for nine months. After those nine months, I was still not able to return home to her because of an injury I sustained in Iraq that is still keeping me at Fort Benning. And I thought, Do I have a heart of wisdom? Am I numbering my days?

I have had more than enough reasons to reflect. Many will load their carts with beverages, chips and salsa, finger foods, etc. and ring in another year. That is often the plan. But I have aged some and hopefully learned a few things about how quickly man’s plans can be interrupted by bigger plans. One might even go so far as to say they are plans of the Sovereign. With a goal, too: to teach us to number our days.

 

Three: Theology, a Novel of the Miniscule, & a Tome by Joyce Carol Oates

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This week, I read three very different writers: John MacArthur, Nicholas Baker, and Joyce Carol Oates. One is a Christian theologian and pastor; one is a postmodern fiction writer whose style departs from almost anyone else I have read; and Oates is an American writer who has been prolific since the 1960s.

Below are some thoughts on each book, its main concerns, examples from each that illustrate said concerns, and some questions for reflection.

In Reckless Faith by John MacArthur, published in 1994, MacArthur introduces his theme up front and unpacks it throughout the next 200 pages. He explains how existentialism, subjectivism, relativism, and mysticism have undercut the very foundations of logic and reason. The result has been widespread poverty of proper biblical interpretation:

. . . to say that people can’t reason their way to the truth of Scripture is not to imply that Scripture itself is irrational. The Bible is perfectly reasonable, consistent with itself, true in all its parts, reliable as a foundation for our logic, dependable as a basis for good judgment, and trustworthy as the definitive test of sound doctrine. Because it is pure truth, it is perfectly rational (xii)

And another gem:

We cannot simply flow with the current of our age. We cannot elevate love by downplaying truth. We cannot promote unity by repressing sound doctrine. We cannot learn to be discerning by making an idol out of tolerance. By adopting those attitudes, the church has opened her gates to all of Satan’s Trojan horses. (81)

But the various isms resulting from suppressing God and his revelation of himself in Scripture have led to abuses and misinterpretations that are embarrassing. In his trademark fashion, MacArthur does not pull punches. He quotes from primary sources in his many analyses of existentialism, mysticism, neo-orthodoxy/liberalism, fundamentalism, Roman Catholicism, and more. He traces the trajectory of how many people wound up with such reckless faith.

One example I found particularly helpful was his analysis of mysticism that has infiltrated much of the professing Christian church. Many people are chasing feelings, chasing experiences:

The faith of mysticism is an illusion. “Truth that is true for me” is irrelevant to anyone else, because it lacks any objective basis. Ultimately, therefore, existential faith is impotent to lift anyone above the level of despair. All it can do is seek more experiences and more feelings. Multitudes are trapped in the desperate cycle of feeding off one experience while zealously seeking the next. Such people have no real concept of truth; they just believe. Theirs is a reckless faith. (30)

He ends this book as he ends every book I have read from MacArthur—with a call to the gospel as revealed in Scripture. Scripture is the authority. Many profess that, but deny it in practice. Say what you will about John MacArthur, but I have never seen him equivocate on that: Scripture is the only objective standard—not traditions, not feelings, not “being led,” not visions, not “looking within,” and certainly not popes, bishops, or councils. If you seek clarity, and want an apologetic resource calling you back to living out, not just the sufficiency of Scripture, but also the authority of Scripture, this is a valuable resource. Isms come and go, but the Word abides forever.

A second book I read was a first for me. More precisely, the book and the author were new to me. Nicholas Baker is an American postmodern writer, and The Mezzanine, a short novel about a businessman’s trip up an escalator, and his mental activity during that trip, is, well, amazingly detailed in its attention to the banal, the quotidian, and the everyday. The author’s goal? To show us the superficial ways we so often glide through contemporary life without thinking through things.

Baker’s forays and footnotes (yes, lots and lots of footnotes, even footnotes about footnotes) serve to focus the reader on the things right under our noses and under our fingertips (like the handrail on an escalator, like the feel of a stapler on your office desk, like why shoelaces break at nearly the same time, etc.). Here is an example:

Presently the metal disk that drew near was half lit by sun. Falling from dusty heights of thermal glass over a hundred-vaned, thirty-foot-long, unlooked-at, invisibly suspended lightning fixture that resembles the metal grid in an old-style ice cube tray, falling through the vacant middle reaches of lobby space, the sunlight draped itself over my escalator and continued from there, diminished by three-quarters, down into a newsstand inset into the marble at the rear of the lobby. (103)

 Baker is new to me. I admire his precision in description. I admire his raising the issue of how the quotidian may teach us if we would but pay attention. But, I think Baker suggests herein, we suffer the illusion that we will be happier if we skate along life, carried escalator-like, unbothered by serious contemplation of our mortality. Baker is, in my view, important. He is not, I admit, easy to read; it can be work. But that, I believe, is part of what makes him important to read. If I had to summarize Baker’s aim, it is this question: What happens if we pay attention–stop entertaining ourselves to death–and just stop and pay attention?

The Oates novel I am (still) reading is her 2001 tome Blonde. It is nearly 800 pages, so it is not one I can finish in a day or two. Marilyn Monroe, as most of the world knew her, was really Norma Jeane Baker, and she is the subject of the novel. As readers, we meet her mother, Gladys, her grandmother, Della, the actors at The Studio in Los Angeles during Hollywood’s golden era, and on and on.

I said the subject was Marilyn Monroe. The more I read this novel, I would say the subject is not Marilyn so much as it is the question of what it means to act, to fulfill a role, to don a façade, and what costs are involved.

Norma Jeane Baker lived roles. And I think Oates is exploring that theme, not a small one. Stay tuned.

7 Worth Your Time

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I had several blessings this year. I returned from a military deployment to Iraq that I deeply appreciated. I worked with some fine Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, and civilians for whom I am grateful. Each deployment brings together diverse personalities, and several people stood out via their unique giftings and particular strengths. We were a diverse group, a motley crew. Because of chaplaincy’s unique inroads, I was able to work near engineers, Marine infantrymen, pilots, mechanics, electricians, fuelers, budget analysts, accountants, cyberspace gurus, logisticians, and more. The diversity of those with whom I labored found a counterpart in my reading life. I discovered several new authors. That is, they were new to me. Some of those have become new favorites. (More on that below.)

What follows is a list of seven books that particularly stood out for me. Some refined my thinking. Some convicted me. Others confirmed my deeply held convictions. If you are a fellow reader, I hope you benefit, too, from my reflections on some of my reading. This is part one of several installations as I look back on some of this year’s reading. More reviews are forthcoming. Tolle lege: Take up and read.

You’ve Got to Read This: Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories that Held Them in Awe This 1994 volume is edited by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard and is my favorite volume of short story collections I own. The selections include masterpieces by Isaac Babel, Borges, Raymond Carver, Cheever, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dickens, Welty, Munro, Joyce, Updike, O’Brien, O’Connor, and more. I am a junkie for short story collections, but the fact that these masterful short pieces are introduced by such impressive writers as Charles Baxter, Jane Smiley, Joyce Carol Oates, Ron Hansen, and Annie Dillard deepens this volume still more.

A Long and Happy Life This novel by North Carolina writer Reynolds Price was published in 1962. I read it for the first time last month. It captivated me such that I read it in a day and a half. The story of Rosacoke and Wesley, poverty and ignorance in Dixie, honor, sacrifice, loneliness, longing, and love, this story explores all of these and more in less than 160 pages. If you enjoy literary fiction set in the South of days reflected in the worlds of Eudora Welty, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, this is a great place to camp. Price has become a new favorite for me.

Pathway to Freedom: How God’s Laws Guide Our Lives A 2003 book brought about by hearers encouraging Reformed Christian pastor-theologian Alistair Begg to put his preaching through the Ten Commandments into book form, this volume is chock-full of biblical wisdom delivered by a winsome wordsmith and faithful pastor. Our lives invariably demonstrate our theological beliefs. Begg excels in connecting God’s words to our ways in the world. An excellent resource for the Christian church.

Why One Way? Defending an Exclusive Claim in an Inclusive World This book was published in 2002. Written by pastor-teacher/theologian at Grace Community Church and The Master’s College and Seminary, John MacArthur elucidates in 75 pages what few other men dare. In a time when many high-profile so-called Christian teachers have caved to the “social gospel” and being “woke” to the culture, MacArthur is one of the few who holds the line. Perhaps it is because I appreciate clarity so much, but MacArthur demonstrates how the gospel always offends the unregenerate, how sin is essential to diagnose, how Jesus himself confronted the world, how Scripture—time and time again—outlives its critics, and how the Christian church needs to grow up and endure the battles we were warned of long before, and engage the emptiness of secular worldviews with complete confidence in the power of God as revealed in Scripture to accomplish God’s purposes.

The Doctrine of Repentance This is a classic of Christianity. Written by Puritan Thomas Watson, it is no wonder that Banner of Truth continues to find a market for these profound writings from the deep biblical minds and pens in the Reformed tradition. My copy is now highlighted and underscored such that one would think I had had this volume for years. Wisdom on every page in this volume.

Words made Fresh: Essays on Literature & Culture Larry Woiwode is a wordsmith, fiction writer, and thinker that merits faithful reflective reading and thought. He has become one of my favorites over recent years. He writes not only moving fiction and essays, but also of other areas with the same deftness. This is my favorite collection of his essays I have read so far. Herein he writes of Shakespeare, Reynolds Price, Wendell Berry, and more. A fine book by an important writer.

Revolutions in Worldview: Understanding the Flow of Western Thought Of all the theology/worldview/”history-of-ideas” books I read in 2019, this 2007 volume, edited by W. Andrew Hoffecker, is exceptional, not just in this year’s reading, but in my library as a whole. If you are a big picture worldview thinker like I am, I cannot think of a better worldview book to have at hand. An invaluable resource.

 

 

 

 

 

Johnny Cash and Thoughts on Vocation

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Over the last few days, I completed reading Johnny Cash’s autobiography cash (ibid.) and I respect him and his music even more now than I did before. It has to do with his determination to follow his vocation with simple (not simplistic) truthfulness.

Vocation—(n.) a summons or strong inclination to a particular state or course of action

I remember sitting down with a professor when my family and I moved for me to attend seminary several years back. We met with a scholar from the church history department. My wife and I went into the professor’s office and exchanged pleasantries for a bit. He asked me which writers and thinkers most influenced me. Then he asked me to describe my vocation. It was then I discovered his aim. It was for me to understand what I really valued. By whom and to what was I called?

I relearned through that conversation years ago something I again appreciated in Cash’s autobiography. It is this idea of vocation.

This idea of vocation/calling shapes Cash’s music. He is not glamorous. He is not flashy. He is not adorned. He is simply (not simplistically) “the man in black” with his black Martin guitar, his black boots, his deep Arkansas-Tennessee voice, his simple lyrics about love, loss, self-destruction, rescue, redemption, Jesus’ work on behalf of sinners, marriage, forgiveness, restoration—all with ever-present focus.

His country music attests to his worldview. It bears witness to his efforts to answer and follow his vocation.

There were dark times, of course. He battled amphetamine and opioid addiction. He battled the bottle. He battled lust. He was not a perfect husband or father. But he pressed on; he followed his vocation. He did not sell out to style over substance.

When he saw that much of so-called country music had degenerated to donning a cowboy hat, wearing tight jeans, boots, and speaking with a southern accent … well, he stayed true to what he knew—the old gospel tunes, Hank Williams Sr.’s tunes, the Carter Family mountain music, Bill Monroe, and the other pioneers.

He kept to the timeless truths he had learned the hard way … from growing up poor in the South, picking cotton, listening to the panthers screaming at night in Arkansas and to the whistle of the trains as they cut through the farmlands.

He stayed close to his heart for telling the truth musically. He fought to maintain his allegiance to his vocation. Towards the end of his autobiography, Cash writes about his awareness of his own mortality:

Not that I believe you have to “grow old gracefully.” I go along with Edna St. Vincent Millay’s idea that it’s okay to go out screaming and scratching and fighting. When death starts beating the door down, you need to be reaching for your shotgun.

And when you know he might be in your part of town, which is true for anyone my age, you should be taking care of business. Quit gazing out the window at the lake and start telling your stories” (p. 273).

 Cash died in 2003, but I think his contributions will endure due in large measure to his faithfulness in following his vocation, and not losing his soul to this world. I am grateful.

 

Johnny Cash, October Sands, and Family

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There’s a line in Moby Dick that sticks with me. No, it’s not “Call me Ishmael.” It’s this one: “Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded forever.” Why? Short answer: I have found it to be true. Something there is about the sounds of waves meeting shore; something about the way moonshine bathes the sea’s surface in white, and you can see the dark below and the light above, and you seek to discover some truth therein.

Perhaps it’s something about the strands of white and the impressions they hold for a moment: footprints of walkers, runners, kite fliers and tan seekers, young and old, working and retired—all there until the next wave or footprint or toddler with an orange shovel and matching pail.

I had my family, Johnny Cash’s autobiography, and a week of sun-drenched days and moonlit nights. Tonight is the full moon but it was nearly impossible to tell it was not full already, it was that bright.

Sitting on the balcony looking down towards the pool, I watched a gray squirrel climb a palm tree. Until he spotted me watching him, he seemed on a mission. I watched children play in the Gulf of Mexico while Zac Brown’s “Free” poured from a Bose Wave Music System, and many of us sang along, even if to ourselves.

I swam with my son and rode the waves in from the sandbar. I heard his boyish voice say, “Hey Dad, watch this!” wave after wave, afraid I’d miss seeing him.

I watched my wife’s skin absorb the sun and turn brown almost immediately. I read my Johnny Cash autobiography and listened to his last album filled with gospel songs about hurt and redemption and heard his voice say, “The Man Comes Around,” in a voice like no one else’s.

I watched my immediate and extended family work to provide and continue to make memories. And it’s all so simple: sunlight, water, sand, each other, music, ice cream, walking at night with headlamps on our foreheads, chasing the crabs on shore, their black eyes glowing in our beams of light. And still, the moon above. The sand like a white ribbon. The sounds of the water lapping at your ankles and retreating. Children’s voices. An occasional firecracker. The silhouette of lovers walking beside one another.

Melville was right; meditation and water are forever wed in a dance. And it is a good thing to be able to participate, to wade in and belong.

Roads to Redemption in the Stories of Denis Johnson

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Tree of Smoke, Johnson’s long novel published in 2007, won the National Book Award. Its subjects were Vietnam, conspiracies, and myriad struggles to discern what is the “really real.” I read this novel over the last few weeks as I have worked my way through the fictional works of Johnson.

Perhaps it was because I still have an appetite for Vietnam stories. Though that was the war of my parents’ generation, in high school I read Vietnam stories and novels, and got hooked on them. Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War and Going After Cacciato were books I was assigned to read, but I actually enjoyed those. And Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, though it has been years since I have read it, still remains with me. Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers is another fine book about the many fallouts of the whole Vietnam era from which I have benefited.

Even though I was too young at the time to have understood Vietnam when it ripped America apart, the scores of novels and memoirs I have read of that war have hopefully helped me understand a terribly divisive time in America’s history, especially with regard to issues related to war, the dangers of trusting mainstream media, drugs, feminism, secularism, and the loss of shame. The list could go on.

The late 1960s and early 1970s still shape my parents’ generation. They can recall JFK’s assassination, Watergate, and Charles Manson like I recall the Challenger explosion, the attempted assassination of Reagan, and the Islamic terrorist attacks of 9/ll.

I know that is a lot of background to explore the fiction of Denis Johnson. But context is critical. No one writes in a vacuum. Johnson’s novel Tree of Smoke was, to me at least, not his best writing. In my view, it was too long, and he lost track of his main idea. But that was the first piece of Johnson’s that I read. Its backdrop was Vietnam, the effects upon brothers and families, upon men and women with each other, and upon how people very often lose their way.

They lost belief. Does that sound banal? Perhaps. But Johnson’s characters can rip your heart out when you see them unravel existentially and flounder in trying to put themselves back together again.

Here is an example of the protagonist (Skip Sands) thinking about who he is and what he is about, about how he is to make his way in the world of Vietnam’s horrors and the pervasive lies surrounding him:

Skip regretted the role handed him at the end, that of traitor to the rebellion. At the end the colonel had sought reasons not just for an operation gone wrong, but for the breaking of his own heart, had looked for betrayal at the very center of things in the shape of some classical enormity, and what could have been more enormous, more darkly Roman, than betrayal by one’s own house, by his nephew, by his own blood? A soul too wide for the world. He’d refused to see his downfall as typical, refused all collaboration with the likes of Marcus Aurelius: “You may break your heart,” the old emperor had written, “but men will go on as before.” He’s written himself large-scale, followed raptly the saga of his own journey, chased his own myth down a maze of tunnels and into the fairyland of children’s stories and up a tree of smoke. (p.515)

But it was not in his long novel Tree of Smoke that most impressed me. It was his short stories.

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden contains amazing short fiction. Johnson, you need to know, is not a gentle writer. That is, he addresses life at its extreme moments, as if the extremes are oracles revealing mysteries not otherwise spoken.

In the short story “Strangler Bob,” (from the Sea Maiden collection of stories) for example, the first-person narrator describes his mindset while at the county jail and courthouse. Like many scenes in Johnson’s fictional world, this character is amidst addicts, rebels, dreamers, and rebels:

While I was kept there I wondered if this place was some kind of intersection for souls. I don’t know what to make of the fact that I’ve seen men many times throughout my life, repeatedly in dreams and sometimes in actuality—turning a corner on the street, gazing out the window of a passing train, or leaving a café just at the moment I glance up and recognize them, then disappearing out the door—and it makes me feel each person’s universe is really very small, no bigger than a county jail, a collection of cells in which he encounters the same fellow prisoners over and over. (p. 99)

And in his novella Train Dreams, Johnson explores the experiences of Robert Grainer, a common railroad laborer in the early 1900s in Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Texas. Uneducated but hardworking, he marries, becomes a father, loses his wife and child in a fire, becomes a recluse, howls at the mountains with the wolves, battles insanity, a gives a dying man a drink of water from an old shoe. Yes, this is the world of Denis Johnson’s fiction, and it may shake you, too.

Lastly, my favorite Johnson stories came from his collection Jesus’ Son. This collection—again—explores lives of men and women on the edge—not just on the edge of society and laws, but on the edge of sanity. Characters hitchhike across America, find themselves in and out of hospital ERs, dives and bars, car crashes, and cabins for junkies. But they also serve as characters who illuminate the beauty in life that escapes the attention of most people.

I don’t think for a moment that Johnson would advocate for going through life on drugs or alcohol (he himself got clean after a long battle with both substances in the 1970s and into the 1980s) but in his fiction, Johnson does not shy away from using the extreme experiences—both comic and tragic—he was privy to in order to shock us into realities we would otherwise suppress. But those realities matter; they are important. They are sometimes those oracular insights—about ultimate things, and how we can know redemption is not just possible, but actual, if we will follow the signs.

 

What Is Your Worldview?

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Seven questions reveal a lot … if they are the right questions. In his book Discipleship of the Mind: Learning to Love God in the Ways We Think, James Sire asks the right ones. 

 

In a world ripped apart and often characterized by (pardon the poor grammar) Us vs. Them, Sire excels in this book by demonstrating that all of us have a mental map of the world, a set of assumptions about the big questions and answers of life. We may not be conscious of our own worldviews at all times, but learning to be aware of ours and the worldviews of others—be they politicians, writers, entertainers, teachers, lawyers, philosophers and theologians, etc.—helps clarify what we think, why we think the way we do, and why we behave the ways we do. 

 

The questions he asks us to ask are fundamental questions that go a long way in revealing each person’s worldview. In a world ripped asunder via politics, race-baiting, shouting matches, and ad hominem attacks, Sire’s book may encourage you, too. 

 

Sire’s seven questions that elucidate each person’s worldview follow. Each time you listen to a politician, read a newspaper article, listen to the lyrics of a song, watch a film, ask these questions about the person’s or persons’ views behind what is being promulgated. What worldview are they operating from? How would they answer these questions?

 

1. What is prime reality—the really real?
2. What is the nature of external reality, that is, the world around us?
3. What is a human being?
4. What happens to a person at death?
5. Why is it possible to know anything at all?
6. How do we know what is right and wrong?
7. What is the meaning of human history?  

 

And perhaps most important of all, Sire’s definition of worldview: a set of presuppositions which we hold about the basic makeup of our world. 

 

One of the passions of my life is literature. Sire dedicates an entire chapter to worldview analysis of literature. In one chapter he contrasts the worldviews of the Christian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poem “Pied Beauty” with the atheistic writer Thomas Hardy in his poem “The Darkling Thrush.” 

 

The worldview of each writer is manifested. Hopkins, a Christian writer, sees the world as the creation of the infinite-personal God, and beautiful colors and creatures in life as indicators and evidences of God’s nature being inseparable from the true, good, and beautiful. God exists, his creation exists, our minds exist, and we reflect God’s glory because we are created as his image-bearers.

 

Hardy, writing from an atheistic worldview, sees a bird dying along a fencerow at dusk as symbolic of man’s darkening hopes with regard to life and the future. The universe is a closed system, there’s no God beyond it, and all that exists is material, etc.—yet here we are, trying to make sense of why we feel empty and lonely in a dark world. Well, when we explore Hardy’s worldview, it’s no wonder. Why write poetry if we are just material in a material world? 

 

If you are curious about why we people think, create, and behave the ways we do, you are curious about worldviews, and an excellent place to begin is with Sire’s book.