Some days the air is brisk, the sun smiles, the trails beckon, and Brewster’s ready to be on point. Again we take to the trails and it could not be better. He’s an old boy now, but he still presses on, as we rack up the miles.

This week a friend of mine sent me this quote from Davies. My friend is a reader, too. He understands the gift of good books. He understands the power of the written word. He understands lasting value in a world shot through with kitsch.

As I thought on the Davies quote, it encouraged me to share with fellow bibliophiles (and future bibliophiles) a handful of books I have read recently that have become some of my favorites:

1. Annie Dillard: Holy the Firm
2. Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist
3. Larry Brown: Tiny Love
4. N.D. Wilson: Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl
5. Ted Geltner: Blood, Bone, and Marrow

I gain nothing from sharing my thoughts except the encouragement of fellow readers, those who are likewise mysteriously drawn to the power of the written word. In a world of Youtube, and all visual media that assaults us, I cannot explain how good books still endure but they do. And I, quite literally, thank God for that reality.

It staggers my mind how folks can spend their lives in video after video after video, and feel no guilt. How do they not sense their lives flowing away, like so much sand being washed from the shoreline of their allotted days?

But somehow, thankfully, writers press on in their solitary crafts and good books get written and some publishers take a chance, and literature continues. And I, for one, am grateful.

Here’s a very brief assessment of each of the five pieces I listed above:

1. Dillard is a masterful wordsmith. This piece of hers is a blend of Christian allusion, pantheistic motifs, solitude, and contemplation. Her wordsmithing is as striking as the nature she describes. Read it slowly. Read it aloud. Then read it again.
2. I must show my cards with Dickens. I am a disciple. For characterization, ear for dialect, and capturing of human foibles, Dickens remains for me a treasure in literature almost unsurpassed. I read my first Dickens novel as a high school student, and I was hooked for life. In Oliver Twist, Dickens takes on human greed, the exploitation of children, and the beauty of compassion.
3. Larry Brown is one of my favorites, too. He writes of the “rough South,” Mississippians mostly, who are down on their luck, prone to drink and violence, persistent, lonely, and yet loving. If you like Cormac McCarthy, William Faulkner, William Gay, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor, you’ll probably like Larry Brown’s collection of short stories.
4. N.D. Wilson is a brilliant thinker and imaginative storyteller. This is one of his most important books, in my opinion. The upshot of this book? The world is magical. And we have forgotten that. And that is a big problem. I love this book.
5. The last book is a bio of a writer I adore: Harry Crews. Crews’ works are not for the delicate. He spares nothing. He writes of brutality, usually by way of the “freakish.” Like Flannery O’Connor, he is demonstrating the hypocrisy of which we are all guilty. We wear one face for the world; meanwhile, our faces, if seen truly, are grotesque. Crews’ stuff is tough. You’ll be shocked at some of the episodes in his fiction. But he wrote truthfully, and that can be often ugly. Geltner does an excellent job in this bio of Crews in explaining what Crews wrote about and why he wrote about it. A touching, balanced, compassionate treatment of the brutal life and brutal works of Harry Crews.

Question: “Is the LORD among us or not?” That is a question that Israel asked, in the form of testing God, after having been miraculously delivered from Pharaoh and the Egyptian military. It is a question that Israel asked after having been preserved through the ten plagues God sent upon Egypt. Israel was spared; Egypt was judged. Just as a reminder, Israel had been preserved and delivered while Pharaoh’s Egypt was judged by way of the following: 

1. The Nile River was turned to blood
2. Amphibian invasion: frogs 
3. Gnats
4. Flies
5. Death of Egypt’s livestock
6. Boils 
7. Hail
8. Locusts
9. Darkness
10. Death of the firstborn 

Answer: Ten answers were not enough for Israel. Those were insufficient. They persisted in their unbelief, all the while paying lip service to believing the Lord. 

Ten empirical eyewitness answers were not enough. 

Then there was this little event of crossing the Red Sea. Just a small thing, of course. The nation of Israel, slaves under pagan Pharaoh, walked across the floor of the Red Sea, and watched God cover Pharaoh’s military in salt and brine and drown them as a judgment for their rejection of the truth of God. 

And of course God rained down manna from heaven (Exodus 16) while they wandered through northern and eastern Egypt. And of course He provided water from the rock (Exodus 17). Israel’s daily bread and water were provided by God. Just a small thing, of course, after having crossed a sea, and seen God send judgment after judgment upon Egyptian unbelief and rejection. 

The question remained with them: “Is the LORD among us or not?” (Exodus 17:7). 

Takeaway: This is the beauty of the  Question and Answer format. 

The people asked; God answered—over and over again.

And then of course, there was this small thing of Jesus, nearly 2,000 years later, taking on flesh and fulfilling precise predictions about His birth, His ministry, the effects it would have upon Israel and world history, about what His haters would do to Him, about how He would be rejected, sold, betrayed, mocked, pierced, crucified, buried three days and nights just like Jonah, and raised again for all to see, just like Jonah—who made it to Nineveh, after all—and that He (Jesus) would build His church—that even Covid, mask mandates, and big government politicians could not put out.

You see, God answered Israel in the 1400s B.C. and He answers still. How? Through the historical transforming power of the truth: He is the God who provides.  

If you grew up in a nominally cultural Christianity as I did, it was not uncommon, then or now, to hear homilies taken from verses in Proverbs 31, especially around Mother’s Day. In this section of Proverbs the king pens an encomium. He praises the blessings of a virtuous wife.

But it’s not Mother’s Day in our culture, one might say. True. But aren’t you glad that the virtuous wife in your life (if you have one) doesn’t just embody that one day a year, but lives it over and over again, often with very little thanks? And are you perhaps like I am–way too seldom thankful, in word and deed, for her and to her?

Scripture reads this way about the excellent wife:

An excellent wife who can find?

She is far more precious than jewels.

The heart of her husband trusts in her,

and he will have no lack of gain.

She does him good, and not harm,

all the days of her life. (Proverbs 31:10-12)

And these words, too:

She looks well to the ways of her household

and does not eat the bread of idleness. (Proverbs 31:27)

I don’t say it or show it enough, but you are a blessing, CJ, God’s blessing in my life.

Something in me believes that good books are forever. 

There is something about posts, tweets, and videos that promises to last as long as an honest politician or a Hollywood marriage. 

This evening I was reading an essay by Annie Dillard entitled “Living Like Weasels” and came across this extraordinary passage:

The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect for me the way is like the weasel’s: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.

The background context of the statement concerns how Annie was looking into the water in a pond in Virginia, when suddenly a weasel shot up from under a downed log in the water. Their eyes met. They both were stunned at the otherness of the other. Then, just as quickly, it was over. And all that was left for Annie was trying to make sense of the exchange. 

Then she expresses a longing: “choosing the given . . .” I love that. Choosing the given. 

There’s a worldview implied in that—namely, that we can choose to understand, appreciate, and share the truth and beauty of what is given, or we can amuse ourselves to death via distractions. No one will stop you. If you want to live your life in front of a screen, you’ve arrived. Behold your god. 

And there is at least one other application in her phrase about choosing the given. Life is, the world is, the sunrise today is, the moon’s glow is, the sound of the birds is, the smile of your children is, in sum, given. It is all to be received with thanksgiving because it is just that: a gift. Gift upon gift upon gift. 

¹ Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk, (New York: HarperCollins, 1982), 68-69. 

A place I love to hike has rock outcroppings. This one is one of my favorites. I call the rock upon which I sit “Reader’s Rock.” This weekend, it’s been home to Dickens (again) and his Oliver Twist. I love Dickens’s works. And as you will see, I love sunsets (regardless of season). Enjoy.

(Crossing the creeks, following game trails, an ancient pattern.)

Late in 2021 I discovered the literary world of William Gay, and fell in love with it. If you don’t care for the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, and William Faulkner, you may not like the literary world of William Gay. But if you do gravitate towards Southern Gothic literature, you will likely appreciate William Gay’s literary world. 

A few of Gay’s books remain for me to have read his oeuvre. And I’m eager to get to them. Why? Well, it’s Gay’s wordsmithing, the sheer beauty of his language. Just read and savor the power of this passage from Twilight, a volume of Gay’s I completed just this week: 

Beyond the window the night looked purple. The window vanished and thunder came rumbling down the corridors of the night. The rain came in hard, windy gusts, then subsided to a slow, steady winter drizzle, and he wondered where Sutter was. Under boughs of cedar, hidden with the nightbirds clotted about the branches like malefic fruit, driven to earth like the rest of the beasts of this fabled wood. Crouched in a dry spot beneath the caved roof of an abandoned house, malign revenant among other revenants keeping council. Cursing the rain and biding his time. Or maybe he had just trudged on, as impervious to the vagaries of the weather as stone. 

The above passage is indicative of Gay’s style. Like McCarthy, he is a master of capturing his world’s landscape. For Gay, it’s Tennessee—with its rolling hills, caves, limestone, backwoods gnomes, and ominous mysteries. Gay makes the woods pulse with mystery—the perfect setting for the moral evils men and women commit. 

Some of the violence and moral depravity you come across in Gay’s literary world is so haunting that you will wonder if man is noble at all. But then you will read of those who sacrifice themselves for others, and do it out of sheer love. No boasting, no public acclaim, no recognition by others. That was William Gay’s way, too. He did not publish until he was in his fifties. But when the literary world discovered him, he was recognized for the literary giant he was. Read William Gay’s works. There are a couple of interviews of him you can find on YouTube, too. You sense even in his interviews how much he left unsaid. He played the ignorant bumpkin from TN; in fact, he was a masterful writer of literature and a writer for the ages. 

¹ Gay, William. Twilight (Ann Arbor: Dzanc Books, 2006), 186. 

I had the misfortune today of reading the news online. The first headline concerned a “Red Threat,” about tensions between Russia and America reaching “dangerous levels.” The second headline was about Oregon’s governor lauding a “clemency push for violent criminals.” The third headline was video footage of a “brazen crime in NYC” wherein the criminal simply walked out without being so much as bothered by security personnel. The upshot of the headlines: chaos is carrying the day. Crime is paying. Criminals are being glorified. Lawfulness is mocked and blasphemy is praised.

This is the macro level, the bird’s-eye view. But when you talk to your own people on the micro level, with the day-to-day view, it all comes into sharper focus, a sharper image. We are undergoing a dissolution, an undoing. For those with theological moorings, we are undergoing divine judgment.

Of course the secularist scoffs at such a notion. “Divinity? Hah! Nonsense. There’s no Divinity in charge, up there somewhere, ruling the nations. We’re on our own,” they contend. Well, if that’s true, where’s all the “progress” the Enlightenment promised? How is secular humanism panning out? How is “the brotherhood of man” looking for you? Is Utopia just around the corner still?

It’s funny when I read the secularists. They hate the God they say they don’t believe in, but then they demand “rights.” Rights? But you are just so much matter in motion. Why should material causes be granted rights? Says who? Who told you you were special? You’re just goo, according to your own worldview. Rights? Meh.

There is another way, of course. It’s the biblical way. It’s the way that says the world is a mess because it is fallen. People are a mess because we are fallen. Politics is a mess because fallen sinners want their own fallen sinful ways.

But the biblical way also is crystal-clear in its offer of reconciliation and hope. It centers on Christ and the Gospel. In Acts 17, the Jewish apostle Paul, having become a Christian years earlier (see Acts 9), is in Athens, Greece. He has been explaining that man is an idolater by nature. He worships idols. He worships lies and liars, but God commands us to love the truth, not lies. And the people’s reactions to Paul’s biblical teaching were just what you should expect, if you have a correct anthropology: some mocked (Acts 17:32a); some gave him another hearing (Acts 17:32b); and some believed (Acts 17:34).

The world has been a mess since Genesis 3, since the Fall. Man wants his own way, not God’s way, unless and until individuals are reconciled to the God who is, the God of the Bible. That’s not a popular message. Never has been. But it’s the truth.

So when you see the sun going down, when you lament the gloaming of the culture you’re in, when you see violence rewarded, and virtue penalized, know that you have a choice. You can shake your head in fear and revert to pietistic retreat and mutter, “Oh, isn’t it all just dreadful?” or you can saddle up, be of good courage, strengthen yourself in the Lord and His Word, and know that Paul came before you, and fought the good fight. You can be of good courage, and know that Timothy came before you, and fought the good fight. You can be of good courage, and know that John came before you, and fought the good fight. You can read of heroes of the faith in Hebrews 11, and then go back and study the lives of those men and women who showed courage and fought the good fight.

But ultimately, if you’re a Christian, you will know Christ. You will see that He is the historical proof of courage, of faithfulness, of righteousness, and of triumph in the end. Look to Him. In Paul’s words in Acts 17 in Athens that day in the first century:

The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead. (Acts 17:30-31)

It was not a popular message then. It is not a popular message now. But is it true? And if it is, may we have the courage to deal with it.

Appreciate the time along the muddy waters, even in winter, when deciduous trees stand naked, their leafy garments shed below them. Sycamores with wraith-like limbs overhang the creeks and cast shadows over the muddy water.

Trail time is good time.