Tuesday, May 20, 2008

May 20, 2008: Imaginative Works Where Holiness Dwells

In a sermon I recommended finding exemplars of holiness in great works of fiction. For men there is Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird and Jeremiah Land in Peace Like A River. For women: Jane Bennet in Pride and Prejudice and Desdemona in Othello. For children: Lucy Pevensie in The Chronicles of Narnia and Charlie Bucket in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. For the imaginative: Reepicheep the Mouse and Puddleglum the Marshwiggle in Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair respectively.

Recently I found to my delight what I think might be an example of virtuous life imitating virtuous art. Just before the great battle scene in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis has the Christ figure Aslan give the following order: "Those who are good with their noses must come in the front with us lions to smell out where the battle is." The other lion in the scene, the merely mortal one, is exultant. He "kept running about everywhere pretending to be very busy but really in order to say to everyone he met, 'Did you hear what he said? Us lions. That means him and me. Us lions. That's what I like about Aslan. No side, no stand-off-ishness. Us lions. That meant him and me.'"

Lewis wrote that in 1949. In May of 1955 he was writing one of his many letters to Mary Shelburne, a neurotic American who constantly complained to him about illnesses and money troubles and all the injustices that others had inflicted on her. She also wrote bad poetry. Out of the blue, Lewis dropped the following:

Between ourselves, as one rhymester to another, it is a great pity that the word "world", such a good important word and often so emphatically demanding to come at the end of a line, has so few rhymes in English.

One rhymester to another! Goodness. Lewis should have been poet laureate of England, whereas Shelburne (bless her heart) was an irritating fool. When she got this letter, did she go around to her friends and say to them, "Do you see what Lewis wrote? One rhymester to another. That means him and me. One rhymester to another."

I'm reminded of the hymn Oh What Matchless Condescension the Eternal God Displays, and the Bible verse that says that Jesus "is not ashamed to call them brothers" (Hebrews 2:11). This is that gracious, unpatronizing virtue found in noble kings who treat mere peasants like fellow royalty - or themselves like mere peasants. Could the grace of Lewis's Aslan have been in the back of his mind when he stooped to Shelburne's level, or raised her up to his?

Jesus liked to use fictional stories (The Good Samaritan, The Prodigal Son) to inspire good behavior in real life. With holiness in the real world so rare, fiction is a great place to find it. Read Pride and Prejudice (or watch the A&E miniseries), and in some situation you may soon be asking yourself, "What would Jane Bennet do?"

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

May 13, 2008: The Privacy Of Darkness And The Innocent Plea For Light

Three cheers for Wheaton College firing Professor Kent Gramm for refusing to talk about his divorce.

He's not getting fired for divorcing his wife, or being divorced by her. He's being fired for refusing to divulge details to college administrators. Wheaton has a policy that professors sign saying that they will abide by certain standards of Christian conduct, including
marital conduct. You can divorce your spouse if you have biblical justification for it - but you have to explain yourself. Gramm refuses to explain himself. He believes he should not be held accountable to the conduct code that he signed, and that the college has no business asking him about it. Now he has taken his case to the media. "I think it's wrong to have to discuss your personal life with your employer," he told the Chicago Tribune. He even dares to frame his case as an example for his students: "I feel that it's important for [the students] to know that they're not somehow rejected by God for having more or less normal lives and for having lives that didn't work out the way they intended them to turn out," he said.

Hey Gramm, got news for you. Christians aren't supposed to lead "more or less normal lives." We're supposed to be holy (1 Peter 1:16). Divorce isn't holy. God says he hates it (Malachi 2:16).

As a divorced man myself, I am blessed with an inside perspective here. When my wife renounced her faith and left me and divorced me against my will, I was eager for the spotlight of investigation. I made plain to all (and still do): "Ask me anything. And don't take my word for anything - here's her phone number and email and address; ask her anything about me. Ask my children about me. I have nothing to hide. I despise this putrid monstrosity of divorce - even as I despise rape and torture and genocide and all manner of evils that provoke the wrath of the Almighty. I have no part in this sin."

When charged, the innocent welcome investigation to clear their name while the guilty hide in the darkness of privacy. Jesus said, "[M]en loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed." (John 3:19-20). Wickedness fears exposure even as innocence longs for vindication.

Suppose for example we find out that a man was present at a Nazi concentration camp, but it is unclear whether he was one of the guards who incinerated bodies or one of the Jews who struggled to survive. So we ask him about it. He responds, "I think that's a personal question. It is really none of your business. Look, Auschwitz was messy and unfortunate and sometimes life just does not turn out the way you expect. The important thing is that God loves us all no matter what." That is not what a victim says. The persecuted Jew rolls up his sleeve and shows you the number tattooed on his arm.

We should look at divorce the way we do a dead body hanging from a noose. It is ugly and awful and we hope we never see it. But if we do see a hanged corpse, and have no other information, we can only conclude that a terrible sin has been committed. We don't necessarily know what it is or who committed it. Maybe the dead man was guilty of evil and justly hanged by duly appointed authorities. Maybe he was innocent but set upon by murderous thugs. Maybe he was guilty but hanged by a lynch mob contemptuous of due process, so there was wrongdoing on both sides. Maybe he committed suicide. There are all kinds of possibilities, ranging from 0 to 100 percent guilt on the part of the hanged man. While we don't know where the guilt lies or to what degree, we do know that somewhere, somehow, a moral outrage has been committed.

The one thing that passersby may not say when observing that body twisting in the wind is, "Well, that's certainly none of my business. These things happen. We live in a fallen world. Let's all agree not to talk about it. (Hey, I might want to lynch somebody myself some day, and the last thing I want is nosy people asking me questions about it.)" And if a possibly suspicious character near the body tries to shoo us away saying, "Move along! There's nothing to see here. This has nothing to do with you," then we have a duty to stand right there unmoved and insist, "I'm not going anywhere. I've got some questions first."

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

May 6, 2008: Can You Gauge Your Spiritual Progress?

"How are you doing spiritually? Do you feel you are making spiritual progress?"

These were the questions that my pastor would ask during a yearly home visit when I was young, and they would always annoy my mother. She never knew how to answer. How do you gauge your spiritual progress, and is it appropriate to do so? Do you respond, "Well, last year I prayed about 15 minutes a day but now I pray 20; and there were some occasions when I resisted my husband's leadership, but recently I haven't done that, so I'd say that while I used to be a 7, spiritually speaking, now I'm about an 8"? Mom found the practice of grading yourself in the things of the Lord to be distasteful.

All saints do. Their focus is on Christ, not on themselves and how well they are following Christ.

I have learned to distrust self-evaluation, having seen good people bemoan their depravity and bad people pat themselves on their spiritual backs. Forty-one years ago my father saw the church that we were attending utterly fail to respond in a godly way to a crisis in its midst, and he said, "This church will die." He was right, it did. He could perceive the spiritual decay, but the decaying ones could not see it in themselves. They were like the ghosts in M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense: they did not know they were dead.

Those who are spiritually alive, on the other hand, may be only vaguely aware of that life. The less aware the better. It is like playing basketball. A point guard who thinks, "I'm playing well now! Seven assists and two steals and even a blocked shot!" is more likely to commit a turnover in the next minute than the one who is simply focused on his job running the offense and listening to his coach's instructions.

Having carried with me all these years my mother's suspicion about the value of grading one's walk with God, imagine my delight the other day on finding the same thought beautifully expressed in a letter by C. S. Lewis. He wrote to his young friend and protégé Walter Hooper:

We should, I believe, distrust states of mind which turn our attention upon ourselves. Even at our sins we should look no longer than is necessary to know and to repent them: and our virtues or progress (if any) are certainly a dangerous object of contemplation. When the sun is vertically above a man he casts no shadow: similarly when we have come to the Divine meridian our spiritual shadow (that is, our consciousness of self) will vanish. One will thus in a sense be almost nothing: a room to be filled by God and our blessed fellow creatures, who in their turn are rooms we help to fill. But how far one is from this at present!

Indeed, we are far from this at present. But maybe, by looking to Christ and not ourselves, we'll inch ever closer to it.