James E Hartley

Finding Joy Through Humility

“I’m a very umble person….I am well aware that I am the umblest person going,” said Uriah Heep, modestly; “let the other be where he may. My mother is likewise a very umble person. We live in a numble abode, Master Copperfield, but have much to be thankful for. My father’s former calling was umble. He was a sexton.”

When the most famous humble person in all of literature is Uriah Heep, is it any wonder that Humility has a bad name?

Gavin Ortlund wants to change your impression. Humility: The Joy of Self-Forgetfulness is a humble little book on a big topic. Quiz: when you saw the word “humble” in the last sentence, did you think that was a positive or negative adjective?

Ortlund begins with what should be obvious: We know that humility is a virtue because Jesus was humble. He is explicitly described that way by Paul:

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:5-8, ESV)

If Jesus humbled himself, then we can immediately dispense with the three common ways of thinking about humility. Humility is not self-hatred, weakness, or hiding your talents.

Ortlund’s preferred definition of “humility” is “self-forgetfulness leading to joy.” That’s not a crisp definition, but it does get to the two parts of humility Ortlund most wants to emphasize. First is the self-forgetfulness. In example after example, Ortlund argues that the difference between those with humility and those without is the degree to which they concentrate on themselves. If I am talking with you and thinking more about what I am saying and what I am about to say and what I want to get out of this conversation, then I am not humble. The humble person listens and is gratefully learning from whatever others are saying. “Humility actually values the input of the speaker.”

It is the second part of the definition, though, that is the more revealing. Humility brings joy. In one of the very many quotations from C.S. Lewis, this joy is described:

Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call “humble” nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.

With that definition, Uriah Heep, that greasy, smarmy person, is not humble at all.

Why are humble people so full of joy? Have you ever noticed how many truly amazing things there are in the world and realized how fortunate you are to live amongst all those amazing things? You look at the majesty of a sunset and you realize that it is wonderful to be a small part of such an incredible world; on the other hand, the sunset does not look at you in awe. Imagine if when you encountered other people, you had that same sense of awe; you are in the presence of yet another image of God and you think about that rather than how that other person should be admiring you. That is humility.

It is hard to escape the feeling of humility when you think about the grace God has shown you, and yet we do manage to escape that feeling all the time. Quoting Edwards:” A sense of the loveliness of God is peculiarly that discovery of God which makes humility. A sense or discovery of God’s greatness without his loveliness will not do it. But it is a discovery of his loveliness that is the very discovery that affects the thing and makes the soul humble.

Ortlund is enamored with that idea of loveliness. Once you realize that God is lovely, far more lovely than you are, how could you not be humble?

Yet, when you look at the church, do you see humility? In the second half of Ortlund’s book, he moves from the theory to the practice of humility. What is striking about the second half is that there is nothing in it that is surprising in the least, but it is painfully obvious that people in the church need to hear this message again and again. Humility is in rare supply among people who profess to be captured by the loveliness of God.

Ortlund splits the discussion in to three parts: humility in leadership, between peers, and toward leadership, but his discussions in each chapter constantly cross the lines between those three things. The chapters are more accurately delineated by the types of practices being advocated to develop humility.

The first chapter is on leadership. There are far too many pastors out there who are filled with pride. Granted, many of them are convinced that they are, like Uriah Heep, “the umblest person going,” but they give away the game by showing their pride at how humble they are. What does Ortlund advocate? He doesn’t say it, but stripped to its essence, he recommends that everyone in a church should immediately buy a copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Consider these two passages:

1. “Too often, we conceive of leadership as primarily corrective, with occasional encouragement. It should be the exact opposite. Encouragement should be the norm. Corrections should be sparing.”
2. “Tell your child, your spouse, or your employee that he or she is stupid or dumb at a certain thing, has no gift for it, and is doing it all wrong, and you will have destroyed almost every incentive to try to improve. But use the opposite technique—be liberal with your encouragement, make the thing seem easy to do, let the other person know that you have faith in his ability to do it, that he has an undeveloped flair for it—and he will practice until the dawn comes in the window in order to excel.”

Or this pair:

1. “Be willing to apologize….If you are a leader, freely acknowledge your mistakes to those under your care.”
2. “There is a certain degree of satisfaction in having the courage to admit one’s errors.…[W]hen we are wrong—and that will be surprisingly often, if we are honest with ourselves—let’s admit our mistakes quickly and with enthusiasm.”

The first one of each pair is Ortlund; the second is Carnegie. Ortlund could have included Carnegie’s whole book as an appendix. If you want to be a leader in the church, you need to adopt the social skills that Dale Carnegie advocates. Smile. Be encouraging. Never criticize or complain. Make others feel valuable.

When Ortlund turns to thinking about humility among peers in the church, he writes an essay on the destructive vice of envy. There is again nothing theologically new in this chapter and I have no doubt Ortlund would agree with that assessment, and yet sadly it is a chapter that could profitably be handed out in every church in the land. Paul talks about how everyone in the church is a distinct part of the body of Christ, and yet too many of those body parts are, just like Paul described, constantly complaining that the other parts are getting too much attention and silently rejoicing when they fail.

The chapter on humility toward leadership is the most heart-breaking in the book. The main point is that churches need leadership and in a functioning church people respect that leadership. But the emotional bulk of the chapter is Ortlund’s repeated assurances that he is not saying that one needs to submit to abusive church leaders. In a book about the positive virtue of humility, why this dramatic emphasis on the negative effects of abusive church leaders? It’s rather obvious, isn’t it? Churches across the land are filled with refugees from abusive church situations. If you want a simple explanation for why humility is in short supply in church congregations, it is that far too many church leaders have abused their positions of authority. Trust has fallen. If you don’t trust the leaders of the church, how can you set aside your defense mechanisms and be humble?

What to make of a book like this? There is nothing strikingly novel about the argument; it hews closely to orthodox Christian theology. In a church full of people who are models of Christian behavior, there is nothing here that would not be lived out on a daily basis. But, that church of perfect saints does not exist. Your church, filled with real people, could almost certainly benefit from a reflection on this theme.

(The ever-amusing mandatory legal disclaimer: Crossway sent me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Why does the law doubt my honesty? Does anyone in Washington really think I would sell my integrity for a $12 book on humility?)

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The Tedious Tropic of Cancer

“Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.”
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Hi, my name is Jim, and I am an enemy to the human race.

I first heard about the book Tropic of Cancer way back in high school or college when I learned that it was a book that was banned from being imported into the United States because it was obscene. When it was finally published in the United States in 1961, a series of obscenity lawsuits were brought against stores selling it. The lower court rulings were all over the place, the best being (as noted in that ever-valuable resource Wikipedia!) a court opinion in Pennsylvania that Tropic of Cancer is“not a book. It is a cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity.” The US Supreme Court eventually ruled the book was not obscene, so you are now free to read it at will.

I was never tempted to read it.

There I was blissfully unaware that reading this book was in my future, when on a trip to the California Coast with the Long Suffering Wife of Your Humble Narrator we stumbled upon a quirky place in Big Sur. Right off the highway, there is a sign for The Henry Miller Memorial Library. Having nothing better to do than explore quirky places, we stopped, and discovered it is the Platonic Ideal of quirky places to stop. One part bookstore, one part event space, and one part bizarre art exhibit of that type of art which involves throwing a bunch of random items in a small space and pretending it all means something. (Look a broken typewriter next to a broken piano!) The books for sale aren’t just on shelves; many of them are bagged and hanging on buildings and trees. Describing this place is hopeless. Fortunately, you can visit their website and click on the video which is appropriately amateur-hour in quality and filled with lots of high-falutin voice-overs. Go ahead, and look. I’ll wait until you get back.

Amazingly weird, right? If you are ever in the area, you really need to stop; it is truly worth a bit of time to admire the oddity of the place. Once you are visiting a place like that, you just have to buy a book to bring the visit to fruition and if you are going to buy a book from the Henry Miller Memorial Library, I suppose it really should be Tropic of Cancer. And then once you bought a book to memorialize the visit, it really needs to be read. So, I tossed it on my “Six Books I Have Never Read but I Solemnly Swear to Myself that I Will Read This Year” List.

I have now read Tropic of Cancer so that you don’t have to.

First off, you can freely ignore all that obscenity talk. It is not surprising that once upon a time in these United States a book like this would have been considered obscene. Now? The latest pop fiction thriller has more sex than Tropic of Cancer. Way more. The average rom-com is far more sex-infused that this book. The only way I can imagine anyone thinking this book is particular obscene is if you only approve of sex scenes in which the participants have bathed in the last year. I suppose if you don’t like to see naughty words being tiresomely repeatedly deployed for shock value, the book is also obscene.

Second, you don’t read this book for the plot. A bunch of grungy people hanging out in Paris. Because nobody does anything productive, and alcohol is clearly the primary product need, they sometimes have a hard time getting food or shelter. “Lying on the mattress in the hallway the odor of the germicide stifles me. A pungent, acrid odor that seems to invade every pore of my body.” “’Oh, you,’ says Bessie. ‘You’re just a worn-out satyr. You don’t know the meaning of passion. When you get an erection you think you’re passionate.’” “But about the smell of rancid butter….There are good associations too.” And so on, ad nauseam.

So how does a book like this get Karl Shapiro calling Miller “The Greatest Living Artist” and Bob Dylan listing it among books he really likes and all the other similar accolades from all the Beautiful People?

It’s all about the Author Message. You have to wade through 238 pages of senseless aimless drivel to get to the chapter where Miller unfolds his Theory on Life. That is undoubtedly the chapter which causes all that weak-kneed swooning. It’s deep, man. Really Deep.

Up to the present, my idea in collaborating with myself has been to get off the gold standard of literature. My idea briefly has been to present a resurrection of emotions, to depict the conduct of a human being in the stratosphere of ideas, that is, in the grip of delirium.

And this:

If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality. If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world.

How much more of this would you, Dear Reader, like to read?

Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. To-day I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity—I belong to the earth!

I will give Miller this much: decades before all those 1950s Beat Writers plied their trade, Miller had already perfected the literary style. You can just imagine reading this while strung out on your drug of choice and saying, “Groovy, man. That’s deep. I want to be inhuman too.”

To what end does all this proceed? Miller wants to tell you how important his book is.

I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul.

Now that is an admirable remark. The book is 318 pages long, and if 317 pages are complete drivel, the book may still be a masterpiece because of that one great page. Surely you are not going to claim that there is nothing in those 318 pages, not a single scrap, fragment, or toenail (??) that is great. You need to read this book for that one great moment, buried deep in this book. Alas, Your Humble Narrator’s mining skills are not refined enough to have uncovered that one great page.

Poor Henry Miller. There is literally nothing in this book that Thoreau didn’t do better, much better, in Walden. There is nothing in this book that ever rises to the poetic heights of Whitman’s best lines. Tropic of Cancer is tired book rehashing Thoreau and Whitman, with a bunch of naughty words tossed in to shock the rubes.

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Hope in a Kingdom Far and Clear

“As these images sorted themselves into events (i.e. became a story) they seemed to demand no love interest and no close psychology. But the Form which excludes these things is the fairy tale. And the moment I thought of that I fell in love with the Form itself: its brevity, its severe restraints on description, its flexible traditionalism, its inflexible hostility to all analysis, reflections, and ‘gas.’ I was now enamoured of it. Its very limitations of vocabulary became an attraction; as the hardness of the stone pleases the sculptor or the difficulty of the sonnet delights the sonneteer.”

“On that side (as Author) I wrote fairy tales because the fairy tale seemed the ideal Form for the stuff I had to say.”

That is C.S. Lewis in his 1956 essay “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s To Be Said.”

Fairy Tales went out of style when Realistic Novels became all the rage. One of the charms of reading essays by Lewis and Tolkien is seeing them defending the genre. As Tolkien famously noted, the fairy tale only seemed like a subset of children’s literature because adults had abandoned the genre; the fairy tale is much like the old arm chair tossed into the nursery. There is nothing in particular about the fairy tale that makes it the natural medium for children’s literature.

Fast forward a half-century, and there is no doubt their argument won. Well, sort of won. Fantasy and Science Fiction are both all the rage in ways that would have surprised both Tolkien and Lewis. But, such stories still live in a sort of academic ghetto—serious novelists can glance in that direction, but they better not settle there.

The Fairy Tale, though, is still an elusive genre. When does a story merit that title? Are The Chronicles of Narnia or The Lord of the Rings fairy tales or not? Probably not the way most people think of the fairy tale. The Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Anderson definitely wrote fairy tales which can be enjoyed by children and adults. There are plenty of children’s books that would count as a modern day fairy tale, but a good set of them offer little other than nostalgia for the older reader. The Wind and the Willows is probably the best example of an early-20th century fairy tale.

And then there is A Kingdom Far and Clear by Mark Helprin. I don’t know of another book that even competes in the category of modern day fairy tale suited for both kids and adults.

The book is a trio of related novellas: Swan Lake, A City in Winter, The Veil of Snows. Three different narrators, each telling a stand-alone story which is linked to the other two in chronological fashion. The overall story is, not surprising given the first part’s title, a variation on the tale of Swan Lake, a notable fairy tale in its own right. But, this is far more than just a retelling of that tale.

Somewhere in Eastern Europe is a fair land, beautifully described, in which the rightful rulers have been displaced by a cruel Usurper. The daughter of the rightful rulers vanished, and this is the story of how she discovered her true identity and sought to claim her rightful throne. In other words, you don’t read this book for the plot; you’ve read and seen that plot a million times.

It’s the manner of telling that makes this book great. Let’s look at an example from the middle of the book. The narrator of this portion is the true heiress to the throne, and this is the first time she is in the presence of the usurper.

Do not dismiss those who stand above you, for very seldom are they there by chance. Most often their power is genuine, their evil a power in itself, and their visage impressive. The usurper’s face was many times the size of mine, and seemed even larger than it was. His smile was fixed, revealing huge teeth and immense incisors. He looked if he might eat you, like a wild animal, and the plains of his cheeks resembled a battle helmet. Upon these plains were the scars of crossbow bolts, arrows, and knives, their presence a testament to his invulnerability.

You could see in his eyes that, if indeed he had a soul, it was someplace else, but that he was enjoying the dinner nonetheless, even if he enjoyed it not at all. He lived for absolute power, and his possession of it was confirmed in ceremony after ceremony, dinner after dinner, by the strength of his armies and the slavish obedience of his flacks. I had seen the selections. My own family had been among the first. This and my destiny kept me the model of girlish grace, smiling and light on my feet as I held my post. I turned my eyes from the usurper, determined to meet them one day, close and clear, in the presence of death. And from this, I took a certain joy.

At a literary level, that is a great example of the prose style of the book. It is a book that simply begs to be read aloud on a snowy evening in a mellifluous voice. The book dictates being read at a leisurely pace as the images erupt. (It is also worth noting that the book is filled with gorgeous full page illustrations by Chris van Allsburg.)

This is very much at tale of Good and Evil. That is not the same thing as saying it a tale of the triumph of good over evil. Evil most definitely has the upper hand in this story. The tone is brilliantly crafted in a way that while there is much beauty, there is no doubt that there is a veil of darkness cast over that beauty. And yet, hope endures. Even to the very last pages, when it is genuinely uncertain whether evil will triumph in the end, hope endures.

Indeed, the endurance of hope is the most important lesson of this fairy tale. There is no reason to have hope. There is zero reason to expect that the usurper will be overthrown. The true heiress to the throne has no power, no allies, no base of support. She enters the usurper’s impossibly vast castle by becoming a lowly servant so far down in the pecking order that she has no prospects. And yet, hope peeks through the darkness. There is no reason to have hope, there is never a reason to have hope, but the reader’s hope endures.

Never give up hope. That is the message of this fairy tale. Has there ever been a time when that lesson was more necessary? (Yes, it has been equally necessary at many times in many places.) What makes this fairy tale so great is that the disappointments just keep coming; every time spirits lift because maybe this is the beginning of the end for the usurper, a twist of fate reasserts the status quo. This fairy tale actually teaches hope in the face of disappointment.

It is a beautiful book, highly recommended. I have enjoyed it since I first read it a decade ago. It lingers in the imagination, constantly reminding you to never despair. A nice little Fairy Tale, in other words.

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An Unseen Hook and Invisible Line

“I sometimes think when people wanted to hate God they hated Mummy.”
“What do you mean by that, Cordelia?”
“Well, you see, she was saintly but she wasn’t a saint. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can’t really hate God either. When they want to hate Him and his saints they have to find something like themselves and pretend it’s God and hate that.”

Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is not just a brilliant novel, it is a brilliant Christian novel written in the mid-20^th century when that Christianity thing was supposed to be passé.

The story is of Charles Ryder’s interactions with the Flyte family, denizens of an ancient English manor dubbed Brideshead. He enters the Flyte orbit via his college chum, Sebastian, for whom he has a vaguely homosexual attraction. Sebastian’s parents (now separated) and his siblings (Brideshead, Julia, and Cordelia) make up quite the menagerie. The defining trait of each character is the relationship to the Roman Catholic Church. Over the first two-thirds of the book, we watch these characters become developed as a Catalogue of Failed Saints.

Charles, on the other hand, has no religious background. The discussions about religion among the characters are masterfully done; they capture the nature of that sort of discussion perfectly—ships passing in the night. “You know all this is very puzzling to me” is how Charles summarizes it. And this about Brideshead, “I knew that this disagreement was not a matter of words only, but expressed a deep and impassable division between us; neither had any understanding of the other, nor ever could.”

But, the explicit discussions about religion are not the heart of the book. The story follows Charles in his quest for an object of love, from Sebastian to Celia (whom he marries) and onto Julia. In a moment of shocking self-awareness toward the end of the novel, Charles explains this to Julia.

“It’s frightening,” Julia once said, “to think how completely you have forgotten Sebastian.”
“He was the forerunner.”
“That’s what you said in the storm. I’ve thought since, perhaps I am only a forerunner too.”
“Perhaps,” I thought […], “perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.”
I had not forgotten Sebastian. He was with me daily in Julia; or rather it was Julia I had known in in him, in those distant Arcadian days.
“That’s cold comfort for a girl,” she said when I tried to explain. “How do I know I shan’t suddenly turn out to be somebody else? It’s an easy way to chuck.”

Right there the whole structure of the novel is revealed. All these longings after failed people and ideals are all pointing to something greater; Charles loves Sebastian and Julia and maybe at some point even his wife, Celia, but none of them are really the object of his love—he just doesn’t realize yet that he loves something more. Those other loves are a hints and symbols of something more.

Waugh is a master of the small but telling detail. Throughout, there is a detail here or there that feels like it just gave a vision of an entire world. A couple of examples:

1. In the first chapter, Charles is at college, and one of his acquaintances (friends?), Anthony Blanche, stands on a balcony with a megaphone reading The Waste Land to the people below. I don’t know of anything which more perfectly captures the effect of that poem in the 1920s. The scene embodies an era and a type of person in that era…you now know exactly the type of person Anthony is…and simultaneously, you know the type of poem Eliot just published. And the part Waugh chose to have Anthony read is perfect: Tiresias on the wall.

(When I taught a Western Civilization course and we got to Eliot, I always mentioned this scene. The guy in the know reading Eliot from the balcony to the masses below. One year, a half dozen or so students showed up at my office and stood in the hallway, reciting The Waste Land. Sometimes Mount Holyoke students have a real sense of humor.)

Eliot hovers over this novel, from this moment on. Eliot’s Four Quartets came out around the time Waugh was writing this novel. Waste Land to Four Quartets is Charles’ journey.

2. About two-thirds of the way through the novel, Charles returns from a long journey in which he was completely cut off from civilization. His return is when we discover that he was married in the space between the last chapter and this one. Not only that, he has kids, one of which was born while he was away. Charles shows a truly shocking indifference to his children; he shows zero interest in seeing them or even hearing about them. It is easy to conclude that Charles is a cad.

But, then the telling details start getting dropped into the narrative in offhand ways. In a conversation between Charles and Celia, she tells him that things will be like before he left, and he asks if she means right before he left or shortly before that. Celia is silent. It’s never explicitly stated, but when reading that I assumed Charles had an affair. Turns out I was right about the affair, but wrong about the person: it is Celia. We later find out that Celia, has been unfaithful in a casual remark in a conversation between Charles and Julia.

The realization that Celia was unfaithful generates another realization of something which is left totally unstated at any point in the novel. We know that Charles’ daughter, Caroline, is born while Charles is away. The realization: she is not his child. The timeline is perfect—Charles finds out Celia is pregnant, he knows he is not the father, he heads off to South America and cuts himself off from all contact with civilization. That also explains an awkward moment when Celia says that Caroline is named after Charles—that would indeed be rather awkward that Celia is pretending to the outside world that this is Charles’ daughter when Charles knows it is not. Then it hit me; why assume that the older child is Charles’ son? Maybe Charles has no children. No wonder he is totally indifferent to them and has no real desire to even see them.

None of this is actually stated in the novel. That is what I found so fascinating. It’s like all the clues are there, but there is no grand reveal. What we think about Charles is hugely affected by whether or not these are his kids. Only an author who is sure of himself would leave something like this buried in a novel. (It is like a small version of Nabokov’s Pale Fire—now that was artistry—the entire plot can only be pieced together by connecting the endnotes (which are a part of the book, not something added later.))

The whole novel is like that. You only realize it at the end, but Charles spends the whole book looking for an object of love that will bring him satisfaction. Sebastian, Celia, Julia…all of them just keep pointing him onwards. At the end, again in masterful understatement, we find out that Charles has converted. He visits the old chapel at Brideshead and discovers a small lamp burning before the altar. And there he explains to the reader that something none of them thought about at the time, some small red flame, that flame the old knights saw from their tomb, burns again for others. That flickering flame is what this novel is. It is only when some flickering light allows Charles to see through “fierce little human tragedy in which I played,” that he comes to “accept the supernatural as the real.” If the novel had been more overt about the conversion, it would have lost this point, it would have lost that sense of inevitability that hovers over the whole story. The novel is arguing that conversion is not due to some loud event; it comes from a still small voice softly calling.

What makes the novel so brilliant is that high percentage of readers almost certainly will miss the larger narrative of the irresistible pull of grace. The novel reads nicely as a tale of the decline of the English aristocracy too. But Waugh, in another bit of misdirection, explains what he is doing in this novel. Cordelia says to Charles, “I wonder if you remember the story mummy read us the evening Sebastian first got drunk—I mean the bad evening. ‘Father Brown’ said something like ‘I caught him’ [the thief] ‘with an unseen hook and invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.’” Waugh is not just explaining the hook that has been planted in Charles; the whole novel is designed to plant a hook in the reader. It’s an unseen hook and an invisible thread.

Wander to the ends of the earth, Waugh says, it doesn’t matter…because the hook is set.

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Is Your Church a Company or a Family?

What is the difference between a church and a retail store?

That sounds like the start of a bad joke, but instead it is the start of a reflection on (one of) the problems in the modern American (and maybe not only the American) church.

Begin with the answer: “There is no substantive difference between a church and a retail store.” A church is a business entity designed to sell a product (Christianity). It does so by advertising its product to non-customers to convince them to come into the store (the sanctuary) a first time in order to sample the wares. This outside advertising needs to emphasis the positives of the church, promising to meet some need of the prospective customer. Once the prospective customer is inside, the church needs to encourage return visits by making sure the product is appealing and enjoyable. The CEO (pastor or priest) of the church needs to be charismatic, making sure that people are eager to come back and hear more next week. Once a customer enters the building, the experience needs to be catered to ensure that this is indeed a great shopping experience, that the product is of uniformly entertaining quality. It is also helpful if the structure of the church is a pyramid sales model; the customers can move up in the organization and become part of the sales team, and those who are most successful at sales can ultimately be promoted to the senior management team and have regular meetings with that charismatic CEO, hearing the CEO’s latest vision for advancing the organization.

If that vision of church sounds enticing, then congratulations, there are many many opportunities out there for your entertainment pleasure.

Skye Jethani hopes you reacted to that description with disgust. What if Jesus Was Serious About the Church? is an exploration of a better model for the church. The church is a family.

Jethani has been around the church in a wide array of capacities for some time. Currently, he is the straight man on The Holy Post podcast with his funny man sidekick cohost Phil Vischer (of Veggie Tales fame). You don’t have to listen to that podcast for very long to realize that Jethani is clever and highly (very highly) opinionated. (The Long Suffering Wife of Your Humble Narrator loves said podcast, by the way, so many of my car journeys have been filled with Jethani’s thoughts.)

One of Jethani’s recent projects has been the What If Jesus Was Serious? books. This is the third installment in that series. Organized as short, pointed reflections on an array of topics, the series reaps the benefits and pays the costs of a long set of short three page long reflections. On the plus side, this allows Jethani to make his arguments with very little build up and no need to force a connection from one part to the next. “If Jesus was Serious…Then We Gather to See Through One Another’s Eyes” is followed by “If Jesus was Serious…Then the Church Gathers for Community, not a Concert” and preceded by “If Jesus was Serious…Then We Must Not Give Up on Meeting Together.” Chapter by chapter, Jethani zeroes in, makes his point, and ends the chapter. Since author has strong opinions, most of the individual chapters are thought-provoking. But that leads to the weakness of the form. There is simply no time to build some arguments in three pages. When you agree with Jethani, you think it is a powerful short statement of Truth. When you disagree…well, you wish The Holy Post podcast had a call-in portion so you could at a minimum ask him to explain or sometimes explain to him why he is a bit off.

So, what is the overall argument of this book? As I noted above, Jethani argues that the church is better thought of as a family than as a corporation. The reflections are loosely grouped into five larger sections. He begins noting that the church is like a family reunion. When you are crafting a business, you can imagine your ideal customers and seek them out. When you have a social club, you can offer membership to the people with whom you want to socialize. When you go to a family reunion, however, you have that Uncle whose opinions you can’t stand, and that Cousin with zero social skills, and that Great Aunt who is infirm and might die any day, and that Niece who is flirting with alcoholism. Of no small importance in the modern age, the family is where you have people with radically different political opinions, and because this family is the church, you have to find a way to remember that what unites Christians is of far more importance than what divides us.

Jethani goes on to note that when the family gathers, it is the meal which brings us all together. That meal at the church family is Communion. We remember Christ’s death by jointly partaking of his body and blood. “If Jesus was Serious…Then His Table Should be More Revered than the Pastor.” Who would argue with that? Yet, in the life of many churches, the table is relegated to something of second or third or fourth level importance. But, the Eucharist should remind us that we are part of something much larger than ourselves, the church is the body of Christ, united with all the other churches in the world both now and in the past.

All of which leads to the question of what we are doing at the family gathering on Sunday mornings. If you are showing up for a floor show, then you have missed the point of a church service. If entertainment is the goal of the service, then once again, something is strongly amiss. Churches spend far too much time dreaming up ways to ape the modern forms of entertainment, forgetting that if this is a family gathering, if this is the body of Christ, then the point of the gathering is not to separately entertain everyone who is there. You go to church to meet others and worship God together, sharing in one another’s sorrows and joys. You go to church not just to have people minister to you, but also and of equal importance to minister to others.

This, Jethani notes, is the family business. This is the role of the family servants. The family does not need a new vision statement. It does not need a celebrity CEO delivering charismatic messages to reach a preselected group of people. If Jesus was serious about the church, then “worship is about seeing God’s intrinsic value, not his usefulness,” “true worship is about relationships, not rituals,” “the church’s mission requires the church’s unity,” and “the church shouldn’t just be strong, it should be anti-fragile.”

Why read this book? This is not a book to read because Jethani has the definitive answers to all the questions. (I am pretty certain he would completely agree.) The reason to read the book is that Jethani does a fantastic job asking the questions. This is a book designed to make you think about your congregation and your relationship to your congregation, and ultimately your relationship to the holy, catholic and apostolic church.

If you read this book because it raises the questions in thought-provoking ways and then read Jethani’s ruminations in a generous and thoughtfully critical way, you will learn much. If Jesus was serious about the church, then he really wants you to be thoughtful in thinking about his body, the Church.

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Leaves of Grass (imaginary edited edition)

“I celebrate myself”

Walt Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855. In a rather confusing publication history, the original volume Leaves of Grass had no titles for any of the poems within it. But Whitman kept putting out new editions of the book Leaves of Grass, eventually giving titles to the individual poems. The first and longest poem in the original collection was eventually entitled “Song of Myself.”

All of which creates a real headache for those who want to discuss the first poem in the first volume of Leaves of Grass. Technically that original poem is not entitled “Song of Myself.” Pity the poor person wanting to discuss this poem.

Let’s just embrace our inner Whitman. “What I assume you shall assume.” Let’s call the poem “Leaves of Grass.”

“Leaves of Grass” is a sprawling mess of a poem. If you think that is a harsh statement, you have never read the poem. It is deliberately and cheerfully a sprawling mess. I doubt a single person has ever read through the poem, all 60 pages of it in the Library of America volume, and maintained focus throughout. It’s that type of poem. Endless freely flowing lines with no discernable pattern, flittering all over the place.

Whitman is responsible for a ton of horrible contemporary poetry. Whitman has a lot of good lines, so he is better than the contemporary formless dreck. But he definitely made the idea of writing a formless poem seem possible to people who have no ear for a beautiful line.

Thoreau published Walden in 1854. A fun parlor game would be to pick random bits from Thoreau and random lines in Whitman and see if it is obvious which is which. (OK, it would not really be a fun parlor game.) As far as content and catchy images, they are the same. Thoreau uses complete sentences though. So, one way to think about “Leaves of Grass” is “Walden written with poor grammar.”

Take an example from fairly late in the poem:

I tramp a perpetual journey,
My signs are a rain-proof coat and good shoes and a staff cut from the woods;
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, nor church nor philosophy;
I lead no man to a dinner-table or library or exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooks you round the waist,
My right hand points to landscapes of continents, and a plain public road.

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.

The bit above has some rather nice lines, memorable and evocative. Tramping a perpetual journey, the signs (and the theological implication of the idea of signs), no settled abode, the knoll, the left hand hooked around a waist and the right hand pointing onward (you can imagine the painting). Then the final charge in the two line stanza. There is something really beautiful here.

As a standalone poem, those 10 lines would be rather good. But, this isn’t a standalone poem. Those lines come after over 55 pages of other unrelated things. That is bad enough. The real crime, however, is the next five lines. Whitman doesn’t leave this image after those ten lines. The poem continues:

It is not far . . . . it is within reach,
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know,
Perhaps it is every where on water and on land.

Shoulder your duds, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth;
Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.

Ugh. Those five lines completely destroy the beauty of the previous ten lines. Suddenly, immediately after being told you must travel alone, Whitman and you are traveling together with shouldered duds, seeking something which is everywhere, in fact maybe you are on it right now. Instead of the marvel of that hooked left hand and the right hand pointing out to the horizon, we get…what exactly? Just some general mush.

The whole of “Leaves of Grass” is like that. Nice images surrounded by lumpy porridge. It is hard to even notice the good bits because you must be lucky to have your mind alert at the moment when they show up.

All of this leads to a couple of thought experiments which would be fantastic real experiments for anyone who wanted to spend a lot of time conducting them.

1. Imagine taking “Leaves of Grass” and chopping it down to 10 percent of its current length. You can pick which parts to keep. The result is a six page poem, presented not as an excerpt from “Leaves of Grass” but as an original poem. There are then two questions to ask about that new shorter poem:

a) Is it good? Is it better than the full version? Does it convey the same impression but in a fashion that makes you more likely to want to reread it? Would a poem that is 20% of the original be better or worse than the poem that is 10% of the original?

b) If you got a bunch of people to do this experiment at the same time, how similar are the shorter poems? Which parts are in all of them? (The opening stanza for sure. The barbaric yawp for sure.) What percentage of the lines of this poem are in the essential 10% for everyone who does this experiment?

2. Imagine scouring all the places where people mark their favorite passages. Then add in all the evaluative reviews of the poem. What percentage of “Leaves of Grass” has ever been chosen to be highlighted? Or putting it the other way, how much of “Leaves of Grass” has never been pulled out as something admirable?

Is “Leaves of Grass” a Great Poem? I think the answer has to be “Yes” because parts of it are Great Poetry. But, the fact that this is actually a debatable question again points to the massive problem with this poem. I have read it several times in my life. I am not eager to read it again. But, I know, once the memory of the tortuous slog has faded, I will once again think, “It can’t be all that bad, can it?”

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