A true story.

The sky appeared as if by accident one day. After years of black, all the people looked up and saw open fields of blue with only here and there a small puff of white cloud like pollen from the flower of the sun.

At first they were simply stunned, then awed, then afraid. Their superstition suggested all kinds of omens, that the darkness was folded back because of some sin, or that a great transgressor had died and blessing was restored, all theories conflicting and unfounded on any infallible truth. Suppositions filled the cleared air.

Eventually, as is the way with people, the sunshine ceased to be a wonder and they grew accustomed to illumination and bright light. They no longer stood in the meadows looking up. They went back to walking with bowed heads, looking at the brown dirt and their worn shoes.

The little girl walked to the top of a short hill. There was one brown-limbed dogwood sprouting from the hill's green grass. She stood beneath it and shook her black hair at the sky, as if to invite it for a romp on the ground. The sky beamed back, all blue and joyful and filled with birdsong even though no birds flew there. It was the sky, singing, and the girl sang back.

She had never heard singing, or seen a bird, because neither of those things existed where she was from; if they ever had, it was a long time ago, and they were long forgotten.

An old farmer saw her up there, singing, shook his head, and dug his fingers further in the soil like bony worms.

Change is often painful; the first pang is a harbinger of transformation. With the little girl it was not so. When the first feather poked through her smooth skin, it merely tickled. She stroked its black barbs, soft and shy, and in the way of little girls she was not afraid, and she did not try to guess what would happen next. She only watched.

Everything from the shafts to the afterfeathers was black. Not crow black, or even raven black, but simple blackbird black. It was a warm black, like a log still blazing in the fire. The girl looked, and in place of clothes or skin she was feathers all over. A little ruffle, and she spread her new wings and took off with a little hop. The dogwood turned from green to white, all its blossoms going off at once like little clouds.

The place where she first struck the sky turned ink-colored. From there, the dark spread until it had encompassed the whole sky, an enormous map in which every feature bled into the next. After awhile, the people once more grew accustomed to darkness.

Never again was the little girl seen on earth. But sometimes, if you'd take the time to look into the sky, a small patch stood out blacker than the rest, and you could almost believe in birds.

blessed are the satisfied

For many, the end of hunger is food. If we can only put bread in empty mouths want will cease. Even Christians have succumbed to this myth, mobilizing for social action and reform, meeting physical needs before (and sometimes in place of) spiritual needs.

Christ's Gospel is very different. He offers the end of hunger in Himself, His body as bread for those willing to accept such strange fare, His blood pure wine for the parched.

His whole self a complete feast for those invited to His wedding.

How do we manage to get such a simple concept wrong? Too many times I've heard the most famous Beatitude turned into "blessed are the hungry," leaving the true depths of Jesus' statement unplumbed, the gravity and the joy of "blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled." The emptiness of the misquote is fear-black; but the filling of the righteousness-starved is a beautiful mystery.

We do not partake of Christ because we're desolate and need to be filled; we come to the Table because we're already full of Him. We come because we want to be like Him. We come because our desires are captive, our wills hostage in His hands, because He leads us there and commands us to eat and drink, to satisfy our hunger in true manna and new wine.

Christ demands of us nothing short of perfection, and that perfection is Himself. Our desire to conform to His likeness gives us no option but to slake ourselves on Him, to become like Him through steady consumption and digestion of the Word of God.

If we belong to God, we are fed. It's not a single meal as some suggest; it's a continual, neverending, unabating banquet on the Lord Jesus Christ who is without end and without death and who will continue to present Himself to us for our sustenance and nourishment through all the endless days of eternity. How can we turn from His body and His blood? How can we stop devouring the God of our days, who changes our countenance by easy stages the more we delight only in Him?

Christians, we cannot. If God is our God, righteousness is our food, and there is none righteous but Christ alone. In Jesus' name, let our hunger never cease, and our appetites never falter.

Christ is not a metaphor.

Everything is a metaphor. The calculus is simply a series of equations representative of the physical world; words are symbols that represent meaning; dollar bills are not inherently valuable, they are simply representations of abstract value and can be exchanged as such.

It's doubtful whether our human minds could even learn apart from the exchange of metaphors. Metaphor is transfer, and to understand that which we cannot requires a transference, a swapping of something we grasp in order to grasp what we do not. It's more art than science, more poetry than logic, but true metaphor is neither unscientific nor illogical. It's simply another way of putting the difficult-to-articulate truths that surround us.

Nowhere is metaphor more profound or profuse than in the Bible. It begins in Eden: each true truth (to borrow from Schaeffer), each physical reality, also represents other truths, both physcial and spiritual, earthly and heavenly. The Tree of Knowledge is not simply the harbinger of Death, the catalyst of unlawfulness, or even a tree with bark, leaves and fruits: Christ died on a tree just as Adam, trees represent wealth and abundance and peace, and trees (ironically) symbolize life.

All these metaphors are mutual. If the Tree of Knowledge represents Death, Death also symbolizes the Tree, at least indirectly through man's sin. No metaphor only works one way; that would make it not a metaphor. None, that is, except one.

The life and Passion of Christ is the only event in human history that is not a metaphor. There is nothing representative of His work, nothing that can better explain it except the narrative of His deeds, nothing that connects us to it besides the blood spilled and the body resurrected. Adam may be a foreshadowing of Christ, but Christ is no mere holy duplicate of Adam—Christ is the First and Last Man, the sum of creation, the consummation of God and humanity in a single violent, righteous, flaming union. Christ is the final, the only, the supreme superlative.

Why do we treat Him otherwise? Why do we filter Him through our truncated understanding, insisting on likening His death and glorious return to the transitory elements of life we think we know so well, but which in fact we only know in relation to other things, as metaphors? We talk of redemption as though it were just another modest blessing, or (worse) as though redemption is something of which humans are capable.

Christ is the one thing we are able to understand without the aid of metaphor. Not that we understand Him entirely or even fractionally, and especially not that we understand Him apart from His willingness that we should do so, but He has given us life and presented Himself as the unfailing stream from which we are to drink truth and salvation and wisdom. Yet we just as unfailingly look elsewhere for drink, places infinitely less pure and satisfying.

Why?

The power of the Holy Spirit within us calls us and strengthens us to approach Our Lord without fear, in hope and submissiveness. He moves within us and speaks directly, without the use of metaphor, through His Word. God's Word in us, and we look for knowledge elsewhere. Why?

Highbrow? or simply good?

I've been called a book snob, an art snob, a film snob, and probably other kinds of snob that I can't remember. Recently, I was told I "talk fancy." I'm not even sure what that means, but I absolutely deny every charge, and counter with the assertion that my taste is far less "snobbish" than that of my accusers, largely because I don't make the same distinctions between "high" and "low" art they seem to imply.

No one reads books they think are awful. At least, not on a regular basis; you might just to keep abreast of current trends, or to make fun once in awhile, but most people won't consistently read books (or watch movies, etc.) they think are bad. People naturally apply hierarchy to what they enjoy; these books are bad, these ones are okay, those over there are really good. Whether it can be helped or not isn't really the question. People rate everything.

But it's not just that they accept some things and reject others. To keep the book analogy, there are books they don't like, books they like, and books they call good but hold at arm's length because they're too difficult or intimidating or dark. The books in the latter category (which could include anything from The Lord of the Rings to Crime and Punishment to If on a winter's night a traveler) are held to be mystically superior to other books, an elite group to which common detritus cannot and must not attain, but to which most readers apparently cannot attain, either.

It's the old cult of the artist, come back to dictate both taste and preference. Because, for every person who admits they've never even attempted War and Peace, there are three more who carry it around to look smart and maybe get a date at the coffee shop.

When will society realize there's no such thing as highbrow and lowbrow art? no difference between pop, folk, and high culture? no meaning in definitions that insist on arbitrary gradations of greatness and worthlessness?

There are two kinds of book: good books, and bad books. Good books are consistent within themselves, have something worthwhile to say, are aesthetically pleasing, and have at least some semblence of subtlety. Bad books are bland, obvious, unsubtle, and present no unique, interesting, significant, or accurate view of the world or people. And never the twain shall meet. Does it matter or should it trouble us that both The Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh and Moby-Dick are legitimately considered good books? Absolutely not.

If I say, "That book wasn't very good," I'm not saying, "You're an idiot for having read that." What I am saying is that it failed the litmus all good books must pass. Likewise, if I say the Star Wars films are bad, I'm not implying that no one should watch them; just that they shouldn't be put on the pedestal they often are, and that George Lucas has the originality of a termite.

A snob is by definition one who "imitates, cultivates, or slavishly admires social superiors." If I don't like a movie or painting or book, it's because it doesn't live up to the objective standard movies or paintings or books should live up to. That doesn't make me a snob. In fact, it makes whoever accuses me of snobbery the very thing they appear to hate, since they're the ones attributing hierarchy to a body of work the individual elements of which can only be described as good or bad.

the Word

some writers eschew punctuation on grounds that it impedes their creativity or restricts their style too much but the fact is its hard to understand what they mean sometimes because the words run together like skeletons without meat or skin barely connected either in idea or coherence still less in anything resembling the proper use of the english language but thats just the point they say because we need no longer bind ourselves by the outmoded grammatical constructs of ages past and instead should revel in the freedom of the new age which isnt really a new age at all but they dont know that for them history is an endless progress toward the perfection of mankind an apotheosis based not on order and meaning but on self expression and the celebration of license, neither of which are solid foundations for any age, whether old or new.

the rejection of punctuation isn't creative. creativity demands a certain observance of tradition and accepted forms coupled with an ability to push those forms to their known limits. Cormac McCarthy doesn't use quotation marks, but following his characters' dialogue isn't difficult. e.e. cummings manipulated the order of words and their punctuation as few others have been able (despite his many imitators), but meaning is still conveyed through his poems, often very beautiful meaning.

Throwing out the tools of language is tantamount to throwing out language itself. When Jackson Pollock started splashing paint on canvases, he wasn't reinventing painting as an artform, he was declaring it dead. Gertrude Stein didn't love words; she hated them, and so tortured them and her unfortunate readers by making them do things they weren't meant to do. William S. Burroughs wasn't even a writer in the proper sense, he was a crazy man intent on smashing English into a fine powder the same as he did with his drug cocktails every morning.

Christians who try to imitate this style are betraying not only their craft, but their faith. Christ is the Word, the organizing person of the Trinity that brought order from chaos by speaking when the Spirit hovered over the deep spaces. He didn't speak anarchy to create, He spoke clearly so that each element would know exactly what it was supposed to do and how it was to arrange itself.

When God delivered the Law to Moses on Mt. Sinai, He did so in meaningful phrases, not a jumble of words that Moses had to ponder just to make some kind of limited sense of. Through the Prophets God spoke plainly, both of judgment and redemption, wanting Israel to understand and turn from their sin and uttering accordingly. Christ on earth revealed the mind of the Father and His will in poetic speech that, while hard to accept, isn't difficult to understand.

The purpose of language is not to obscure truth, but to divulge it, to elaborate on it, to explain it to those still lost in the wasteland of meaninglessness and hazy communication. Those who speak in darkness may think it's powerful, or artistic, or even simply cool, but their rebellion against God makes them fundamentally unreliable judges. There is one Judge who decrees, one Speaker to whom we must listen, and one Word that is truth powerful enough to save. We hear it and respond because the message is plain.

Not everything a Christian writes needs to be the Gospel explicitly, but everything every Christian writes should reflect the Gospel. A "stylistic" choice as fundamentally flawed as the abuse or rejection of punctuation is not a reflection of God's truth. It's a depiction of man's chaotic and disjointed rebellion, a sad commentary on his foolishness apart from God, and a pathetic attempt to establish a false truth apart from Christ's. As followers of the Word, we must in turn reject this pretense of autonomy in favor of the celebration and presentation of meaningful truth, whatever its critical reception.

The first full day of spring.

It snowed all day long. Not much of it stuck, but the sky was gray and the clouds too close to the ground and the air stiff with its own chill from morning to nighttime. Even inside it was cold, even with the heater running, even beneath two thick shirts. I wondered if we'd ever see the first flower of the year, or if it would remain buried in life-forbidding snow.

Snow falling is frustratingly silent. You can't hear it piling on itself, or hitting the lamp-posts, or falling off the branches of trees. It moves like a too-pale ghost of itself, finger raised to lips in a shush of all it touches. When it has fallen, only hard cold and muffled sound are left.

And impossible white. The world beneath snow is only a contour of reality, but no less real than what lies under it. It isn't the shape of snow, but its white whiteness, that is foreign. Because we're used to color; because we're used to conflict; because we're used to asymmetry and chaos. Snow shakes us into acknowledgement that uniformity and purity and stillness are possible.

The Bible uses snow as a metaphor for our sinfulness after Christ removes it. When His blood has finished its purifying work, we're left white as snow. But this is no mere blanket over us, the whiteness begins within and spreads slowly out to everything we think, say, and do. The main difference is that with snow the change is often accomplished overnight.

Kind of like manna in the desert—the children of Israel woke up, and there was white manna all around like snow. They ate it, and it was good because it was the food God gave them. Manna like snow, manna like communion, each thing a symbol of itself and something else, each one showing our incapable minds just a little more of God and His goodness.

Snow and manna are mysteries. But their properties, where they come from and how, are less important than what they represent. The significance of all things lies in their relation to the Maker, and not in their constitution and form. Our redeemed state in Christ is not just like snow; snow is like our redeemed state, and reflects it the same way it reflects house lights and moonbeams.

Some part of me has always disliked snow. It makes driving difficult, it's cold, and when it's gone it leaves mud and wet. But snow was here before our petty inconveniences, and it will be here long after we've become fully sanctified in Christ's presence. It will continue to reflect the power of His salvation, and it will continue to fall like manna on a weary and starved people, and we will watch it fall from His hands together with Job, and David, and all those whose hearts He's cleansed from the beginning of time and forever.

The Apathy of Activity

Adventure is essentially an escape from the mundane. Our prosaic lives demand it. Every day we wake up, get dressed, go to work, come home and have some dinner, watch TV, go to sleep. There are few breaks in the routine. Oh, there's the weekend, when we pursue our hobbies, go to church, sleep in and fry eggs and do the crossword, but even weekends are part of the routine.

So we invent stories about adventure, the positioning of a man or woman against nature, evil, bad guys, wild animals, whatever obstacles to safety and comfort we can come up with. It's the hazard that gets our blood up, the element that animates us, the reason we devise more and more stories of peril.

Many of which are devised quite badly. I watched The Adventures of Tintin recently, and while I wasn't expecting a cinematic masterpiece, I was quite surprised by what I actually got. The whole thing was plot, and the plot never stopped. All two hours were a frenetic race from gunfight to chase to swordfight to fistfight to explosion to secret passageway to......it was utterly exhausting. And while those who read my post on John Carter will know I don't expect every adventure story to be a weighty reflection on life and death, I do want there to be something more than just a series of events.

Even Edgar Rice Burroughs knew you had to put some flesh to the characters. Not so that you could see them develop, but just to add some kind of human factor that would make all the action and suspense interesting in the first place. Without that, the adventures simply become flat images, disconnected and of no value for the viewer or reader.

We can't identify with people who never rest. Because, as exciting as adventures are, it's the rest afterward that makes them most appealing. That's why we long for happy endings, so we can rest assured that the heroes and heroines don't have to go on fighting till the bitter end, that someday they'll get to sit back and relax, with the adventures of youth a happy but distant memory.

This is certainly the structure of Christian theology. We fight now, but with the knowledge that eventually we'll fight no longer, we'll simply rest in the glory of God and the love of Christ, free forever from the fight against evil, against our own natures, against the enemies of our Lord and Savior. Because while all adventures don't have to be philosophically meaningful, all the good ones are symbolic. The Christian story has the advantage of being symbolic and real.

A movie like Tintin has no rest in view, and really would have nothing to offer if the idea of cessation were somehow shoehorned into the script. For directors like Spielberg, who have nothing to say and a great desire to convince us that they do, the idea of progress is a dizzying cumulation of events moving us from one place to another. Unfortunately, there's nowhere to get to, and no place really to start from.

This leads to nothing so much as apathy. Why should we care if the heroes have accomplished their goals? What does it matter if they're still alive? All the movie cares to share with us are their exploits, at breakneck speed, and with no human element. In the Bible, Christ's exploits are prominent, but they have significance and meaning; without those elements, there's nothing to do but sit around waiting for the next poorly executed action movie to spin past our blank stares as rapidly as the reels can go.

Is it courage?

If you're good at preaching, that's what you should do. If filmmaking is your forte, make films.

This fundamental logic seems to escape the folks at Sherwood Pictures, particularly now-veteran director and star Alex Kendrick. Courageous is his latest effort, the story of four cop friends in rural Georgia (and a Mexican immigrant worker) who overcome life's plentiful obstacles through faith in Christ. The central struggle in this film is that of Christian men stepping up to lead their families in godly fashion.

A message no good Christian would argue with, myself included. Christian men do need to lead their families, and the call to do so seems particularly urgent now in our age of neglected responsibility and outright abandonment.

A message, too, that could provide the basis for an excellent film. It monumentally fails to do so here. It's not that Courageous is a bad movie; it's that it's scarcely a movie. Granted, it's a Golden Globe winner compared to Facing the Giants or Fireproof, but that's not saying a whole lot. Facing the Giants was juvenile and doctrinally suspect; Courageous is sophomoric and doctrinally ambiguous.

Running through every Sherwood Pictures production is the idea that faith in God will either straighten every path, or cut tragedy short just before things go haywire. That's not to say tragedy never occurs, just that bad things will always lead to better things. Jesus promises His followers a hard road and tribulation; Kendrick seems to counter with an affirmation of constant blue skies and the idea that bad acting will not return void as long as the actors' hearts are right.

Even more troublesome are the constant emotional appeals. Grown men cry a lot in all of these movies, and there's always a Hallmark-inspired guitar and synth business going on in the background to stir our hearts to conversion-pitch. The Gospel of Christ is not an emotional business. It convicts us of our sin, demands our repentance, and calls us to follow Him whatever the cost. I don't think Simon the Zealot was playing sappy John Tesh pieces in the background during the Sermon on the Mount.

That's not to say we should never feel emotion as part of our faith, and to give Kendrick some credit there are plenty of legitimate tears in Courageous given the often sad plot turns. But in the film's last scene, when Kendrick's character delivers a Braveheart-on-Lucado speech, it's clear that all along he's only wanted us to feel his message is right, not to know it because that's what Scripture tells us.

Scripture is often appealed to, but never quoted. That's a major lack in a movie clumsily trying to convince us that the Gospel changes everything. The Gospel does change everything, but not necessarily in the way Kendrick implies.

Which leads me to my initial complaint: Kendrick evidences mastery of a certain kind of megachurch preaching, but no evidence that he can actually make a movie. Courageous is a Southern-fried, often strangely racist, megachurch-y, sanctified version of CSI, but it's not a work of art in any sense. There's not one moment of subtelty, nowhere are the characters portrayed as anything other than stock characters, and (especially odd for a Christian movie) symbolism is never employed.

A lot of critics have simply derided the Christianity of the film's cast and crew. As a Christian, I have no desire to do that, or to appear as though I disrespect or disagree with the underlying message of the movie. What I do want to know is, why do Christians think it's OK to make bad art on behalf of Christ? This could have been a good movie; it wasn't. Does its message redeem it? Is it courage simply to preach when the chosen medium is intended for other purposes? Somehow, I don't think so.

John Carter is my hero.

Probably not as much as the next guy, but I do like simple escapist films from time to time. Unfortunately, there are so few of them. Genuinely escapist films, that is. The superhero drivel only serves to point out to audiences in the most slavish fashion that they are, in fact, inescapably in the real world; The Adventures of Tintin was simply an experiment in cramming as much plot into just under two hours as possible; the Star Wars movies (all of them, really) and the Matrix franchise are too full of pseudo-Eastern philosophy and "character development" to be much fun.

One reason I love reading books by Edgar Rice Burroughs is that the man had an exquisite sense of pace and a love of good old fashioned action. He wasn't a good writer, but he wasn't really trying to be. He told adventure stories, and he did it quite well.

I was expecting John Carter to be pretty awful. One of the main problems with adventure/action movies these days is that the protagonist always has to undergo some kind of self-realization experience, reaching into his heart for the strength to do what needs to be done, usually called "the right thing" by the skewed ethics of modern filmdom. Why wouldn't they do that to the Earthman-turned-Marsman hero?

Magically, they didn't. Maybe it was because Michael Chabon helped write the screenplay, or maybe it was simply because the director isn't an idiot, but John Carter actually met my hopes and shattered my expectations. I'm not saying this was a great movie; it didn't have anything to say, and it was simply an adventure story. Which is why I loved it.

If your story has no real significance, don't bore us all to death and make yourself look foolish by pretending it does. Director Andrew Stanton (better known for his work with Pixar) avoided that common sin by making a film that wasn't overly corny (it had its moments), featured a love story that actually included some subtlety and wasn't sophomoric, and had action you could actually follow visually (unlike G.I. Joe, Transformers, or just about any Marvel movie). It also wasn't crude, disgusting, or unnaturally obsessed with the sexuality of its clearly beautiful characters.

The part when John Carter fights an entire Martian army is way cool.

And largely why this movie exists. It's meant to give audiences a good time, and it does. It doesn't insult their intelligence by pretending to have anything meaningful to say. It simply glories in being awesome. There will clearly be sequels; I hope they live up to this one.

John Popper gives me the wrong kind of blues.

John Popper of Blues Traveler fame is often called a virtuoso harmonica player. Sure, the guy can play his harps the way other dudes play guitars, but the deep wah and piercing scream he seems constrained to lack the most essential element of all good music (especially music coming from a band with "Blues" in its name): Soul.

I found my old Blues Traveler collection recently, and listened through it. Each member is individually a fine musician—as far as bass players, Bobby Sheehan was probably among the best (he died in 1999), and Popper has a great voice and mad harmonica skills. Taken together, however, their undeniable talent becomes a wash of competing sound.

Not that any of them (besides Popper) is particularly a prima donna. In the jam band tradition, they're almost impossibly tight, even at their most chaotic. But I say it again: the music lacks Soul.

As does most modern music. I've been in love with rock'n'roll most of my life, but it's sad to think how little truly fantastic rock music exists. And if we explore the lesser non-blues based genres like pop, modern country, techno, etc., the prospect is even more bleak. Many of the musicians are very good, but they have no connection to the feeling music can generate, or ought to generate.

Which is odd, since so much modern music seems entirely based on mere emotion. It's designed to evoke a mood more than to communicate anything significant, yet the mood generally produced when I listen to bands like Blues Traveler is simple boredom. Despite the chops, there's nothing to sink my teeth into. It's bland and tasteless, not because there's no flavor, but because there's too much flavor.

To cleanse my palate, I listened to some Woody Guthrie. Just an old dry-wind voice and his "This Machine Kills Fascists" guitar. He's not particularly "good" in the way most critics mean, but the man was clearly one of the greatest musicians of recent times. He had simplicity, mean guitar skills, an excellent lyric sensibility, and Soul. You can literally feel the emotion in his voice and songs, not because he's virtuosic, but because he means what he sings.

That's probably my biggest beef with Blues Traveler. There's no indication that Popper's rambling lyrics are backed by conviction, or that any of the players would stand behind their licks, fills, and solos in a court of law. It's either showboating, or it's intended to sell records; either way, it's un-emotional and not very good music. I'm ditching my collection.

God is present.

When Elijah was hiding in the mountains, he was visited by God. But God wasn't in the whirlwind, or the earthquake, or the fire. He was no more than a still small voice. The cataclysms that preceded Him were no clothing for Him, only His messengers. He does not wear nature; He created nature.

Rain and strong winds have been incessant around here lately. Trees have lost limbs and caught fire; the rain is visible and comes down at a sharp angle; it's cold and grey. And invariably, people complain about the weather.

I have to admit to doing so myself, just today. I said the weather was absurd, that it was fine for midwinter but shouldn't continue to plague us on spring's doorstep. Then I shrugged, and splashed through interminable puddles to my car, the wind lashing my back and sides as though I'd offended it.

Complaint comes naturally. We complain about everything, and sometimes we know we shouldn't, while at others we bury it beneath excuse and rationalization. But complaint is rebellion, a premeditated attack on the mercy, grace and abundance of our Saviour. A lack of gratitude, of praise, even of simple acknowledgement.

It is a lack of wonder.

One of the many responses God's presence commands is awe. Before Him, who can stand? and when He has passed by, who will remain? Yet there is a sense in which we are never out of God's presence, never out of His sight or reach or hearing. We enter His presence in a unique way during congregational worship, and in Heaven we will certainly be engulfed in His glory in ways not possible now, trapped as we are in earth and ignorance. But wherever we go, He's there.

Not in the sense pantheists would have us believe, or panentheists for that matter, but in the sense that He holds all things together, that He is the singularity of the universe around which everything revolves and to Whom all things submit.

He's in the wind, and the rain, and the frigid air. How can we complain about their presence? To do so is to complain about their Master, our Master, the sovereign of the elements, and that is not behaviour befitting His servants and His children. It is not an attitude of wonder, and it certainly isn't an attitude for mere mortals to entertain in the presence of Him who saves, judges, and rules all things.

Out of the Labyrinth

Art is no substitute for faith, worship, or biblical exegesis. It can, however, support Christians in the pursuit of clear thinking, godly living, and appreciation of God's created world. Indeed, it ought to do those things; there is a real sense in which it must. If it does not, it is either bad art, or not art at all.

Those who reject art, or who simply indulge in entertainment with no thought to its purpose or quality, devalue the gift God has given us. Art either reflects God's character and the true nature of creation, or it does not. Consequently, there are only two kinds of art: good art and bad art. Highbrow, lowbrow, folk culture, pop culture—these are all human terms, and don't reflect the combative nature of art, the sense in which good art and bad art are constantly contending for support and acknowledgement.

Identifying what is what is a skill which must be developed. Most people can't simply watch a movie or read a book and understand its themes without plenty of practice; but if a Christian is going to ever watch a movie or read a book or go to an art museum or listen to music, he or she must practice and cultivate that skill. There is no option. We're called to put on the mind of Christ. It is essential, therefore, that we learn to be discerning in all things.

There are messages in every art form and medium, and most of them are anti-Christian. It's not wrong to read Nietzsche, but it is wrong to read Nietzsche without analyzing his work from a biblical Christian perspective; it's not a sin to watch Inception, but it is a sin for a Christian to watch it without comparing everything that transpires onscreen to Christian doctrine.

Most people would agree it's impossible not to be engaged with art (whether good or bad) on some level, no matter your cultural context and personal preferences. If that's the case, Christians are obligated to develop a working attitude and approach to art, one that is careful, perceptive, and most of all dedicated to growth in Christ.

It's like a labyrinth that appears complex to those trapped inside, but seen from above becomes a simple puzzle anyone can solve. All humans begin trapped in the middle of the labyrinth, but their goal (whether they realize it or not) is to make their way, not out of the labyrinth, but above it. The contemporary view that all things are subjective is defunct, and was so from the beginning; the ancient modern view is that all things either speak truth or lies, and that it is the Christian's responsibility to untangle both wherever he finds them.

The Blood, the Cup.

One of my favorite quotes is from Friedrich Nietzsche: "....if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." While he certainly didn't intend it as such, it's an eloquent summation of the effect sin has on us.

We celebrate Communion every Sunday at our church. Yesterday, as I stared into my own small cup of wine, it struck me that Christ's blood also gazes into us, though its gazing is far different from that of the abyss.

If Communion is only a symbolic act, then my realization would be a false one. If its only purpose is to remind us of what Jesus did on the cross, there really is no place for reflection on the act itself; the eating and the drinking are only rote behaviours divested of mystical significance and power.

But Communion is far more than that. It is spritual food, and mystical unification of the Body with the Body, and the Body with the Head. Not only the saving act it reflects, but the spiritual power it effects in the faithful of God are worthy of reflection. And so I stared into my cup of wine, into the spiritual realm of spilled blood and violently trampled grapes.

The wine stared back at me.

Only, so much different than Nietzsche's horrific abyss, the wine that gazed into me also entered me, and it brought more of God's abundant grace with it, more strength to resist sin, more courage to pursue good openly. We only drink a little at a time, but then the road to Christian maturity is trod only a few small inches at a time. That's why we drink and eat over and over, just as we move one foot in front of the other....over and over.

Christians are all too eager to resist the mystical elements of the Christian faith, the spiritual doctrines that cannot be properly or fully articulated in words. But that doesn't keep the mystical exchange from occurring, doesn't bind the Spirit in place, or sequester God to a material region in which His Holy Ghost has no purpose and no power. Rather, He intersects the spiritual realm with the physical, meeting His creation through His creation. Nowhere is this more certain, more obvious, or more genuinely terrifying than in the Holy Supper that sees each of us who partake.

Simply a post about the moon.

Tonight the moon was very large. It glowed rich orange over the treetops, a few clouds like bandages clinging to the top, as though the Man in the Moon had suffered a head wound. It must've been a very old head wound, though, because the Man's had that same pained expression as long as I can remember.

It was daylight when the moon first came in view; my fiancee and I were headed south on Oregon Hwy. 99W. When we returned it was dark, and the looming orange moon was eerie, too close and too round and far too orange. It outshone the stars.

The hour or so we'd spent in premarital counseling with our pastor was long enough for the sky to turn black, but not enough time to smudge out the moon.

Now it's a few hours later, and the moon is still orange and round, but it's diminished somewhat in size. I don't know if it has actually, or if it's just an optical trick, something M.C. Escher could have pulled off handily with the right pencils. I half expect to wake up in the morning to an enormous moon, perhaps right up against my window, mouth open wide and eyes turned down at the corners in pain or fear or sorrow.

The moon's light is just a reflection of the sun's. Not, as the Greeks supposed, Artemis pulling pale fire behind her chariot. I have a hard time believing they actually thought that, but I guess it's possible. We all believe crazy things; believing the moon's light is just a reflection of the sun's is kind of crazy in its own way. But then, I'm no scientist; maybe it makes more sense to those who are.

The Tree of Life, by Terrence Malick

I'm not really surprised that the Best Picture award for 2011 would go to a second-rate movie, or that a far superior film was overlooked. But the discrepancy this year between the film that won and the film that should have won is pretty staggering.

You all know my opinion of The Artist.

Terrence Malick's credits as writer are somewhat more impressive than his directorial credentials, though the latter are no cause for embarrassment. The Thin Red Line is one of the best war movies of the last 60 years, and indeed, one of the only actual war movies ever made (as opposed to anti-war movies). But his latest offering, The Tree of Life, is quite simply one of the finest films ever made.

Audiences wanting an easy viewing experience will be disappointed. Malick seems to delight in metaphor and suggestion as much as direct storytelling, but given his adopted medium this is a blessing rather than a curse. Too many films (from any era, really) aren't visual despite their watchable nature; The Tree of Life is almost wholly visual, with short punctuations of dialogue offering just enough context for us to comprehend the tragedy onscreen.

The triumph is a bit more accessible. Long sequences show the birth of stars, the flora of the world, the fauna of the sea, and even dinosaurs (surprisingly not as cheesy as it sounds, though the CGI isn't perfect). These scenes are accompanied by sacred choral music, and clearly represent the creation of the world, though other kinds of creation are also in view.

Essentially the film is about death. The main character's brother dies, the main character is dying, both his parents are already dead. Most of the action takes place as flashbacks to a Texas boyhood beneath the elms, and one senses there is a high level of autobiography at work. And yet death is not the dominant feeling; there is birth, and rebirth, both physical and spiritual, as the main character (played as an adult by Sean Penn) grapples with his upbringing and his present circumstances. There's a fine degree of ambiguity at all times, but the final scene is clearly meant to be taken as a redemptive assertion of grace.

Malick is a self-proclaimed devout Catholic. He makes films about his faith, and about his religion, and The Tree of Life is no exception. The family patriarch is played by Brad Pitt, and in him we have an exemplary case of hypocrisy not yet beyond the pale of repentance, not yet too dead to be saved. His son's greatest battle is coming to believe that this is so.

The Tree of Life is a vast, lovely film, a true artistic triumph. I don't want to say too much about it because you need to watch it, but there is no question in my mind that it deserved the Oscar far more than The Artist. An award of such scope should be given to a film that embraces universal themes and doesn't wallow in its own cleverness; Malick's masterpiece is such a film—The Artist is not.

The Cult of the Artist

During the Renaissance a new phenomenon emerged in which the artist was seen as important as the art he or she produced. The most blatant iteration of this philosophy was shaped during the Romantic movement, when the Artist was seen as some kind of spiritually and emotionally advanced person capable of capturing beauty and truth better than other people. The stereotype persists.

In our postmodern "everyone is unique" milieu, the idea that the artist is a different kind of person has led to all kinds of nonsense, like eccentricity as a badge of creativity, the acceptance of bad behaviour as a necessary corollary to the process of creation, and the association of artists with darkness and melancholia. (Melancholy as a prerequisite for good art is its own absurdity; it deserves its own post.)

The Artist (as its name might imply) propagates the artist cult motif shamelessly. Ironically, I have problems with the film on an artistic level, but many more from an ideological standpoint. To get the artistic problems out of the way: the director steals plot elements wantonly (most obviously from Singin' in the Rain, Sunset Boulevard, and Vertigo), fails to capture the feel or attitude of a silent film, and (at 1 hr. 40 min.) has created a film that, using the salient elements of talkies while eliminating dialogue, is much too long. Jean Dujardin does a fantastic job as the Artist (hilarious and emotive as usual), but his performance isn't enough to save the movie.

In a nutshell, the plot involves a silent movie star who refuses to adapt to the changing times when talking is introduced to films and quickly sinks into despair and depression when his career and personal life fall apart. He's able to return to work at the end, but only when the studio execs agree to let him enter talkies on his own terms.

The Artist is a man dedicated to his art, dedicated to himself, and unwilling to compromise. By the standards of the Cult of the Artist, he's an exemplary human. What he produces is almost inconsequential; his self-produced, self-directed, self-starring film is panned by the critics, and in truth what we see of it is silly and poor, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that the Artist isn't a sell-out, he refuses to sacrifice his own standards on the altar of popular opinion, critical engagement, or current trends.

What happened to valuing art itself? The Cult of the Artist leads to ridiculous things like claims that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare, a theory only permissible if the artist is valued higher than whatever he creates. It's a little odd that such a Modernist attitude should still be defended in our postmodern era (Foucault, after all, declared the death of the author), but The Artist clearly demonstrates that society is unwilling to dispense with the idea.

I reject that attitude altogether. The product is the important part; the artist is simply the conduit. That's not to say he's wholly unimportant or to be disregarded, but he's not some different kind of human or some spiritually advanced sage. A good artist is simply good at what she does, like a good baker, or a good plumber, or a good economist. Once we can break the ideal of the artist as a special kind of entity, maybe we'll have a return of art that says something valid, reflects universal themes, and isn't self-aggrandising. Until then, I think we're doomed to artistic dross on the level of The Artist that neither speaks to the human condition, nor is particularly entertaining.

Among the Thugs, by Bill Buford

I recently read Bill Buford's Among the Thugs. As an American expatriate living in Britain in the 1980s, he became fascinated with the football hooligan culture and decided to investigate and document it firsthand. His book is elegant and profane and visceral and terrifying.

Apparently Buford is friends with Salman Rushdie; personally, I think Buford's the better writer. His style is immediate. The book is over 300 pages long, fairly compact print on broad pages, but it reads quickly. There are no extraneous words. When Buford's material demands brutality, he's uncompromisingly brutal; when it demands compassion, he complies.

In England, fans of football (soccer, in the U.S.) like to riot on match days (Saturdays). Fans of the Manchester United, Chelsea, West Ham, and whatever other clubs go to matches ostensibly to watch the games, but more often than not to participate in crowd violence. Some of it is chilling; most of it is grotesque; one or two andecdotes in this book are simply incredible. The firms (as the gangs of fans, or supporters, are called) clash and battle with each other, with the police, and with public and private property.

Some of the thugs are National Front skinhead neonazis, some are jobless kids, some have families, good jobs, and plenty of money. Individually, many of them are benign, non-violent members of society who've never done jail time and simply fancy a bit of fun. Together, they become an engine of destruction, a single, mindless, chaotic entity. This is what the book is really about.

Buford's conclusions are frankly astonishing. He offers no evidence of any religious background or conviction, but by the time he's become sick of the violence near the end of the narrative he's arrived at a shockingly Christian conclusion: there is no socio-political or socio-economic impulse or excuse for the crowd violence among England's hooligans—there's no reason for what they do other than the human propensity to sin.

He doesn't put it in those words, of course. He calls it human nature. But what is human nature except rebellion against God? It is fleshly nature, sin nature, and there is no excuse or reason for it except man's continual quest for autonomy. Crowd violence, Buford asserts, is always mindless. To the extent that all sin is foolishness, I couldn't agree more.

Don't read this book if you have a weak stomach or an aversion to graphic depictions of violence. If you can handle it, however, Among the Thugs is one of the most penetrating deconstructions of the true nature of fallen man at his most ungoverned you're likely to encounter.

Abhorred of the Rings

Peter Jackson is not the lord of the rings. He's not even an adequate representative; he squandered his chance to commit the greatest fantasy novel of all time to the big screen on weak scripting and lots of special effects.

I'm not so closed-minded as to deny that the special effects were, indeed, special. They were pretty mind-blowing. But The Lord of the Rings isn't some cheap sword-and-sorcery paperback to be treated like any other Conan-esque literary burlesque: it's great art. More specifically, it's great Christian art, which I suppose makes Jackson's experiment in postmodern humanism kind of impressive in its own way.

The Return of the King by Tolkien contains one of the most terrifying and impressive scenes in all literature. Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli travel the Paths of the Dead to enlist the help of the Dead Men of Dunharrow, the Oathbreakers who promised to help Isildur in the War of the Last Alliance. They pledged their swords to Isildur at the Black Stone of Erech, but they broke their promise and were cursed to remain as shades until one would come to call them to fulfill their oath.

In the book, Gimli is so terrified of the Dead that he ends up crawling through the darkness on his hands and knees. It's pretty scary. Legolas has no fear of the Dead because he's an elf; Aragorn simply knows his power over the Men of Dunharrow. In the movie, the Grey Men are portrayed as green comic relief, roughly the size and texture of cartoon farts. No one is afraid of them, not even the Corsairs of Umbar whom they actually fight in this excuse for an adaptation; in the book, the Corsairs kill themselves rather than face the Dead. In the movie, Gimli banters with them, though no one says anything particularly witty (or witty at all, for that matter).

This is just one example of a billion trillion to prove why this film is so bad. It may seem like a rather inconsequential incident to have a cow over, but that's just because the movie treats it so poorly; it's actually one of the central symbolic motifs in the novel.

The Christian symbolism: Aragorn is the returning king, a Christ-figure come to restore what was broken and lost (which he does when he reforges Narsil, accepts the crown of Gondor, etc.). In the case of the Dead, just as Christ led captive a host of captives in Hades, so Aragorn leads the Dead in one final mission before releasing them to their rest. There's more to it than that, but you don't need any more to realize what Jackson has done.

He simply stripped deep Christian metaphor of its power, majesty, and significance, and left a goofy scene that isn't good cinema, good fantasy, or good anything.

I really want to just go on and on about how awful these movies were. Like the fact that Gandalf basically tells Pippin to find courage and guidance in his heart (Gandalf would never say that), or the goofiness of the Mouth of Sauron (one suspects such an entity would not be goofy, whatever else he may be), or the whole business with Faramir. The whole business with Faramir; seriously, what was going on with that?!

So, Peter Jackson succeeded in turning a great Christian novel into a bit of consumer trash. He deserves no praise for this. He deserves to be making films with Jack Black and computer-generated monsters. It's just sad; the saddest part being the fact that he's created a generation of people who think they're fans of The Lord of the Rings when in fact they're just fans of postmodern solipsistic relativism. Jackie, I hope you're happy, though I suspect even the millions you made on your filmic/literary prostitution can't accomplish that.

King Arthur did not know Eastern martial arts.

My fiancee recently told me I should talk about some stuff I like instead of just trashing things I don't. I intend to take her advice, but first I have to rant about a couple more movies.

Clive Owen as King Arthur is pretty awful casting, for starters. Owen makes a good Byronic hero, but not a good traditional hero; Arthur is about as traditional as they come. Sure, the legend probably has roots in some small-time Celtic horse thief, but that's beside the point. The legend of King Arthur and his knights is one of chivalry, purity, honor, and bravery.

Not one of conflicted heretics fighting the baddies using techniques that weren't even developed yet, let alone in pre-Medieval Britain. Even the heresy part is all mixed up: Pelagius was active till his death in the early 5th century; historians agree that Arthur (whoever he was) probably fought off the Saxons in the 6th century; and, Roman Britain was a thing of the past even before the death of Pelagius.

Oh, and who had the brilliant idea of dressing Keira Knightley in "woad" and giving her a bow and arrows (a long bow and arrows, no less).....while having the audacity to call her Guinevere? It's all so absurd and disgusting I don't even know how I made it to the final credits. It's not to my credit that I did.

Even the rest of the cast couldn't save this movie from being terrible: Ioan Gruffudd, Mads Mikkelsen, Ray Winstone, and Til Schweiger as Arthurian Knights is a fantastic idea, unless you have a script someone pasted together from the advertising section of Men's Health and the kind of historical accuracy you'd expect from a six-year-old whose entire knowledge of the past is predicated on some parody he read in Mad.

But none of those elements were why I hated this movie so much (they just added to my feelings of antipathy). I hated King Arthur (2004) because they took an essentially Christian legend and "demythologized" it to the point of senselessness.

And who cares if Arthur wasn't originally a Christian figure? All the extant versions of the story we have are explicitly Christian in their symbolism and imagery. Arthur's death predicted by Merlin; his return at the hour of Britain's darkest need to save Albion; the Summerland kingdom as a result of his return, a paradisiacal time of plenty and peace? Arthur is clearly a Christ-figure.

In this movie, however, he's a bloodthirsty brute with exotically-armed friends who kill everyone while believing that all people have some good in them and that Christ's atoning sacrifice is a theological invention. Or one would assume they believed this, given the Pelagian influence; if not, they're even dumber than they look (a true feat indeed!).

I'm just sick of things having to be reinvented, especially when they're reinvented from glorious awesomeness to resemble nothing so much as Eckhart Tolle with hair on his chest and someone else's blood under his fingernails. It's all absurd, and it's all garbage. And how many people are going to think Arthurian legend is just about feminism, New Age ideals, and carnage after seeing this "movie"? Too many, I do indeed fear.

If Hollywood suddenly blew away in the wind and all the bad movies it's churned out with it, I'm not sure if I'm the only one who'd be celebrating, but I am sure it would be good for everyone. I'll probably have to be content to never watch this sad excuse for cinema again.

I'm back.

Not that anyone has missed me much, but I kind of fell down on the blog job about 1/3 of the way through February. I will be posting much more regularly throughout March. If anyone's interested in my excuses, I got really sick, then I went on vacation (our cabin in the woods had very jittery and unreliable WiFi). Also, I'm getting married in June, so there may be another lull for awhile. Again, not that anyone will notice. I just feel compelled to explain myself. Which, I guess, is why I have a blog in the first place.