Manalive

When my wife and I were going through counseling before we got married, our counselor, Chris Mitchell, told me, "Never stop pursuing your wife. Always remember that there is infinitely more to discover about her." That may have been the best piece of advice I have ever received, and I've found it to be true. Betty is the most amazing person, and she never ceases to surprise me. Innocent Smith, the hero of G. K. Chesterton's Manalive, will go to any length to remind himself that the things he loves in this world are worth loving.

It isn't the people we love or the things we love that become dull; it is we ourselves who become dull to them. We are like the people in Wordsworth's "Westminster Bridge" who, dull of soul, pass over the breath-taking bridge every morning, thinking nothing of it. Smith says of himself, "I am always trying to find him--to catch him unawares. I come in through skylights and trap-doors to find him." He tries to surprise himself, not with new and exotic things, but with the most familiar things that he has forgotten he loves. Michael Moon calls him "a ritualist," and when he encounters a Russian, Smith tells him that the Communists have it all wrong: "True revolution is a return."

In this wild pursuit, Innocent Smith is full of boundless energy. He climbs trees, shoots guns, folds origami, collects colorful bottles, all with the seriousness of a little boy at play. In fact, I think he exemplifies Schiller's assertion that we are most human when we play better than any other hero. Paradoxically, this way of finding himself comes through losing himself. Jesus would like that. "He was not asserting himself like a superman in a modern play. He was simply forgetting himself like a boy at a party." In one funny scene, which I won't explain and ruin for you, Chesterton quotes Tennyson:

"Self knowledge, self reverence, self control:
These three alone will make a man a prig."

The quotation pretty much defines the villain of the book, Dr. Warner, if he is even alive enough to be called a villain. Mary Gray, the quiet heroine, advises her friends to look for men who "look outwards and get interested in the world." With the open eyes of an outward look, a man can wake up to his world and find eternity in a puddle. A letter from Innocent Smith and one of his friends veers off on one of many tangents: "What is a puddle? A puddle repeats infinity, and is full of light; nevertheless, if analyzed objectively, a puddle is a piece of dirty water spread very thin on mud."

I've read this book three times now. It's becoming a ritual! It's not the easiest book to read; Chesterton's wit is sometimes overly complex and hard to follow. High school students may feel at some points like they are wading through mud, but I guarantee that if they will give themselves over to it, they will find it full of light.

The Reason for God

In the introduction to The Reason for God, Timothy Keller talks about a great gulf that separates liberalism and conservatism. "Each side demands that you not only disagree with but disdain the other as (at best) crazy or (at worst) evil." As a conservative Christian school teacher living in Alabama, I have had to fight the desire to paint liberals as crazy or evil, not because it comes naturally to me, but because it's so easy to get a laugh out of my students with it. It's like pushing a button; say the word "Tree-huggers," and everyone is chuckling. I have consciously tried to beat the words "us" and "them" out of myself as a teacher. I have heard Christian authors and pastors, often in the name of evangelism, make fun of beliefs that some of my friends sincerely hold. It throws up a barrier rather than creating a bridge. In The Reason for God, Keller writes to people with a liberal bent, whether they be atheists or some other kind of believer, treating their objections to Christianity with respect. Considering where I live and the circles I walk around in, I'm probably not a great judge of how he comes across, but I can see he is trying, and I really respect that.

In each of the first seven chapters, Keller describes a common objection to Christianity and then attempts to answer it. One issue Keller brings up is the doctrine of God's judgment. "If you believe in a God who smites evildoers, you may think it perfectly justified to do some of the smiting yourself." Keller concedes that the church has a terrible record on this issue--everything from burning people at the stake to going on crusades. Then he argues that the sense of justice that makes such things wrong comes from a belief in God. He quotes from Foucault and Nietzsche, arguing that in a world without God, power is a more sensible motivator than justice. Keller argues that the belief that God will ultimately judge our enemies motivates true believers to leave judgment to God. He quotes Miroslav Volf, a writer who has been at the center of the Balkan conflict: "It takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human non-violence [results from the belief in] God's refusal to judge. In a sun-scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die." Keller explains that "if you have seen your home burned down and your relatives killed and raped," you have a much stronger sense that there must be a God who judges such things.

Of course, there doesn't have to be. We can conceive of a purely material world set swirling by chance. A great many people obviously have. In the second half of the book, Keller argues that though we don't have irrefutable evidence that God exists, we have many clues that form a strong argument for Christianity, and a number of aspects to Christianity that should be appealing to the liberal mind. One of these aspects is a respect for the world we live in. In Christianity, "we do not see the illusion of the world melt away, nor do we see spiritual souls escaping the physical world into heaven. Rather, we see heaven descending into our world to unite with it and purify it of all brokenness and imperfection." Keller argues that the work of God is not only to restore the human soul, but the world we live in. Part of true Christianity then would be "the restoration of perfect shalom, justice, and wholeness in this material world." I love how God's very real love for this world comes across in the book.

The Reason for God begs for discussion. It would be an ideal book for a twelfth grade class to go through together in one quarter. It provides a good corridor not only into Christian apologetics, but also into postmodern philosophy. Many of my students don't know why anyone would have a problem with Christianity; they just haven't been led to think like people outside their own communities. This book is good medicine for the closed minded on any side of whatever religious fences we have raised.

The Bridge Over the River Kwai

This is a review by one of my students, Tim Bartlett.

The Bridge Over the River Kwai, authored by Pierre Boulle, sparks the synapses of the brain into the humid jungle of an uncivilized region of Siam. British prisoners of war suffer to build a bridge over the River Kwai by the compulsion of Japanese military officials. Completing the bridge would aid the Japanese war effort by allowing trains to cross the river to supply Japanese lines with the essentials of war, such as food, ammunition, and more troops. The novel climaxes as Force 316, a demolitions team, pours their mental aptitude, time, and energy into destroying the recently complete bridge. The Bridge Over the River Kwai beautifully concocts a satisfying mixture of entertainment, instruction, function of writing style and plot, and virtual realism.

Swirling around from relaxation to intense contemplation, from laughter to anger and sadness—the reader glides through Boulle’s emotional whirlwind of entertainment. The novel grabs the reader’s interest and covers the emotional spectrum. Never uninterested, the reader excitedly jumps into his chair to experience the entertainment enclosed in The Bridge Over the River Kwai. The flow of ink across the pages of the book enters the eye, fills the brain, sparks the imagination, and BANG! an instant intriguing tale about POW’s in a jungle drops before the reader’s eyes like a projector screen. The novel is a creative code that once inserted into the imagination, creates a virtual motion picture. Reading The Bridge Over the River Kwai rewards the audience with the visual clarity of a movie and the acute understanding of a book. The novel provides something for each reader to enjoy, taste, feel, and see.

In its central theme, the novel teaches that pride in excess will destroy honor. Colonel Nicholson is the incarnation of the theme. He never releases his dignity before the Japanese officials, especially Colonel Saito, a man suffering from a raging inferiority complex. After continually questioning and refusing to obey Saito’s authority, Nicholson eventually breaks Saito down into emotional obscurity and self-pity. Undeniably, the poor Colonel Saito cannot conquer Colonel Nicholson’s pride, high morale, and inspirational leadership. At first, Nicholson’s pride increases the morale of the POW camp, but later it leads to a betrayal of the British war effort. After completing the satisfactory bridge, he arrogantly relishes in the success of his structure and resists the British attempt to destroy it. Although Nicholson builds a wonderful bridge, he becomes dishonorable because of excessive pride.

Boulle uses an aesthetically average but enjoyable writing style and plot arrangement throughout his book. The audience will appreciate his smooth, fluid sentences that make the novel relaxing to read. Also, the timing of the two subplots ticks perfectly. The first subplot deals with Colonel Nicholson and his troops in the POW camp, while the second describes the procedures of Force 316 in their efforts to destroy Nicholson’s bridge. The converging of these two plots can be compared to two people, one on each side of a river. They walk in the same direction while occasionally glancing at each other. After much walking and observation of each other, they eventually cross over and meet. In The Bridge Over the River Kwai, the two subplots literally cross from opposite sides and join at the River Kwai. Even though the plot structure and syntax fulfill their purpose, the novel lacks complexity and the advanced writing style that would make it more aesthetically beautiful.

The Bridge Over the River Kwai entertains, teaches a lesson about pride, and provides decent aesthetic value. Readers seeking to learn through its theme will be enlightened, while those seeking aesthetic value will not be satisfied. However, those thirsting for adventure, diplomacy, military procedures, and stealthy maneuvers will soak in every letter and word dripping from this fountain of entertainment. While reading, one is a stealthy demolitions operative of Force 316, lying in the damp jungle leaves, steadily holding a pair of binoculars to gather information about the enemy, worrying that a Japanese patrol might see a glint of sunlight on the dark blue lenses of the telescopic apparatus. The steaming burn of jungle ants, the painful pricking of splinters from touching bridge supports in murky waters, the fear of the bridge explosives being discovered—the audience can experience these visual sights, physical jitters, and adrenaline-rushing emotions. The imagination of being a jungle commando or a back-broken prisoner became realistic in my mind. I feel as if I actually hiked through the treacherous woods and baited the bridge with explosives. The story caused my imagination to be very playful and artistic. I felt like I played a role in the story. Because of its exciting entertainment value, I would highly recommend The Bridge Over the River Kwai to anyone who desires to delve into a jungle military endeavor. Its audience will experience a virtual world in the jungles of Siam.

A Passage to India

This is a review written by my daughter Joanna Carter:
E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India is written beautifully, but it failed to lead me into a sense of play because of major problems in the story itself. A Passage to India follows two friends, an Indian doctor and a British school principal through the ordeal between their societies when the Indian, Dr. Aziz, is falsely accused of attempted rape. I disliked the book because none of the characters were likeable, the underlying messages bordered on Satanic, and the plot was weak. Forster’s writing style was wonderful, but reading style without a good story is like eating straight cheese sauce without the macaroni.
The first thing I realized about the novel was that it was slow going. I had a nasty shock when I found myself on page one hundred and twelve and was still waiting for something to happen. I think one of the things that made it so hard to get into is the lack of a character the reader can really relate to. The four main characters are Mr. Fielding, Dr. Aziz, Mrs. Moore, and Adela Quested. Of all of these, Fielding is the most likeable, but only because of his lack of any major faults. He is a flat character, the "good guy," effortlessly making the right decision to stick up for Aziz, even though he has no more reason to than anyone else. If it were me, I would not have been so quick to believe Aziz innocent; the Indian is a sensual and syncophanic liar who suffers from dramatic mood swings. I always emerged from a scene with Aziz and found myself wanting a dose of tea and Andy Griffith to recover. Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested are not such nauseating characters as Aziz, but kind old Mrs. Moore completely loses her religion in the Marabar caves, and Miss Quested is as dull and practical as a grocery cart. There was no one I could be comfortable with during my read, no one I could trust or develop any affection for. As a result, I had a hard time getting into the story.
A second thing I disliked about A Passage to India was the underlying theme of meaninglessness and failure. Forster’s sinister philosophy revealed itself fully in the scene where Mrs. Moore enters the Marabar caves and hears the echoing "Boum" that answers any sound, no matter how profound. "But suddenly, at the edge of her mind, Religion appeared, poor little talkative Christianity, and she knew that all its divine words from ‘Let there be Light’ to ‘It is finished’ only amounted to ‘boum.’" I was so disturbed upon reading this that I almost put the book down. Forster tells the reader that Christianity and religion are meaningless, and that by extension there is no good in the world. According to him, good and evil are the inventions of man. Nature knows nothing of them, for she is eternal and they are only the whispers of a finite creature. This message is so overwhelmingly evil that this book would be repulsive to me even if it had wonderful characters and a great story.
The third thing I disliked about A Passage to India was the plot. Aside from the problems of one hundred and thirty-two pages with only dining room gossip for conflict and pointlessly killing off Mrs. Moore, Forster left the untied thread of Miss Quested’s attacker in the caves. If it wasn’t Aziz, then who was it? Did Miss Quested imagine him? It seems as though Forster needed an attacker, but was too lazy to deal with him once he started on the mess of Aziz’s trial. If it were a less important detail, it would not matter, but the entire book is built around the disaster in the caves. The attacker’s undetermined identity wriggles awkwardly in the story like a stick caught in a bicycle wheel. Forster’s words are beautiful, but his plot doesn’t hold water.
All in all, A Passage to India did not lead me into a sense of play. The beautiful writing style spoke to me directly, but it repelled me. Such a twisting of talent made me feel as if a friend had betrayed me. I wanted to physically and mentally separate myself from the book instead of to explore the ideas it presented. Although Forster describes Mrs. Moore’s despair at the Marabar Caves in an eloquent and natural style, the sinister content of his words kept me from playing with his novel.

The Writing Life

Picture a dusty region of Africa. The sun is beating down on the grasslands near the water hole. A rhino stands nearly motionless, soaking in the heat. Birds land on his back and talk to each other, walking around as though he is a carpet. Only the gleam of his beady eye shows the rhino's irritation. Finally he can stand it no longer and flicks them away with his tail. That's it; that's the picture of me as a writer. Make of it what you will. I'm not nearly as good at this as Annie Dillard.

The Writer's Life is filled with poetic metaphors of what it means to be a writer, from a bee catcher to Wile E. Coyote to a Zulu warrior to a lion tamer to a dog chewing on a bone to a stunt pilot. Each metaphor illuminates in some way both the wonder that drives a writer and the impossibility of fulfilling his task. The book is a paradox. The harder Dillard makes it sound, the more she inspires you to write. One of the most inspiring passages describes the impossibility of transferring a poetic vision onto the page: "The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins. The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling, this bastard, this opaque lightless chunky ruinous work." Why does that make me want to write? First of all, she's saying that the writer's vision might truly be something transcendent, something greater than myself that is worth giving myself over to, even if I can't control it. It's like Kubla Khan's pleasure dome that Coleridge can't get onto the page however wildly his eyes flash and his hair flies around. The vision becomes something else, but there's discovery in that too.

It's all so terrible, like Jesus saying, "Are you willing to drink the cup that I drink?" To follow your calling, you move to a desolate, wind-swept island in the Northwest, pace back and forth in a cold cabin with no insulation, chop wood while people laugh at you, plug in a coffee kettle that's rigged with a clothespin, and (probably most important of all) "throw pots." "The materiality of the writer's life cannot be exaggerated." Annie Dillard is Thoreau all over again, but she seems more like the real deal, maybe because she smokes cigarettes and admits that she would rather play chess with librarians than write. At one point she describes fighting through writer's block until she has written a few sentences: "At once I noticed that I was writing--which, as the novelist Frederick Buechner noted, called for a break, if not a full-scale celebration." Having written this post in no fewer than four sittings, I say, "Amen!" I think one of my kids has some Christmas cookies I should try to celebrate finishing this paragraph.

Annie Dillard is more of a poet than a story-teller, and this bias does emerge in spots. She quotes a well-known writer asking a novice, "Do you like sentences?" One imagines the novice hanging his head and walking away like the rich young ruler. I don't think that J. R. R. Tolkien or Tom Wolfe liked sentences at age twenty though. I think the former was drawn in to writing through his fascination with story and the latter through his fascination with the world. There are different portals. When Dillard starts talking about structuring stories, I take it with a grain of salt. I love to hear her ramble, and The Writing Life is one of her best rambles.

Well, I've flicked another bird off. Now I can go back to basking in the sun for a little while without that nagging feeling that there's something I have to do.

Macbeth

The idea that one person is really no better than another is deeply rooted in us. I find my students about as willing to question this belief as they would be to try sushi. Its little brother is that all sins are equal, which seems to me as ludicrous as saying that I'd just as soon pick up a cobra as pick up a fire ant. It's worse to murder someone than to lie. There, I said it. But doesn't that make a murderer worse than a liar? And if a murderer is worse than a liar, how can a liar be humble? You can't beat up the little brother without getting the big brother involved.
In Macbeth, Shakespeare takes a war hero and in a matter of minutes turns him into a scheming murderer simply through the power of suggestion. There isn't even any temptation involved. "Hail, King that shalt be." Five words, and he's hooked like a stupid grouper. His imagination does all the rest. Remember how James told us, "Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desires"? That's Macbeth. Everyone is singing Macbeth's praises in the opening scenes. He's Duncan's "worthiest cousin," he's "Bellona's bridegroom." His sword "smokes with bloody execution!" Is the thought of murder in his head? No, he's carving his way through the Norwegians with the patriotic furver of a Patrick Henry. Ask him if he'd like to murder the king he is fighting for, and he'd laugh at you or take off your head for such traitorus thoughts. Here's the great equalizer. I cannot say that I am any better than a murderer if I have not seriously been tempted with murder. Even that abstraction doesn't quite fit gear to gear. I'd have to face the temptation as he faces it, with his whole genetic make up and background, to know whether I would handle it any better than he would.
The situation begs two questions. First, what five words tossed out in the most opportune moment could get me to throw away all my noble aspirations? I don't have to think about that too deeply to see what shaky ground I stand on. I'm a sinner in need of grace. Second, how have I handled the temptations I have seriously faced? Now the ground has crumbled under my feet. I'm a sinner in need of grace.
There's a lot more the play has to offer. How the forces of darkness tell us truths in order to betray us, for instance. Consider the temptations Jesus faced. He really could turn stones to bread, and what was so wrong with that? Or how the mind convinces itself that the eye could really "wink at the hand." I'll just turn off my conscience for a bit, not worry about it, and then the thing will be done. Or how when I offer the poisoned chalice to someone else, I'm really lifting it to my own lips. If the lessons themselves don't compel, consider a floating dagger that leads a murderer to his victim, a ghost disrupting a banquet, and a sleep walker divulging secrets.
Macbeth is a great tragedy; the truths are so woven into the plot that they hardly need commentary. Maybe that's why it's Shakespeare's shortest play. That's a compelling enough reason to read it; what teenager would disagree? Now that kids aren't having to struggle with the King James Bible every Sunday, the 17th century language is a much bigger barrier. This play has a lot fewer dated idioms and literary allusions than most of Shakespeare's plays, making it very readable.

The Alchemist

When I was in ninth grade, I wrote an essay on the misery of living in the TEAM Hostel. I had felt like a floundering swimmer with his mouth barely above the water, sucking what gasps of air I could get from moments of peace. The hostel was a place where missionary kids from my parents' mission could live a little ways off campus; it was supposed to be a home away from home, but to me, it was anything but that. The older kids bullied the younger kids, and our hostel (hostile) parents didn't give a rip. Well, actually, I felt like the biggest bully there was the man in charge. I was angry. So I wrote the essay and turned it in to Mr. Jones, my English teacher--an enormous, jolly man who gave us Dr. Peppers to drink whenever we had a test.
A few days later, Mr. Blair, the head of the English department, called me in to Bedlam to have a chat with him. Bedlam was his name for the book room, which was a fantastically messy room full of books and old papers that would have made Dickens smile. It was in that book room that I first encountered "my personal legend." Mr. Blair encouraged me to write. I told him I was just writing honestly what I felt. He looked me in the eye and said, "Honest writing is good writing." At that moment, my two-fold calling landed on me. I wanted to write, and I wanted to become an English teacher, to be like this great man who so inspired me. Now here I am in my nineteenth year of teaching and trying to get an agent to look at my first novel, and I'm amazed at how God has dragged, shoved, and gently led me into such green pastures.
In The Alchemist, Melchichizedek tells Santiago that if he follows his "personal legend," the world will conspire to help him. Even setbacks will slingshot him toward his dream. "When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision." The real conflict in the book is whether Santiago can keep his focus on his true calling. Santiago leaps over riskier and riskier precipices, all along becoming more alive to "the soul of the world." He comes to the point that he realizes, "To die tomorrow was no worse than dying on any other day." Life was pursuing his dream, and if God "wasn't willing to change the future" to see him through to his goal, well, that was God's business. The story is incredibly inspiring!
As a Christian, I felt my heart take a leap every time a piece of the gospel was woven into the carpet of the story. Coelho's faith seems deeply embedded in biblical stories, and he clearly wonders about them in ways that I wish more people from my background would. How could you not be fascinated by Urim and Thummim? At the same time, Coelho's universalism made me squirm. I really think that this book captures the spirit of the age more than any other novel I've read. All roads, if sincerely followed, lead to the same place. This is clearly Coelho's position even as he happily sings some of his own personal, orthodox beliefs: "Our world is only an image and a copy of paradise . . . . God created the world so that, through its visible objects, men could understand his spiritual teachings and the marvels of his wisdom." How could you believe these things, but only as a sort of menu item? My copy of the book has an interview with the author at the back in which Coelho explains what he likes and dislikes about organized religion: "The value is that they give you discipline and they give you collective worship and they give you humbleness toward the mysteries. The danger is that every religion, including the Catholic one, says, 'I have the ultimate truth.' Then you start to rely on the priest, the mullah, the rabbi, or whoever, to be responsible for your acts." There's some truth to the way he perceives the attitudes of people in organized religion. Man has a hard time owning something without taking pride in it, especially truth. In Till We Have Faces, C. S. Lewis talks about truth being clear and muddy at the same time. That's a good answer, but now you'll have to read that book too, because it's chewing on the story that gives you the real taste for the argument.