Author: myer4269

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Once Upon a Time vs. In the Beginning

Once upon a time…

A recent article by Maria Konnikoiva examines the enduring power of these four little words. As she notes, some variation of the phrase appears in most languages, pointing to its near universal use and appeal. But why is the phrase so powerful? What makes stories, especially fairy tales, so affective? Konnikova argues that the phrase offers us both distance and vagueness by placing us in another time in an upspecified place. Such psychological distance allows us “the possibility of comprehending far more about reality than can come from reality itself.” And such vagueness allows us to insert ourselves into the story, to try out different lives and scenarios. Such stories, then, offer a kind of virtual reality in which we can process our own stories. As Konnikovia says,

“The world of once upon a time is not reality. It is a creation of make-believe. It is an invitation for fantasy and imagination to take the stuff of real life and do with it what they will—and perhaps, to translate the newfound truths back from story to actuality. In the realm of the imaginary, anxiety doesn’t become less anxious, nor tragedy less tragic. But in that world, you can make sense of it all from a distance. It can’t touch you in quite the same way—and yet it can lead you to a much deeper understanding and feeling of realities that would be too impenetrable without those four magic words at the fore.”

Konnikovia argues that stories, especially fairy tales, have psychological value because they give us a place to ennact pieces of our own lives and a means to process our own anxities. And while I don’t want to deny this pscyhological function of stories, because I have experienced it myself, I do want to contrast it with what I take to be a Christian understanding of story.

Take the way the Bible begins. “In the beginning…” pulls us into the narrative in similar way to “Once upon a time.” But while “In the beginning” gives us a sense of distance, it is only a chronological distance, more akin to “Once upon our time.” No matter how far back those words stretch, we are placed firmly within our own time and space. Whatever one thinks about the historiticity of Genesis in general or of chapters 1-3 in particular, the Bible wants us to know that this is our story and this is where we came from.  

As another example of Biblical storytelling, consider the opening of Samuel. It begins, “There was a certain man…” Such a phrase offers us neither distance nor vagueness.  Here we have a specific man in a specific time with specific wives and and specific problems. We are not distanced from this man, Elkanah. Rather we are thrown into the middle of his family sorrow–his beloved wife Hannah is barren. Yet in the midst of all the specificity, fairy tale like things happen. Against every odd, Hannah conceives a child. Even in our age of fertility doctors and artificial insemmination, the reversal of barreness is a kind of miracle. And the song Hannah sings in exulatation to the Lord has all the sweep and force of epic poetry, cataloging a host of reversals: the rich become poor, and the poor become rich, the proud are cast down and the humble are exalted, the fertile become barren and the barren become fertile. Indeed, one of the great tropes of stories is reversal–the unexpected the rise of the unlikely figure, and it is one of God’s favorite tropes. We need only look to the incarnation and crucifixion to see that God loves reversal and that he knows how to tell a story.  

To put the contrast another way, while Konnikovia’s approach rightly affirms the benefit stories have for our understanding of reality, the Scriptures point to something even bigger–the narrative shape of reality. It is one thing for us to examine our lives by means of other stories. It is quite another to affirm that reality itself is a kind of story and to thereby conclude, whether consciously or not, that there is a storyteller. From my bias, one reason fairy tales are powerful is that for all their fancy, for all their distance and vagueness, they point to the narrative shape of reality. Indeed, even when stories aren’t “true” they inevitably speak to the narrative shape of our lives by pointing to true things. This is because we live in the world of “in the beginning” where God spoke or “narrated” everything into existence.  In the God narrated world, we cannot help but place ourselves in stories because we cannot help but see our lives as part of his story. 

I suppose a merely psychological understanding of narrative would say that natural selection is telling the story. If so, then one reason I believe in God is for completely aesthetic reasons–I think a creator God who narrates the world and who is bringing reality to its ultimate conclusion makes for a better story than Darwin and the Big Bang.

 

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Earnest Words in Swirling Noise – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot at Ten

Early in college, I fell in love with Wilco. I know how that sentence sounds, but I’l write it anyway, simply because I also know how many others could write the same thing. Or if not about Wilco, then about some other band that has become synonymous with the glories and terrors of coming of age in a city not your own. So last week’s tenth anniversary of their greatest album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, was something of a moment for me. Not because I can’t believe it’s been ten years, but mostly because I still haven’t outgrown YHF. So much of what I listened to and read and thought and believed ten years ago has proved both embarrassing and ephemeral. But not YHF. It’s importance has only grown for me. For one, the album has such a stranglehold on my sense of taste, that I can’t help but judge other music’s greatness by its standard. It is truly canonical for me, by which I mean it is a measuring stick for other artists and albums. For another, it in some sense shaped my own sense of wanting to write. More on that later.

 

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Before YHF came out I had devoured *Being There* whose tracks “Misunderstood” and “Sunken Treasure” stand among my favorite all time songs. And Summerteeth was a revelation–Beatles and Beach Boys filtered through alt-country swagger. Still, for all their greatness and the obvious experimentation in those albums, nothing could have prepared me for YHF.

I bought the album the day it came out, back when people did such things. On the way home, I sat alone in my car and listened to the opening track over and over. The seven minute dream wrapped in a nightmare wrapped in a dream that is “I am trying to break your heart” took immediate hold of me. I don’t even remember driving back to my dorm. I only remember listening to that song on repeat and the vague impression of lights flashing and passing me in the dark. It was the strange lyrics, the almost haphazard drums, the plink of the child’s piano, the strained and weary voice. But mostly it was the swirl of noise, the impending sense of chaos. I reveled in the noise, turned up the volume, let it wash over me.

As the best articles celebrating the tenth anniversary of the album have pointed out, the whole album is about wanting to be understood and also about the terror of actually being understood. It’s about vital messages coded in noise and misdirection, and about the hope and fear there is someone on the other side to both receive and decode those messages. Those messages come mostly in the form of ambiguous lyrics. I will never really know what “I am an American aquarium drinker” means exactly. I can’t exegete the deeper meanings of “take off your bandaids cause I don’t believe in touchdowns,” or delve the implications of “our love is all of God’s money.” But I love these lines. Such lyrics are at once ambiguous and earnest. They are exactly the things I was trying to say, but couldn’t or wouldn’t. I understand that these are the very reasons some people hate this album. And in the hands of lesser artists such lyrics are nothing more than nonsense, or worse still unbridled pretension. But for Wilco, layered in the haze of static and delivered in Jeff Tweedy’s broken voice, such lyrics are messages about the inherent fragility of messages. There is so much say and so many ways for that to be misunderstood.

In college I started writing poetry. Partly because I had always wanted to write poetry and partly because I was hopelessly enamored with the girl who edited the literary journal for the English department. The fact that she would read the entries spurred an incredible flurry of terrible poems. And the fact that she would read the entries meant I would never dream of submitting them. Even though they weren’t anything resembling a love poem, and even though they weren’t veiled confessions of devotion, I still felt I would be exposing a nerve. I couldn’t risk being understood.

Eventually, I let other people read versions of those terrible poems. And I even wrote some more. I guess I figured that even if people got it wrong, or worse still got it right, and I was found wanting, it was still worth writing. This may have been because I came to see that the world often feels like YHF sounds.

At the end of “Poor Places,” there is a swell of static, and as it peaks you hear the faint accented voice of woman emerge from the noise. She repeats the phrase, “Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot,” over and over, even as the static get louder and louder. It is clearly a code, a message veiled in subterfuge. It is not meant to be understood by just anybody. But it is meant to be understood by somebody. I heard those three words, sent out across radio waves, hoping to alight somewhere and to be heard by someone, as an apology for art, as a kind of artifice themselves, a cry made in hopes of making sense of things in the midst of chaos. 

In this same vein, I’ve always find a particular lyric in the closing song arresting. In “Reservations” Tweedy sings, “The truth proves it’s beautiful to lie.” Like the rest of the album the statement is veiled in ambiguity, but one way to take it is that the truth makes art necessary. We have to interpret our world, and that world is often enveloped in noise and static, not unlike much of YHF. Even so, we can take the noise and make it into something. When it comes to art, the artifice is a kind of lying, but to me such artifice proves that the world is worth paying attention to and worth interpreting after all. This is certainly why I type out words that maybe only a handful of people will ever read.  I am simply trying to make sense of the noise. I am hoping, praying even, that as I tap out dispatches, there is someone on the other end.

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Beholding God or How People Change

“The air was growing brighter and brighter about us; as if something had set it on fire. Each breath I drew let into me new terror, joy, overpowering sweetness. I was pierced through and through with the arrows of it. I was being unmade. I was no one. But that’s little to say; rather, Psyche herself was, in a manner, no one. I loved her as I would once have thought it impossible to love, would have died any death for her. And yet, it was not, not now, she that really counted. Or if she counted (and oh, gloriously she did) it was for another’s sake. The earth and stars and sun, all that was or will be, existed for his sake. And he was coming. The most dreadful, the most beautiful, the only dread and beauty there is, was coming. The pillars on the far side of the pool flushed with his approach. I cast down my eyes.” C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

Looking back over my posts over the last couple of months, it’s clear to me that I’ve really spent the summer thinking about one question—What does it mean to encounter the divine?  Till We Have Faces is in many ways a book length answer to that question. And in reading the novel, I realized that encountering God can never be an end in itself. Rather, it is about transformation, or as we Christians call it, sanctification. In fact, as Christians, our own ongoing transformation actually depends on our beholding God.

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:18).

In Exodus when Moses asked to gaze on the glory of the Lord, simply seeing the passing glory of the Lord made his face shine with a resplendent glory so radiant that the people of Israel asked him to wear a veil. And in reflecting on that encounter in light of Christ, Paul makes an astonishing claim–our relation to God through Christ is even greater than Moses’ because we come to God with unveiled faces by the power of the Spirit, and in beholding him we become like him. In Christ we are able to gaze on God, a reality that sparkles and cuts like a diamond because to gaze on the divine is to encounter both terror and beauty, both dread and joy.

Terror and dread because who we are and what we desire is finally exposed. Just as Orual is finally able to see how sickly her love for Psyche is in the presence of the divine, we too are exposed, laid bare, disintegrated in God’s presence. One reason I believe people don’t really seek God, don’t really read their Bibles or pray with any real earnestness is because deep down they know to do so is to risk exposure, to have their desires revealed as petty, to have their loves exposed as anemic. The sound of the Lord comes to the garden like a storm, and we hide ourselves because we know that we are naked.

But it is not just terror and dread. It is beauty and joy too. God is not simply beautiful—he is the source of beauty. As Augustine says, God is, “The beauty of all things beautiful.” This means that the rush of joy we experience in the presence of earthly beauty, in faces and sunsets, in symphonies and meals, in laughter and mountains, finds its source and fullness in the face of God. To gaze on him is to experience the fullness of beauty which is itself the fullness of joy. But it is more than that. To gaze on God is to be realigned with and by the source of beauty itself, a beauty that actually changes us into the fullness of beauty itself-the face of Christ.

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Love and Beauty in Till We Have Faces

Till We Have Faces is C.S. Lewis’s imaginative reworking of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. It is a meditation on the nature of beauty and ugliness and of love and hate, and because gods and goddesses encounter men and women throughout, it is also a novel about the nature of the divine, of revelation and epiphany. Told from the perspective of Psyche’s older sister, Orual, as she wrestles with the loss of Psyche, it is a beautifully complex and moving novel, and Lewis considered it his most accomplished work of fiction. I don’t want to give much of the plot away because I hope that you will read the novel for yourself. But I do want to reflect on some of the novel’s themes as a way of processing some of the thoughts from the previous posts on epiphany and the nature of revelation. In this post I want to look at the intertwined themes of beauty and love in the novel.

Orual is the first-born daughter of the King of Glome, a violent madman who desires nothing more than to sire a son. But his second marriage only produces a third daughter, Psyche, an exceptionally beautiful child, whom Orual takes under her care. But Orual’s love for Psyche is a devouring sort of love, an all-consuming obsession, even from the beginning. She alone wants to possess Psyche and her affections.  And this devotion is perhaps primarily motivated by Psyche’s beauty, which Orual describes as one might describe a god’s, saying, “Her beauty, which most of them had never seen, worked on them as a terror might work.” Indeed, the subjects of Glome are convinced that Psyche must be a goddess. Because she is ugly herself, Orual, it seems, wants to become beautiful by being in Psyche’s presence. As Orual says, “She made beauty all around her. When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver. When picked up a toad—she had the strangest and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes—the toad became beautiful.” Orual is the toad in a certain sense. She desires to become beautiful, to have a face, by possessing Psyche for herself, and as the novel progresses this hunger only makes her more ugly.

Later in the novel, Psyche is offered as an appeasing sacrifice to the Mountain Brute.  After the sacrifice Orual decides to go and gather the remains of her sister, only to find that Psyche is still alive. As she relates what has happened to her, Psyche believes she has married the god of the Mountain, who she believes is no brute at all, while Orual believes that this so-called husband who refuses to show his face is either the mountain-brute or an opportunistic mountain dweller who has tricked her. Because Orual cannot believe Psyche’s happiness is real, she demands that Psyche expose the face of her husband. And as Orual makes these demands, Psyche realizes that Orual’s consuming, possessive love is a kind of hate, saying, “You are indeed teaching me about kinds of love I did not know. It is like looking into a deep pit. I am not sure whether I like your kind better than hatred.”

In other words, Orual’s ugliness is not primarily physical. Rather her devouring love for Psyche makes her ugly. Psyche by contrast is not just physically beautiful—her love is beautiful as well. She doesn’t wish to go against her husband’s wishes because she trusts him. Earlier in the novel she goes among the plagued people because they believe her touch can heal. She is willing to give of herself in hopes of helping others. Love and beauty are contrasted with hate and ugliness, and so the novel, read a certain way, is a study in sanctification, in Orual’s love becoming more beautiful, of her gaining a face. So in the next post, we will turn to the themes of faces and epiphany.

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Jonathan Franzen and the Danger of Seeing Through Everything

Since my last post, I’ve still been reflecting on the nature of epiphany in contemporary literature, particularly in the novel Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. Despite my reservations about the real possibility of actual epiphanies in novels like Franzen’s, I haven’t read a recent novel that better captured the world as it is right now. Franzen’s stated purpose as a writer is too write novels that are accessible to as many people as possible but that still grapple with big ideas (see his essay “Mr. Difficult” in How to Be Alone).

One way he accomplishes this is with a liquid and inviting prose style that shows you his literary world without drawing much attention to itself. His prose is transparent. But transparency characterizes more than his prose style—it also describes how he views the world. He wants to see to the heart of things, and as a very good novelist, his gift as a cultural observer is in making things transparent. Much of the novel occurs post 9/11, so thematically the novel grapples with rise and fall of the political topography resulting from that tragedy. But in his quest for  transparency, he has just as much venom for environmentally motivated liberalism as he does for war profiteering neo-cons. No one, it seems, is immune from his critical eye.

For example, Franzen uses the occasion of a Bright Eyes concert, an event he describes as being “almost religious in its collective seriousness,” to explore generational attitudes toward music. And with nothing more than a couple of lines he is able to conclude some fundamental things about my generation:  “They gathered not in anger but in celebration of their having found, as a generation, a gentler and more respectful way of being. A way, not incidentally, more in harmony with consuming.” In a flash all my earnest allegiance to indie music was exposed for what it often is—a highly selective and somewhat pretentious kind of consumption. And the novel is full of these barbs. But the prose is so crisp and the characters so compelling, that you are willing to risk his unrelenting gaze.

The benefit, of course, of seeing through everything is that not much is lost on you, and Franzen has an amazing ability to skewer hypocrisy and to layer everything in irony. In reading the novel though, I couldn’t help but be reminded of C. S. Lewis’s observation that to see through everything is to ultimately see nothing:

The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles…If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see. C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

So after reading a book that saw through everything, and after thinking about epiphanies, I wanted to read a book that was undergirded with a sense of the divine. It is the divine that not only makes real epiphany possible, but that also ensures there is something more than total transparency. With that in mind, I decided to reread Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces, which retells the myth of Cupid and Psyche through the eyes if Psyche’s sister. It is a novel about encountering the divine, about epiphanies in the original sense of the word. And in reading it I realized the main character and narrator, Orual, is a lot like Franzen. She can often see through things and describe things as they are, but in the end, her willful blindness to see what is actually there leads to her undoing. Over the next few posts, I want to explore the nature of epiphany in Till We Have Faces.

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Water into Wine – The True Nature of Epiphanies

“I disapprove of epiphanies and their phony auras but I am besotted by them — can’t get enough of them in life or elsewhere. So sue me. Seriously though, as a person who was brought up with religious faith and then got out of it, I’m always looking for secular manifestations of the sacred.”  Charles Baxter

I wrote a paper on John 2 this past semester, and in his feedback my professor noted that the water into wine story is part of the lectionary reading for the feast of Epiphany. He thought this was an interesting connection between the story itself and the idea of epiphanies in literature.

Indeed it is an interesting connection. And I got to thinking about it and reading up on it, and it turns out the epiphany has fallen on hard times. The epiphany in it’s truest form comes from Greek Mythology. Gods and goddesses break into the human realm, and people are overcome with the presence of the divine. In the Bible the epiphany is more properly called a theophany or christophany. Think of the burning bush. Think of Jacob wrestling the angel. Think of the Mount of Transfiguration. Think of the Ascension. The Bible is so thick with epiphany that it is almost commonplace. Indeed, the Bible is an ever increasing cascade of epiphany culminating finally in the eternal epiphany of God dwelling with his people (Rev. 21:3). What is interesting is that n both the Greek and Christian understandings, the epiphany’s center of gravity is the divine. The human’s experience is one of revelation. It is not experience, in other words, that comes from within, but from without.

But epiphanies are very different in literature, and we have James Joyce to thank for that. He was the fist to self-consciously use epiphany as a literary term. For him the epiphany was, a “sudden and momentary showing forth or disclosure of one’s authentic inner self.” It was a way to describe a particular moment of clarity, usually towards the end of a story, that characters have about themselves and their lives. (To see a beautiful example of this read Joyce’s story “The Dead.”) Typically, if and when we say we’ve had an epiphany, we mean it in this way. With Joyce the moment of divine encounter became a moment of personal clarity. The center of gravity shifted from the divine to the self.

So why would a writer like Charles Baxter hate epiphanies and write an essay called “Against Epiphanies?”  I suspect that Baxter senses on some level that the epiphany as Joyce describes it is a sham. If there is the possibility of revelation or the divine, the epiphany seems inevitable. If there is a voice on the other side, we would, it seems, in moments of clarity, distress, comfort, euphoria, in those moments, that is to say, where we come to the edges of human experience, hear that voice or encounter the divine. But in a voiceless world, the epiphany first becomes a “secular manifestation of the sacred,” and eventually, disintegrates because in our world the self is so incoherent that any moment of inner clarity would only reveal a sliver of a fragmented whole. For us truly postmoderns there is no authentic inner self to be revealed.

Without a true sense of the divine and without a coherent self, the literary epiphany becomes, as Baxter says, “phony.” Life, he insists, isn’t like that, since if epiphanies happen at all, they happen rarely. And yet he still longs for them. His self-contradictory impulses reveal an appetite for transcendence, for the divine, for there to be a voice on the other side. But contemporary literature has no space for the divine, no category for the possibility of revelation.

Despite these tensions, you don’t have to look far in contemporary literature to find epiphanies. Take Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom.  This scene towards the end of the novel records the reunion of Patty and Walter Berglund, who had been estranged by adultery and betrayal:

Her eyes weren’t blinking. There was still something almost dead in them, something very far away. She seemed to be seeing all the way through to the back of him and beyond, out into the cold space of the future in which they would both soon be dead, out into the nothingness that Lalitha and his mother and his father had already passed into, and yet she was looking straight into his eyes, and he could feel her getting warmer by the minute. And so he stopped looking at her eyes and started looking into them, returning their look before it was too late, before this connection between life and what came after life was lost, and let her see all the vileness inside him, all the hatreds of two thousand solitary nights, while the two of them were still in touch with the void in the sum of everything they’d ever said or done, every pain they’d inflicted, every joy they’d shared, would weigh less than the smallest feather on the wind.

Here is epiphany in the Joycean sense—a moment of clarity and closure. And perhaps even of forgiveness and reconciliation. But what does it amount to? Two estranged characters reconnect and in their connection see past themselves into what lies beyond them and what lies beyond them is nothing. This is an epiphany, yes, because the characters come to see some truth about the world but it is an epiphany without transcendence.  There is no voice, only void. And if in the end both joy and sorrow weigh less than the smallest feather on the wind, then what use is either?

So where does this all leave us? When I think of epiphanies in any sense it becomes clear to me that I ought to be wary of my own capacity for insight. I ought to be suspicious of my own sense of clarity. I am waiting for the world to act on me, to arrange itself in scrutable ways. Art is a path to such clarity, but as a Christian I sense that this is only true because there is a voice on the other side. To be an artist is to have an appetite for transcendence, and yet, in what seems to me to be the height of irony, many artists reveal that appetite in their longings for epiphany but refuse it’s true nature by denying what an epiphany really means—that the divine seeps into the world, that there are moments when we see behind the curtain and what we see is not the void, but something almost more horrifying (if we are really honest). We see the terror of God’s beauty, a beauty that exposes ugliness and strips pretense. And though we might walk away with our faces shining like Moses, we are first disintegrated like Isaiah.

Unless.

Unless that God comes to us in our form, and spends his days as a human gradually unfolding his glory, a kind of epiphany by degrees. Read the Gospel of John with that in mind—“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”  Each of his signs points to his glory, and for those with eyes to see he is the epiphany of epiphanies, the theophanies of theophanies. He is the first and final word who gives all other insights their meaning. He is our assurance that when the world becomes transparent to us, what we see on the other side is not void but the vast abundance.

 

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Homeless Dung Bread or Cooking from the Bible! Ezekiel 4

“And you, son of man, take a brick and lay it before you, and engrave on it a city, even Jerusalem. And put siegeworks against it, and build a siege wall against it, and cast it up a mound against it.” Ezekiel 4:1-2

Say you have just spent a night out in the city, enjoying downtown, perhaps taking in a show, at the very least dining somewhere, and after dinner you decide to walk the streets and take in some air before heading home. And suppose you turn the corner and pass an alley only to hear the grunt and rustle of a human body, and peering in the dark down the alley you see a man on his side, laying next to what appears to be a model of a city.

As you look closer you realize it isn’t just a model of a city, it’s a model of your city, skyline and all. And more than that this model is surrounded by tanks and artillery and soldiers—it’s a city under siege. Next to him is a small fire on which he cooks what appears to be a loaf of bread, and yet when you smell the fire’s flames, they carry the pang of manure.

Of all the things you might think of this, ranging from curiosity to pity to revulsion, perhaps the last thing you would think is that this man is a prophet of God who speaks the very words of the Lord. In fact, if you could have made out any of his mumblings, and you heard his supposed divine proclamations, then you would be instantly convinced that that he harbored delusions of grandeur and that he needed serious help.

And yet this scene—the model city, the man laying on his side, the food cooked on dung—is the scene of Ezekiel 4. God asked Ezekiel to do all of those things in order to enact the judgement that was about to befall Jerusalem.  And Ezekiel did them. So the only way that he isn’t completely insane is if God actually spoke to him. If there isn’t a voice on the other side, then Ezekiel was nothing more than insane, a seeming schizophrenic.

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When I was in high school, my mom started buying something called Ezekiel Bread. It was the first health food that I ever remember eating and enjoying. And I still enjoy a toasted slice with bananas and honey. But what is interesting about the bread is that it is made from a recipe taken from Ezekiel 4. You can read the verse that contains the recipe right on the bag—“And you, take wheat and barely, beans and lentils, millet and emmer and put them in a single vessel and make your bread from them.” Bread of Life actually makes this bread using this exact recipe. Amazingly enough the bread is actually good, and more amazing than that is that the combination of ingredients forms a complete protein. It is a perfect health food. And you can still find it at Whole Foods today.

What the bag doesn’t tell you is that God first told Ezekiel to cook it over a fire of his own dung, but that after some bartering Ezekiel talked God down to a manure fire instead. I can assure you that the makers of Ezekiel Bread are not literalists when it comes to the bread’s cooking method.

But when I think of Ezekiel Bread as a commodity in light of the scene of the man in the alley, I feel a disconnect. I wonder is that what this text means? Are we supposed to walk a way from reading this disturbing scene with nothing more than a bread recipe? The reason I ask is because this question really gets down to what we believe the Bible is for. If all Ezekiel 4 is good for is a bread recipe, then the text is both manageable and practical. It’s healthy! It’s a complete protein! Isn’t God good? And this plays in to the dominate impulse that we have about living and applying Scripture, namely that it must be practical. That we must seek out the timeless principles of a text and live them.

Now the longing for practicality can be a noble impulse, but it can also be a kind of pragmatic fetish and a veil for taming those Scriptures that confront and offend our sensibilities.

Don’t get me wrong.  Seeking principles from Scripture can be a way of honoring the text. After all aren’t we meant to be doers of God’s Word and not just hearers? But what is there to do in this text? What are the principles in Ezekiel 4? Are we called to build replicas of our cities, lay on ours sides, and enact God’s judgement? Moreover, if we are going to go ahead and bake the bread, why not cook it on dung like Ezekiel did? But people who do things like that either live on the streets, in an institution, or are starting cults. Surely, God can’t mean that. So we bake the bread  the way we want to and then say thanks for the protein, as if that is all this chapter or this book has to tell us.

Here’s the truth. If this text has a principle at all, then that principle horrifies us, and that principle is this—because God is our maker and our redeemer, there is no limit to what he can demand of us. If there really is a voice on the other side, that if God actually speaks (and speaks still to us through his Word) then what he asks we must not refuse, even if it appears insane. When we read the Scriptures with only practicalities and application in mind, then we can often go hunting for recipes, when God is trying to confront and overwhelm us with the reality of his character and might, with the actuality of his grace and judgement, with the centrality of his voice. 

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How High School English Helps You Read the Bible

“As I was among the exiles by the Chebar canal, the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God.” Ezekiel 1:1

“Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with.” Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being 

“A metaphor is not merely an ornament; it has communicative power that transcends literal language.” McCartney and Clayton, Let the Reader Understand

Though you may not have consciously thought about metaphors since high school English class, and even then perhaps only reluctantly, you live with metaphors every day. Take love. Love catches us so off-guard and throws us so off-kilter that we describe it as falling. Or take time. Time is not money, and yet how many are slaves to both watch and wallet because they believe it is?

And this makes metaphors dangerous because metaphors are often stealth. They sneak in and imprint themselves like a thumb on the cortex, changing the way we think. How many lives have been destroyed because people operate with the metaphorical understanding that sex is power or that people are animals? Conversely, and beautifully, how many lives have been enriched by the thought that life is a story?  Donald Miller, in A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, uses this metaphor to powerfully shape and ultimately change his life. Read the book. Without the animating metaphor of life as story there would have been no movement forward.

Movement is actually one of the best ways to think of metaphors. Metaphors are a way of moving our thoughts and language from one place to another. Standing on the edge of a lake, I might be able to describe the other shore. But I need a boat to take me to that shore. In the world of language, metaphors are the boats that move us from one shore to another. With literal language, I can look over the edge of a cliff, but with a metaphor I can repel down its face. Literal language is a still shot of a cityscape. Metaphor is a sweeping crane shot through the streets.

All of this is a way of answering the question—how do you describe a vision of God? How do you describe the one who dwells in everlasting light? How do you give form to the invisible one? The simple answer is metaphor. You trace the face of the ineffable with metaphor and simile, and all the other tools of poets. It is no accident the prophets of Israel are also the poets of Israel. Without a poet’s sensibility of sensory language, without a poet’s feel for the metaphorical, what the prophets wrote could not communicate the beauty, depth, and power of what they saw.

This is not to say that the metaphors  contain God or grasp him. They are still at best approximation; they are just the best we have. We must stretch language as far as it can go in our effort to honor God, but we must also fall down in worship before him, knowing that no language can fully contain him. Ezekiel may have been an exile on the shores of the Chebar, but without metaphor and poetry he would have been language’s exile because he would have had no words, however feeble, however approximate, to describe his experience. And without metaphor we too can become language’s exile.

Ezekiel is so overcome that he uses the word “like” eighteen times to try capture the vision. What he sees is so overwhelming, so other, that he can only pile up approximations. He must use metaphor. The sights are “like the appearance of lighting” and “shining like awe-inspiring crystal.” The sounds are “like the sound of many waters” and “like the sound of an army.” Here we see the metaphorical in all its glory, because here metaphor becomes an act of worship. Let us be as Ezekiel. Let us be overcome–“Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. And when I saw it, I fell on my face, and I heard the voice of one speaking” (Ezek. 1:28).

Read through Ezekiel 1-3 with all this in mind. Read it like you might read a poem. Don’t try to understand every detail or explain the imagery. Instead let the utter strangeness and beauty wash over you. Be as Ezekiel-slack-jawed and stunned that God would appear. Be overcome.

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Why you should be eating your Bible

“And whether they hear or refuse to hear (for they are a rebellious house) they will know that a prophet has been among them…be not rebellious like that rebellious house; open your mouth and eat what I give you…When I looked, behold, a hand was stretched out to me, and behold, a scroll of a book was in it. And he spread it before me. And it had writing on the front and on the back, and there was written on it words of lamentation and mourning and woe…And he said to me, ‘Son of Adam, feed your belly with this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it.’ Then I ate it, and it was in my mouth as sweet as honey.”  from Ezekiel chapters 2 and 3

Ezekiel is a very difficult book. Its images are strange. Its pronouncements are harsh. And more than that, its world is foreign. We are not, after all, post-exilic Jews living in Babylon. In light of all these obstacles, the ESV study notes advises readers to “give themselves to the sheer strangeness of what is presented.” This is actually really good advice, and I think it’s what Ezekiel did himself. He sees incredible visions, so he pulls at the very hem of language trying to describe what he sees. He hears God speak, so he enacts living parables, becoming himself a sign to the people. He gives himself to the strangeness.

Before all of that, Ezekiel does something that is even more striking—he eats the very words of God. This is how things begin for Ezekiel. He is in Babylon with the rest of the exiles, and God shows up, in all his glory and strangeness. And in the midst of an overwhelming vision, of God wrapped in light carried by seemingly mythical beasts on a chariot with spinning wheel within wheels, Ezekiel falls to his face. In the same way that the vision stretches language to its limits, Ezekiel is taken to the edge of himself. He is so overwhelmed and weakened that as the Son of Adam that he is,  he must be reanimated by the Spirit of God (Ezek. 2:1-2).

But then something else happens that is almost more incredible. To nourish and refresh him, God spreads before him a scroll and commands him to eat it. God commands Ezekiel to eat the word of God. The scroll is spread before him like a feast, and Ezekiel takes and eats, and what he tastes, though its contents were lamentations and woe, is as sweet as honey.

There is something in Ezekiel’s experience that helps us approach the book ourselves. We like Ezekiel must feast on the words of God. It has all the complexity and depth of a five course meal prepared by the most meticulous and subtle of chefs. And the implication is clear. If we will not savor, then we will not taste. This is not a meal to be scarfed. It is meant to be savored. This is not merely functional food meant to fuel the body so that you can get you through the day. It is food as art, food as culture, food as community. Bu we, it seems,  don’t want such a feast. Ezekiel, like foreign cuisine, turns the stomach, and like so many Americans in Paris, we crave McDonald’s over the city’s richest fare. We want all that is pungent and earthy in the Bible processed and made palatable.

And our problems with Ezekiel are indicative of our unspoken problems with all the Scriptures. We really don’t want metaphor and mystery. We really don’t want narrative and poetry. We would prefer the Bible to say what it means.  We want the Bible to explain things precisely with the concern and care of a technical manual, complete with attendant diagrams. Don’t believe me? Flip through your favorite study bible and you are likely to find outlines, charts, diagrams, maps, all of them means of, if I can say it this way, digesting your food for you. I am not against such helps (I did, after all, just quote the study Bible of the hour). They are often wonderful. But they can also whitewash the Bible’s inherent strangeness. And more than they can obscure the flavor and taste God intended, a flavor and taste we can only get if we are willing to feast.

Will you take the scroll, will you taste, and savor?

Over the next few weeks, I plan to blog through Ezekiel in an attempt to feast on it and give myself to its strangeness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Some Reflections on Preaching

I took a class on preaching this semester and was asked to write a one page summary of the course. I thought I’d share it here too.

“Any notion that the preacher is less than an ambassador of the kingdom of God reduces the pulpit from prophetic urgency to timid homilies on marginal matters.” Merrill R. Abbey, quoted in Preaching Christ from the Old Testament by Sidney Greidanus

In reflecting on Gospel Communication, I think first of the the image of John Stott preparing sermons on his knees. His Bible is open before him and his head is bowed. Why? Because he is not simply studying abstract truth that he means to relate in a lecture. Rather he is encountering the living God and asking the same for the people he will preach to. This has been the semester’s primary theme for me–though the Gospel itself  is central, the centrality of the Gospel must first be evident in the life of the preacher. If I want to faithfully proclaim the Gospel, I must faithfully live the Gospel.

So the living of the Gospel and the preaching of the Gospel are interconnected, and sermons themselves must reflect this reality. This is because “accuracy is not the ultimate goal of preaching…It is encounter with the King so that the rule of Christ extends over the lives of the hearers.” And an encounter with Christ through preaching can only come when there is clarity, compassion, and conviction. Clarity so that the hearers might see Christ. Compassion so that the hearers might feel the love of Christ. And conviction so that the hearers might leave to live for Christ.

And clarity, compassion, and conviction are intimately tied to character. If encounter with Christ is the true goal of preaching, then as a preacher I must be encountering Christ.  If I preach a Christ I do not believe in and love, then those who hear me will not encounter a Christ to believe in and love. If character is central, then my union with Christ is central, not simply for the effectiveness of my preaching, but for the sake of my own soul. So I walk away with this question–does my proclamation of Christ vibrate with the clarity, compassion, and conviction that come from preparing in his presence and feasting as a son at the table of his word?