Living With a Practical Brave Heart

Living the Braveheart Life is a motivational book by Randall Wallace, the writer of the film Braveheart. In this book he describes the characteristics of and actions taken by the ‘braveheart’, a way of living for every person. William Wallace, the historical figure of the film, and the film itself, illustrate this way of living, marked mainly by courage. Much of the book is autobiographical, illustrating the universals with his personal experience. Wallace writes of relationships, especially his relationship with his father. (This is reflected in the film, though briefly. In the book Wallace is able to expand on it.) He also writes of his relationship with his sons, mother, wife, colleagues.

Those who like the film may take an interest in Wallace’s thoughts behind the story – on the figure of William Wallace, the relationships between characters, etc. – and some of the circumstances in Wallace’s life he associates with the film.  

Overall the book’s theme is what a braveheart is and does. The braveheart life includes fitness, ignoring pain but acknowledging wounds, always learning and teaching, loving of stories, embracing mystery, living a lifelong campaign. It is not a hard heart. It is a “crucial point” to Wallace’s philosophy that “the heart that is brave is not ours; it is God’s” (182).   

Reading this just after reading a chapter of Ravi Zacharias tells me how motivational and inspirational books are similar, but may connect better than other books with certain demographics, based on the metaphors and images the authors use. The chapter I read of Zacharias’s book, The Grand Weaver, will connect, in part, because of the exotic culture of India he uses, (exotic being foreign or alien to Western readers). It will also connect with those who take interest in arts and crafts, as Zacharias uses the details of intricate rug-weaving to illustrate points. Living the Braveheart Life is likely to connect with different demographics, most likely with men. Both books offer good reading for Christians.

The Theology of Work: Timothy Keller's Every Good Endeavor

In Every Good Endeavor Timothy Keller writes of the theology of work – all work. Vocation is not defined as a profession or position, such as ministry; a calling may be to any job. “A job is a vocation only if someone else calls you to do it for them rather than for yourself. And so our work can be a calling only if it is reimagined as a mission of service to something beyond merely our own interests” (19). The theology of work helps us to reimagine this mission, and that is not to say we delude ourselves into thinking our work as a mission when it is not. Keller writes, “If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavor, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God’s calling, can matter forever” (29). Knowing the theology of work may also help one integrate his or her faith with the work they do.

 

Keller writes the book in three parts, each with one major question:

Part I. God’s Plan for Work: Why do you want to work?

Part II. Our Problem with Work: Why is it so hard to work?

Part III. The Gospel and Work: How can we overcome the difficulties and find satisfaction in our work through the gospel?

His main text throughout the book is Genesis, chapters one through three.

 

In Part I Keller points out God’s design for work. God works himself, and continues to care for his creation after creating it. An important verse is John 5:17, in Jesus says, “My Father is at his work to this very day, and I too am working.” It is God’s gift to Adam and Eve to care for his creation. This was before the fall, so it was not a curse when given the responsibility. Keller also points out that since man was created in God’s image, there is dignity in work, a connection I have not read before. Keller writes on how God has designed work for cultivation (which only man is created to do) and for service.

 

Part II deals with work after the fall, when it becomes labor, and that labor is fruitless. Keller illustrates how work may become pointless by citing Ecclesiastes. He writes of the story of Babel to illustrate how work may become selfish, as the builders of the tower sought what “we all want so desperately – glory and relationship,” but apart from God. Selfishness leads into the chapter that I think is the anchor of Part II – “Work Reveals Our Idols.” Keller cites Martin Luther for defining idolatry as “looking to some created thing to give you what only God can give you.” We have to ask ourselves what we work for. In this chapter he also points out group and societal icons as well as individual ones, such as the market, technology, the present reality – ideas that we may allow to take the place of God.

 

Part III is The Gospel and Work. It includes a new narrative or worldview through the gospels. The Christian worldview differs from social or political movements in seeing the problem as the fall, rather than some aspect of man’s or society’s nature. The Bible does not focus on one part of creation as the source of evil or its solution. Here Keller applies the Christian worldview to some specific occupations, including business, education, and journalism. Important to this part of the book is chapter ten, in which Keller writes about how God’s providence is seen through the work of all. He cites Martin Luther on this subject. God provides through the work of others, so even the non-believer may share in ‘common grace’. This is one of the ways of general revelation of God.

 

This is the first book I’ve read by the popular author. I will read more by him. Timothy Keller writes on substantial topics in the language of a teacher, but not so technical as to be academic. His references show depth and breadth of reading, not only in spiritual classics. In this book I found points, backed by biblical address, that I have not read before on the topic of work.  It is a good expression of the theology of work.

 

C. S. Lewis on How to Read a Book - Review of An Experiment in Criticism

C. S. Lewis’s experiment is to evaluate critics by how they read, not what they read. In an effort to cut down on the negative reviews by evaluative critics, Lewis questions their methods of reading, determining whether they are literary or unliterary. He writes of the potential hazard of adverse judgments (of books), which are common from the evaluative critics, and illustrates it by the change of fashionable authors over time. Lewis suggests how to read rather than who. So Lewis presents his plan on how to read a book.

Lewis categorizes literary readers apart from the majority. The majority never read anything twice. The majority never set much store by reading; “but literary people are always looking for leisure and silence in which to read and do so with their whole attention.” The majority do not see reading as eventful. The majority do not have what they’ve read “prominently present in their mind.”

If this categorizing of literary and unliterary sounds snobbish, reading more of Lewis, within this book and other writings of his, will show this is not the case. Two of the readers that Lewis criticizes are the one who reads only what is fashionable and the one who reads only those authors who are well-established. He states his attitude in reading any work: “We can never know that a piece of writing is bad unless we have begun by trying to read it as if it was very good and ended by discovering that we were paying the author an undeserved compliment.” Lewis also proved he was not a snobbish reader by his other writings, with comments on little-known books, and his interest in science fiction, a genre not embraced by the intellectual elitists of the day. Lewis was not one to read only Great Books.

Lewis also categorizes users and recipients for those who read or take in art – the audience. The terms ‘user’ and ‘recipient’ describe what the audience does with the artwork (which is more than just books). The user is the person who uses art to gratify self; the experience of art is subjective. Lewis’s example is how we may use photos. I would take the example of popular loves songs, in which the listener does not learn of an experience portrayed in the song (such as Looking Glass’s “Brandy”), but applies the “Silly Love Song” to his or her own experience. Here Lewis goes into an aesthetic approach to art, surrendering oneself to the artist. “Real appreciation demands the opposite process. We must not let lose our own subjectivity…. We must begin by laying aside as completely as we can all our own preconceptions, interests, and associations.” The difference between the two positions determines whether we learn; “’Using’ is inferior to ‘reception’ because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it.”

Diversity in the Not So Wild West

Death Comes for the Archbishop is a story of Father Jean Latour and Father Joseph Vaillant, two French Catholic missionaries sent to America’s western frontier in 1851. Father Latour starts the story as a newly appointed Bishop to New Mexico. Father Joseph, a friend of Latour’s since college, serves with him.

The two travel their spacious diocese to establish Latour’s Vicarate and serve the people of this territory, a task that is complicated by different cultures and different religious practices, within and without the Catholic church. When Latour arrives in the area, Mexican priests do not recognize his authority. Others question his authority because of his youth. A corrupt priest ignores Bishop Latour until he and Father Vaillant must replace him.

In each chapter the two priests, together or on their own, have new encounters, quite different from what they remember of France. In one chapter they realize the danger of the frontier when they ask shelter for the night from a murderer, only to be warned by his frightened wife. In another chapter as Bishop Latour travels a distant town he sees that the residents practice a mix of religion and superstition, since they seldom see a priest. When Latour arrives he performs several marriages and baptisms before he must leave. In another chapter Bishop Latour is taken to an Indian sacred site by his reluctant guide, to protect them against threatening weather. The Bishop is told, “Their priests have their own kind of mysteries.”

If there is one central subject of the story it is the friendship between Bishop Latour and Father Vaillant. This relationship gradually develops until the last third of the book, when it becomes a subject in itself, when Bishop Latour becomes conscious of how meaningful the relationship is. “Since Father Vaillant went away the Bishop’s burdens had frown heavier and heavier. At a important point, when Father Vaillant must leave for another ministry, and after the Bishop realizes the importance of their friendship, the Bishop tells the father to take two mules that have long been in their service:

 
             "Oh, no. Not at all. But if you take Contento, I will ask
      you to take Angelica as well. They have a great affection
      for each other; why separate them indefinitely? One could
      not explain to them. They have worked long together."
     
Willa Cather’s book is remarkable for the diversity of cultures, each represented by singular characters, brought together in the wide expanse of America’s West. The priests meet Navajo, Mexican, Spanish, and American people. Since they are represented by characters, each has his or her own particulars. And yet Cather does not use this to build conflict, but rather to find some commonalities in religion, even different religions. Cather’s book is not completely devoid of conflict, but I do think the book challenges two maxims of fiction: that fiction must have conflict and that good people do not make good characters in fiction.

The expanse of the West is a culture in itself: “this settlement was his Bishopric in miniature; hundreds of square miles of thirsty desert, then a spring, a village, old men trying to remember their catechism to teach their grandchildren.” Cather describes the unusual landscape well, by buildings, by plants, by rock-formations. An example:

Ever afterword the bishop remembered his first ride to Acoma as his introduction to the mesa county. One thing which struck him at once was that every mesa was duplicated by a cloud mesa, like a reflection, which lay motionless above it or moved slowly up from behind it. These cloud formations seemed to be always there, however hot and blue the sky. Sometimes they were flat terraces, ledges of vapor; sometimes they were dome-shaped, or fantastic, like the tops of silvery pagodas, rising one above another, as if an oriental city lay directly behind the rock. The great tables of granite set down in an empty plain were inconceivable without their attendant clouds, which were a part of them, as the smoke is part of the censer, or the foam of the wave.

The descriptions are exotic, as they would be for the French priest, and for the reader unfamiliar with this territory. That is one of the strengths of Cather’s book, her description of the frontier.

One quality I look for in any kind of writing of the spiritual, is the author’s ability to convey something of the spiritual, something of the Mystery. Perhaps the best passage is this:

Without comment or explanation he then proceeded to build a fire. The odor so disagreeable to the Bishop soon vanished before the fragrance of the burning logs. The heat seemed to purify the rank air at the same time that it took away the deathly chill, but the dizzy noise in Father Latour’s head persisted. At first he thought it was a vertigo, a roaring in his ears brought on by cold and changes in his circulation. But as he grew warm and relaxed, he perceived an extraordinary vibration in this cavern; it hummed like a hive of bees, like a heavy roll of distant drums. After a time he asked Jacinto whether he, too, noticed this. The slim Indian boy smiled for the first time since they had entered the cave. He took up a faggot for a torch, and beckoned the Padre to follow him along a tunnel which ran back into the mountain where the roof grew much lower, almost within reach of the hand. There Jacinto knelt down over a fissure in the stone floor, like a crack in china, which was plastered up with clay. Digging some of this out with his hunting knife, he put his ear on the opening, listened a few seconds, and motioned the Bishop to do likewise.

Father Latour lay with his ear to this crack for a long while, despite the cold that arose from it. He told himself he was listening to one of the oldest voices of the earth. What he heard was the sound of a great underground river, flowing through a resounding cavern. The water was far, far below, perhaps as deep as the foot of the mountain, a flood moving in utter blackness under ribs of antediluvian rock. It was not a rushing noise, but the sound of a great flood moving with majesty and power.

                        “It is terrible,” he said at last, as he rose.

 

Christian Origins of Individuality

Larry Siedentop’s book Inventing the Individual looks at Western history from the birth of Christianity until the fifteenth century, observing how concepts of the individual, specifically individual rights, developed. The book begins with the pre-Christian classical world of Greece and Rome, establishing some of the basics of ancient religion, such as the development of religion within families, then clans, then tribes, then associations of tribes in cities. The religion started with a family hero; as the families grew so did the mythology. As tribes associated to form cities, gods represented natural phenomena and events as it was easier for different families to agree, rather than competing family heroes. Since religion was in the family, exile from the family meant loss of identity, because the exiled also lost their religion.

From these family religions St. Paul turned the world upside down with his teachings on moral equality. (I would add Jesus taught from the same perspective.) With moral equality comes individualism.

"For Paul, belief in the Christ makes possible the emergence of a primary role shared equally by all (‘the equality of souls’), while conventional  social roles – whether of father, daughter, official, priest or slave – become secondary in relation to that primary role. To this primary role an indefinite number of social roles may or may not be added as the attributes of a subject, but they no longer define the subject. That is the freedom which Paul’s conception of the Christ introduces into human identity."  (62)

Chapter four is the key chapter of the book, explaining how Paul’s teachings fostered individuality. The teaching that humans were equal in God’s sight was revolutionary to the ancient world.

After Rome fell the church became the central authority. Christianity starts to merge with politics when medieval cities evolve out of basilicas, and bishops serve as de facto rulers. “The social evolution of the new kingdoms can be inferred from the successive law codes that they promulgated from the fifth to the seventh century” (137). Bishops also became advisors to leaders. Aside from the power within the church, the church exerted influence on all leaders. Charlemagne and his clerical advisers increasingly relied on ‘rhetoric of the Christian people’ when addressing the relationship between the ruler and the ruled. Charlemagne wanted that every man understood the oath taken, so as to be liable, and this led to conveying the oath in the vernacular. The oath was to serve Charlemagne “with all my will and with what understanding God has given me” (153). But after Charlemagne’s death, “the threat to political unity was a threat to the universality of the church’s mission. “That is why a ‘political’ will began to form within the church. Previously, it had worked in concert with secular rulers – to ‘civilize’ barbarian laws with the help of Roman law” (175).

During the tenth century the church was threatened within by the appointments of bishops by secular rulers. Some bishoprics became hereditary. The papacy became the ‘plaything’ of aristocrats. With papal reforms, however, the church developed its own court system. Corporate law arose, in part, in response to the papal authority. Corporate law represented the people. “It [liberal thought] emerged as the moral intuitions generated by Christianity were turned against an authoritarian model of the church” (332).  

During 12th century the papal order of authority and law was attempted in the secular world, but not so easily. Not only did kings compete, but different forms of government competed, such as feudalism vs. monarchy. This led to kingships being established over territories. Under the secular authorities, urban insurrections started in the 11^th-12^th centuries. These often led to drawing up charters between the overlords and citizens of cities, which became the basis of later constitutions.

Proto-liberal beliefs developed within the church by the 15th century. They included “the belief in moral equality and a range of natural rights, in a representative form of government and the importance of freer enquiry” (333).

In his history Siedentop confronts some popular misconceptions, such as the church hindered individuality (a modern concept), when it actually fostered it. Siedentop also addresses the concept that the Renaissance was the period of individuality, when the assertion and protection of the individual started in the pre-modern period. The Epilogue of the book addresses these contemporary perspectives. The book provides the historical context to look at a holistic perspective.

P.S. This could make for a good comparison to Charles Taylor’s Sources of Self.

Current Reading Plan

Reading a lot it satisfies some desire to categorize what I’ve read, what I’ve learned, just as it is to categorize books for my own library system. (I use a combination of subject and chronological order. This still leaves many questions unsettled: which books should have the best showcase – the most impressive looking (the coffee table books) or the most valuable (which are usually not the most impressive looking); questions of subject – is Augustine theology or literature (his Confessions are both); and which books have to be boxed up because I can’t fit any more bookcases in my apartment?) Categorizing led me to think about reading for breadth, rather than to specialize my interest, as is one of the goals of the liberal arts education – to study a breadth of subjects, to gain some breadth of knowledge. The result is a reading plan I have developed and practiced since June, 2015. I have categorized Three Motifs of Learning and Five Methods of Learning:

Motifs of Learning

1.    Science and Social Science

2.    Philosophy and Theology

3.    Arts and Literature

Methods of Learning

1.    Informational

2.    Motivational

3.    Theoretical

4.    Lyrical

5.    Narrative

The plan is to read four texts at a time. They should fit under different categories as shown above. I try to read one from each Motif of Learning and the fourth text may fall under any. I try to pick books that differ in Method of Learning. I may read a work of literature – poetry (3.4) or fiction (3.5); a history book (1.1); a work of theology (2.1, 2.2 or 2.3); and a book of literary criticism (3.1 or 3.3).

When designing the plan I take into account book length so as to try to finish a book every 7-10 days. I plan start and finish dates for each book.

The plan is not only to read this way, but also includes taking notes and writing a summary or a review after finishing each book.

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead

Gilead is the story of an elderly reverend recounting days of family history and personal thoughts to leave to his son. John Ames begins his book length letter to his son by saying his heart is failing. He does not expect to see his very young son grow up.

John Ames comes from a line of preachers. His grandfather and father, also named John Ames, served as pastors. This does not mean they saw eye-to-eye on all matters. John writes of some of the conflicts between generations. His grandfather was a gun-toting abolitionist. His father, a pacifist, was ashamed of his father for his militant attitude that came out of the Civil War. The current John Ames, who writes the letter in the late 1950’s, did not disagree with his father so much, but still created some conflict by attending another church.

For John, he hasn’t a conflict with his toddler son, but he does have a conflict with the son of his best friend, named after him – John Ames Boughton, also known as Jack Boughton. Jack Boughton is the son of a preacher too, but is certainly not one to carry on the tradition. John recalls Jack plaguing him as a boy, mischievously taking his things or damaging them. When Jack returns to Gilead in his adulthood, John is wary of him, repeatedly warning the addressee of this letter about the man. Eventually Jack admits his wrongs to John, since he feels he cannot admit this to his own father, proving John’s suspicions right, but also surprising him by what may be genuine seeking of spiritual guidance.

Marilynne Robinson writes a story in which theology is lived by its characters. It is sometimes brought forth as it is integral to the narrator, but it is not didactic. The voice of John Ames is rather folksy, “When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think What is the Lord asking me in the moment, in this situation?” (p. 141). His voice, that is Marilynne Robinson’s voice, is also poetic. Ames writes, as he considers life’s end, “I didn’t feel very much at home in the world, that was a fact. Now I do” (p. 4). He notices the beauty of life, and appeals to the senses. One line, among many, that reflects the poetic voice: “Everywhere you stepped, little grasshoppers would fly up by the score, making that snap they do, like striking a match” (p. 15).