"The Pastor's Wife" graphic novel does not represent any actual person, event or Women's Auxiliary Committee. Though the title character is loosely based on the author (me), I have never conversed with a personification of guilt, though I must say he's pretty cute - like a Moomin with bat wings.
Labels: graphic novels, guilt, humor
Over the summer I had the privilege of meeting with a one time-youth now-friend once a week. Part of our meetings were dedicated to reading and discussing "Surprised By Hope" by N.T. Wright. Our discussions meandered between being joyful in the present while keeping our future hope in mind. We talked about ideas of God that we've held in the past; ideas we've learned to question and sometimes disregard. And through the lens of the resurrection, we found a new freshness and potency in familiar passages.
One of my favorite parts of the book was the section on love at the very end, especially Wright's take of I Corinthians 13. It's a familiar passage, to put it lightly; used in every other wedding I attend, recited off the lips of children in Sunday school, used as narration in a youth skit that our kids often perform, I remember it read at Princess Diana's funeral... and countless sermons as well. What Wright points out, that is such an appropriate ending to the book, is that the poem ends by addressing the incompleteness of love, and our hope to be completed.
"For we know in part and we prophesy in part; but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away. When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known." 1 Corinthians 13:9-12
This passage is the bit we don't expect in this wonderful chapter. The poem doesn't just celebrate the fact that love is the greatest thing in God's world. It doesn't just explain what love will mean in hard-edged practice... It isn't, in other words, a poetic way of giving us simply a rule of life, another goal in the struggle for obedience or even Christlikeness. The poem does much, much more: it yearns over the fact that our experience of love, as of everything else that matters, is decidedly incomplete... But Paul is urging that we should live in the present as people who are to be made complete in the future. And as a sign of that completeness, that future wholeness, the bridge from one reality to the other, is love.
(pg 285, 286)
The hope of the resurrection is so much bigger than mere escapism. The God that will redeem and resurrect the world, uniting heaven and earth, is so much bigger (and infinitely more good) than the god who would sweep his believers up into heaven in an apocalyptic rapture. Such a hope (the rapture hope) is no hope at all for me. Like Daedalus in James Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, the choice between created beauty and gnostic denial of physical creation goes to the heart of why I believe what I believe. Resurrection affirms the beauty and goodness of the physical world and we who inhabit it. Religiosity, denial of the physical, a longing to flee a corrupt and filthy world are the outcomes of a rapture-focused hope. Those who would flee the world don't love the world as Christ did. And it is love that traverses those great distances.
Labels: books, resurrection
If you have not yet seen 30 Rock... this may not make sense to you. It's a spoof of The View with Barbara Walters interviewing 30 Rock's Jenna about a B-list movie she starred in called "The Rural Juror". Tina Fey, the writer and creator of the series is probably the funniest woman in the world right now. The show is a cool vindication for women who would join the high school football team in order to advance the cause of feminism, relish in the attractiveness of a fancy new humidifier, eat pudding while walking on a treadmill, or make true love wait just to finish an amazing teamster sandwich.
The sand castle Sasha and I built in the backyard.
Sasha's fifth birthday! Complete with a knights and castles theme! (The only thing holding that cake together was the fact that it was still half-frozen!)
Sasha after a long ride tubing on Lake Day with the youth. Check out the hair.
Sasha and Noah all cleaned up after a long day of good ol' summer fun!
Labels: family
"Hey Nostradamus! Did you predict that once we found the Promised Land we'd all start offing each other? And did you predict that once we found the Promised Land, it would be the final Promised Land, and there'd never be another one again?"
Hey Nostradamus, 91
After much prodding from my husband, I decided to read my first ever Douglas Coupland book, Hey Nostradamus!. Coupland is famous for the west-coast cynicism that infuses his fiction - a gen x-er's take on the world I suppose - and he's also published a couple of very fun books on Canadiana. I had been meaning to read something of his for some time now, but I soon found that I was unprepared for the spiritual and emotional depth of Hey Nostradamus! - not a book to read while you're trying to unwind, but a book you should read nonetheless.
The book takes place in the aftermath of a school shooting in North Vancouver 1988. Four characters narrate the tragic effects of the senseless killings over the following years. Coupland dives to the vacuous core of suffering - its randomness, its meaninglessness, and the vain and hurtful attempts to afford it some kind of meaning or purpose. The four characters struggle with senselessness of suffering both in the event and aftermath of the shooting, but also in the context of the disappointments of everyday life. Coupland confronts religiosity, prayer, and our concepts of God with honesty, if not tinged with a well-deserved cynicism.
Amazingly, in this unbelievable mess that the characters find themselves in, Coupland subtly suggests some kind of hope - and this is a stretch because by the end of the book, many (if not all) of the main character's lives have ended in violence or in abysmal relational failure. Where can this hope possibly be coming from?
In the beginning pages of his book, Coupland quotes 1st Corinthians 15:51, 52
Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed — in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
This quote is mirrored in the final sentences of the last chapter. I have to admit that I am on the fence about what Coupland is getting at. Is he really saying that the only way to adequately and justly address suffering and death is a bodily resurrection? Or is he saying that such a hope is made utterly ridiculous within the context of such a horrible act of violence - that the hope for resurrection is the escapist hope of the religious hypocrite?
The book is not without its flaws - the voices of the four characters are too similar, for example. Some of the circumstance seem overly extreme - yet, that is how life is sometimes... Coupland's cynicism can become abrasive after a while, but I found that by that time I was too wrapped up in the plot to care.
Despite its minor flaws, Hey Nostradamus! was deeply moving and worth the read. It's a book that begs discussion so I hope some of you out there will end up reading it. Believe me, it will be a story you'll be unpacking for a long time.
Labels: books, Coupland, resurrection, suffering
We're starting a new adventure in a big city on the west coast... I'm a student married to a great guy and we have two very energetic little boys. There's a little bit from column A and column B on this blog - hope you don't mind!
