What to Read for Holy Week

This year, for Lent, I've been taking the advice of one of our other TTC writers and, instead of giving something up, I've added devotional readings. Like Renea, I've added children's readings from the charming and talented Sally Lloyd-Jones. I've been adding a chapter a day throughout Lent from her Jesus Storybook Bible to my morning routine.

If you're looking for something to do to remember Holy Week this week and if you love beautiful, simple storytelling, or if you have children and would like to find something the whole family can participate in, readings from this book are a great idea. If you started today and wanted one reading through Good Friday, you would start with the story of the prodigal son and end with the crucifixion. Then, you could take a break on Saturday and pick up the readings on Easter morning with the story of Christ's resurrection. A word of warning to purists: this book is more storybook than Bible, but that's why I love it so much. Lloyd-Jones's whimsical writing brings back my childhood delight and wonder at the Big Story of Christianity and helps me to see my faith from new perspectives and from old perspectives I thought I had lost. And if you're looking for a Christianity 101 primer, this isn't a bad place to begin, both for children and grown-ups.

Happy Holy Week.

Messy Spirituality

About ready to crumble under the (in many ways self-imposed) pressure of living by all the Do's and Don'ts we often mistake for Christianity, I was desperately seeking a messy (incarnational*) spirituality, though I didn't have the words for it at the time.

I read Mike Yaconelli's Messy Spirituality in college; it was part of an onslaught of Holy Spirit two-by-fours the Lord used to dislodge my legalistic blinders so I could see that I am the prodigal and the one who has been forgiven much.

Messy Spirituality is about exactly that. It’s a humble, unassuming story of and guide to rightly rejecting neat, sanitized spirituality, breaking out of the plastic shrinkwrap of systematized religion, and embracing abundant life with all it’s messes, failures, complexities, questions, joys, triumphs, tensions, and paradoxes. A messy spirituality truly embraces our constant need of God's grace, which turns us into people of Grace, people of God.

Romans 12:2 warns against allowing the world to squeeze us into a particular pattern, a box that doesn’t let the Light in and keeps us from real living. Yaconelli recognizes we aren’t only in danger of the world trying to make us into what the world wants us to be, but that all too often our various Christian subcultures try, often with good intentions, to squeeze us into one-size-fits-all patterns of spirituality. This small book says big things about what it means to simply walk with God. No formulas, no four-year plans. Just one foot in front of the other. One step at a time.

While a messy spirituality rejects the boxed-in legalism found in certain churches, it does not reject the Church. Messy spirituality is not a lone wolf spirituality. It is a life lived together. The more the messier! (Well, okay, not necessarily---I just couldn't resist.) Incarnational spirituality does not reject the Body of Christ (though it might shake the dust from a particular church off it's sandals).

Yaconelli helps us look at life as a rich and enriching sort of muddling in the middle---the narrow path between legalism and libertinism that leads toward wholeness and freedom. He does so with pastoral patience and humility, humor and earthiness, wisdom... and grace.

If you find yourself struggling with I'm not good enough at x, y, z spiritual discipline. If you find the Gospel truncated and irrelevant to your friends, neighbors, coworkers, or in your own life. If you could use a reminder, an affirmation in the midst of the seemingly constant struggle against our culture's/human nature's pharisaical spirituality.

This book is for you.


___________________

* "Incarnational theology [affirms] Jesus Christ as the human expression of [God,] the second person of the Trinity. Incarnational theology can also refer to the belief that Christians are to function as Jesus Christ to humanity and represent the incarnated [embodied] Word of God to all people." We are His hands and feet. We are His messengers. (Source: http://carm.org/dictionary-incarnational-theology)

The Theological Importance of Reading Fiction

Several months ago, I wrote a post called "The Theological Importance of Imagination" in which I attempted to dispel that nasty Modernist rumor that imagination is childish at best and evil at worst. I discussed how imagination is childlike and as such, essential to faith, hope, and love.

Since imagination is so vital to Christianity, we ought to be keenly interested in developing our capacity for imagination and prayerfully disciplining our hearts and minds, for imagination can be employed viciously just as it can be employed lovingly. This, like most true Christian work, is countercultural.

I argue today, as you may guess from my title, that reading fiction is one of the best ways to cultivate our capacity to "envision that which is not," as JK Rowling puts it, and reading good fiction is a way of disciplining ourselves in virtue.

This is not Anna Karenina.
(Fan-fiction is the funnest!)

The most common expression of a loving imagination is empathy, the ability to "think [our]selves into other people's places." Empathy always results from reading good stories. When we read good stories, we enter a reality through the perspective of an other: a narrator or character or multiple narrating characters. When we're reading a fictional reality through first person narration, we've put ourselves, not merely in the shoes, more like in the skin of that other, walking around in that new skin for sometimes hundreds of pages.

I've never been to Russia in "real life." But I've spent months there, in the 1870s no less, with Anna Karenina. And through the people I met in 19th-century Russia, I learned about human nature, love, forgiveness, and a tiny bit about early turn-of-the-Industrial-century farming too.

Fiction helps us empathize with individuals and people groups we don’t understand, whether because of long distances of time and space and/or large gaps between their ideology and ours. This is huge. What we don’t understand we fear. When we act out of fear, we fail to live by faith and act out of love. So fiction serves as a bridge to other people, but it also works to connect us to the Other, to God. We need imagination to envision the Kingdom of God, a world which Jesus said is here but not yet here. We need our God-given imaginations to pray, Father, make it on Earth as it is in heaven. Fiction helps us go there, helps us engage our imaginations by journeying us to otherworldly places like Narnia and Hogwarts and Middle Earth. When stories depict light and life and love, they are, whether we realize it or not, whether the author intended it or not, pointing us to the Source of light, life and love, to Light, Life and Love himself.

I have a difficult time imagining the world completely devoid of hope, but when I first read Heart of Darkness, my capacity for understanding and empathy expanded. Heart of Darkness is a stunningly crafted world that is horrendously bleak, desolate, and violent. It's a world in which depravity has rejected grace. I have never experienced such a world in "real life," but reading this story gave me compassion for those who have.

Even when novels and short stories show us the shadows, when we’re forced to face all that is dark and dead and ugly in the world (and in our hearts), this too points to Christ. Like the negative of a photograph shows us what should be fully there but isn’t, dark, "ugly" art shows us our fallen condition and points to the realities that begin to take shape when God is taken out of the picture, when sin has pushed him out of the framework of our lives.

Frederick Buechner, one of my favorite writers, puts it this way:

There would be a strong argument for saying that much of the most powerful preaching of our time is the preaching of the poets, playwrights, novelists because it is often they better than the rest of us who speak with awful honesty about the absence of God in the world, and about the storm of his absence, both without and within, which, because it is unendurable, unlivable, drives us to look to the eye of the storm [to God himself]. (Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale 44)

In short, reading good fiction... by which I don't mean only 1000-page Russian novels and horribly dark high school required reading... reading good fiction is a remarkably fruitful form of spiritual discipline and spiritual formation.

October is National Book Month. We here at Thinking through Christianity, naturally, are celebrating. In the next few weeks we'll be discussing our favorite books, so I thought I'd tee up the ball and introduce our upcoming series by talking about why we think good books are worth celebrating and discussing on a site about a faith tradition that sometimes eschews itself from fiction.

Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality

This book was recommended to me by a friend in the business of recommending good books, and once again, her recommendation has turned out to be one of the most important books I've read this year.

Washed and Waiting is, at its most basic level, a spiritual memoir of a gay Christian who does not believe the Bible's prohibition of homoerotic sex is outmoded or culturally bound---he believes homoerotic sex is a sin. At the same time, however, Hill's experience as a homosexual Christian does not jive with the metanarrative from other theologically conservative Christians that same-sex attraction is a choice that can be changed.* Hill, therefore, practices celibacy.

Here are the reasons I found Washed and Waiting so important:

1. Understanding. Conservative Christians are generally told homosexuality is a choice that can be changed or a coping mechanism that can be healed. While this is true for some, it is not true for all or even most people who experience unwanted same-sex attraction. It's time we stop being so one-dimensional, which generally leads to a lack of understanding and therefore a certain lack of empathy.
2. Empathy. As a spiritual memoir of sorts, Washed and Waiting provides heterosexuals the human super power of walking in an other's shoes. Even for those who can skip number one on this list, the glimpse of the immense and unrelenting loneliness and frustration Hill experiences is invaluable.
3. Relief. For those with similar stories to the author's, Hill's brave telling of his story is an affirmation and encouragement, if nothing else, that they are not alone.
4. Challenge. Washed and Waiting ends with an afterword from Kathryn Greene-McCreight who challenges the church: "Can we [heterosexual Christians] continue to ignore the isolation these brothers and sisters experience within the body of Christ?" The answer, of course, is no.

For a well organized and more in-depth review of Washed and Waiting, click here.


*Neither of these points is up for debate in this post, the goal of which is simply to point to one book; anything else would be beyond the scope and therefore counterproductive here.

WITCHES, WIZARDS, AND WISE PARENTING

It's now my second Halloween as a Christian parent. I have yet to get around to forwarding emails about children reading Harry Potter then becoming witches, and I still have yet to pass out my first chocolate-covered New Testament to trick-or-treaters. But my daughter is getting old enough now that I have to start thinking through exactly how I am going to let my daughter interact with alot of themes that Halloween brings to the forefront every year. Will we read books with magic in them as she's growing up? Will we watch movies with wizards, monsters, etc? What sorts of Halloween parties (if any) will we attend as a family? What will I do when I find her playing in her room and she tells me she's pretending to be a witch?

Now these are important questions to me for at least two reasons. First, children process information very differently from adults. So while I can watch a movie about an evil sorcerer or a giant dragon terrorize humanity, my daughter won't be watching those sorts of things until she is much older. Why? Because children have a very hard time processing abstract concepts, symbolism, etc. They also have a hard time distinguishing reality and fiction.

Daddy! That symbolic representation of the

consequences of corporate greed is in my closet again!

But I have a second, larger concern, as well. You see, I believe there really is a spiritual reality, that there are supernatural beings and supernatural power at work in the world. And I believe that how my daughter thinks about these things is important. Now I'm fine with my daughter dressing up as a fairy princess for Halloween, and I have no intention of burning my copies of Lord of the Rings just in case my daughter takes a shining to ole Sauron. But I'm going to expose my daughter to these things in a controlled manner. It's like giving your child a vaccine to protect her against things you don't particularly like. I don't mind my daughter being exposed in controlled doses to false ways of seeing spiritual reality, but I want to be the one administering the vaccine.

Take one overextended metaphor and call me in the morning.

In fact, there are many wonderful stories and movies in our culture that incorporate supernatural or magical themes that can have a very beneficial impact on a child's development. For example, I have no doubt we'll read The Chronicles of Narnia together as my daughter gets older. In addition, there are stories and movies that incorporate supernatural or magical themes in ways that are harmless (maybe even teaching a few life lessons along the way). I've never heard of a child starting to worship Satan after watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory or Mary Poppins.

But again, for me it goes beyond making sure my daughter is old enough to distinguish real from fake. It's also a matter of there being a real spiritual reality that is being falsely displayed. I'm not saying there is some vast conspiracy involved in the way we portray supernatural things in our culture. Indeed, I think that much of our literature and films are produced not by those trying to create a counter view of spiritual reality, but by those who think no such reality exists!

Since everyone knows there's no such thing as crocodiles,

let's teach children that they are musical vegetarians who only use their sharp teeth to punish bad vegetables.

However, while I know my daughter isn't going to run into fairies, white wizards, and the like, she still may very well encounter spiritual beings and have spiritual experiences over the course of her life. I want her to think correctly about these things. That doesn't mean that we are going to avoid magic and supernatural themes in books and movies. It just means that we are going to be talking about those things as she watches them, and I will be making sure she understands them in light of the spiritual reality that God has created.

Now, honey, what did we learn about eating creepy people's houses?

This is how my wife and I will navigate raising a child in a culture full of magical and supernatural themes. We're certainly not going to avoid these things and pretend they don't exist. We're also not going to de facto villainize everything we don't 100 percent agree with. What we will do is help our daughter navigate this part of our culture, as with every other part of our culture, in a discerning way as we try to help her understand the world as God has made it.