Monthly Archives: March 2008

Reading Trollope

Needing a good novel to occupy my attention, I happened across Anthony Trollope’s The Duke’s Children. It has turned out to be a good book for me to read right now. Trollope is gentle with his characters:– he makes you see their deepest motivations; and he shows you when they lie to themselves or misjudge the people around them; but he is gentle with them, and you feel that you want to know them. In his autobiography, Trollope writes that his characters lived for him, or that he lived with them, and that he liked them. He had enough affection for them that he sometimes couldn’t kill them off even when the plot demanded it, and the same characters appear in novel after novel because (he says) he liked them that much.

I don’t read Trollope for his prose style; his prose is adequate but sometimes the seams show. Nor do I read Trollope for his plots, for his plots can be a little too creaky. But I do find myself caring for his characters. I still get upset when I think about the ending of The Small House at Allington, because I cared about the characters.

Too many novelists (especially recently) do not treat their characters well:– they treat their characters as disposable entertainment modules, or as commodities, or as inferior beings, or as superstructure upon which to hang a plot, a concept, or a philosophy. Too often this is the way the world treats real human beings:– as disposable, or as commodities, or as inferior beings, or as superstructure on which to hang political power. I suspect the real reason I wanted to read Trollope right now is because of the ongoing presidential election campaign, in which the candidates seem to treat the United States populace as mere pawns, things to be polled, bought, and moved about on a political chessboard; this political campaign is not being gentle with anyone.

Water cooler conversation

“Hey, didja see it on YouTube?”

“What?”

“That crazy preacher guy. You know, the religious leader that presidential candidate follows?”

“Oh yeah, him.”

“What a nut case. Ya know what he said? He said, ‘You impostors. Damn you! You slam the door of Heaven’s domain in people’s faces.’ [1] What’s up with a preacher saying ‘damn you’? Isn’t that swearing?”

“Huh. I didn’t know he said that.”

“Yeah, doesn’t it sound like he’s a communist or something? I saw this other video clip where he said, ‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.’ [2] Hey, in my church I learned that you gotta earn your daily bread. This preacher sounds like a goddam Commie who wants to give everything away to homeless.”

“Jeez, he sounds like a radical nut.”

“You don’t know the half of it. He also said the peacemakers are children of God. [3] You know what that means — he’s one of those anti-war nuts that wants us to pull out of Iraq and leave it to the terrorists. Anyway, that’s what Brush Limburger said on his radio show.”

“Christ, that’s pretty bad.”

“Well, it gets worse. If you look at those picture of him, he looks like a hippie nut, with that long hair braided down his neck. And I’m telling you, he doesn’t look exactly white, if you know what I mean. Like maybe he’s Middle Eastern, where all these terrorists are coming from. [4]”

“Hoo, boy. You think the guy is a terrorist?”

“Hey, all I know is he doesn’t like us Americans. There was this other YouTube clip of him preaching, and he said, ‘How much longer must I be among you? How much longer must I put up with you?’ [5] You can lay money on it that he wants to bring down the American government. [6]”

“Man. Thanks for telling me all this.”

“Yeah, well, I’m just trying to keep America safe. No way am I going to vote for anyone who follows a religious nut like that — I’m a good law-abiding Christian, not some kind of Commie peacenik who wants to bring down the American government.”

“They should just execute guys like that.”

———

Notes:

[1] Words of Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 23.23, Scholar’s Version translation.
[2] Words of Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 5.4, King James Version.
[3] Words of Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 5.9, from the King James Version.
[4] Scholars generally agree that Jewish men in Jesus’s time wore their hair long and braided; as for Jesus’s skin color, it could have been a light to medium brown.
[5] Words of Jesus of Nazareth, Mark 9.19, New Revised Standard Version.
[6] Not to belabor the point, but Pilate accused Jesus of being “King of the Jews,” i.e., a possible political threat to the government.

Friday videos

Just over a year ago, I started posting short videos on this blog, with the goal of posting a new video each week. The most popular videos have been the ones dealing with the Bible from a liberal religious perspective; least popular have been the videoblog entries. With 40+ videos online and a total of 4,700+ total views, the online videos are a small but important part of this blog’s overall traffic.

At the moment, I’ve stopped production to think about what direction I might want to take. Your suggestions, as always, are most welcome — you can leave your ideas in the comments section. And I’ll be rolling out new videos beginning in April, with new theme music and a new look.

My take on Jeremiah Wright

Jeremiah Wright, the recently retired minister of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, strikes me as the best kind of prophetic preacher, someone who speaks without sugar-coating his moral and religious message for the comfort of his listeners. Jeremiah Wright now has the misfortune of being Barack Obama’s former minister, and Wright is being trashed because he preached a prophetic message, a few seconds of which have been replayed as sound bites on national media in recent days.

But preachers have to answer to religious standards, not political standards. We are not bound to preach patriotism for the United States, we are bound to preach the permanent truths that we find in our religious traditions. It may not be politically acceptable to do so, but we preachers at times may be called to point out that our country cannot legitimately take the moral high ground until we face our own moral failings with candor. And we prophetic preachers may find ourselves called to proclaim, for example, that ongoing racism demonstrates that some white Americans do not treat their neighbors as they themselves would like to be treated. No one likes to hear that they have moral failings; this is one reason why some of the things we preachers say are not appreciated.

Politicians, on the other hand, have a very different task from preachers. Politicians do not speak prophetically; they speak in order to build political consensus. As a preacher, I am not surprised when I hear Barack Obama trashing Jeremiah Wright’s sermons. Wright preaches a religious truth: Our country has done moral wrongs, and those of us who are religious persons need to engage in repentance and forgiveness for those wrongs. Obama’s political truth is different; he needs to distance himself from Wright and build a political consensus.

It should be obvious by now that I’d rather hear Jeremiah Wright preach than Barack Obama speak. As a preacher, I might want to take Obama to task for sugar-coating our country’s moral failings. But then, I guess I should accept that he’s only a politician and thus is in the business of sugar-coating moral truths (from my point of view, anyway).

One last point: I wonder why we have not heard about Hillary Clinton’s minister, and John McCain’s minister. If I had a presidential candidate in my congregation, I trust they would be embarrassed by some of the moral stands I have taken; if they weren’t embarrassed, I would take that to mean that I had been sugar-coating moral truths.

The junkyard cometh

Tomorrow morning, the junkman will come and pick up my old ’93 Toyota Corolla, which I have owned since July, 1997. When I bought the car, we were still living in the center of Concord, Massachusetts, and I was still working in my first church job, as the Director of Religious Education at First Parish in Watertown. The car has driven me to work at every church I have served, and it has driven me home to apartments in Newton, Concord, Oakland, Geneva, Illinois, and now New Bedford. We drove from Massachusetts to Oakland in that car, stopping at Havusupai Canyon and Mono Lake on the way. And after a year there we drove the car back, stopping along the way to spend a year in Geneva, Illinois. I bought it with 45,000 miles on it, and now it has 177,000 miles one it. That car has been one of the most constant things in my life over the past decade. But now the brake lines are so corroded the mechanic said I can’t trust them ($1,500 to repair), and the timing belt is due to be replaced ($650), and the power steering pump sounds like it’s going (at least $500), and the rear struts are shot. And Carol’s mom wants to get rid of her ’93 Toyota Camry, for well below market value, and with less than half the mileage of my old car. The poet Robert Graves wrote that “technology produces millions of identical and spiritually dead objects which as a rule take far longer to humanize than their expected length of service; whereas unmechanized craft exercised by individuals or closely knit groups produce objects with elements of life in them.” Unfortunately, I can’t afford to spend $3,000 on repairs in the hopes that my old car will become more humanized in a few more years; I can’t afford sentiment; the junkie will come tomorrow maybe leaving behind a few rusty memories.

Update: This morning (March 20), we got a call from someone we met through an environmental group, and he wanted the car so he could fix it up for one of his teenaged kids. He and his daughter just came and picked it up, and I called off the junkman.

Arthur C. Clarke

There was a time in my early teens when I was obsessed with the book 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke. I saw the movie later, and have never liked it as well as the book. In the book, Clarke tells his story efficiently and well. True, the human characters are one-dimensional automatons, but that creates the delicious irony that HAL, the rogue computer, is the only three-dimensional and interesting character. When at last the human “protagonist” (although he is so bland and unsympathetic it’s hard to call him a protagonist) comes back to the solar system as a post-human creature produced by non-human aliens, you wish that HAL had survived instead — HAL seems more trustworthy.

I think I understood 2001 partly in religious terms:– a mysterious force (non-human aliens rather than God) determines the destiny of human affairs through rather heavy-handed interventions — and the prophet, the one who returns to earth after meeting this mysterious force, starts out as a bland faceless prig and doesn’t get any better from his encounter with the aliens. That is to say, I disagreed strongly with the basic moral argument of the book:– that humanity needs to depend on some external source, some deus ex machina, for moral authority. As a young teen, I only felt a vague disquiet with the premise of 2001, but somehow I knew it Clarke was wrong: humanity cannot depend on some outside saving force to redeem itself.

We need to read authors with whom we strongly disagree. As a teenaged science fiction fan, I got to disagree strongly with Arthur C. Clarke, which helped me better understand my own thoughts. That is a gift that cannot be underestimated. He wrote many other books and stories that made my teenaged self think, and so I was very sorry to hear that he died this morning.