For the Sheer Joy of It

This is the reason you shall do it. For it brings you a pleasure which is unalloyed, an unmitigated good. I don’t know what it might be for you, this thing. I can think of a handful of things for me: writing, driving (not commuting), reading a good book, going for a walk with my wife, playing with my kids until the giggles and shrieks mingle, building or fixing something with my son, and so on.

By dint of our individual natures and life experiences we will each have some set of activities which tap into some simple and primal creaturely mirth. My exhortation is: do that. It’s good. Obviously some caveats are in order, such as, don’t sin, since sin by definition does not satisfy nor is it aligned with who we were made to be. But aside from that, there is broad freedom here.

For some, there are kinds of manual work which fall into this category. Probably not shoveling – though who knows? I’m thinking of something a little bit more skilled which passes the time and brings pleasure. The pleasure should not be dependent on the accomplishment of some task or goal. The thing I have in mind is not done for the sake of productivity or efficiency; it is anti-utilitarian. It’s the kind of thing that fills in the open spaces on the hourly planner, which doesn’t really cross any items off any list, but which never feels like wasted time.

In short, it is good to do some things for the sheer joy of it, and not for any other purpose. There is something here which we share with other creatures. While animals are guided largely by instincts, they each have their own personalities and they also engage in playfulness which has no strict Darwinian logic to it, not that I am a Darwinian. Sometimes a dog just wants to run around the yard in big loops as fast as it can. There’s a pleasure inherent to the sensation of motion, balance, and even the aesthetics of a finely executed jump or swoop. See for example how the birds seem to enjoy playing in the wind, for the same reason children and child-hearted adults enjoy holding their hand out the car window on the highway, playing on the flowing air like the aileron of a jet.

If your life is so full of lists and efficiency and every-moment-scheduled activity such that there is no room for these kinds of things, or if the thought of it induces a mix of anxiety and guilt because you’re captive to an inflexible productivity mindset, I shake my finger at you, though in a friendly way.

My friend, we are human beings, not machines. We are mind, body, soul, and spirit, not algorithm, subroutine, and hydraulics. A human life, at a human pace, is one of those universal aspirations of all people everywhere (with varied manifestations of course). The French term, joie de vivre captures something of this essential joy in being. To lose this thing I’m trying to describe in any measure is to slide towards the mechanistic, robotic, slave-like inhumanity. Chesterton makes a related point in his chapter called The Maniac in the book Orthodoxy. Allow me to quote the relevant section:

The last thing that can be said of a lunatic is that his actions are causeless. If any human acts may loosely be called causeless, they are the minor acts of a healthy man; whistling as he walks; slashing the grass with a stick; kicking his heels or rubbing his hands. It is the happy man who does the useless things; the sick man is not strong enough to be idle. It is exactly such careless and causeless actions that the madman could never understand; for the madman (like the determinist) generally sees too much cause in everything. The madman would read a conspiratorial significance into those empty activities. He would think that the lopping of the grass was an attack on private property. He would think that the kicking of the heels was a signal to an accomplice. If the madman could for an instant become careless, he would become sane. Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

I rarely read Chesterton without a smile on. His writing is so colourful, even playful. His mind jumps around between ideas and is always running here and there on the page, the reader at times struggling to keep up. And then at the end of a few paragraphs he puts the finishing touches on some zany idea and it comes into focus for the reader with a shock, like having been led into the Sistine chapel in darkness and then having someone suddenly flip on the lights. (Does the Sistine chapel have artificial lights? My metaphor depends on it.) I remember when I first read this paragraph above, how delighted I was. I had never thought of reason and madness that way before, and it gave me a new and permanent enjoyment of little ’causeless’ and ‘useless’ actions. Children are, of course, the ultimate example of this. They are playfulness incarnate, and have much to teach us in this regard.

*G. K. Chesterton, the so-called prince of paradox.*

Another fine example comes from the movie Chariots of Fire, where a conflict arises between the gifted runner Eric Liddell and his ministry-focused sister. She thinks he should quit running since it accomplishes nothing for the kingdom, but he sees something in the running that she cannot – some worth that is in and of itself, not dependent on some other measurable accomplishment. “When I run, I feel God’s pleasure.” But lest this attitude be taken as a being fundamentally at odds with a life lived fully for God’s glory, I want to point out that after his epic performance in the 1924 Olympics, during which his conviction to keep the Sabbath engendered no small amount of publicity, he became a missionary to China where he eventually died at the age of 43, a prisoner in a Japanese internment camp during World War 2. His love, concern, and self-sacrificing generosity towards his fellow inmates left an indelible mark on those who survived.

There is an application here for those in demanding and important vocations, perhaps especially ministry, since it concerns eternal things. There is an understandable way of thinking that says something like I can’t possibly read a novel or take up a hobby or learn a new instrument when there are people suffering and I can do something about it. This can work for a while, but I see at least three problems with it. First, this mentality is at odds with the natural rhythms of work and rest that God has designed us for. This attitude leads towards burnout. Second, there is a messiah complex, or the seeds of it, in that approach. Third, a life crammed to the ceiling with work is not a good model for others to emulate. Those in ministry especially are to be ‘an example’ to regular folks. But a life with no margin, no niches carved out for the simple pleasures described above, is not balanced or healthy. This is not to say we should not work hard, put in long hours, or have certain seasons of especially intense exertion. One can do all those things and yet preserve the kind of childlikeness, freedom to rest, and simple pleasures I’ve been trying to describe.

So to return to my opening exhortation: go ahead and do that thing for the sheer joy of it. Who knows? You may even find yourself feeling God’s pleasure in it.

Review of Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation

I have been an avid reader and consumer of Tim Keller’s teaching since not long after my conversion to Christ in 2004. I found in him something of a kindred spirit, a person whose temperament and disposition was in many ways similar to my own, and therefore someone whom I could look at and say, “I’d like to learn how to be more like that.” I can say that Keller’s influence on me has been profound and positive. And in the interest of honesty and disclosure, I must admit that Keller and I are very close, by which I mean that I once said a brief hello to him during a large lunch gathering at a conference while he ate macaroni salad. I’m sure he has never forgotten it.

Tim Keller, probably thinking about that macaroni salad.

I therefore approached this book with a warm disposition. Despite the presentation of the book as not quite a biography, it is. Only it’s one that rightly makes no attempt to analyze Keller’s legacy. The book deepened my appreciation for his influences, many of which I was already familiar with: R.C. Sproul, Richard Lovelace, Jack Miller, Harvey Conn, Edmund Clowney, John Owen, and Jonathan Edwards.

The narrative spanned Keller’s entire life and ministry and it filled in many details that I was not familiar with, including some that weren’t so flattering, such as the persistent struggles he had leading the staff of Redeemer church before the arrival of a good executive pastor. The only part I cringed at a little bit was the mention of Francis Collins as the supposed paragon of the ‘faithful presence’ approach to cultural influence. Whatever respect I had for Collins died from the multiple gunshot wounds of this, that, and the other bullets of journalism and public facts. His role in the early days of the pandemic slandering the framers of the Great Barrington Declaration hasn’t helped either. But let’s move on from that unpleasant subject.

Like all of us, Keller’s weaknesses are the inversions of his gifts. His ability to see things from all sides, analyze them, and arrive at a mediatory solution can sometimes slip into the pitfall of false equivalency. His self-confessed disposition towards peacemaking has at times been at the cost of moral clarity. In short, he is not all that the church needs. He is not Luther, and at times we need Luthers. Much of the criticism of Keller in recent years has amounted to just that: the sense among some that the church now needs more of a blunt, Luther-like voice, and that Keller is not the man for that job. I sympathize with that sentiment, but it does not lessen for one moment my gratitude for Keller’s influence on me personally and on the church as a whole.

The church needs men and women with Keller’s uncanny ability to synthesize insights from wide-ranging sources. Rarely have I heard or read Tim Keller and not been stimulated to think more deeply and wisely, as well as to feel (or wish to feel) more affection for Christ. His greatest gift to the church has been the combination of his fertile mind and warm heart. Yet the church needs more than Tim Keller and those like him. This shouldn’t be controversial or surprising, should it? ‘The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!”’ (1 Cor 12:21). Likewise, the church which tries to grow into a balanced and healthy body using only one or two body parts will become anything but.

If nothing else, I hope this book encourages many readers to mine the spiritual and intellectual resources that so shaped and animated Keller’s thought. In years past I did it by scouring articles, podcasts, and footnotes, scribbling authors’ names and book titles down and looking them up later in libraries and on iTunes and Amazon. I still remember the thrill of stumbling upon all the audio lectures for Keller and Clowney’s D.Min preaching course from Reformed Theological Seminary, Preaching Christ in a Post-Modern World, on the now-defunct iTunes University platform. I then found the accompanying syllabus as a badly-scanned 188-page PDF somewhere online. For the next few weeks I soaked up the stimulating lectures while doing repetitive manual labour at my cabinet-making job. That experience alone led to permanent shifts in my understanding of sanctification, preaching, and the dynamics of sin in both the preacher’s and listener’s hearts. It was through Keller that I was introduced to Luther’s Shorter Catechism, Lovelace’s Dynamics of Spiritual Life, Edwards’ The Nature of True Virtue, Chalmers’ The Expulsive Power of a New Affection, and other gold mines.

It brings me joy to think of many others now being ushered into those rich deposits, for in them the believer discovers more of Christ and more of the Scriptures which testify to Him.

A Reluctant Review of A Book – Becoming Free Indeed by Jinger Duggar

Okay, yes, I did read this glossy author-on-the-cover reality TV star’s co-written faith ‘memoir.’ Guilty as charged. As a general rule, I avoid any book with the author on the cover like a slug avoids the salt shaker. I know what I’m likely to find behind the cover: smarmy tone, bland prose, predictable writing – But! There were extenuating circumstances, your Honor. You see, my wife, whom I love, watched the Duggar show for a while (and possibly I sat beside her at various points while it was on – who can say?), and so she was interested in the book, and we were on a long road trip, and we had free access to it via Scribd, and it purported to be a kind of reverse-deconstruction of the author’s faith, a topic which has interested me for some time. So you see? Anyone would have read this book in such circumstances. Good, I’m glad we got that out of the way.

Frankly, I had quite low expectations, so I can say it was better than I expected. The story, in case you’re not up to speed, is that Jinger Duggar grew up in a uber-conservative subset of American evangelicalism that had many elements of your typical cult. Centered around the person and teaching of Bill Gothard, a one-time Wheaton grad and inner city youth minister, it focused heavily on external issues of morality such modest dress, courting instead of dating, having lots of children, shunning debt and mortgages, not drinking alcohol, not listening to secular music, etc. Her family had a long-running reality TV show because they had 19 kids and seemed like a strange artifact of American culture. The whole thing took a dark turn when the eldest Duggar son, Josh, was accused of molesting some sisters and eventually got caught with child pornography and was hauled off to jail where he remains. Gothard was also accused by scores of the young attractive women he staffed his headquarters with of sexual misconduct of various kinds.

Gothard’s ministry was called the Institute for Biblical Life Principles (IBLP) and the whole thing sounds to me like a giant collection of red flags literally on fire. But clearly quite a few thousand people were taken in hook, line, and sinker. As with other legalistic and unbiblical religious groups, you can’t help but have a lot of compassion for the people raised in it. And it’s not surprising that a huge chunk of them leave Christianity behind completely, imagining it to be equated with what they knew growing up.

This book does a decent job of drawing important distinctions between the legalism of IBLP (and ultra-conservative fundamentalism in general) and the gospel of Christ. The story, such as it is, is pretty interesting and is written in a simple, straightforward style. The narrative is interspersed with lengthy treatments of Gothard’s teaching and explanations of Jinger’s new understanding. There is a certain irony in the fact that Jinger recovers from the fundamentalism of IBLP by landing at Grace Church in California, a place which many within evangelicalism would equate with a kind of quasi-fundamentalism. I wouldn’t totally agree with that characterization but there’s no denying that Grace is very conservative.

One thing I found particularly interesting was the author’s description of how her view of God changed as she ‘disentangled’ the beliefs she absorbed from Gothard from the truth of Scripture. I recently re-read Sinclair Ferguson’s superb ‘The Whole Christ,’ wherein he shows how legalism and antinomianism share a common rotten root, one which reaches all the way back to the garden, and that this root is a suspicion that the heart of God the Father is not one of love, mercy, and grace. So this God must be appeased with performance and religious duties lest he be angry and withhold the good things we want.

At one point, Jinger quotes Gothard as telling a woman whose life was a sinful mess that she needed to clean up her life before Christ could come into it. As Ferguson shows, this is more or less the same instinct as some in the Church of Scotland had during the Marrow Controversy and the debates over whether the gospel should be freely offered to all or only towards the truly repentent.

It is nothing less than an anti-gospel, and it enslaves rather than frees. It sees the Father as one who holds back the benefits of redemption through his Son until the person has made themselves worthy to receive them. But as Ferguson points out, this results in a grave error, the separation of Christ from His benefits, and it breeds spiritual sickness rather than health.

Rather, the Father has sent the Son because he loves us, and all who turn to Christ in repentance and faith receive Him and all the manifold gifts of redemption. The believer is united to Christ by the Holy Spirit, and Jesus is the greatest gift – for in Him are all the benefits, and through Him we are reconciled to the Father, and it is His Spirit by which we are sealed and with which we are filled.

It’s hard to overstate the distance between this rich and glorious gospel and the paltry saltine cracker ‘gospel’ of IBLP and Bill Gothard. This book made me thankful for the wonderful teaching I found and received early in my Christian life which helped me grasp not only the pulsing heart of the gospel but the grand sweep of Scripture’s united narrative, the history of redemption.

I have to say there’s a certain amount of righteous anger I feel towards the people who run these legalistic religious systems based on the Bible. I was stunned to hear that Jinger, despite having grown up in a supposedly very ‘Christian’ environment for her entire life, had never heard decent expository preaching (only proof-texting), nor an explanation of how the two Testaments fit together, nor how Christ fulfilled the law, nor had she ever heard a real God-centered emphasis on His glory and character, nor been given any sense of the historical placement of her community’s tiny slice of Christian belief within the grand scope of Christendom, nor had Romans 14 or the concept of liberty over disputable matters or the Christian conscience ever been explained to her, nor had she been shown how all of Scripture is ONE story which all culminates in Jesus. What!? Was it really all about how long skirts should be and avoiding rock music? These poor people.

I’m glad Jinger managed to disentangle that mess and find that Christ is far better. Given the size of the audience for their now-ended TV show and the toxic level of interest many Americans have towards the lives of celebrities, I’m sure it will be read by many. I think it could be helpful for some, especially those who grew up in IBLP or similar legalistic groups. If some are thereby guided towards a living faith in the real Christ through a richer understanding of the gospel, then all I have to say is: Thanks be to God.

Wild Mountain Thyme

“Do you still hear the voice in the fields?” she asks.

“I don’t know.”

“It’s not a modern idea,” she says.

“I’m not a modern man.”

*Photo by Stephanie Guarini on Unsplash*

Bewildered, then intrigued, then charmed. This has been the trajectory of my feelings for this movie, Wild Mountain Thyme, which I first watched for no other reason than I recognized the title of it as the name of a song on James Taylor’s recent album, Before This World. I liked the song, with its folk melody that has the peculiar flavor of being non-modern. It’s not a melody that would be written today, nor the words. Something about it calls to the modern ear, a memory echoing from a happy heart among green hills, from before the world grew so complicated and fraught.

So I put the movie on and sat down with my wife on the couch. As the movie started we were caught up into the beautiful cinematography. So far so good. But as the story begun to unfold, and the characters revealed, we were a bit confused. Christopher Walken as an Irish farmer? A man who shoots his shotgun at the crows? A girl who thinks she’s a white swan? The dialogue was both funny and strange, witty and unrealistic. By the end of the movie I was left thinking, what was that?! And it might have been left there, forgotten, but for a nagging sense that there was something rather worthwhile in amongst the odd dialogue and narrow scope of the story.

The story may be summarized thus. Two farms next to each other; two families – the Reillys and the Muldoons. Tony Reilly (Walken) is old, but has doubts about passing the farm on to his bachelor son, Anthony (Jamie Dornan), who has some unknown mental issue which makes him a bit off. He thinks of selling to his American nephew Adam (Jon Hamm) instead. Mr. Muldoon, on the other hand, has passed away. His widow, Aoife, is growing older and will pass the farm down to her daughter Rosemarie (Emily Blunt). Rosemarie and Anthony have known each other since childhood, and are in love with each other, but Rosemarie is waiting for Anthony, who can’t bring himself to act on his feelings because of his mental oddity and his shyness.

My wife and I found ourselves quoting some of the more memorable lines over the next few weeks.

“That horse is Satan on four feet.”

“There’s no answer to blather like that.”

“I can’t stand a man with feelings.”

“A man with feelings should be put down!”

And so we found ourselves putting it on again, but only the scenes that we had thought amusing. We did this repeatedly – which is not normal for us – until we put the whole movie on again one night when the despair of scrolling through the nihilistic offerings of Netflix and Prime were too much.

When I realized the movie was based on a play, it started to make much more sense. The strength of the dialogue, the way the scenes were organized, the way the ending wrapped it all up and brought the whole cast – deceased or not – back on ‘stage.’ With repeated viewing came a richer appreciation for the layers folded into the story. Behind the witty repartees emerged some rather beautiful moments. In fact, the entire ethos of the movie emerged as pre-modern and redemptive, shining all the brighter for the rarity of this quality in all modern movies and shows. It lacked that ubiquitous characteristic of modern cinema: cynicism. Aside from a rather forgettable scene where a character unconnected to the rest of the story tells of having slept with a priest, there is a refreshing innocence to the sexual tension of the movie – which is a romance after all.

Perhaps this is best seen when Rosemarie visits New York city for a day and goes on a date with Adam, the American banker. At the end of the date he kisses her unexpectedly. “Oh my God,” she responds, “What did you do?“

“You know exactly what I did. And now being the gentleman that I am, I’m going to walk you back to your hotel.“

The scene then cuts to her traveling back to Ireland in a shocked stupor from that unexpected kiss, repeating “Oh my God” to herself as if she can’t quite believe it. (The movie, set in Catholic Ireland, has a lot of taking the Lord’s name in vain.) The audience is left with the impression that this was perhaps her very first kiss. But this seems unbelievable to a modern audience. A woman in her late 30’s with no previous sexual experience? The only time we are treated to such characters is to mock them, as in The 40-Year Old Virgin (which I have not seen). Innocence is a rare commodity in Hollywood, something which they seem to be incapable of imagining (which is also why Elf was so charming).

Rural life is presented as simple, difficult, and good. Natural beauty and the order of creation is both shown and described, as in this memorable line: “There’s these green fields… and the animals living off them. And over that there’s us… living off the animals. And over that there’s that which tends to us… and lives off us maybe. Whatever that is… it holds me here.“

Even the American banker dreams of becoming an Irish farmer, as a kind of stand-in for all of us moderns who find ourselves longing for that simpler life and deeper connection to creation. But he can’t help importing his modern mindset, asking Rosemarie how many acres she has.

“I don’t know,” she replies with a shrug.

“How do you not know how many acres of land you own?” he asks, bewildered.

“Because it’s just a number.”

“I’m all about numbers. I manage money for a living.”

“Oh, does money need you to manage it?” she asks.

“I’m not sure,” he answers, after a thoughtful pause.

Lastly, there is a scene of reconciliation and redemption which has grown on me with each viewing. It happens as Tony is dying. He calls Anthony to him and they have a remarkable conversation the effect of which no description here will adequately reproduce. But one part of it speaks of Tony’s… conversion? It’s a kind of watershed moment in his life and marriage that he describes this way:

“Till one day… something gave way. Out in the fields in the wet grass the quiet hand of God touched me. Something came to save me. And it’ll come for you too. I can’t name the day the rain let up. The sun shone on me. And I started in singing. Just like that. That old song. Singing! In the field. Me.“

Well, just imagine Christopher Walken saying that with an attempt at an Irish accent. Like I said, it’s definitely a strange movie. But for a strange duck like me who despairs of Hollywood’s ability to capture the good, the true, and the beautiful, it has been a welcome surprise.

Trees & Flames: Reweaving the Threads

The following is an excerpt from a longer work I’ve been chipping away at for a few months. It’s a mix of storytelling and reflection. My vision for this work is that it would be an ideal companion for sitting quietly and enjoying a half hour of pleasant reading; in a word: enjoyable, thoughtful, at times edifying. If this is something you’d be interested in, let me know in the comments below!

I love trees. They fascinate me, they enchant me. I can stare at a massive tree for a long time, just soaking in the size, solidity, solemnity, and sagacity of that being. I don’t believe trees are conscious like we are, but they do have life as well as a kind of wisdom. They know how to grow, how to find the sun, and how to dig roots down when they feel the wind. Did you know that trees that don’t feel any wind do not put down strong roots? Some researchers found this out when they grew trees inside a completely sealed dome. The trees grew tall but then broke and fell over under their own weight much younger than in the wild. It was discovered that the lack of wind and stress on the body of the tree meant it never put down deep roots. If that’s not a kind of wisdom, I don’t know what is.

A live oak with Spanish moss. *Courtesy of David Price, Bok Tower Gardens*

My family and I have traveled down to South Carolina a few times near the end of winter to get a jump start on summer. One of my very favorite things about being in the lowcountry (as they call it down there) is the massive live oaks covered in Spanish moss. These behemoth trees have sprawling branches that reach out and up in a way that our trees up here just don’t. It makes for a tree of mesmerizing size and branches with lovely whimsical shapes. The Spanish moss adds a delicate beauty as it hangs down silvery gray from those great limbs, similar to the way freshly fallen snow adorns our northern trees and makes them lovely to behold.

Despite my romanticism about trees, I accept that they must be cut down for our use; and because of my romanticism, I don’t take that reality lightly. It means something to me when I put those logs of fragrant maple, solid oak, or sinewy ash into the fire. These great trees did something we cannot do: transformed CO2, sunlight, water, and ground nutrients into solid substance (and solid fuel). It’s a kind of alchemy, isn’t it? We let the familiarity of it rob us of the proper wonder. You try to take those ingredients and make something that can hold up a house for 100 years (as the logs in my basement have done) and also keep it warm and cozy.

Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Modern man is alienated, buffered. In our suits of technology and mass culture we are far removed from the primal realities of the wilderness from which we all came. Our ancestors knew how to make fire, or they died. They knew how to find food, or they died. They also knew the night sky. So much of our modern fiction and storytelling wrestles with this desire to reconnect with that lost world. A part of us admires the man or family who leaves all behind to live in a remote cabin; a part of us envies the blessed simplicity of the castaway’s life. We cope with this in all kinds of ways: We go camping, we put our kids into scouting or other nature programs, we watch Survivor or other similar survival-themed entertainment.

We do need technology to protect us from the elements. Clothing is the first technology; it shows up in chapter 3 of Genesis. It creates a layer of protective distance between our vulnerable bodies and the things which can harm them. Every subsequent technology adds more protection or helps to facilitate survival; but in so doing it further distances us from the raw experience of nature. And so a part of us always longs for those raw unmediated experiences of nature. As a teenager I walked to my local park in the middle of a violent thunderstorm to better see, feel, hear — to experience the raw power of that event. I wanted to feel small. At the ocean I love to feel the big waves crashing onto shore as they push and pull my body. I want to feel a little bit of the incalculable power of the waters.

Let me bring this back to chopping wood. There’s something raw and real about taking a tree, chopping it down, drying it, and then burning it to keep myself and my family from freezing to death during the long harsh winter months. Unlike electric heat, which needs massive infrastructure to produce and then deliver the energy, or heating oil, which is extracted out of some faraway hole in the ground, refined in some dystopian maze of pipes and tanks, and finally delivered to my house by a large truck, the process of producing the wood to run my woodstove doesn’t need to include anyone or anything outside my own property. And my point is that this distinction is significant, and that this is part of the reason why I — and so many others — enjoy chopping wood and heating with it.

Humans have been gathering around fires since beyond the horizon of memory. Warmth and light. Hands outstretched to thaw stiff fingers. How many endless hours did our distant ancestors spend staring silently into the dancing flames? The flickering light and unpredictable leaps and licks of flame casts a spell over us. It is a kind of hypnotism, and we fall into a trance. The conversations that take place at such a time are of a different quality. They are slower, lower in volume, punctuated by longer silences, and more confidential. It is around the fire that the previously untold chapter is revealed, that some hidden pain or secret hope is unveiled. Time passes differently when we gaze into the fire. And unlike time spent gazing at a screen, I have a hard time imagining that time spent staring into the flames was wasted; some good thing is communicated to the soul.

*Photo by Vladyslav Cherkasenko on Unsplash*

One of my favorite chapters in the whole Bible is John 21, the restoration of Peter. It’s a masterfully human story of failure, dejection, and doubt. Though the prose is sparse, the scene is charged with emotion. Peter, once a self-strong man, is an empty husk, gutted by his own betrayal of Jesus. The way Jesus takes him aside and gently restores him is, for me, one of the most moving episodes of the entire gospels.

But I’m getting distracted. My point is that tucked away in the first half of that chapter is a little detail which takes on a special significance in the context of this discussion. Namely, in this passage we find the only instance in the gospels of Jesus sitting around a fire. Doubtless it was an almost daily reality, given the nomadic nature of his public ministry, but here is the only time we are given a clear glimpse of the scene. We find Christ having kindled a fire on the shore and cooking some fish for breakfast. And it makes me wonder: what did he think when those first few smoky flames were lit?

Did he think back to the first blast of heat and light on that first day of creation? Did he think of the flaming sword in the hand of the cherubim at the entrance of the now-forbidden garden? Or did he think back to an astonished Moses standing before a flaming, burning bush, somehow unconsumed by the One who calls himself a consuming fire? Or how about the pillar of fire that held back the Egyptian army on the shores of the Red Sea? Perhaps for a moment he thought of that memorable day in Babylon when he (surely it was he, the fourth man in the fire?) stood in the midst of the raging fury of the king’s furnace with his three faithful followers, unscathed.

Who knows what he thought. But here was Jesus, the Lord of heaven and earth, making a fire on the quiet morning shores of Galilee, kindling flames that share their essence with every fire which came before, flames which harken back to all those sacred scenes.

Some important thread holds all those moments together in the mind of God, the architect of history. For in reality there are no unsacred places or moments at all – that is an illusion of the unbelieving mind. Meaninglessness itself is an illusion, it is alien to the world as God made it. All of us are somewhere along in the process of learning to see the world rightly, which is to say, shimmering with meaning. And part of that process, it seems to me, is learning to weave back together the separate and disconnected threads of our experience by following the master key of the Scriptures. This is re-enchantment.

So here are the few threads I’m fumbling with at the moment: God describes himself as a consuming fire. He manifests his presence as fire to Moses and the Israelites. And we all experience fire, its radiant light and warmth along with the dangers of burns and destruction. But do we make the link from the flame to the Father?

Do we, as Lewis said, run back up the sunbeam to the sun?

Do we weave back together what our fallen minds have pulled apart?

Learning What We Can from The Alchemist

With something like 65 million copies sold worldwide, The Alchemist, by Paulo Coehlo, is a phenomenon. Whenever one finds a bestseller on this scale, there is something important to learn. The book may or may not be of much value – just think of 50 Shades or Twilight – but it always tells us something about our own culture and the spirit of the age. It’s my contention that the success of The Alchemist is a powerful indicator of the spiritual poverty of modern secularism and the pull towards re-enchantment that is at work. Ironically, this book was first recommended to me by a coworker who was a very staunch Dawkins-style atheist.

The 25th anniversary edition is very nice, with rough-cut pages, a nice font, and an embossed cover.

The book wraps its narrative around the big ideas it is trying to convey. In this sense it is overly didactic and not like the great novels which embed such lessons deep into the structure of the work. Here it is on the surface, the narrative serving as a platform on which to serve up the lessons the author wishes the reader to learn. But the story makes use of a number of archetypes that lend it narrative power.

The story follows the life of a young boy, a teenager named Santiago, who leaves his seminary studies to become a shepherd because he wants to explore the world. “But ever since he had been a child, he had wanted to know the world, and this was much more important to him than knowing God and learning about man’s sins.” (10-11). “I couldn’t have found God in the seminary, he thought, as he looked at the sunrise.”

The book freely borrows from the Bible. Melchizedek plays a prominent role, as do the Urim and Thummim stones from Israelite law. Characters refer to the story of Joseph and Jesus. Yet the Bible is seen as one religious tradition among others, all of them a kind of fractal of the Universal Language and the Soul of the World. These include Islam, alchemy, Gypsies reading omens, and fortune tellers interpreting twigs. Key phrases, like Personal Legends, are capitalized throughout to make sure we don’t miss their importance. The influence of Eastern philosophy bleeds through heavily in numerous ways, such as when we are told (more than once) that “All things are one.”

These concepts sacralize one’s life. There is undeniable power in their ability to transform one’s experience of everyday life. They are an antidote to the meaninglessness of modern secular thought: rather than the victims of random impersonal forces, we are each of us given a Personal Legend to fulfill, a purpose which was birthed deep in the Soul of the Universe, and the fulfillment of which “is a person’s only real obligation” in life (24). They are amorphous and ambiguous, which locates the authority firmly in each individual’s interpretation of their own Personal Legend – or life mission. Now here is a message custom-made for our age. Sensing the cold emptiness of rigid rationalism, we want the thrill of the supernatural. Allergic to the endless arguments over doctrine and dogma, we want a Oneness which can reconcile all differences. Terrified of any authority outside the autonomous self, we want a spiritual paradigm that evokes wonder without demanding surrender; an impersonal God-force that infuses our lives with transcendent meaning while leaving us firmly in charge.

One can see how comfortably this focus on an individualized life mission fits with the modern elevation of personal autonomy. Somehow I don’t see this teaching leading many to persevere through a difficult marriage or make sacrifices to care for an aging parent. After all, one’s only real obligation is to realize their Personal Legend. This is thin gruel indeed. Small wonder then that this book proved to be so popular with that segment of American life most famous for being ego-driven and selfish: celebrities.

Despite the Biblical language and references, at its heart the message of the book is deeply unbiblical. It borrows from the spiritual capital of the Bible’s more symbolic and flowery phrasing to construct a tower of Babel which leaves Christ very much behind. This is not uncommon in the New Age movement, where every religious tradition is mined for some compatible nuggets of spiritual wisdom. Such an approach pretends to embrace a generous openness by saying all religions see only a part of the whole picture, but really that means it alone has the objective view that incorporates all the rest. This is a claim of epistemological superiority based on sophistry. It claims to see what others are blind to, and it accomplishes it through nice-sounding but vague spiritual language about universal Oneness. This is all done with the stated intention of being very agreeable and inclusive, harmonizing all the different paths into some kind of universal spirituality, but it always does violence to the integrity of those religions to tear bits and pieces out of context and reinterpret them as needed.

We see this repeatedly in the Alchemist’s use of Biblical phrases and ideas. Three examples will suffice. At one point the protagonist is told, “Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure.” In context, it is clear that his heart is to be followed, and that it will lead to a real or metaphorical treasure. But this advice is an inversion of the Biblical principle that it resembles: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:21). Jesus’ point is that the heart of each person is revealed by what they treasure — by what they love — and that his followers ought to live in such a way that they store up treasures in heaven, not on earth. Not quite the same thing.

In another place, the shepherd boy is told, “Listen to your heart. It knows all things, because it came from the Soul of the World, and it will one day return there.” This is more self-trust than the Christian can ever allow, for we remember that bracing passage in Jeremiah: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9)

One last example, which comes at the culminating moment of the narrative: “The boy reached through to the Soul of the World, and saw that it was part of the Soul of God. And he saw that the Soul of God was his own soul. And that he, a boy, could perform miracles.” Well here we have the whole beating heart of this project laid bare, and it makes a very simple argument: that we can be as God. Or even better: in some way we are already God, if only we would realize it. What is essentially the same promise was made to Eve in the garden; “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God,” (Genesis 3:5). So here is a good reason to know one’s Bible. False teachers love to use the very words of Scripture, and even those of Jesus, to teach what is, at bottom, a satanic doctrine.

It’s not too difficult to render a critique of this spiritual-but-not-religious approach to life. But the question I asked myself as I read this book was whether this might be an improvement over strict materialism or not. I make no bones about the fact that I am Christian, and of the sort who believes what the Bible says: that salvation is found in Christ alone. But I also recognize that to view the world as The Alchemist does is closer to reality than the frigid cement bunker of atheism. It has echoes of that older and more human paganism which Lewis and Chesterton saw as pre-Christian. I wonder if a post-Christian paganism, this New Age view of universal Oneness, can lead back to Christ as readily as the old paganism eventually did. I have my hopes, but also my doubts.

The hope comes in because a non-materialist worldview makes room for a supernatural being and often seeks after some kind of spiritual connection. These are the spiritual-but-not-religious types, and I get the appeal of that approach. It leaves the door open, as it were. And yes, sometimes Christ comes through that door. But I also have my doubts because spiritual experiences can have the effect of thoroughly blinding one’s heart and pulling people deep into half-truths and deceptions. In its worst forms, it leads to the occult.

Whatever else we might say, the massive popularity of this book belies the fact that our secular age has a strong undertow of spiritual hunger. And yet the dish of choice, this amorphous New Age spirituality of universal Oneness, is one which leaves our preferred idol of the autonomous self-defined individual unchallenged.

A Gem Among the Wreckage (of YA Fiction)

What books can we give our teenagers that will help them grow in virtue? So much of the Teen Fiction genre today seems to find its raison d’être in being transgressive and celebrating vice. The result is often a reading experience that drives a wedge between the young person and their moral and spiritual heritage. But there are always a few bright spots, a few gems among the wreckage.

Enter Black Bottle Man, a novel that recently came to my attention. It is a fine example of an exciting story that, while not a explicitly Christian, is nicely compatible with a Christian view of the world. It is the debut novel of Craig Russell, a Canadian from Manitoba.

The story begins in the 1920’s, with an extended family living on three connected farms. Three couples, but only one child: young Rembrandt. The two childless women reach a point of dark desperation and resort to black magic to bring about the children they so desire.

The magic works, but there’s a very nasty catch, and only a hastily struck deal with the nefarious Black Bottle Man gives the troubled family a glimmer of hope. There are souls at stake and the men of the family, including Rembrandt, must find a champion who will be able to defeat the Black Bottle Man. From this strange beginning we follow the trio as they learn to survive out on the road and as Rembrandt matures into a young man.

The narrative spans the entire life of the protagonist, with chapters jumping back and forth across time so that we see snapshots of the characters’ lives at various stages as the story unfolds. These separate pieces gradually come together for the climatic end, which is framed as a battle between good and evil, the champion against the Black Bottle Man.

The world in which the story takes place is anchored by Christian reference points. The book contains its fair share of the supernatural, but rather than relegate it to the world of fantasy, it is presented in a straightforward manner. The moral compass is calibrated correctly – virtue is good, vice is bad – which is all too rare in teen fiction. And so Black Bottle Man is the kind of book that has something of value to offer the human spirit as it deals with the themes of family, tragedy, loneliness, romance, and grace.

The writing is consistently good. In one memorable scene, Rembrandt finds himself in a small town church where the preacher uses Scripture to cajole and manipulate rather than edify. “Right then and there Rembrandt knew that he’d study that Book like Pa had, until he knew all the funny little corners where the mean, small-minded people like to hide” (p36). That’s insightful.

Scattered throughout the book are clever and thoughtful descriptions. At one point, Rembrandt is eased into the back of a police car: “The back seat is vinyl, patched and repaired from a life spent accepting displaced anger. The car smells of human beings in all their wondrous variety, locked in a perpetual battle with cheap disinfectant” (p91). One chapter opens up like so: “All music contains within itself a kind of divine madness. Few will read a book or watch the same film more than once, but everyone returns to their favourite songs. Of all the arts, music is the king of repeated experience” (p120). These fine touches help lift the book from a prosaic adventure book to something in touch with the imaginative.

Not everything about the book is a complete success. At times the back-and-forth motion from past to present is jarring and hinders the momentum of the story. Also, some aspects of the book are a bit harder for me to believe or understand. But these hiccups do not detract significantly from the overall appeal of the book. Craig Russell has managed to craft a compelling story with a clear moral vision, bring it to life with vivid and memorable descriptions, and fire up the reader’s imagination; all within a world that is infused with spiritual realities. That’s quite an accomplishment.

If every Young Adult book had these ingredients in the mix, we would have much less reason to be concerned about what our teens are reading.

_{I received a complimentary copy of this book from the author for the purposes of writing a review.}

A Christian View on Psychedelics

Just a quick little post to say that my article got published on Rav Arora’s Substack, Noble Truths: Click here to read it. And I hope you will. I consider it a notable act of hospitality on his part to invite me to publicly disagree with him on this important topic and to offer my perspective.

In the process of writing and editing the piece, Rav and I have had two phone conversations as well. He asks a lot of really good and challenging questions, and forces me to think more carefully about my own positions. I appreciate that. The plan is to record a podcast where we revisit these themes and questions together.

I really didn’t plan to think and write so much about psychedelics, and I’m an unlikely candidate for the job, but here we are.

As I mentioned in a recent update post, I’m at T4G this week. We just finished the first day. It’s quite a production, let me tell you. But it’s been tremendous: encouraging, edifying, enjoyable. And the highlights are the random breakfast conversations in the hotel and reconnecting with people I haven’t seen in 10 years as much as the main sessions – which have been excellent. And I haven’t mentioned the singing or the books. Well, I can see why it’s been popular.

There’s been lots of discussion in the panels about the meaning of the current ‘moment’ in reformed evangelicalism, the conference’s role in that, and what comes next. I’ll surely have more thoughts, but for now I’m enjoying taking it all in.

Of Thirst and Living Waters

The following is the text of a short reflection I shared at my church’s Good Friday service.

‘After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), “I thirst.”’ (John 19:28).

Is there any more universal human experience than to feel thirsty? Jesus, the all-glorious second person of our triune God, humbled himself and took on flesh. God became man. And as a man, he experienced a truly and fully human life.

As a newborn baby he thirsted for his mother’s milk just as every other human baby has since the days of Adam and Eve. And here we see that at the very last moment of his earthly life, this all-too-human experience of thirst drove him to ask for a drink, fulfilling the Scriptures that had foretold and foreshadowed his coming. How striking that thirst was the first and last experience that our Savior had during his human life upon this earth.

But all through Scripture we see that thirst is also spiritual. And each of us knows this, do we not?

David’s soul panted for God as the deer pants for flowing streams. In the prophets we are told: “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters.” And what are those waters? Jesus said that “whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again.” and “The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” Like the Samaritan woman, I find myself saying “Give me this water.” Do you?

Before coming to Christ I found in myself a deep and profound soul-thirst, although I may not have called it that. But I had been trying to quench that thirst with fleeting pleasures and religious good works, with the poison of pornography and the hypocrisies of church attendance and Bible knowledge. The Bible calls these ‘broken cisterns,’ vessels filled with putrid water that can never satisfy our thirst. I sought in them what can only be found in God, who is that fountain of living waters.

Earlier in his ministry, Jesus said ‘If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.'” I find myself saying again: “Give me this water.” Do you?

This comes from the Spirit’s work deep in our hearts. So we pray: Lord, do this in me, do this in us.

We cannot quench our own thirst. We must go to Him who hung on that cross, and suffered so horribly for our iniquities and sins, our rebellion and our hypocrisy, and our misguided attempts to quench our soul thirst with anything and everything aside from the living God. And as we come to Him, our crucified Savior, and drink in his grace and mercy for us, we find our souls are truly satisfied.

Jesus endured the cross, and the thirst, so we would not have to. And through His thirst, we are given a fountain of living water.

Thanks be to God.

Stepping Off the Tilt-A-Whirl of Social Media

I got it into my head that it would be good to take a month off social media. This decision, of which more later, came about after a few months of reading a lot about technology, media, the internet, and the massive changes causing so much upheaval in the West. There are tectonic shifts occurring under our feet in real time. Francis Fukuyama famously wrote in 1989 that we had reached The End of History, that liberalism had prevailed, and that we had entered a golden age wherein democracy would continue to spread across the world. Such a feeling was perhaps understandable, but it is no longer credible. With war in Europe once more, and liberal democracies everywhere struggling with debt, decadence, and internal decay, such illusions are dissipating. Even Fukuyama himself agrees. History has started up again.

With all this instability in the world, I felt compelled to try and understand the nature and implications of these changes. I plunged into Paul Kingsnorth’s essays about The Machine, which is shorthand for the cumulative effect of technology’s endless march onwards. I, like millions of others, watched The Social Dilemma which exposed how Social Media giants exercise massive control over their users. I learned about the movements towards decentralization, such as cryptocurrencies and homesteading, and the powerful movements from above towards ever-greater centralization, such as the dangers of Central Bank Digital Currencies. I read about how AI increasingly functions like mysterious capricious spirits; how people have been broken and undone by an addiction to technology. I read thoughtful Christians reflecting on the spiritual impact of technology in our lives.

I’ve been getting clarity on the fact that my relationship to technology is not that healthy, even in the process of learning so much about how technology so often shapes us more than we think. The words of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman are coming back to me. The medium is the message. Each technology has an inherent logic that works itself out despite the intention of the user. As one writer pointed out in an essay titled Technology and the Soul:

Every major smartphone app, especially social media, is the interface for an artificial intelligence “algorithm” which constantly processes everything it “learns” about you, updating a virtual representation of you, testing hypotheses about it against your real behavior, and continuing to update the model. The goal is not merely to predict your patterns of behavior, but, by presenting you with customized digital stimuli, to actually shape what you do. What is commodified is not information from and about you, but your very attention and behavior.
The closest analogy is to the insidious, absurd, but dangerous manipulation of demons as described by C. S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters. Like Screwtape and Wormwood, digital technology companies observe and gather and analyze information about you, and it is not the “data” itself they seek to harvest, but your very mind and your will. Jaron Lanier, a former artificial intelligence innovator who has become a sharp critic and an evangelist for more responsible technology, clarifies that the “product” of social media is not information or attention but “the gradual, slight imperceptible change in your own behavior and perception.”

That’s helpful and sobering. So all this nudged me towards trying to do something concrete to reset and reboot the role of technology and social media in my life. But a big part of me, the addiction-prone part, didn’t want to change anything. So I posted my intention to take a month off of social media on… social media. This meant I was on the record – no backing out now.

But why exactly am I doing this? It’s important to be specific about the goals for such an undertaking. In order to answer this question, it’s worth reflecting on what negative effects technology and social media are currently having in my life. First, Facebook and Twitter can easily act as huge time-wasters. Too often I have found myself passively scrolling the endless string of content from the algorithm that was designed by expert psychologists and neuroscientists. They have chosen to use their hard-earned PhD’s to hijack the dopamine loops of countless millions, including me. Second, if I post anything to these platforms, I tend to compulsively check for engagement with that content every few hours for the next couple days. Third, daily news content & opinion comes my way via email, news websites, podcasts, and YouTube videos. My intake of these varies from day to day, but at times is excessive and unhealthy.

In addition to these effects upon me, there is also a definite negative impact on my family relationships. I am not nearly as mentally present with my wife and children if I have my phone in my hand. But even with the phone elsewhere, if I’ve filled my mind with these things to the point of saturation, I’m still not as engaged relationally as I want to be. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I’ve been a complete zombie, but the difference is measurable and therefore lamentable. My wife and my family deserve the very best I have to offer, and I have too often given them far less – and for what?

So these are some of the things I am hoping to change during this coming month. I have removed Facebook and Twitter from my phone entirely, and will block access to them on my browsers. I will not watch news or current events opinions on YouTube, but take that kind of content in only through published articles. I will aim to not have any passive time on my phone, and to have nothing available on it to which I instinctively turn in those many small moments of tedium or delay throughout the day.

But what will replace all of this? You cannot create a vacuum without something filling its place. Well, more silence would be good. Silence encourages a prayerful heart, reflection, thoughtfulness. Good spiritual food is another thing I want to emphasize. Bible reading or audio is good, as is the daily prayer service of the Church of England. I would like to find a sermon series or seminary lecture series that I can dig into as well. I’m open to suggestions. It’s also a great chance to be outside more, with the weather warming up here in rural Quebec.

We moved out to the countryside a year and a half ago. A few things have been more difficult, but by and large I have loved it. The natural beauty is awesome and endless: stunning sunrises and sunsets, flocks of geese noisily settling down for the night in nearby fields, a distant train quietly moving across a winter field with a long trail of snow floating behind it, the power of the wind whipping across the landscape, and on and on. Living out here, you can’t help but recognize that, despite our modern conceits, we still need to bow to the natural forces that can so easily overwhelm and humble us. The city erases the wild; the suburb domesticates it; the countryside just barely keeps it at bay. Unplugging from ubiquitous technology allows for a deeper connection to natural beauty which, for me at least, speaks to my soul of the undomesticated Creator.

I will also aim to write more. Silence really helps me to write more, as the stillness allows my heart and mind to come up with ideas. Although I’ve been writing on and off for about 20 years, creative writing has been very intermittent. For example, after a season of reading a lot of poetry, I found myself writing some. I say it that way because it sort of bubbled up; I didn’t sit down and decide to write poetry. Recently, I noticed that I stopped writing poetry immediately upon returning to work after a season of parental leave.

I’ve long wanted to try my hand at fiction, whether through a short story or a short novel, but nothing has come yet. I recently discovered a chapter’s worth of fiction that I wrote about ten years ago, and I was very pleasantly surprised. I didn’t really remember writing it, so it felt like reading someone else’s writing – and I enjoyed it. If I could find the right idea, and then have the mental space to develop it, who knows? I might just write something worthwhile.

And of course I want to write about this specific experience of resetting my relationship to technology and social media. I’m not sure what that will look like, but it will probably include some shorter pieces on this blog, and then something like a personal reflective essay with some broader application. I am not, after all, the only one who struggles to keep technology in its place. If anything, I belong to the last generation that will have had a memory of life without technology and the internet as an ever-present reality. I suspect that in the coming years our society, and young people especially, will be desperate to reconnect with nature and the transcendent as technology leaves them empty, frazzled, and addicted.