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Sunday, 8/13/00
It has been a while since I journalled. I kept some journals after my Journal of an Awakening, but they disappeared when my previous laptop died. I am not sure this is a bad thing; I don't think that what I said in them was on par with my Journal of an Awakening, and certainly not stellar. It is not my talent to be able to continue to produce good writing in a genre of my choosing; writing in a new genre has often been easier than writing in one I have practice in. Or, to put it differently, my writings come to me with the genres they will be in, and if I try to force success in a style that has succeeded for me in the past, I may cause the style, but I will not always cause a successful writing.
Now writing is coming to me -- or has been coming to me, I haven't gotten it written down yet, and I fear I may have lost some of it -- so it is time for me to get back to journalling, not necessarily on a day by day basis, but when the muse strikes. Tonight will be my first night in my new 1 bedroom apartment, and I will have more time -- though I do not know what, or how much, will come to me.
The thing that has brought me back to journalling is as follows:
Last schoolyear, I spoke with a mystic who is a student at Pooh's Corner (the group of people at Wheaton who meets to read children's books aloud), and I talked about how I identify with Charles Wallace in Madeleine l'Engle's A Wind in the Door, and Michael Valentine Smith in Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. I asked him if he knew of any other characters like that. He suggested that I read Steven Lawhead's Merlin, where Merlin is portrayed as the last of the Druids, a Christian who has grown up with Druid lore, a mystic, and a politically active prophet. I was disappointed -- I had been disappointed at his placement of Merlin with Moses and Elijah as political/leader/prophet/mystic types, because the character of Merlin reeks of magic, a reek that has as little to do with Christian mysticism as astrology does with astronomy. I did not mention this to him, because I did not want to enter a fruitless argument (I have had enough of those to last a lifetime), but I was disappointed.
Recently, wanting to read something that would give me insights into medieval culture (and having learned from another friend that Lawhead did historical research before writing), I checked Merlin out at the library, read partway through, and returned it after reading the scene in which Merlin makes the stones fly around in a circle. This was a display of pagan magic, not a Christian miracle, and I read it with a feeling of defilement.
I later waited and picked up the book again, reading it to the end. There were passages that I did not read in good conscience. There were other passages that grabbed me. As I began writing this journal entry, I realized -- or, more properly, remembered -- something. When I first read Stranger, I hated it -- I saw its lewdness, its anti-Christian invective, its introduction of psychic powers in a context that (at least to begin) seemed as out of place, deus ex machina, as anything I could think of -- and none of its strengths. I was going to say that I didn't know if I was going to read Merlin again, but then I reflected on my actions in the past and how my emotions flow, and I realized that I will probably read Merlin again, but not now. God willing, the time of rereading will be when I know in my heart that God has given me the strength to be ready to read it without being troubled by the parts that defiled my conscience -- and God has given me the strength to read Stranger -- I was not polluted by it, merely angered.
What about Merlin pulls me, that I am writing about it now? I had that more clearly in my mind a few days ago, when I was thinking, walking about at a classic car show with my parents and one of my brothers, but there are three things:
Ynes Avalach. Ynes Avalach is the island (Ynes) castle of the Fisher King (Avalach), the wounded king who sat on a boat on his island and speared fish. It was the place of Merlin's childhood, the place where he grew up, and in a world of shifting sands it was steady -- even unchanged, a piece of another world.
Ynes Avalach resonates with me; it is a symbol of Heaven, and a place that I believe can be found on earth -- but that we can never control. C.S. Lewis wrote about this sort of thing in his introduction to The Great Divorce, saying that Heaven is everywhere, but not everywhere is Heaven. I have a great longing for home, a place like Ynes Avalach; the two areas where I most consistently experience it are worship, and in writing and the expectant time when I feel out what I want to write.
The bard's awen. The awen is an aroused, mystical state that descends on a bard; Merlin felt it when he was close to the supernatural. Two of the times listed, he was fighting in battle and, suddenly, the world around him seemed to slow down, so that he moved rapidly and lightly amongst the sluggish invaders. Other times, it came around a miracle.
The awen is also something that resonates with me. A similar state has descended on me, too, at times. It is not something that I can turn on at will, but walking has often been a precursor to its minor modes in writing.
When Merlin was with the fhain (the people whom other races called the baen sidhe (fairies)), he spoke of learning "that which men call magic". I realized (partly after reading the "How to Become a Hacker" document) that I have picked up along the way a number of skills that are in our world something like magic -- I thought most specifically of being able to make web pages.
I also realized that many of the things that are supporting me now are things that I picked up along the way in activities I was discouraged from as distractions from my work. I learned how to program when I wrote The Minstrel's Song -- and it has profited me far more than additional effort on coursework would have. My writings on my web page are also things I have been discouraged from doing, and in them I believe I am accomplishing far more of lasting value there than in my job. Life is what happens when you are making other plans.
Monday, 8/14/00
There was something else nagging at the back of my mind yesterday, that I wanted to remember, but couldn't. It was the other point that motivated me to want to write in this journal.
On Saturday, my family went out to eat at a nice Italian restaurant. We were all under-dressed and over-smelly from a day's hard work, and I was unshaven. I needed to go to the restroom in the beginning, and (after I washed my hands) I turned to find a towel dispenser to dry my hands. There was a smiling black man in a tuxedo (sans jacket), holding a roll of paper towel, and standing next to a rack of amenities (I remember seeing small cigars, and other things that looked expensive); he was complimenting me on my "PRAY HARD" T-shirt.
I was only marginally able to keep my composure then; I wouldn't have been bothered that much by just having someone to hand me paper towel, but having a black man do it... I was not comfortable. It was patently offensive to me. It felt like having a slave. Semiotically, everything about him said, "I am here to smile and adore you, but I am only here to be treated like part of the wallpaper, to be treated like dirt if you are in a bad mood." He looked like support staff under the mentality that makes jokes like, "Confucius say, 'Secretary not part of furniture until screwed on desk.'" During dinner, I thought of reading about Gandhi as he was in danger and a rickshaw (a man-pulled cart which aged and wore terribly at its carriers) was offered to him... my feelings were lesser, but they were of the same kind.
After dinner, I needed to go to the bathroom, and it wasn't until I was almost there that I remembered he was there... I had enough time using the facilities to decide that, if I could not avoid him, I could at least treat him as a peer, not as part of the furniture. So I talked with him, treating him as cordially as he treated me, and he told me that he was a Jew who grew up Baptist, but had never been to a synagogue. He asked me if I was a minister.
I think I missed a witnessing opportunity. The one person I spoke with about it thought I was being too hard on myself -- I was tired and in a hurry -- but there was an opportunity I missed to speak with someone who had some questions, and who was probably ready to move one step closer to the Kingdom of Light.
I have grown up in an academic context which tells us that witnessing is offensive and evil (at least when done by Christians -- when done by environmentalists, it is treated differently). Sometimes it is even necessary to be offensive. But there are also many times when witness is not necessarily offensive, when it is welcome.
I think our equation of witnessing with offensiveness and disrespect for persons should be jettisoned.
I have been thinking recently about the origins of the word 'obscene'. Ob-scene material is material that takes place off-scene.
As the word has developed, it has come to mean "material which should not be portrayed because it is highly inappropriate to portray." (The meaning has narrowed further to mean "inappropriate sexual content". I have not heard any contemporary usage having 'obscene' refer to violent content -- probably stemming from the same reason as why there are innumerable films rated X due to sexual content, but almost none rated X due to violent content -- the mentality that, in the words of one Christianity Today article, "finds massaging a breast to be more offensive than cutting it off." Dorothy Sayers' essay "The Other Six Deadly Sins" speaks powerfully to this problem.)
The word 'obscene' means "inappropriate content" to us, but placing material off-scene can serve other literary purposes. Done the right way, off-scene presentation can be more powerful than on-scene presentation. In Calvin and Hobbes, there are references to "the noodle incident", which is never described. Watterson said that he believed it would be better if left to the reader's imagination. For related but subtly different reasons, I am intentionally not specifying small but significant facets of my second novel -- Aed's academic discipline is never explicitly stated.
Giving just enough hints to fuel the imagination can be a powerful alternative to explicit portrayal.
There is a musing which I had some time ago, and never recorded.
When I was a TA in UIUC's math department, during orientation, Prof. Weichsel told us, if we had to do something unpopular, to say, "It's department policy," and that he would be the complaints department for us, as well as a resource for questions and problems that came up.
I never said that an unpopular decision was department policy, but there was something that struck me about this, a sense of "You are supported in your good faith efforts." He might suggest a different way of handling a situation if it came up in the future, but he would support us in our efforts.
I believe some of the same beauty is true of God. In terms of dealing with moral dilemmas, I have come to believe that a Christian who listens to the Spirit and makes a good faith effort to do right in a moral dilemma doesn't have to succeed in guessing the right course of action -- even if he makes a mistake in judgment, his action is holy, supported by God. There is a story -- first mentioned to me, by the way, in a discussion with a Christian who believes in a just war -- about one of Corrie ten Boom's family, sheltering Jews when a Nazi soldier came and asked, "Are you hiding any Jews?" She told the truth: "Yes. They're hiding under the table." The Nazis didn't believe her. They went on their way.
From the other side, there was a Christian couple, the wife pregnant and grievously ill. The doctors told her, "You cannot live and carry this child. You're going to have to have an abortion." After great prayer and deliberation, they decided to have the child removed from their womb and an attempt made to save his life. The child lived, and is a blessing to those who come into contact with him.
If I were asked, I would have advised both to choose differently. (At least a possibility in the first case, with my mind changing over time, and a certainty in the second case. I have heard of hard cases where not having an abortion would have been very difficult. I have not heard of a case where I would have approved of an abortion, and one person I have known was born out of one of those very hard cases.) Perhaps I am right, perhaps I am wrong; I am not raising these cases to stand in judgment over my fellow believers. The reason I am raising these cases is to say that God supported the believers in their choice. This is not an occasion for license to do anything and say "God will support me" -- in both cases, people were seeking to do God's will; it is necessary to seek out a knowledge of the right action through prayer and the Spirit -- but it does mean that we are not going to land in trouble because there was a legitimate debate among believers, and we came down on one side of it, and God came down on another. (And -- who knows? Maybe the lines of morality fall differently than any human system; maybe God led and specifically wanted Miss ten Boom to tell the truth about whether she was sheltering Jews, and specifically wanted Dietrich Bonhoeffer to try to assassinate Hitler. I don't know if that is true, but it seems on a surface view to be consistent with how God works.)
Existentialism portrays a picture where we are orphans, who must make any, arbitrary choice because we are abandoned and without guidance. The place I was at for a while, where I believed you had to choose the right thing, believed there was a right choice, but saw us as in a sense abandoned in trying to pick out that choice. It had a ring of existentialism. This is, I believe, removes another layer of existentialism: there is a right choice, but God supports us in our efforts to pursue that choice; we are not abandoned in picking out the right. We are God's children. We are supported.
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