Written in 1941, it tells the story of Father Francis Chisholm, a Scottish Catholic who turns poverty and tragedy into a life of beauty in the service of the poor and of the Chinese people.

Jesus promised Peter the keys of the kingdom (Matthew 16.18). Cronin contrasts the worldly Anselm Nealy, who rose to be bishop of Chisholm’s home, with Chisholm, bent and battered by the rough and tumble of life in the interior of China.

It belongs with other books such as Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Georges Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest.

What makes a good priest? Denominations and Christ answer differently.

Chisholm utterly fails to meet expectations. His conversion rate is lowest in the Mission Society. By the way he refuses to pay “rice Christians,” starving people who profess faith for a stipend. Yet at the end of his tour, the prominent Mr. Chia becomes a Christian, having watched the priest through long decades.

Some of the novel’s clearest preachments espouse pacifism and tolerance. Yet when a war lord threatens the people seeking refuge in his mission, Chisholm arranges for the destruction of his armament, causing the deaths of dozens of his soldiers.

The book is not the first rank of great literature. Often, Cronin uses characters’ letters or journals to pry open their thoughts, while greater ambiguity and tension might have been created otherwise. His depiction of Chinese characters relies too much on stock images of the simple child-like soul addressing its European Master, or the inscrutable mandarin.

What is first rate, however, is Cronin’s grasp of what makes a great pastor and Christian. Here his instinct is unerring.

If only Keys of the Kingdom were required reading for every member of every pulpit committee!

“Life without Principle” Collected Essays and Poems. Library of America. p. 365.

The original film kept close to the mood and attitude of the author. He watched it often. The TV series, however, which became a vehicle for less conservative views, Hornberger seldom if ever watched.

The docs rejected Major Jonathan Hobson, 35, surgeon from the Midwest, and preacher in the Church of the Nazarene. “The fortunes of war had given him a job for which he was unprepared and associated him with people he could not comprehend.” Hobson had a legalistic viewpoint, and sought to impose a ritual of prayer on the camp at meals. He was shipped home, tout suite.

What fascinates me most about the book is why the surgeons accepted Father John Mulcahy, whom they call Dago Red, a kind of cheap wine.

“We gotta do something for Dago Red,” said Duke. “I mean to show our appreciation for all the good fixes, bead jiggling, and Cross Action.”

I’ll write more on Mulcahy, whom I think is one of the most intriguing priests in literature and film. He gets put down in hell, and finds a way to bear witness that’s received. He doesn’t sweat the non-essentials (such as drinking, prayer meetings, etc.) and he also gets it. He adapts and connects.

I’ve always believed there is somewhere one or more Catholic chaplains whose witness is made public in the character of Mulcahy.

Just finished reading Gone with the Wind. It was impossible to  put down. Although I knew the story from the film, I found myself day after day reading from early morning until late at night.

Why?

It’s so breathtaking. The characters are alive: Scarlett, Rhett, Ashley, Melanie, Mammy. Who doesn’t know these people and care about them, whether liking or disliking them?

What a blunder it’s been to live in the South for 20 years without reading this book.

The film (to be shown on TCM tonight) has all the action sequences and much of the dialogue. I held my breath at the end, waiting for Rhett’s immortal line, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Minus “frankly,” it was there.

What the movie doesn’t have are Ashley and Rhett’s indepth analysis about the dream of the Old South that still lives in many hearts today, like Scarlett’s ill-fated obsession with Ashley. It doesn’t have the explanation of “gumption,” which author Margaret Mitchell once said was the theme of the book.

It doesn’t have the stunning racism of South and North, such as the frequent linking of even beloved Mammy and Uncle Peter with monkeys and apes. Mitchell has Rhett explain the Klan as rising up to protect Southern womanhood from free issue “niggers” [sorry!] or as disappearing when Southern Democrats discovered party politics were more effective against Yankee depredations.

I understand Southern attitudes toward the North better, and see more clearly and painfully the burning, looting and desecration perpetrated on the prostrate South.

The only book more prevalent on Southern shelves than Gone with the Wind is the Bible. Baptists and Methodists have flourished, churches on every corner. Yet the only positive recourse Scarlett ever had to the Bible was to hide money in it!

The family Bible recorded births, marriages and deaths. But other than that, Scarlett’s only thoughts of God were rare fears of judgment that she quickly explained away, or bargaining prayers to save someone she needed (not loved) from dying.

I know Scarlett well. Several very like her served the churches I pastored. Whether or not God’s love ever succeeded more than Rhett’s, or like his simply wore out, is God’s call, not mine.

Many people, South and North, operate on grasping gumption, like Scarlett’s, that fierce anxiety that drives acquisition, terror of the wolf at the door—or the blue coat or Scalawag or free issue “nigger,” or wet back or Muslim terrorist (or to hark back to Nazi propaganda “Jew”) whoever it is that looms Dark in our deepest fears. 

They operate on  gumption, not grace. Their pious claims notwithstanding, they know little of the mind of the One who being in very nature God thought equality with God not something to be grasped. (Philippians 2.6)

Sometimes I feel that fear myself, and pray for grace.

Please God, one day (who knows how far in the future) may the hate, suffering, obsessions and fears be Gone which this novel portrays with the accuracy of an anatomist’s scalpel.

The question is, what else will the hurricane that finally blows them away destroy as well?

What bugs me about the book is its New Age-y themes. Although Christ appears in the book, there are a crystal shop, omens, Melchizedek, and the mysterious Urim and Thummim as well.

Many people may be blest by the book, but I have a feeling of dys-ease about stuff like this, born of Isaiah’s prohibition of the occult (8.19-20).

Today’s Christians have yet to decide where the boundaries are about the occult. Yeah, that includes Harry Potter—all volumes of which I’ve read and admire.

If you compare Narnia to Potter, however, you notice the difference between books drenched in the Bible and the Holy Spirit (Lewis) and books which commend virtue but do not provide a foundation for it (Rowling). The culture has lost much of its Christian light.

I don’t like closed-minded critics, and hope not to be one.

This issue belongs among those like food offered to idols (1 Cor. 8). Some say such things as witches have no life, hence are harmless; while, for others, witchcraft is a grave danger to life in Christ.

Coelho’s book was a good read, a fast read. I especially liked the prologue to the 10th anniversary edition. My dream has been to write and publish, which I’ve done only a little. Perhaps Coelho will encourage me not to let go of that dream yet.

The Pilgrimage, same author, is an autobiographical/fictional account of the author’s pilgrimage along El Camino de Santiago de Compestelo (Way of St. James in northern Spain), which he describes as a life-changing event. Would it answer some of my questions?

Your insights are welcome.

Quoting Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls (1993):

“At the [Cuban] National Library in 1969 Lezama [Lima] gave a reading of perhaps one of the most extraordinary essays of Cuban literature under the title ‘Confluences.’ It reaffirmed the creative force, the love of language, the struggle for an integrated image against all  those who opposed it. A sense of beauty is always dangerous and antagonistic to any dictatorship because it implies a realm extending beyond the limits that a dictatorship can impose on human beings. Beauty is a territory that escapes the control of the political police. Being independent and outside of their domain, beauty is so irritating to dictators that they attempt to destroy it whichever way they can. Under a dictatorship, beauty is always a dissident force, because a dictatorship is itself unaesthetic, grotesque, to a dictator and his agents, the attempt to create beauty is an escapist or reactionary act.” p. 87

Arenas is not somebody conservative Christians typically read. He was a promiscuous gay activist in communist Cuba. His writings caught the acclaim of an international audience, and of Castro’s State Security, which hounded Arenas and imprisoned him in El Morro, a notorious lockup for murderers and the like.

Arenas was brutalized. Even after he escaped Cuba by slipping into Key West in the Mariel exodus in 1980, Castro’s agents sought to destroy him.

One night a mysterious blast, like a gunshot, shattered a glass of water in his apartment. Unfortunately, because he was debilitated due to AIDS, poverty, and the struggle to publish as an ostracized Cuban expatriate, he took this shattered glass as an omen, a metaphor of his life. The protective aura he had enjoyed from childhood abandoned him. He died.

He ended a letter published posthumously:  “I do not want to convey to you a message of defeat but of continued struggle and of hope. Cuba will be free. I already am.” (p. 317)

Yet, I find some lessons from his memoir:

• Faith and a living relationship with God make a difference. As tyranny hammered Arenas, he could have benefited from experiencing the unconditional love of God [not the stereotypical right-wing deity, however].
• His commitment to Beauty, truth expressed through literature, and his refusal to use his gift to glorify the state, have transcendent value. Quakers speak about “that of God in everyone.” Arenas’s commitment to writing were “that of God” in him.
• His experience of America as “a country without a soul,” a country tyrannized by “the power of money” is a legitimate warning. I know another America, where people’s love of God and one another is the primary power. But I believe Arenas’ experience is also true. I can’t read the Hebrew prophets, who condemn the rich for caring not at all about the poor, without recognizing parallels in the US today.

Other voices have sounded the warning, too. Aleksandr Solzehnitsyn addressed Harvard; he spoke about how human potential must be balanced by belief in a Supreme Being who gives value to human life and responsibility to human freedom. I also compare Maria von Trapp in Sound of Music with Sally Bowles in Cabaret, two figures iconic of America–but which will we ultimately choose to become?

Not the kind of book you’d expect a preacher to be reading. Lots of rowdy sex.

Besides that, what I like in this book is the longing evident from early days in Arenas’s life, a longing for something missing in the Communist paradise he grew up in.

Maybe food. As a boy he often ate dirt to fill his stomach.

His writing brought him to the attention of the literary community in Cuba. Despite the many parasites who sold out to State Security, there were others who gathered in small groups to read their work.

In one meeting the poet read his original poems, then burned the only copy in a hibachi to the gasps of the crowd. In Cuba it’s criminal to write except in connivance with the State.

Arenas’ friends smuggled his work out of Cuba, and it was published in France, winning acclaim.

He writes that tyranny hates the Beauty of a poem which cannot be enslaved to its purposes.

He would have liked Ephesians 2.10, “We are God’s works of art…” [lit. poema] NJB.

In my heart is a longing that Arenas somewhere, somehow met the God, who might be known by other names—such as Beauty, Medicine, Truth, Justice, Love. Transcendent names.

I don’t know. I’m just really clear that the system I grew up with, in which people were either saved or lost (no other possibilities), doesn’t cover all the people I know.

There are those souls who long for a better God than all the gods they know, souls who serve their better God even though they have no proof their God exists, souls who put many “saved” folks to shame.

C.S. Lewis wrote of one such soul in The Last Battle. Emeth [Hebrew word meaning faithful] was an enemy soldier who loved the pagan bird god Tash fiercely, risked his life to catch a glimpse of Tash, only to learn in Aslan’s country that he had worshiped the great Lion all his life.

Lewis explained, you can’t offer true worship to a false god; nor can you give false worship to the true God. By whatever name they call God true worshipers serve the true God; false worshipers, false gods.

O true God of mercy, love and grace, you have other sheep, belonging to other folds. May you bring them home in peace at the last. Amen

 Note: high pain today, so I can’t write a lot.

Left: Victor Hugo

I just finished Les Miserables, 1260 pages in the Modern Library translation by Charles Wilbour.  If anyone has read the new translation published by the Vintage Classics, please comment.  I’d like to compare translations, because I’ve read that Wilbour’s was hurried.

I confess, after the death of Javert, I felt less motivated to read the remaining 100 pages.  So I speed read them.

You got to give me credit: I read all four chapters on the sewers of Paris.  Hugo, the patriot, wrote that the waste of the French was the best waste in the world.  I’m certainly glad to know that!

My guess is, however, that the sewers of Paris symbolize all the people discarded by society as waste, and other things as well.

The final 100 pages also reveal Hugo’s genius level insight into human nature (like the 1100 pages before them). Jean Valjean could not be free until he reconciled his own self-image as a convict with the reality of his saintly life.  Rejection by his son-in-law Marius paralleled his own self-rejection.

I recall a young Korean woman whom we met in Texas.  She had been rescued from a tormented life by a loving G.I. who married her and brought her to the States.  But she couldn’t accept his love or a happy life, because the scars of her suffering remained unhealed within.

Just as Javert could not accept Valjean’s transformation, Valjean himself could not— until he found acceptance in the hearts and the eyes of those he loved.

The incarnation means, I think, that God does many things through human beings.  When we accept people who feel unacceptable then they begin to feel accepted.  And by the way so do we.

More as I have the chance to reflect.

Thoughtful minds make but little use of the phrase: the fortunate and the unfortunate. In this world, evidently the vestibule of another, there are no fortunate.

The real human division is this: the luminous and the shady. To diminish the number of the shady, to augment the number of the luminous,—that is the object. That is why we cry: Education! science! To teach reading, means to light the fire; every syllable spelled out sparkles.

However, he who says light does not, necessarily, say joy. People suffer in the light; excess burns. The flame is the enemy of the wing. To burn without ceasing to fly,—therein lies the marvel of genius.

When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will still suffer. The day is born in tears. The luminous weep, if only over those in darkness.

I’m not good at keeping other people’s suffering separate from my own, a flaw which doomed my career as a pastoral counselor, but may in the end save me as a human being.

So, rather than writing a post on the beginning of Lent as part of our CCBlogs community exercise, I’ve engulfed myself in 19^th century France and the trials of Jean Valjean.

I’m also preparing my income taxes, and in two Bible study groups leading a close reading of the book of Revelation.

The last is my response to the huge interest in the Left Behind series. (I didn’t want to be left out!) A friend’s faith was awakened when she read the books and began looking up the biblical prophecies.

I’ve taught Revelation four or five times over the past thirty years, usually in response to something like Hal Lindsey’s Late Great, for instance.

My mind is not systematic, but intuitive-poetic, so it’s hard for me to snip verses from here and there and paste up an end times chronology. So many have been wrong! I’m sure I’d be, as well, if I tried.

I prefer to take the whole book—Daniel, Ezekiel, Revelation—study its message as a whole, and leave systematics to others.

So what’s all this got to do with Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent?

First, to get my view, you have to know I’ve had to undo a layer of anti-Catholic prejudice that I took in with mother’s milk. Ironic that my dad’s family had been Catholic before converting to Baptist, though Mom told me Dad, a Baptist preacher, was never baptized. I guess he wanted to play it safe, and keep his infant baptism credentials.

I never got any of his affection for the Church, only his objections to it. So I’ve had to unlearn a lot of stuff.

The value of Lent, for example.

Lent, from the Old English “lencten” or as we spell it today “lengthen,” a reference to the lengthening daylight of spring. In Lent the hours of light lengthen!

That’s a symbol I love. A whole lot better than Jeremiah’s sixth century lament,

Woe to us, for the day declines,
     the shadows of evening lengthen! Jer 6:4 (NRSV)

A time of reckoning had come. The enemies of Judah were massing, and soon would descend upon Jerusalem and Judah like a horde of destroying angels.

How about us? For our culture, which are lengthening: hours of darkness or hours of light?

Some Left Behind folks believe the doomsday clock is about to or has already begun to strike midnight. A submerged ice mountain has rent the hull, the ocean liner is going down.

 Abandon ship! Our job as Christians is to get everybody into the lifeboats.

 Lent, however, has a different meaning. It’s the light that is lengthening toward the full force of day. Life on this earth, by the breath of the Creator, is renewing. The voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.

 There comes a moment in the second Lord of the Rings films. Sam, Frodo and Gollum stand on the edge of the Great City, which lies in ruins from the juggernaut of the flying Nazgul.

 ”What are we fighting for?” Frodo asks, exhausted from wrestling with his addiction to the ring.

 Gollum looks up. It is the question, the only one that matters.

 Sam says, “There’s some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.”

 That’s the question we Christ followers also must answer. Is the message of Lent that all is dust and ashes? Or is the message this: that we need to examine our lives, recommit to our vows, and get on with the struggle to walk in newness of life, not just as individuals, but as a planet, not just for the world to come but for the good earth here and now?

 I believe it’s the second that’s true. Apologies to Tim LaHaye, but I’m not ready to jump ship just yet.

 In the 19^th century Victor Hugo wrote:

Society must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.

 His words are as true today as when he penned them.

 One of Isaiah’s disciples wrote the people of his time, those who had returned to Palestine from exile, only to wake up to a very hardscrabble morning after. Were their hopes a foamy draft of deception? Would they have been better off to stay in exile?

 Some turned to ritual, the rules of their fathers: just recite the prayers right, offer the right animal on the right altar exactly as God requires.

 No, Isaiah said, ritual has its place. But what God wants now and here is something else:

 Is not this the fast that I choose:
     to loose the bonds of injustice,
     to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
     and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
     and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
     and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
     and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicator shall go before you,
     the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard. Isaiah 58.6-8 NRSV

 Whether it’s evening or morning that’s lengthening may be up to us.

 The fastnesses of extremism far from here have demonstrated how deep the roots of hatred and terror grow in the rocky soil of poverty, ignorance, and neglect. It’s not Islam vs. Christianity at issue here, but light vs. darkness in Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Hinduism and in all other religions.

 But, the arms of love are stronger. The reach of Light is infinite. John wrote, “God is light, God is love,” (1John 1.5; 4.16).

 Lent is God’s calling us, for the sake of this world, come what may, to live in love and in the light.

So let’s get a move on. As John Wayne (or was it Shakespeare) said, “We”re burning daylight.”