Nothing New Under the Sun

It always frustrated me when I was little that their weren't character with my name, or anything akin to it, in stories. My little sister had a picture book -- Bread and Jam for Frances. Andrew is a very common name -- and in my house, if you had a name from a Biblical narrative you were set. Try finding Demetria in a children's story book. (Or on name bracelets.) I remember being very excited when the movie Anastasia came out. Dmitri is close enough. And yes, in a class discussing The Brothers Karamazov, I did jump every time the name Dmitri was mentioned.

The point being -- I feel like I've always had some trouble finding myself in the narratives I was handed. Trouble that extended beyond just having a strange name. Tomboyish, hard-headed Laura Ingalls (of the books, I've never seen the TV show) was close between second and fifth grade. But the narratives that I was supposed to be using for models (i.e. Bible narratives), I was having a bit of trouble with those. I loved the story of David and Goliath, but I wasn't supposed to identify with David, or Peter (I have soft spots for characters who continually open their mouths and see just how far they can jam their feet down their throat). Frankly, I'm not sure who I was supposed to be identifying with -- let's face it, you've got to do a bit of looking to find strong female characters, and they were emphasizing that Mary of Bethany repented, not that she was blatantly transgressing gender roles by sitting with the men instead of helping in the kitchen -- oh, and this chick has an attitude and didn't seem shy of taking J.C. to task over letting Lazarus die. (Let's not count how many Marys I just conflated into one.) There is a reason why Martha has a place in the patriarchy described in The Handmaid's Tale, while sister Mary has been forgotten.


I've been thinking on narrative, folklore, and story-telling for some time now. Early Christian hagiography has become my pet subject. "Weirdos", of course, transvestite and transgendered saints last round -- holy fools this time around. (Incidentally, it's easier to dig up English translations of the lives of holy transvestites than it is to dig up english translations of lives of holy fools.)


It's hardly an original point, but storytelling really is inseparable from how we construct, or make some sense out of, ourselves. And without a narrative -- a metaphor for yourself, a name that other people recognize -- it's difficult to feel confident and solid in who you are. Reading the life of Mary of Egypt, and hearing her praised as worthy and good, was like a license to just be who I am. Rereading the material surrounding Mary of Bethany and finding her transgression and her contrary attitude accepted, and even lauded -- where was this when I was little?

Hiding underneath the dominant narrative. The narrative that said if you have a uterus, shut up and save thyself through childbearing and submission to your husband. The idea that there is one script. Or two scripts, rather. Take the one we assigned you, and that'll be that.

But somehow, and I feel that this is the miracle of miracles, the dominant narratives never quite manage to completely crush and completely hide the other narratives. They're there, waiting for someone who needs them enough to go and to look for them and to befriend them and if necessary to fight for them.

My Computer is Unhappy

Insanely slow. As in, it takes it 15-20 to start up slow.
I suspect this is mostly just the effects of age, but I'm sure that falling on the ice didn't help. Oh, and the last update of Firefox screwed up Google Gears.

But enough of that. Let’s Talk About Fantasy

High fantasy is my bad habit. Okay, well, one of my bad habits. Both the reading and writing thereof. (Poking around old palaces results in scribbling high fantasy, apparently.)

I think I’ve written about Carol Berg once before, back in the beginning, commenting on her sadism toward her characters, and worrying that she was falling into the trap of repeating the same basic plot. Since then, I’ve read the third book in Bridge of D’Arnath trilogy – The Soul Weaver. I’m actually into my second reading. Do pick up this book if you’re looking for something to read.

First off – Berg is a more than capable writer. She doesn’t hit the sublime height of the greats, but she’s better than many, many writers who are currently being published – including a number of the “literary” writers.

I’m impressed with anyone who can write a novel in first person from different points of view and successful change the tone, dictation, and mannerism of each. And, she’s quite successful in pulling that off in the novel. The style changes appropriately for each character and deftly captures character’s the mental state. Berg’s characterization continues to be strong even with characters who do not get to narrate their own sections. She has a hand for dialogue and indicates dialects and education levels without resorting to obnoxious misspellings or offensive uses of dialect.

There’s a tendency in high fantasy for info-dumping – dropping a lot of description in together. Perhaps this is because fantasy is typically set in an imaginary world and authors want to communicate the setting. While Berg has created some of the most fantastic alternative worlds I’ve ever read about, she also manages to avoid this flaw. She picks just the right details and works them into the development of the plot.

Her characters are deliciously complicated. There are villains of pure evil here and there – but she develops them into three dimensional figures of evil – but on the whole her characters are quite human. Virtuous but mistaken. Blinded by their own needs. So on and so forth. A rare thing in fantasy.

Second, and this is why I’m currently raving, Berg develops some of the most interesting philosophical scenarios in fantasy. In some ways, I even prefer her to Phillip Pullman, whose His Dark Materials Trilogy would be a pressing second. Perhaps it’s because her scenarios are more divorced from the real world, which gives her more freedom to work. Her first trilogy: Transformation, Revelation, Restoration – dealt in part with the question of how a good person should respond when he or she discovers that his or her religion is predicated on a tragic misunderstanding. (You can see how this would appeal to me.)

I wasn’t as in love with her second series. Still good, but just not quite as meaty of reading. Surprisingly, however, the third book – which I picked up for airplane reading – is philosophically satisfying. The Soul Weaver features at marvelously created alternative world – or rather a world being called out of chaos. She refers to it as The Bounded, and it is populated by residents who, due to physical deformity would be outcasts in either of the two “formed” worlds of the novel. Names have particular power in this world, and all the residents of the Bounded desperately desire one.

A number of questions are posed. What is the power of names? (Not that uncommon of a theme in fantasy, but this take is well-done.) Who gets to distribute them? Are people allowed to name themselves – that is, determine the “wholeness” of their being?

Further, the boundaries of this world are in constant flux – growing outwards. How should those who have just been brought into the “bounded” be treated by longer term residents? Kindness, suspicion, welcome, fear, envy? Significantly, “the philosophy” of this world, lives closest to the boundary – on the edge of comprehensible reality.

Obviously, this is a novel – not a philosophical text, so while the questions are posed and explored to varying degrees within the novel, no conclusions were really reached. Berg isn’t especially didactic, as is Phillip Pullman or (to be fair and balanced) C. S. Lewis, which overall, I feel makes her books a more enjoyable read.

Will God's Children Grow Up?

I think when I drive. And since I did a lot of driving over the past few days, I thought. A lot.

I've been reading through some of the criticisms of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. I read the trilogy when I was younger and loved it. And since they're making movies, I figured I would reread. I actually want to see Pullman's worlds on screen, unlike the prospect of the Chronicles of Narnia which got a "meh" from me at best.

Of course, I also read the Chronicles of Narnia when I was little -- much littler than when I read Pullman. I enjoyed them at the time, but they never captured my attention the same way as other fantasy series did. I don't remember much about the philosophy expounded by C. S. Lewis therein -- I do remember realizing that it was an allegory. I only remember two scenes. Reepicheep sitting on the prow of a ship and somewhere in The Last Battle, Aslan allows a foreign prince into heaven because even if he didn't follow the right names his actions were worthy. That's it.

Pullman on the other hand had me at hello. This was refreshing. This was different. (By that time I had been jaded by Terry Brooks, Lloyd Alexander, etc. Never made it through Tolkien.) And there was so many things to contemplate! And, while I don't remember details from the second two books (my rereading plans have been derailed by my little brother's inability to keep up with things), I do remember that while God's death at the end of The Amber Spyglass made me raise my young eyebrows a bit, it didn't offend or bother me. (I also finished up the book while sitting in a church building, if you must know.) I certainly didn't see it as an attack on ethics or morality. And, in fact, it I remember correctly, God's "death" is actually a liberation, as God had been imprisoned and used by other forces. Now, I was a bit older than the publisher's target audience for the series (16, nearly 17 -- I had eagerly awaited publication and bought the book in hardcover as soon as it came out), but I had already figured out that religious institutions have no more a monopoly on truth than anyone else in the world, so you can't say that Pullman destroyed my faith in organized religion.

What I'm quite intrigued by, returning to His Dark Materials with an increased capacity for theological thought, is Pullman's concept of the Republic of Heaven, rather than a Kingdom of Heaven. I've been using the term Kingdom of Heaven myself in a very specific sense that draws on Vladimir Soloviev, Sergius Bulgakov, and other Russian Silver Age thinkers but is certainly infused with a number of notions I've taken from my own experience, sense of justice, and bite from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I've been using the term to refer to existence as it should be and is intended to be. And, in some ways, I think that perhaps the term Kingdom is incorrect for the vision I see and that the term Republic might come closer.

I'm bothered by the overlap of the usage of the world Kingdom by conservative, fundamentalist evangelicals. Perhaps they and I see the same thing, but from radically different angles. Perhaps we do not. I hear people insisting that we must toe the letter of laws that were written done for a society two thousand years gone like children who have been told that they shouldn't say the word "stupid" or "shut up" and run squealing to tell the teacher anytime one of their peers slips up. They want to cling to the forms of the dominant Western society and elevate the traditions of humanity (and only one segment of humanity at that) to Divine Law. Their Kingdom, however, is founded on absolute, unquestioning obedience to authority and submission to one's place within the hierarchy. This isn't an idea I have any wish to promote. It's an idea I have a firm faith is incorrect. (ETA: I should probably put a disclaimer in here that my disgust isn't with all evangelicals, or even all fundamentalists, some of them do have visions that overlap with mine a significant portion of the time. Unfortunately, the ones who dominant the stage and I seem to share little to nothing in the way of perspective.)

Drawing from Soloviev in particular, I see the duty of humans as continuing striving to reshape this world into something that more closely resembles this vision of the Heaven while gaining an ever-clearer vision of just what that Heaven is. We are not to sit passively by waiting for a heaven to come after we die. Further, we can no longer simply accept what we are told by the authorities of this world as if we were the small children of a large household in which the will of the Father is communicated through servants. We must grow up and leave the safety and the certainty of house in which things have always been done a certain way. We must take responsibility for finding our own truths and trusting ourselves as children and heirs of Divinity to see such things. The Divine calls on us all to grow up, assert our independence, gain our confidence, and speak freely before the Divine as an adult child might speak freely before a loving and beloved parent, not to cower as slaves before a cruel judge.

This means we must overcome our fears to leave behind the ways of past. We must recognize that to alter the revelation of our fathers and mothers is not taboo. We have to accept the responsibility of using our own judgement and the possibly that we may be wrong. I'm enough of a Gnostic to see the Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil as a precious gift -- not something unclean and criminal. The laws of Heaven are not found in carefully replicating the dominant themes of human history. Nothing in the statement, "well, it's always been that way" means that it always should be that way. Which is not to say that we can not take our lessons from human history. But one of the most valuable lessons of both the Gospels and the Prophets is that we should look to those marginalized by the dominant society. I mentioned in a previous post how I liked that the labyrinth in the floor of a local church forces one to go out to the margins before returning to the center. And whether this means leaving behind the notion that only men are allowed to have a leadership role in the church, or that marriage can only involve a man and woman, or that all women are intended solely for marriage and childbearing, or that only Christians have access to the truth, or that it's okay to not pay a worker enough to live on because he or she doesn't have specialized skills, we have to be willing move past what we previously held to be true. And we have to be brave enough to claim our birthrights as citizens of Heaven to speak the truth we see, strong enough listen to visions that oppose ours, and humble enough to accept it we have erred. And in our hungry for the good, the true, the just, and the beautiful, the most grievous error we could make would be to sell our birthright of thought, reason, and speech to the first person offering a tasty bowl of lentils.

I think Pullman's scene of God's "death" resonated with me, because I believe that God has been appropriated and trapped by other forces. I would perhaps hesitate to go so far as to say that God must die in order for humans to grow up and become citizens rather than children, but certainly the Divine must be liberated from the box it's been shut up in.

Misquoting Jesus

I've read two books for fun this semester. The Last Temptation of Christ and Misquoting Jesus. I realized the other day that this makes me a geek par excellence, but hey, if that shoe fits, I can deal with wearing it.

I basically finished up Misquoting Jesus this morning. I say basically because I would up skipping a few sections that were things I already knew from classes and so on and so on. Anyhow, this book was written by Bart Ehrman, a well-respected Biblical scholar. I had read some of his more scholarly works for other classes, and given that I never know when a family member is going to corner me with, "well, why don't you believe X" (where X = belief that is supposed as clear as crystal from a certain Biblical passage), or that I'm going to give in to the temptation to once again pick internet fights with fundamentalist, evangelical Christians, I thought it might be interesting to see if I can toss an easily availiable and accessible book out as a suggestion for further reading.

Misquoting Jesus is certainly accessible. The reader doesn't need much, if any background in textual criticism, historical criticism, or even Christian history. Ehrman doesn't assume that anyone is familar with the various controversies that were floating around early Christianity, so he neatly sums up things like Arianism or Gnosticism in one or two paragraphs. My thought, as a geek and lover of Gnostics was -- wow, what an oversimplification! Then I remember that not everyone has the time or the desire to slug through various non-canonical texts or Kurt Rudolph's Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism, and that in all reality a complex understanding of Gnosticism was not necessary to understand Ehrman's point. So, my second thought was he does a very nice job at summing up these controversies.

Ehrman also introduces the reader to the principles of textual criticism, with which I'm not all that familiar. I found his explanations of textual criticism to be clear, concise, and imminently understandable.

I was struck at some points by the humor in the writing -- recognizable to me as religious studies geek humor. In scholarly articles, this humor is sometimes present, but it's normally limited to titles or footnotes. I suspect that Ehrman enjoyed writing in a more relaxed genre. I enjoyed reading in a more relaxed genre. To me, the process of reading this book was more like attending a class taught by a professor with whom I'm familiar than it did anything else. (Having never attended a lecture by Ehrman, I can't guess whether his writing style reflects his lecture style or not.)

The most interesting parts of the book, for me, are the autobiographical bits in the introduction and the supplementary material in the back of the book. Ehrman outlines his personal journey from mainstream protestant, to evangelical, to happy agnostic. It's an interesting story, and it functions nicely to pull the reader into the importance of the matter. The personal touch of the book also keeps it from becoming a "dry" scholarly read.

Another Tempting Quote

"... A pauper, barefooted and hungry, came and sat on the throne. 'god,' he whispered, 'the eyes of man cannot bear to look directly at the sun, for they are blinding. How then, Omnipotent, can they look directly at you? Have pity, Lord; temper your strength, turn down you splendor so that I, who am poor and afflicted, may see you!' Then -- listen, old man! -- God became a piece of breaid, a cup of cool water, a warm tunic, a hut, and in front of the hut, a woman giving suck to an infant. The pauper stretched forth his arms and smiled happily. 'Thank you, Lord,' he whispered. 'You humbled yourself for my sake. You became bread, water, a warm tunic and my wife and son in order that I might see you. And I did see you. I bow down and worship you beloved many-faced face!'"

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ, p. 331.