I got to see the “big show” this week.  This is an annual late April and early May changing of the view from our back deck.  For twenty-six years we have been treated to two equally spectacular but vastly different views.  Our back lot falls off precipitously to a river below, thick with trees, we can barely see through the foliage and can’t make out the riverbank.  In the winter, we can see across the small valley, the flight of hawks hunting around our creek, viewing the distant forested hills of the State Park.  We live close to town, and while the Columbia, Missouri city limits creep ever closer, the old guy who owns most of the small valley, classed a flood plane, keeps enough cattle to allow the land to be taxed as farmland and the rest of us living in the illusion that we too are “rural folk.”

The truth is, of course, most of the homes are owned by doctors and lawyers and such.  These are folks who like being surrounded by trees, keep their neighbors at arms length, and do their farming in small flower plots or tomato pots.  When we first moved here everyone mowed his or her own lawn; often, the only time I saw my neighbor to the north was when he was on his bright green John Deere riding mower.  Now, I guess we’ve all grown older or just too busy; men from Central America mow the lawns.

But spring in Missouri is wonderful and these last two weeks are the best.  Overnight our winter view of the valley fades in a shower of green buds and then in what seems but a day, completely disappears, replaced by an emerald sea stretching from the blue patch way above our roof line down to the sloping leaf covered hillside. This magical change from winter brown to summer green remains an annual and stunning surprise, reminding me how unmindful I am, or perhaps, just forgetful.  The regularity of the stars and the seasons were a daily concern, a preoccupation really, to my farmer grandparents.  For we modern city folk, whatever our rural pretensions, this magnificent demonstration of rebirth and renewal ought to remind us of our unhealthy preoccupations with self and our shameful lack of attention to the created order.

We may sell this home soon.  We bought it over 26 years ago, thinking we would stay but a few years.  We raised a family here and have even housed grandchildren—there are many memories in these rooms and laughter in the walls.  But looking out at those old oaks and maples, sporting their brand spanking new green finery, I am reminded and grateful that the God that cares for his beautiful creation, the God that delights in each bud and distant star, the God whose regularity is but the faintest track of His mighty deeds, is the providential keeper of my home, my loved ones, and this chaotic world.

My great nephew was one this week; the stock market recovered a bit: and our doctor exams came and went without incident, all good things, but not the best.   The biggest blessing was losing the view of the valley, and gaining the buds: for in the loss was a fulfillment of a promise.  I hope my children and my grandchildren will never lose the ability to see those buds in spring or to know that change brings loss, and gain.  For me, watching the change was a relief.  To see the show was, as always, stunning. This year, more than in the past, I remembered the many previous shows I had seen and was overcome with gratitude.  Thankful that I had been granted such joy, blessed to know a little more of the God for whom the, “Heavens declare His glory,” and relieved that the God who so faithfully cares for His creation holds us in His palm.

I have been reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison this week.  I have appended some thoughts that might interest.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a modern church martyr.  The protestant theologian hung by the Nazis in 1945 has reached near iconic status with the popularity of his book, “The Cost of Discipleship,” and to a lesser extent, his last work, “Ethics.”  His concept of cheap grace has been a challenge for at least three generations of churchgoers while contemporary society knows of him only as the pastor who supported the plot to murder Hitler.  I have long noted that many of the Christians I respect: Alan Jacobs, Father John Neuhaus, John Piper and D.A. Carson often reference his, “Letters & Papers from Prison,” usually concerning matters of Christian practice.  As a writer, I was interested in the literary “form” of Bonhoeffer’s letters, was it up to the task of “shaping” an engaging literary work.

Current books in the discipline of creative non-fiction often push writers toward the more literary aspects of prose; diaries, journals, and collections of letters are frequently ignored.  Difficulty in sustaining a narrative arc; the often cluttered nature and variety of topics; and the radical modern shift, or perhaps more accurately, flight from all practice of effective prose skills may explain this avoidance of these most personal of the “occasional prose” genres. However, Bonhoeffer’s letters are a powerful example of what can be accomplished in spite of the inherent limitations of the “letters” form.

I found the letters, placed in chronological order, allowed me to hear closely, as if I shared his cell, the thoughts of a very mature Christian enduring nearly two years of prison.  Isolated and alone, the honesty of his feelings and prose, like a modern day reading of the psalms, gave the work an authority not possible in any other form.  As a Christian, I was relieved to find not an icon but a fellow human: to be sure, a great thinker and martyr who was also intermittently a scared and lonely man, aware of his foibles and sin, trying to be honest before God.  At times, like reading Ecclesiastes or Job, the words become ugly and distinctly “unspiritual.”  But, through the letters you see grace.  Not grace like a cosmic genie, but a grace coming yolked in tandem with a struggling sinful man, a grace remaining faithful as his world disintegrates, a grace that is the steady and faithful love of Almighty God, a constant gardener of his soul.

The details did not clutter the narrative. The multiple topics and mundane matters: missed weddings, food deprivations, broken windows, physical ailments were suffused with Bonhoeffer’s compulsion to bring every moment of his life under God’s control—including his failures.  His sufferings, large and small and never minimized, were the form of his life, the agonizing struggle to hope became the visible sign of God’s shaping His loved creation.  When the more formal “papers” were included, chronological discussions of how we should think about God or act as His faithful creations, I was able to see a context that made the theology exceedingly credible.

As a writer, this book caused a thoughtful consideration of details. Not just descriptive details, the sights and smells that place readers into a scene, but the details of life, seemingly mundane actions and thoughts that are perhaps nothing in and of themselves, but in toto suggest the way someone is, or more accurately, who they are.  Artists often speak of “negative space.”  That is, the visual description of the “figure,” the main object of a picture, by the “ground” that surrounds the figure: the object is not drawn or painted but is known by what it is not.  In one way, the letters in this book describe the ground around the theology—the prose “figure.”  When you read the more formal aspects of these letters, you already sense or “know” what these truths are, the formal description of a fact that seems self-evident—perhaps like the communion chalice informs the communicant, tacit knowledge, that more than wine is present.

To be sure, these letters have been edited and by admission, some things are left out.  But the editor has not beautified by omission.  This is an important lesson for writers: while editing for clarity may be necessary, the subject should not be conformed to pre-conceived ideas of fitness; we the readers must determine character.  I must trust the reader to see with charity and recognize that editing “in” a one sided or “to good to be true” persona is an act of “un-charity.”

I doubt the letters “form” would be up to the task of a more sustained theological argument like, “The Cost of Discipleship.”  But in the end, as he faced the likelihood of his death, he was painfully brought to the hard truth that the wonderful goods of life, his thoughts and writings, his family and dear friends, were not a sufficient basis for hope; they were of no account compared to the riches of knowing Christ.  It was the hope of this grace that sustained him.  It is currently out of fashion in western culture to hold out past lives as exemplars for others to emulate.  Demanding cynical critique, claiming absolute personal autonomy, and a complete avoidance of sentimentality, we abandon our children and all human’s on life’s journey to “reinvent themselves” or “discover truth” in a moral vacuum.   I dread the prospect of following in Bonhoeffer’s shoes; but if that is what is given to me, I hope I may, by God’s grace, leave such clear prose fingerprints of Almighty God, that I might come to know God so intimately, and that I might be as faithful.

Soli Deo gloria

EASTER 2009

Christians all over the world rejoice. “The Tomb is Empty”  “He has arisen.”  What the disciples and his followers then as now could not grasp, what in their human understanding they struggled to comprehend, the cataclysmic and mysterious entry of Almighty God into history, an event  occurring in their presence.  It would take appearances at an early morning breakfast, a supper in Emmaus, and even placing their hands in His wounds to start the process of belief, a process than is ongoing, even now.  He was crucified, He arose, and He will come again in glory.  We confess publicly what we believe, what we want to believe, and sometimes, when we are not at our best but honest, what we hope some day to believe.

For, we live in a time demanding certainty, a “beyond a doubt” kind of proof, requiring overwhelming evidence before our suffocating skepticism can be removed.   If we’re being truthful, that kind of verity doesn’t happen often, if ever.  So, we live in a surreal world of suspended disbelief: operating our lives by rules and laws we opine as “proven” or beyond discussion,” but privately remaining skeptical, perhaps with age, cynical.  I understand these early disciples difficulties with belief just as I cast a dubious eye at the opposite: the easy Christian triumphalism of our times, a distorted shape of our faith that seems to deny both the difficult lives of the saints and the reality of God’s good creation infected by sin, a world that as I write is suffused with unspeakable evil, if only we have eyes to see.

But on Easter we the followers of Christ affirm and confess that this narrative, God’s narrative, starting with His creation and  passing through Golgotha does not end as tragedy.   We affirm with Polycarp, St. Francis, Mother Theresa, and the uncounted martyrs whose blood soaks every corner of the earth that evil exists and the master of this world marches with seeming abandon; but, with the open tomb, God’s love is greater.  Just as the disciples of old needed Christ’s grace, the embodied Trinity, to mitigate their disbelief, we, especially those of us in the west, need our denial blinders removed and our mythical safety breached.  We need a reality testing for an evil that is far more pervasive than our minor peccadilloes—this story isn’t just about us.  We need to see the enormity of brokenness for which Christ was crucified.

But on Easter we affirm that contrary to all human reason, against all man’s history, in defiance of mankind’s just deserts, all creation has been ransomed.  We calculate with incomplete understanding the price paid, Christ carrying our sin to the place of no hope, and can barely comprehend the love.  But beyond all of my hope, beyond all of my reason, the tomb is empty—He Lives.

The narrative of Christ and all humanity must ultimately deal with the reality of the cross and the empty tomb.  He was born; He was crucified; He rose, and He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.  This surely is no tragedy; God is in process of reclaiming His good creation—He is alive.