If I Ever Feel Better

In the last few years, I’ve been intrigued by the work of British essayist/novelist/biographer A. N. Wilson.  Despite being an avowed atheist, Wilson seemed to be drawn to Christians of the past, writing biographies of Tolstoy, C. S. Lewis, Hillaire Belloc, Milton and…err…Christ.  His Lewis biography, the only one I have read, is simultaneously admiring and disdainful of Lewis’ belief.  The other Wilson book I’ve read, the novel My Name Is Legion, is loaded with Christ metaphors and revolves around a wild-eyed Christian mystic prophet.  For an atheist, he sure was a lot more complicated than Richard Dawkins.

But as C. S. Lewis himself commented, a serious atheist can’t be too careful with his reading - or writing.  As he has captured in two well-written articles this Easter, Wilson has found himself once again believing all the things he rejected so dramatically in his thirties.

Surprisingly, Wilson now sees his two decades of atheism as his brush with fundamentalism.  If anything, he has been encouraged back to Christianity by the intolerance and condescension he saw in his fellow unbelievers.  Maybe the side of buses isn’t as good an advertisement as actual humility.

The change-of-heart of one ageing doubter isn’t proof of anything, let alone the resurrection of Jesus, but it does challenge the common narrative of putting away “childish” beliefs with age.

The thing that amazes me most is the bravery it must take Wilson to admit his mistakes so publicly.  I can only imagine that he now reads much of his non-fiction work with the kind of embarrassment most of us only experience when seeing photos of our teenage selves.  At least C. S. Lewis converted before he made a name as a writer.  Wilson is going to have to live with his contributions to the cause he now rejects.  And good luck to him.

Following on from yesterday’s post about Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change, I wanted to look at the issue of “catastrophism” in modern politics.

There’s a strong element of impending disaster that pervades the book - especially McLaren’s use of words like “crisis” and “unsustainable” as well as his overriding metaphor of the world as a “suicide machine”, a system that has set itself on course for its own destruction.  His real views are probably a little more nuanced than his language sometimes suggests, but this is how he expresses himself in Everything Must Change.

Now this kind of language is present just about everywhere these days, especially in reference to global warming and terrorism.  Drastic steps are justified on the basis of the worst-case scenario that is painted.  But equally, opponents can discredit the entire argument where the worst-case scenario goes beyond the evidence.

I believe in man-made climate change and the need to address it through major technological and economic change.  I believe that third-world poverty is a damning indictment on the West - and that resentment against Western decadence and greed is fuelling terrorism and war.  These are real issues and sometimes strong language needs to be used to drive decision-makers and the public to action.  But the language of catastrophe can do serious harm to your credibility and drive misinformed decisions.

By way of example, the neo-Malthusians with their concerns about the world’s population carrying capacity are damaged by the fact that their intellectual father, Thomas Malthus, was wrong 200 years ago about much the same thing.

There may be times when catastrophe is genuinely imminent but so many activists are the boys and girls who have cried wolf.  We have heard of too many impending scenarios of doom to entirely believe the next one.

I think Brian McLaren and a lot of others are smart people and they understand nuance - they’re just not sure that their readers will, or they think that their readers will use subtlety as an excuse to do nothing.  I think that we should assume the best in these situations and trust the recipients of our message.

On moral issues like global poverty, I don’t think we need to convince everyone that food riots will reach their suburb - because in all likelihood they won’t.  The appalling injustice of it all is enough.  I don’t need to believe that we will run out of oil in the next ten years to try and cut my consumption.  The virtues of efficiency and simplicity are enough.

Embellishment and exaggeration are more likely to give people an “out” once they realise they’ve been had.

After hearing a lot about it, I finally read Brian McLaren’s newish book, Everything Must Change, over the weekend and I have a lot of thoughts arising from it. First of all, it was a great read and full of inspiring thoughts about the Christian response to poverty and the environment (hint: we’re for one of them and against the other). I thoroughly recommend it as a book to make you assess your own life and faith in a new light.

I do, however, have some issues that I want to discuss. These aren’t so much to do with Brian himself, and I’m wary of being one of the people who assumes they can judge his entire theology from one book, but they’re rather broader issues about how we talk about Jesus and how we talk about politics. I’ll talk about the theology (which I’m scarcely qualified to discuss) first and then the politics (which I’m much more equipped on) tomorrow.

Again, I have to say that I really appreciate Brian bringing the focus around to Jesus’ thoughts and actions to do with justice and peace. He’s at his best when he’s showing what Jesus wasn’t like and what he was concerned about. The co-option of Christianity by the forces of wealth and inequality should be a big concern and Brian is right to point out that Jesus wasn’t just here to tell us what theology to believe so we don’t get burnt.

The problem is really that there’s not much in the Jesus described in Everything Must Change to set him apart from all other wise moral teachers of history. His message is largely that we should live within limits, care for each other and respect God’s creation. These are not controversial thoughts, especially within the political left.

I was left with the feeling that the Jesus on display here was the ultimate left-wing performance artist; acting out and describing a moral and ethical system that people had come up with before and would come up with again. Kind of Mahatma Gandhi with better party tricks.

In essence, McLaren is pointing out the social justice elements within the Christian tradition, without showing any clear distinction between it and any other social tradition. There’s really nothing in this picture of Jesus to attract anyone from an agnostic or a Buddhist background. He’s really just a way for the culturally Christian to embed their social concerns into their own religious framework.

Maybe McLaren isn’t concerned about Christianity having any superior claims over other ethical or religious traditions - and considering the appalling superiority complex we Christians often demonstrate, I don’t really blame him for moving away from that kind of comparison. But I am left with the question “Why Jesus?” Do I listen to Jesus’ message because I was brought up a Christian and he’s the logical go-to man? Or is there genuinely something about the carpenter from Nazareth that was different and special? What was it about his life and death and life-after-death that makes him more worthy of my time and commitment than Gandhi or Jose Ramos-Horta or Nelson Mandela or any other prophet of love and tolerance?

I think there is. I think the fact that he was the Son of God and had a supernatural ministry and has given us his Holy Spirit to work in us and make us more like him is important. You just wouldn’t get that from reading Everything Must Change.

Tonight I finished off the last of my three book reviews penned in the last week.  The first two were positive but this one was a doozy.  It was a perfect storm of book criticism.  I’d had a rubbish day at work and I came home and cracked open a bottle of red.  After a couple of glasses I was on fire - the frustrations of my day combined with the crapness of the book in question and inspired me to new heights of savagery.  The vitriol and bile were flowing and I thought I was soooo damn funny.

Then I stopped and thought about it.  Sure, some big shot writer isn’t going to care what an unqualified 26 year old writing for a free webzine thinks about his book.  But an Aussie writer carried by a boutique publishing house?  Maybe.

So I took out the most gratuitous insults and added some compliments (well, ONE compliment).  I’ve still only given it 4/10 because it annoyed me and ruined a perfectly good Monday night.  I think the only way to be truly brutal as a critic is to not care what the writer would think, or to convince yourself that your tough love will do them good.

I might be lacking that killer instinct.

After over two years of book reviewing for Popmatters and never once getting a free book, I felt it was safe to put my hand up for a massive wishlist, thinking they would never come through.  Well, I now have three books to read and review in the next three weeks.  Pessimism will be my downfall.

As if keeping up two blogs wasn’t work enough, I’ve been asked to start a regular column over Popmatters’ Re:Print blog. As insider in the Australian book industry (cough), I will be sharing my insights over at Upside-down Notes . My first post was about the Australia 2020 summit that begins today and seems like a bit of a wank. Of course, as an industry insider (cough), I wasn’t invited.

In a month plagued by panic
Attacks the like I rarely see
I’ve found a strange comfort
In free verse

I occasionally buy books on the assumption that I’ll read them “some day”, but then begin to have doubts when I can’t get past the first page.  Just recently, though, I’ve knocked off a couple of the Himalayan mountains in my collection - including the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.  Sure, there are still six more to go, but the feeling of having finished a 500 page novel that has stared accusingly at me from my shelves since the middle of 2002 is a good one.  I’m not boasting, I’m just sayin’…

The thing about Lost Time is that it was the topic of a Monty Python sketch that I remember from my childhood, even if I can’t possibly have “got” it at the time.  The idea is that a sea-side bathing beauty competition is reconfigured as contest to summarise the 2000-ish page work in 15 seconds.  The usual Python funny business ensues.

I guess the first volume could be described as “Boy goes for walks in the country with his family and wishes his mum would give him a kiss.  He falls in love with a little girl whose dad fell in love with a woman who wasn’t his type but who reminded him of a woman in a painting.  She cheated on him and made him a jealous wreck.  The end.”

But that hardly does justice to why you’d actually read the thing.

There’s a great episode of Black Books where Bernard and Manny decide that anyone can write a kids’ book. After much drinking and procrastinating and fussing around, they finally write a brilliant book about an elephant that loses a balloon, which they end up destroying in their drunken state. If you haven’t seen it, you owe it to yourself to do so.

I had a similar moment back in June when it hit me that I’d read enough books to my niece and nephews that I could probably have a bash myself. But I had my doubts soon after and I didn’t really get around to doing anything. Until now.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve written and illustrated a story about a little boy whose toy truck goes off on an adventure. Tonight I coloured in the pen drawings in watercolour and it looks a hell of a lot better than I could have hoped. And I’m keeping away from the bottle tonight so that I still have the book in the morning!

Here’s a sample of one of the pen-and-ink sketches of Josh and Chug the Truck.

Dear Tanya

I read your book “People In Glass Houses” and I have to say, I was impressed. You’ve got an amazing story to tell and you do it with such passion and such guts, that I am filled with admiration. I had some issues with it that I’ve outlined in my review for Popmatters, but they’re trivial in the grand scheme of things. All said, though, it was a hard book for me to read because it reminded me so much of my own upbringing and my own journey this far.

There are some big differences, obviously. I figure from the chronology of your book that you’re about ten years older than me (I’m 26) so we grew up in slightly different eras – I listened guiltily to Pearl Jam instead of Bruce Springsteen. And my parents took me to a wide range of churches, most of them not Pentecostal. We spent most of 1992 in various churches that had two-hours of worship followed by a fiery sermon and we copped the Toronto Blessing in the mid 90s (I think you were probably away from the church in those days – but you didn’t miss anything).

Still, I feel like we’d understand each other pretty well. The same kind of guilt-trips and mixed-messages made my teens a very conflicted place to be and have stayed with me to this day. The same kind of contradictions and wilful ignorance offended my intellect. The same fakeness made me doubt myself and drove me away from those around me in church.

So the surprising thing to me is that I’m still around, calling myself a Christian and going to church every week, while you’ve pretty much burnt your bridges. Maybe your doubts were bigger and your negative experiences more dramatic. Perhaps your lifestyle choices made you more ostracised than mine have. Maybe there’s no God after all and you’re just smarter than me.

I struggled a bit after finishing your book. It hit me at a time when I was annoyed at my fellow Christians for the usual reasons and feeling pretty negative. You reminded me of the 268 reasons why I am tempted to chuck the whole thing in on an almost daily basis.

Yet a strange thing happened in the last two weeks. I remembered the one reason why I stick around and how it somehow outweighs all the others.

I just don’t know how any of this makes sense without the idea that there’s a God who looked at the mess that we people have made of what he gave us and decided that drastic measures were called for; who called a bunch of people out of a Middle Eastern desert and said that they were going to show the world how things should be done; and who actually rolled up his sleeves, came down here and explained it all in the most extreme piece of interpretive dance you’ll ever see. Because that story gives me a reason to hope that things are going to get better. Because it fits with the changes that I’ve seen in myself and other people around me as they start to understand that story better and start to live it out day to day.

To a lot of people, that sounds ridiculous, even offensive. It does to me some days, too. But it’s got a hold on me that I can’t shake.

At the end of your book, you make a reference to the Emerging Church that’s popping up around the place where people are trying to fix up some of the mistakes we’ve made in the past and get back to what Jesus meant 2000 years ago. I’m trying to be a part of that and I figure it’s worth a shot. After all – it might just help me work out what I’m still doing here after everything.

I hope that your questions get answered too.

Take care

Dave