McIntosh, chapter 6: Jesus Saves -- But, How?

With a single matter - of - fact observation in the book Mysteries of Faith, theologian Mark McIntosh drives a stake through the heart of the Punishing God that has haunted me since seventh grade.

McIntosh is already deep into his chapter about how the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus save us, when he drops in this observation: the Eastern Orthodox Church never developed the idea of a punishing God who required Jesus to pay Him for our sins. Orthodox theologian Christos Yannaras writes that the Western Church, when it adopted this theory early on,

changed the truth of God by subordinating the freedom of his love to the relentless necessity of an egocentric and savage justice which demanded sadistic satisfaction.(128)

Yannaros attributes this difference to Roman law and western individualism. McIntosh adds, after Yannaros,

it is no wonder, given the dominance of this theory in the west since the time of the Reformation, that so many westerners have rebelled against such a punitive idea and ended up as atheists.

Been there, done that! Given a comic - book tract in 7th grade by a malicious Baptist named Sidney, I was first terrified at the image of the sinner being tossed in the lake of fire (screaming on the way down, "I didn't kno - o - ow!"); then, I was revolted at the notion that my buddy Gerald deserved eternal damnation for being Jewish, while Sidney would be saved. I became an angry atheist, a stance that I kept well into high school.

For McIntosh, it's the transactional, zero - sum, you've - only - got - one - life - to - live approach to living that demanded the death of Jesus. It's the approach that says, "there is only a limited amount of life to be had, and if I am going to have my share then yours must be crushed and poured out to me" (115). Because Jesus embodied God's bountiful love for all, he threatened the status of those who governed and held authority. They found laws and reasons to have him punished; Sidney and his ilk still do.

That same view is what the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Jesus destroy. It's only in that view of scarcity that believers have to be scared. Jesus exposed that view as a lie when he became one of us, "so that through death he might … free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death" (Hebrews 2.15).

[Another blogpost (10/30/2018) brought together different threads of Christian tradition about the crucifixion's saving powers: "Angles on the Crucifixion." ]

For McIntosh, from the time we hid from God in Eden, straight through the Bible, sin has been our individualistic preoccupation with getting what we deserve -- reward or punishment. Jesus threatened those whose authority and privilege depended on rewards and punishments. In that way of looking at things, Jesus' death is a punishment. Jesus explains their view: "An hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God. And they will do this because they have not known the Father or me." (John 16.2-3). McIntosh says that his resurrection, with healing and forgiveness, demonstrates the falseness of that approach (119), and also demonstrates that God had nothing to do with the Crucifixion.

But doesn't God punish sin? McIntosh says that we experience punishment, not because God lays it on us, but because, like an alcoholic confronted by loving friends who intervene, we feel like our identity and independence are under attack (133). The punishing God is "an idol, a projection of my own self - condemnation."

Throughout the chapter, McIntosh finds ways to say that Jesus embraces or "loves" death; he doesn't negate it. ("Death has to mean something," wrote poet Christian Wiman. (See blogpost of 08/03/2013) We can trust. "As this trusting mind of Christ begins to grow in us, the tyranny of sin and death is destroyed. Sin can no longer terrify us into hiding from God."

More about McIntosh's BookMcIntosh, Mark. Mysteries of Faith. Vol. 8 in The New Church's Teaching Series. New York: Cowley Publications, 2000.

I've responded to other chapters in other blogposts:

• (01/09/2019)"Not the Moral, but the Story" about chapters 1 and 2.
  
• (01/26/2019)"How Episcopalians Believe" considers chapter 4, along with other sources
  
• (01/30/2019)"Jesus Saves - but how?" about chapter 6
  
• (02/12/2019) "Theologian Mark McIntosh Sees Drama in Cosmos" about chapter 7.

A Jung Man's Dream

In a dream I saw a cathedral carved from black stone at the peak of a mountain in a cold northern kingdom. The people there made their cathedral both beautiful and inaccessible, to be a pure gift to the glory of God. The king gave up his throne to serve as caretaker for the empty cathedral. I saw him, dressed in a monk's robe, walking in the warm sunlight tinted by colorful stained glass windows. He had my face.


That king was close friend to another king, another version of me, who ruled a southern coastal kingdom, noisy and thriving with trade and the activity of its energetic inhabitants. That king wrote his friend letters about how he longed to retreat to that mountaintop cathedral, but his people clamored for constant attention.

Both kings were eager to hear more from their sons who were exploring the world in a two - man boat.

[First two images: A composite of my dream, and sunlight through stained glass.]

A Dream from Jung DaysWhen a dream is just a rambling recital of images with meaning only to me, I keep it to myself. But when dreams of mine have confirmed the theories of psychologist Karl Jung, I share them on this blog -- in the interest of science, of course.

When I had that dream in the 1980s, Jung was all the rage. He was central to popular works by mythologist Joseph Campbell and theologian Henri Nouwen, bestselling novels by Robertson Davies, and a unique off - Broadway play by James Lapine, Twelve Dreams. (About Davies, see my reflections 07/23/2010, 04/14/2014 and 03/19/2016)

Jung's salient theories are that the language of dreams is metaphor; that our unconscious minds alert us in dreams to truths that we are too preoccupied to recognize in our waking lives; that the metaphors come, not just from our own experience, but from a great collective unconscious shared with all humanity across millennia; and that the universe also speaks to us through "synchronicity," meaningful coincidence.

The images of the dream encapsulated my sense of my life at that time: a school teacher among eighth graders in Mississippi, I was certainly king among clamorous southerners. An introverted Episcopalian, I've also felt removed from the people and business around me. That mountaintop cathedral was a fine image of how I live "in my head" with music, literature, art, and theology. The two sides meet in that boat, exploring the world, "at sea," moving on to the next place.

This dream urged me to move on to something new. While the fathers were committed to their stations, they felt joy knowing that their two sons were headed off to points unknown in their boat. At the time, while I was committed to teaching English and Drama, I was learning to regret not having majored in music. I'd been discouraged from it by the head of the music department at Duke (on the grounds that the music major was for performers and scholars, not composers), and I lacked the knowledge and facility of my musical friends. So I'd fallen back on two majors that came easily to me, literature and drama. Encouraged by the dream, I initiated private lessons with wonderful composer James Sclater (read about him at my blogpost of 11/02/2105).

The dream came to mind this month because of a story I heard on NPR's Snap Judgment about a modern - day hermit, Christopher Knight. Jung would probably attribute widespread interest in Knight to an unconscious collective need. A quick scan for "hermit" on the internet yields a "hermit" among the deck of Tarot cards, a repository of images that Jungians see as universal, collective archetypes. (About Knight, see my blogpost of 01/20/2019). Evidently, many of us can identify with Knight's yearning to escape the tug of relentless events and obligations.

As I was thinking about posting this dream, my browser unbidden offered up a photo of a real place that combines all parts of my dream, Turkey's island of Cappadocia where the ancient inhabitants of Uchisar carved their church and many homes into the stone of the mountain. Synchronicity?

Long Division

One playful dog and I
divided by

7 hours’ class
plus 3 of practice
plus 2 commutes (rainy, dark, and cold)

equals

me, jogging up the steps
dropping my books at the top

plus Mia
prancing at the open door, ball in her teeth,

over
        joyed.

About this little poem I wrote this poem to demonstrate to seventh graders that a poem and a math equation have a lot in common. An equation is a simple sentence with one verb, "equals," arrived at by reducing and simplifying all the terms to the common denominators.  In a poem, the writer reduces and simplifies all the details of a specific experience until it's expressed by its common denominators -- the details that the common reader will be able to appreciate.

To demonstrate, I showed the students the poem above, after I showed them my free write:

I remember I drove home after seven hours of classes and meetings and answering emails and grading papers and then dealing with two hours of musical rehearsals. Traffic was bad as it was in the morning, and the streets were wet, mist hit the window, and it was already dark. I thought about Mia, my pit bull – mix dog, probably hungry, probably lying on the couch, alone all day long. I worried about whether she was feeling anxious, and I felt guilty that I have to leave her alone so long when we’re doing a musical. I wouldn’t even be able to take her for a walk because of the rain. So when I parked my car in the garage, I pounded up the stairs and burst through the door, and there Mia bowed, stretched, wagged her tail, and dropped her yellow ball at my feet to play fetch.

To put it all in math terms adds a level of fun word play.  For a poem written at a stoplight on the way to school, it strikes me as pretty good.

How Episcopalians Believe: "Sanctifying Perceptions by Forming the Imagination"

"Singing it, you feel like you're praying," said Sharon.

Our choir at St. James Episcopal Church in Marietta GA had just rehearsed Morten Lauridsen's O Nata Lux for the umpteenth time, our director shaping our performance to be less about notes and more about texture, color, expressive phrasing, and dynamic contrast. Sharon and I agreed, we could've rehearsed it umpteen times more!

The inspiration comes only in part from the words. In Latin, the first line tenderly responds to the birth of baby Jesus, "O light born from Light," and the rest builds to ecstatic proclamations -- about what, I'm not sure; I've forgotten the translation printed inside the front cover of the music, but I feel -- we feel -- unified as a choir and in union with God when we sing it.

As the music was more than its words, what distinguishes Episcopalians may be less about what we say we believe -- and more about how we believe it.


How We Believe: Mysteries of Faith (McIntosh), Ch. 4I came to the Episcopal church from Bible study groups in college, rigorous about faith in a very college - boy way. Meeting in a dorm room after homework sessions, we could be forgiven for thinking that the Bible was a textbook and faith was a quiz. Check the right boxes for beliefs, disavow bad behavior, and you're going to graduate to a desirable place when you die.

For a series of books aimed at helping Episcopalians understand their church's salient qualities, theologian Mark McIntosh has written about how we come to know God in Mysteries of Faith. In chapter four, "The Voice of God," about revelation, he surveys how the idea of "knowing" something used to have another aspect, participatory and intimate -- as Adam "knew" Eve (74). Since the seventeenth century, "knowing" has been reduced to an intellectual assent to statements.

Interestingly, today both fundamentalists on one side and revisionist liberal Christians on the other remain locked into this early modern scientific approach to knowing. Revelation itself remains for them either encapsulated in tidy, numbered propositions or reduced to whatever domain of science they tend to favor most, such as psychology.

McIntosh's alternative to those views is that we come to know some things, such as the meaning of the word "love," only through experiences and relationships.

McIntosh cites professor / theologian Hans Frei's historical survey of the ways the faithful have read Scripture, seeing by the end of the 20th century two basic approaches. Scholars saw Scripture "as though it belonged either to the genre of literal historical record -- in which case conservatives claimed it was a reliable record and liberals that it was faulty -- or to the genre of ancient myth" (86).


For McIntosh, the Scriptures read aloud at every Episcopal worship service public and private, are like a sacrament. Episcopalians understand that to mean the outward and visible form, in a rite such as eucharist or baptism, of a spiritual reality. Scripture's "outward and visible forms -- stories, prophecy, poetry, letters -- are the revelation of God's invisible and ungraspable presence" (86).

McIntosh writes that we encounter God not through a bottom - line - pop - quiz lesson of Scripture, but through the language itself. He's describing what our choir experiences when we participate in creating music that is like a prayer. Earlier in the book, he has described how Scripture tells one overarching story from Genesis to Revelation, a story that super - charges the way we perceive our day - by -day lives. (See my reflection on earlier chapters, "Not the Moral, but the Story" 01/09/2019)

I recognize these ideas from other ancient sources. "As you pray, so you live," says one ancient source. Monasteries and abbeys imposed habits to form the souls of the religious, whose robes are called "habits." The same theory bolsters Islam, as the faithful must practice their faith daily with body, voice, and wallet. A thousand years ago, when "believing" had the active connotation of "beloving," St. Anselm said, "We do not understand in order to believe, but we believe in order to understand."


How We Believe: James K. A. Smith on "formative disciplines"A reading offered alongside McIntosh for this week's lesson in Education for Ministry (see EfM class blog) brings all of these thoughts into focus. Worship for Episcopalians, as for Lutherans, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox churches, is guided by liturgy, those readings, songs, prayers, and rituals that take us through the whole story of God's love for His creation, day by day, season by season, year by year, cycles within cycles. Philosophy professor James K. A. Smith explains the theory behind all that in a succinct paragraph reprinted in EfM's Reading and Reflection Guide, 2018-2019, p. 118-119.

If historic Christian worship and ancient spiritual disciplines carry the Story that seeps into our social imaginary, this is in no small part because liturgical practices are also intentionally aesthetic and tap into our imaginative core. It is no accident that the poetry of the psalms has long constituted the church's prayerbook, nor is it mere coincidence that the worship of the people of God has always been marked by singing. …[The] inherited treasury of formative disciplines has been characterized by an allusivity and metaphoricity that means more than we can say.

Smith here packs in some phrases that together describe how Episcopalians are supposed to experience belief, through re-living in a social imaginary God's overarching Story, re - told every liturgical year through discipline of habitual prayer with song and scripture, morning, noon, and night, with corporate worship and eucharist weekly at least, until the metaphors and allusions, jumping to mind in all situations, meaning more than words can say, can sanctify perception by forming the imagination.

I must say, there's a huge "if" at the beginning of all that. Southern writer William Alexander Percy claimed in his memoir Lanterns on the Levy that the glorious phrases of the King James Bible and Prayer Book seeped into the sleepy brains of undergraduates at their mandatory morning chapel services, transforming them; but, perhaps, as a writer, he was already receptive. I meet Episcopalians for whom the music and repeated prayers are so much filler; what they want is a pointed message at the sermon, communion as a kind of vaccine against hell, and a blessing on the way out the door to real life.

There's another caveat about this emphasis on liturgy. Theologian Verna Dozier wrote Living into God's Dream as a corrective to those of us -- she means most of us -- who substitute worship of Jesus for following his example (04/03/2018). Howard Thurman, mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., writes in Jesus and the Disinherited about his shift of emphasis away from the other - worldly take - all - the - world - and - give - me - Jesus kind of faith to an emphasis on freeing the oppressed here and now (12/24/2015).

But readings like these by McIntosh and Smith have had their effect on me over the past few years. My morning ritual begins when I set up the coffee to brew while I feed the dog and prepare bookmarks in the Bible for readings. With my first cup of coffee, I start the prayer book's "Daily Devotions" for the morning (137). When I get to the Creed, I take the suggestion of Diana Butler Bass to think of it as a prayer -- not just, "I believe this is true" but also, "let these cosmic truths be the context for the day ahead." With plainchant to help me, I've memorized the service, and often repeat it in the car on the way to work, or even lying awake in the wee small hours of the morning. On stressful days, I can simply think the tune, and there rises in me that feeling of trust.

Is "a feeling of trust" enough to make Episcopalians into faithful servants of Jesus, the true "body of Christ" in our world today? I can only testify that the anxiety about obligations and nagging guilt about daily peccadilloes that I used to feel are tamed now by a quiet sense of God's pervasive presence. If I take that out with me out into the world, what difference does God make through me?

More about McIntosh's BookMcIntosh, Mark. Mysteries of Faith. Vol. 8 in The New Church's Teaching Series. New York: Cowley Publications, 2000.

I've responded to other chapters in other blogposts:

• (01/09/2019)"Not the Moral, but the Story" about chapters 1 and 2.
  
• (01/26/2019)"How Episcopalians Believe" considers chapter 4, along with other sources
  
• (01/30/2019)"Jesus Saves - but how?" about chapter 6
  
• (02/12/2019) "Theologian Mark McIntosh Sees Drama in Cosmos" about chapter 7.

Other blogposts of mine relate to these ideas:

• "O Praise Hymn," (10/23/12) explains the expressions of the music, even apart from the words;
• "The Power of Liturgy: I've Heard it All Before"(01/06/17) reflects on Inwardly Digest, Derek Olsen's guide to the Book of Common Prayer;
• I recall first becoming aware of the Episcopal church as a "full immersion" experience in "An Especially Good Friday"(03/26/16)

Dementia Diary: Imagine a Liturgy for Dementia

In a dream, I saw a service prepared in the chapel of the Episcopal school where Mom taught 33 years. Old colleagues had gathered and were prepared to speak tributes to her; children of grownup students that she had taught were prepared to recite a poem related to what she had given her students; my relatives were there, and my late father was watching anxiously from the side. Family and friends from her life in Valdosta GA had come up, bringing a young Min - Pin related genetically to Mom's beloved Sassy.


The altar was decorated with flowers and photos of Mom, brightly lit. A gently sloping ramp had been added, so that Mom could process alone down the aisle and up to the altar, as her unsteady gait makes steps risky.


Before the ceremony, she grew anxious about not remembering any of these people, of looking foolish. I hugged her close to assure her that we all loved her, and everyone wanted to bless her while she could still feel appreciated.

Episcopalian myself, I wondered during the dream about where this unfamiliar liturgy came from. It seemed to be modeled on the wedding ceremony, but who or what was waiting at the altar? Jesus, I suppose.

My dream left me feeling reassured, too. Mom is going alone up to a different existence, even as she continues to live. Let us accept that, and celebrate her life while we can.

[Photo: Mom's quite content to stay in bed to noon or later. I lured her up with a cup of coffee and Frank Sinatra on my phone, singing "One for My Baby"]

"North Pond Hermit" on NPR's Snap Judgment

The true story of a legendary hermit is so compelling that I didn't want to miss a syllable of today's broadcast on NPR's Snap Judgment. I stayed in the carport to hear the end on my car radio.


Writer Michael Finkel learned of the hermit through a news story that police had caught a man who, for twenty - seven winters, had taken small items from recreational cabins in dense woods far north in Maine. The mysterious burglar picked locks but broke nothing, and left the cabins as he found them, minus cans of beer (though never "lite"), food items, briefs (never boxers). Locals only surmised his existence, but no one had seen him. They named the hypothetical thief the "North Pond Hermit."


Finkel's imagination was piqued by another detail, that the hermit had stolen a thousand books over the years. The man, identified as Christopher Knight from a high school yearbook from the early 1980s, still wore the same glasses from his class picture. Knight refused to talk to other reporters and writers who contacted him through phone or email, but Finkel tried a handwritten letter, and got a terse reply that showed rigorous candor, an original style, and the dry wit of superior intelligence.

As the radio story proceeds, we learn that Knight simply wanted to be alone. He found social contact awkward, and he didn't see value in the pursuits that occupy our lives. Taking blankets, some food, and some clothes with him, he drove his car deep into the woods and moved around a couple of years before he found an ideal retreat under a tangle of branches, about twenty square feet. Finkel visited the place. "You can hear the wind without feeling it; you can see out, but no one can see in." Knight, never lit a fire, to avoid detection; and, adhering to his own strict code, communicated with no one, not even the residents who left notes inviting him to just list the supplies he needed. The exceptions were a chance encounter with a hiker, when Knight said one word, "Hi." When a grandfather, son, and grandson saw him, he heard the grandfather tell the other two to calm down and leave the man alone; Knight bowed once and disappeared again. Knight regretted only that he had to steal: of that, he was ashamed.

Apprehended, tried by a sympathetic court, he endured jail several months, then worked in his brother's business. Finkel visited, and Knight appeared to be doing fine. But in a unique moment of personal expression, Knight told him he was in agony. (This was my NPR "driveway moment.") Knight made eye contact with Finkel for the first time and asked, "Am I crazy?" Finkel reassured him. Knight told Finkel of the night when, starving, he couldn't walk around his hermitage to generate warmth in the sub-zero cold. Freezing under his blankets, he saw a "lady of the woods" who asked if he was ready to go with her. He perceived that she was Death, and told her, "Not yet." But now he was thinking of surrendering to her.

Reviewers of Finkel's book tell how the author draws on Thoreau's Walden and others' thoughts on "solitude and spirituality" to find resonance with the rest of us.

Knight's written words, read aloud, reminded me of the fictional character "Scobie" in Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter who limits his speech and daily journal to purely observable fact and utter truth. Engaged in work and relationships, Scobie inwardly removes himself, a sort of hermit in the world. (See my blogpost 12/09/2014, "Saints in Spite of Themselves".)

Knight brings to mind another fictional character who retreats from a town of gossips and hypocrites in his late teens and never comes out of the family home in daylight again: Boo Radley.

The questions about how Knight survived are interesting, but the why of his story is what compels us; that, and the strained but deep relationship between the compassionate writer and his rebarbative subject. This is a book I may have to read. Thanks to Snap Judgment for yet another intense story to enrich our imaginations.

Men at Sixty: Ready for the Poetry of Donald Justice

When Garrison Keillor read Donald Justice's poem "Men at Forty" on the radio, I went straight to the nearest bookstore to buy Justice's New and Selected Poems. This was back when Keillor, radio, and neighborhood bookstores were all still "a thing," so, I guess it was twenty years ago, when I was just the age for Justice's greatest hit to speak directly to me. Other poems in the collection felt more remote. But, on the strength of "Men at Forty," I've kept the book by my bedside all these years, sampling it once in awhile between other books, learning gradually to appreciate his other poems. Now in my sixtieth year, I think I'm ready to relate to Justice.

Here's the quatrain that stopped me in my tracks:

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

Making it general, about all those men in all their houses, Justice allows us to imagine ourselves stopped "on a stair landing." Between floors, as between youth and age, the men feel the solid house moving "like the deck of a ship / Though the swell is gentle."  The men reflect on mirrors:

They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father's tie there in secret,
And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.

The men are "more fathers than sons themselves, now." To here, the poem already evokes memories and, inevitably, feelings of loss. But Justice moves on to "something" that is "filling" the men, "like the twilight sound / Of the crickets, immense...." The nature of that "something" is a little dark, a little scary, but the movement is "gentle" and the sound of crickets at twilight is a delight: something is going to fill the lives of men at forty, and it seems to be something good. What is it? The poem is better for leaving that to imagination. (But I've read books about it. See Richard Rohr, Falling Upward, my blogpost of 7/18/2014).

At sixty-ish, Justice wrote "Invitation to a Ghost" in memory of a contemporary. "I ask you to come back now as you were in youth," he writes, "Confident, eager, and the silver brushed from your temples." He remembers passionate long talks about poetry. Justice also seems to have lost his confidence, begging his late friend, "Come back now and help me with these verses. / Whisper to me some beautiful secret that you remember from life." Reading this now with silver on my temples, I, too, envy my twenty - five - year - old self his confidence.

With the self - doubt in age, however, comes recognition that those passionate and confident young men were also pretentious. A bad line, he reminds his ghost friend "could make you wince: we have all seen it." Justice writes in "Early Poems" of his own work, "How fashionably sad those early poems are!" and pictures them as so many suburban homes "on their clipped lawns" with porches where "bored children sprawl / Reading the comics before their parents rise / -- The rhymes, the meters, how they paralyze!" Justice comforts me with the thought that the loss of self - confidence may be the sign of a good thing, outgrowing cocksureness.

As Justice moved on in years, he moved backwards in view, paying tribute to parents, their parents, to his music teachers, and to the places that he lived in Georgia and especially in Florida. Justice's Selected Poems, published when he was 54, recall sensory impressions of homes and farms, long - gone relatives and piano teachers, "First Death," and "Childhood," which he dedicates to Wordsworth, Rilke and other "poets of a mythical childhood."

The one that somehow stays with me most is among the latest poems in the collection. It's "Vague Memory from Childhood," a re-working of images that he'd used for "Sonatina in Yellow" published in 1973. He remembers "Vast far clouds … darkening /At the end of day," birdsong, and aunts' voices through an open window, while he played outside in the dust, "Caught up in a sort of dream / With sticks and twigs pretending," when someone indoors lights a lamp, "Printing a frail gold geometry on the dust." He has captured a memory very specific to him that I feel I've experienced. Like "Men at Forty," there's that impending darkness, but also the pleasure of being in one's own dreamy world, finding life in sticks and dust, alone, yet bathed in familiar voices and the "frail" golden light, muntins of the window criss - crossing to cast a shadow of foreshortened rectangles.

For an epigraph to the collection, he prints three lines, returning to the "Orpheus" myth:

Orpheus, nothing to look forward to, looked back.
They say he sang then, but the song is lost.
At least he had seen once more the beloved back.

"Nothing to look forward to?" My life isn't so bleak at 59. But I enjoy looking back through Donald Justice's eyes, and look forward to appreciating his poems more in years to come.

"Wild Fire" by Ann Cleeves: Everyone is an Island

The Shetland Islands have provided novelist Ann Cleeves an ideal backdrop for mystery. Their remoteness from the mainland and isolation of their small communities from each other narrows the range of suspects to a few that readers get to know well. Cleeves has found ample opportunity for atmospheric word painting in the stark contrasts of the Shetlands' landscapes and weather. (Read my blogpost, "She Knows Her Place" 11/28/2014.) For Wild Fire, last in her series, she makes certain characters' emotional remoteness a theme that resonates with the setting.

The most sympathetic of these characters is Christopher Fleming, an eleven - year - old on the autistic spectrum. He appears at the end of the first chapter, a small boy drawn to a bonfire set up by local teenagers; they turn to mock him. Soon we learn that Christopher, obsessed with fire, once lit a small fire at school, fueling townspeople's malicious gossip aimed at the boy and his parents, newcomers from London.

Least sympathetic is a young woman named Emma. Nanny to children of another family, the Moncriefs, she has had an ill - concealed relationship with Christopher's father. At that same bonfire, she watches with a small smile while the bullies torment the child. When she's murdered soon after, none of the other characters seems to be broken up about it. She, too, was emotionally guarded and secretive, though she drew attention by hand - made dresses emulating high fashion of the late 1950s. "Her life was a performance" says one character (111); "if you got through the style and the make - up, there was nothing there" (113).

Even the lead investigators are estranged from each other. In the first Shetland books, Detective Jimmy Perez met Fran, an artist, married her, then saw her killed. Blaming himself, he fell into a depression that became a drag on the series. Cleves refreshed the story when she introduced a new supervisor for Jimmy, free - spirited Willow. But now, as their relationship deepens, Jimmy in his guilt retreats into his corner again, leaving Willow to commiserate with Jimmy's affable lieutenant Sandy:

He looked at her. 'Are you two alright?'

'Of course,' she said and then, thinking he deserved more than that, 'just a couple of things we need to sort out. Sorry, it must awkward for you.'

'He's not an easy man,' Sandy said. There was a long pause that he clearly hoped she'd fill with more information. When none was forthcoming, he added, 'But if anyone can handle him, it's you.' Another pause. 'You brought him back to us, after that business with Fran. I'll always be grateful for that.' He turned away from her, suddenly embarrassed by the intimacy of the comment. Only the beetroot tinge to the back of his neck stopped her from becoming emotional herself. But seeing his awkwardness, it was a struggle not to laugh. (190)

If other characters are enisled, Sandy's a natural bridge. His humility, compassion, and increasing competence make him the single most delightful character in the series.

While Cleves maintains her third person narrative voice at all times, she gives us the action from different characters' perceptions, sometimes covering the same scene from different perspectives in consecutive chapters. For example, Jimmy glimpses Christopher's parents through a window, and feels that he was "intruding on a moment of intimacy" (64); the next chapter, opening up that moment from the wife's perspective, shows that it was anything but. The first two chapters set up the pattern, as we see the scene of mob cruelty to Christopher at the bonfire, first through Emma's perceptions of it, then via the man at her side.

Cleeves makes a structural use of that bonfire scene. Probing memories of the bonfire time and again throughout the novel, she adds layersa of significance to the details, until our picture of that event is completed at the same moment that the story reaches a climax packed with action and emotional resonance. Shifting the perspectives on the action adds suspense.

In a remarkable chapter, Cleeves takes us into Christopher's strange and beautiful mind. His mother was the one to discover Emma's body in one of the Flemings' outbuildings, and the detectives are searching the grounds. Christopher, who seeks comfort in routine and computer screens, finds "the magic of the screen didn't work":

He was still troubled, not by the break in routine, but by pictures that came into his head, blocking the familiar images on the screen, so he found it impossible to concentrate. This had never happened before. He got to his feet and began to pace backwards and forwards across the bedroom floor, from one window to the other, in an attempt to shake the pictures loose, to send them on their way. It didn't work. Whatever he did, Emma Shearer was lodged in his head.

He walked quicker and tried to order the images, to control them. He decided to treat them like the Pokémon cards he collected. He liked to place the Pokémon characters in the order in which he'd collected them....So he allowed the pictures of Emma Shearer to flash through his head and he sorted them chronologically. (163)

By this device of chronological images, Cleeves efficiently gives us more of Christopher's perspective than he is able to give to the detectives. Christopher remembers that bonfire:

Then, he hadn't seen Emma at first. He'd sat at the top of the bank and watched the wild bird shapes of the flames and felt the sharp, stinging heat. Then they'd turned and seen him. Emma had laughed with the rest of them. Her thin face turned towards him, sharp - edged. She'd looked like a bird herself, pecking towards him, mocking.(164)

This peek into Christopher's efforts to control his mind endears him to us, even while it intensifies our image of Emma's character.

I've often felt in the Shetland books that Cleeves has left herself too much for the detectives to explain following the denoument; but in this one, everything comes together in a way that feels inevitable, and the reveal makes sense, leaving little to explain. Instead, we have a sorting out of relationships, a very satisfying conclusion to the series.


Ann Cleeves. Wild Fire. New York: Minotaur Books, 2018. See links to my posts about many other works by Ann Cleeves on my Crime Fiction page.

Not the Moral, but the Story: Ch.1-2 in "Mysteries of Faith" by Mark McIntosh

[Reflection on Mysteries of Faith by Mark McIntosh, Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Chicago and associate professor of systematic theology and spirituality at Loyola University. The book is part of The New CHURCH'S TEACHING SERIES (Chicago: Cowley Publications, 2000.]

"We do theology not to be clever or well - informed," writes professor and priest Mark McIntosh, "but in order to be drawn into God's own life," a process that McIntosh compares to reading a novel. Drawn into a good novel, we get a "lift," a broadening of horizons, even when we return to our "daily round" (5-6). Theology should do that, he says, keeping us aware of resonances between the daily round and the story of God. In the first two chapters that I've read, McIntosh focuses on those moments of resonance that he calls "mystery."

To explain "mystery," McIntosh tells of his visit to Grand Canyon. It "vanished: when I stepped back just a few feet from the edge... I was completely unaware that this huge reality was right before me." That image helps him to make his point that theology "is walking up to the edge and noticing the mystery before you" (1). Many moments in our lives have this kind of "mystery" or depth to them when we're caught up short. Feeling hurt, or ecstatic, or compassionate, is a starting place; the next step is to find meaning in such moments from context, the intersection of our life experience with others' stories. Knowing God's story from Creation to Revelation, we can find our place in that. Once we understand that others are equally part of that story, we have to recognize, as C. S. Lewis writes, "There are no ordinary people" (9).

In McIntosh's terms, God initiates a conversation through those moments; we've "heard" God when we connect them to Scriptural stories; we converse with God through prayer. These steps or "moments" can be sequential, or a recursive process. Paying attention to these moments, connecting them to stories, and relating to God in prayer: to make these the habit of our lives, he says, is the purpose of theology.  Without it, life becomes like TV talk shows, just a stream of "banal hysteria" in nine - minute segments (14).

McIntosh uses a Christmas memory to explain other aspects of "mystery." McIntosh remembers  coming home from midnight mass with his parents and three siblings. Being the youngest, he was made to wait in new - fallen snow outside his family's picture window while he watched a procession of gifts being stacked by his parents and older siblings.

What entranced me so on that snowy night long ago was not the glimpse of presents, although that was part of it. A deeper kind of marvel tantalized me as I watched my family moving through the house. It seemed that the happiness I could see on their faces and the bounty they carried in their arms were signs of all the love and joy I longed for in our life together. For a moment, though I stood outside peer in, I had been granted a vision of the secret heart and soul of our family. (25)

Like the Grand Canyon anecdote, this is a deep moment, a "mystery," one that he says we recreate in the Episcopal church:

An empty room slowly fills as people trickle in, and soon it becomes a place of prayer filled with all the longing, hope, and pregnant quiet that prayer brings with it. Then a designated band moves up the aisle and into that mysterious space the altar gathers round itself. Later, another group with lights and sacred book comes back down into the people's midst, speaking a Word too intimate to be uttered from far away. Later still the whole place breaks into movement as the flow of communion draws all into its pattern of life poured out, given freely away.

Looking in that window, he also suggests, is the way we "see" the Trinity, longing to be part of it (29).  He writes later that the Spirit is the conversation between Father and Son (no hierarchy involved, here), and that we are what they're talking about.  The trinity isn't a patch up effort after mankind failed to live up to expectations, but the essential communal nature of God(31).

McIntosh's theology connects at many points to what we do in Education for Ministry (EfM), the program that assigned his book.  Each year, we tell our life stories to each other, forced to rethink our stories from a particular angle; McIntosh's emphasis is on seeing God's work in our lives, in the long run.  Each week, we practice theological  reflection, often starting from a "moment of mystery" that one of us has experienced, and we connect those (1) to our own experiences and (2) to novels and movies and (3) to Scripture.  Then, there's this description of a "Jacob" moment that we may have experienced, feeling that we are in the presence of God when we see, perhaps, "the sun set over a northern lake with the sky so richly purple and red you could hardly breathe..." (40).  Isn't that the watercolor, made recently by co - mentor of our EfM group, Susan Rouse?

Finally, he stresses that we relate to stories, and that faith is a relationship, not a bunch of teachings.  Prayer, he says, isn't our effort, but, as Paul writes, the spirit in us (46).  "The work of prayer is the activity of God the Holy Spirit freeing us from the grasping, frightened, self - important bundles of instincts we have been taught to think of as our true selves in order to discover the deep, strong, and passionate person we are created to become in Christ (47)."

Theology can't remain in the abstract, but must be related in our living (11).

More about McIntosh's BookMcIntosh, Mark. Mysteries of Faith. Vol. 8 in The New Church's Teaching Series. New York: Cowley Publications, 2000.

I've responded to other chapters in other blogposts:

• (01/09/2019)"Not the Moral, but the Story" about chapters 1 and 2.
  
• (01/26/2019)"How Episcopalians Believe" considers chapter 4, along with other sources
  
• (01/30/2019)"Jesus Saves - but how?" about chapter 6
  
• (02/12/2019) "Theologian Mark McIntosh Sees Drama in Cosmos" about chapter 7.

Reflecting on "Roma"

The first minutes of Roma tell us what the author - director Alfonso Cuaron has in store. We're looking down on square tiles, oriented to be diamonds across the screen. While credits fade in and out, white on the light gray stone, we hear no music, but we gradually pick out sounds of water splashing, birds, distant cars, a distant dog barking. Then water washes across the tiles, and we now see the reflection of a morning sky, a plane flying across a square of skylight. At last, we see that it's a young indigenous Mexican woman throwing soapy water on the tile, scrubbing it down.

 This movie will be told through patterns, the daily routine of a middle - class Mexican household in 1971, following in the steps of that young woman Cleo, played by Yalitza Aparicio, one of the family's two housekeepers. We will see Cleo waking the children, speaking tenderly to them, picking up their things, helping them to undress for baths, serving their breakfast. We will see her washing laundry by hand and hanging it up to dry on the rooftop; we will see her joining the family in front of the TV after dinner, before she's sent off to fetch tea for the father; we'll see her turn out all lights in the house before she goes to bed. In the morning, she will again scrub that tiled walkway.

 As the water makes a reflective surface of the pattern, we've the hint that this movie will be the director's reflection on life during his own childhood. In an interview on NPR's Latino USA(12/10/2018), Cuaron told how he was about the age of the youngest boy in the story, a charmer who tells Cleo about "when he was older" flying planes or sailing ships. The sounds we hear at the start are the sounds of Mexico City he remembers from the early 1970s. He chose to make the soundtrack for his movie from nothing but remembered sounds and diagetic music - pop songs on radio, a pretty bad military band, and a street vendor's wonderful musical whistle.

 As the water that washes across the tile leaves the pattern intact, so events wash across this family's life. Big events happen that would be the central episodes in a more common melodramatic kind of movie: fire, earthquake, adultery, the infamous Corpus Cristi massacre of student demonstrators. Here, they pass, leave their effects, and draw Cleo closer to the family she's employed to care for.

  Cuaron says that he based Cleo on the housekeeper in his own childhood. He explores what that time must've been like for her. She's close to the family, but can also be disregarded in a minute, commanded by a child to stop speaking her indigenous language, or berated viciously by the children's mother. We hear about her mother and how government policies are hurting her native village, and she tells a friend about her village. Cuaron follows Cleo on dates with a young tough who, learning she's pregnant, leaves her so fast that he forgets his jacket; Cuaron follows her to a slum outside the city where she confronts him; follows her to the hospital in labor. The emotional impact of that story is very strong. She has some allies: a kind doctor, fellow servants. When the children's father moves out to live with his a mistress, the mother commiserates, "a woman is always alone."

Leaving the theatre, I asked my friend Susan if she thought the mother's line was the "thesis" of the movie, that a woman is always alone. Susan thought, maybe, but then cited another moment in the movie that offers something more positive that defies description in words. We see a Mexican media figure, guru cum Hulk Hogan, when he challenges a field of martial arts trainees to do a yoga - like pose that requires immense inner stillness and concentration: "You won't be able to do it with your eyes closed." A hundred recruits fail, but, trying the pose from the sideline, Cleo succeeds.

 I remembered a moment when the whimsical littlest boy joins Cleo on the roof while she hangs laundry. He lies down and won't answer her questions; he says that he's dead. She lies down too, so that the tops of their heads touch. "What are you doing?" he asks. She says, "I can't tell you. I'm dead." After awhile, she adds, "I like being dead." The camera pans from them and her clothesline, to show housekeepers on rooftops hanging laundry as far as we can see.

Susan later sent a text. She had heard NPR's critic Bob Mondelo extol a scene when Cleo watches over the children on the beach, a tracking shot "that packs more drama in five minutes than most movies have in two hours." Susan writes:

Bob Mondelo talking about the long beach take made me start thinking about what we saw instead of what was said. And we saw more than what was said. At the end we see her ascend -- albeit with a big bag of laundry.

After that shot, the director flashes a dedication, possibly to the "Cleo" of his childhood.

Cuaron also pays tribute, macabre but memorable, to beloved dogs of generations past, and includes at least one dog at every location of the film where a dog could possibly be included.

The film maker also takes us to the neighborhood movie palace, which must have been an inspiration for him. We get a minute or two of a 1969 astronaut movie MAROONED. Is that a meta - cinematic cross - reference to Cuaron's own GRAVITY?

Echoes of my Teacher's Voice

For Episcopalians, the new year started four Sundays before December 25th, and we're still celebrating Christmas. (It's the seventh day, time for swans a - swimming.) So I'm reflecting on a gift that the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer gave me in today's morning devotion time: several memories of my long time mentor Frank Boggs, now in his 92nd year.

[Photo: Selfie with Frank on the balcony of his apartment, June 2017]

Following many days of inspirational passages from Isaiah, I turned with a sigh to the relatively dry book of Numbers for the passage assigned for today, 6.22-27, to find that it's the only passage in that book that I'd circled, one that I can recite, and sing, from memory: "The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make His face to shine upon you, and be gracious unto you...." A hundred times or more, under Frank's direction, I've sung those words to Peter Lutkin's rich music, a cappella, holding hands with close friends - in concert; on tour in South Carolina, Russia, Poland; at the ends of long days of summer rehearsal; at reunions.

I think of Frank each morning anyway, adding him to the list of people that our parish prays for, because -- well, he's 92. But this reminder in the reading was a nudge to write a note.

Then the Psalm appointed for the morning is the 8th, with another passage that I can recite by heart: "What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? … Oh, Lord our God, how majestic is Thy name in all the earth." This touches a memory from way back, one of my first days of chorus with Mr. Boggs. We rehearsed this piece just a few times and put it away. At the time, faith meant less to me than Top 40 hits and show music. But Frank had us contemplate the meaning of these words, and he urged us to bring a sense of wonder in our voices and faces when we sang the text. I still hear his voice, speaking the words in crescendo, impending like a train, "How majestic is Thy name IN ALL THE EARTH!"

Coincidence, or God talking to me? I'm leery of people who see God's hand in coincidences. I prefer G. K. Chesterton's remark that coincidences are God's "puns." The next reading, from Galatians, didn't have any particular associations with Frank. But then I read the gospel.

Luke 2.15-21 is about the shepherds leaving the Christ child. Thanks to Frank, I know what they said, and I know that they were singing music by Hector Berlioz, arranged by John Rutter, my favorite Christmas piece for over forty years:

Blest are ye beyond all measure,
Thou happy father, mother mild!
Guard ye well your heav'nly treasure,
The Prince of Peace, The Holy Child!
God go with you, God protect you,
Guide you safely through the wild!

As coincidences go, finding three connections to Frank Boggs in the scriptures for today isn't so remarkable. With memories of Frank's lessons categorized under so many headings - education, music, theatre, faith, friendship -- it would be more remarkable not to find some echo of his voice in my week.
But for this seventh day of Christmas, the coincidence was a sweet gift. (UPS, take back the swans)



Earlier Blog Posts About Frank Boggs

• Tributes to My Teachers: Frank Boggs, choral director(11/9/15)
  
• Frank Boggs at 90 -- at 50, Frank sang "You Make Me Feel So Young" for his teenage choir; for his 90th birthday, I rewrote the lyrics for him (1/26/17)
  
• Drill it in or Tease it Out? This is a reflection on the way Frank taught us (10/1/13)
  
• Georgia Festival Chorus Celebrates "Legacy" (5/21/18) ends with links to reviews I've written over the past twelve years.

For more about the liturgy in the Episcopal Church, see "An Especially Good Friday"(3/26/2016) and "The Power of Liturgy: I've Heard it All Before" (1/6/2017). Frank Boggs gave me a deep appreciation for musical theatre; I see Episcopalian liturgy as musical theatre -- only the parishioners are participants, not audience, and the story envelopes our lives 24/7: "Liturgy as Theatre" (3/23/2013). Much more is at my page Those Crazy Episcopalians.