Cheese

Cheese is a thing of sublime European importance, if only because of its antiquity. I do not intend any idiotic joke in speaking of the antiquity of cheese. Cheese and wine are the two things of which we can read in the remote pastoral poems of the Romans. And in connection with such really ancient matters there is a curious thing to be noticed. The older things are the more they are really fresh and free and varied, the more they differ really from town to town and from valley to valley. The new things are entirely the same wherever they go.

Bears’ soap in the Hebrides is the same as Bears’ soap in London. There is not some dark and delicate variety of Bears’ soap suited to the stormy islets in the ultimate sea. The men who use Bears’ soap do not find it smell faintly different; the children who eat Bears’ soap do not find it taste with an exquisite difference merely because it is experienced in that fringe of indeterminate and rainy island where, as Mr. W. B. Yeats would say — “Time and the world and all things dwindle out.”

The people in the Hebrides either know Bears’ soap or they do not: their enemies say not. But if they know Bears’ soap at all, it is Bears’, not theirs. It is the same exact and excellent article that is sold in a shop in Regent Street. But it would not be thus if the soap were cheese. If the people of the Hebrides had a cheese it would be an awful, shadowy, Hebridean cheese. It would taste of the terrible headlands and the hopeless sea.

It is so, I say, with all the old things, and with cheese especially. Cheese changes from county to county. Cheese can even change, like wine, from valley to valley. It is exactly because it is very old that it is always various and surprising; and it is exactly because humanity (with one dreadful voice) demands cheese, that cheese is always different…. It is precisely the things that have been most continuous that are able to be most diverse. The more old a thing is the more full of life it is. — G. K. Chesterton, “On Local Cheeses,” Collected Works 27: The Illustrated London News, 1905-1907 266-267 (I’ve divided this into paragraphs for easier reading).

Learning and Schooling

In his discussion of hearing (vs. reading) the Word, Eugene Peterson says that we all suffer from “an unfortunate education,” which “has come about through the displacement of learning by schooling”:

Learning is a highly personal activity carried out in personal interchange: master and apprentice, teacher and student, parent and child. In such relationships, the mind is trained, the imagination disciplined, ideas explored, concepts tested, behavioral skills matured in a context in which everything matters, in a hierarchy in which persons form the matrix…. The classic methods of learning are all personal: dialogue, imitation, and disputation. The apprentice observes the master as the master learns; the master observes the apprentice as the apprentice learns. The learning develops through relationships expressed in gesture, intonation, posture, rhythm, emotions, affection, admiration. And all of this takes place in a sea of orality — voices and silences” (Working the Angles 93).

As Peterson points out, what he is describing here is the way children — even infants — learn from their parents. Interestingly, I noticed that my son picked up the music of “Thank you” before he could say the words: he was imitating our pitches, first a higher one (“Thank”) and then the lower (“you”).

But learning, Peterson argues, has been replaced by schooling:

Schooling is very different from learning. In schooling persons count for very little. Facts are memorized, information assimilated, examinations passed. Teachers are subjected to a supervision that attempts to insure uniform performance, which means that everyone operates as much alike as possible and is rewarded insofar as the transfer of data from book to brain is made with as little personal contamination as possible. In schooling, the personal is reduced to the minimum: standardized tests, regulated teachers, information-oriented students” (94).

Peterson admits that this sort of schooling does not replace learning all at once: elementary school teachers must interact with their students as persons. But he suggests that the replacement increases as the student progresses in his education, so that in the end the student’s education can be “summarized on a transcript in number, the most abstract of languages. Learning, a most intricately personal process, will not submit to such summarizing” (94).

I’m not entirely sure how to evaluate what Peterson is saying here, and I invite your feedback. Some of what he says sounds accurate. Some even seems inevitable: include more than one person in your classroom and you have to standardize; you simply cannot teach Jane at her pace and Wendy at hers, ensuring that each girl learns what you are teaching and has adequate personal interaction with you to do so.

But I can see, too, the problem he points out with standardization: if you are going to require a certain grade point average for admittance into a college or university, you also want that grade point average to mean the same thing, no matter what school the student graduated from. And the best way to achieve that goal is to reduce education to things that can be standarized: facts and numbers and dates and so forth.

I’m still thinking about these things, and again I welcome your thoughts.

Ral Donner

Yesterday, as I drove to the church, I was listening to Louisiana Public Radio’s “Old Gold” show. They played a song from the ’60s in which the singer sounded to my ears a little bit like Elvis Presley. A stray thought drifted across my mind: “Who was the guy, a contemporary of Elvis, who sounded so much like him that it hurt his career?” I remembered hearing a song by him years ago, but I could remember neither the song nor the singer. There was little I could do to retrieve the rest of that memory. I didn’t even remember enough to Google it.

The song I was listening to ended. And the next song was the very one I had been thinking of: “You Don’t Know What You’ve Got (Until You Lose It)” by Ral Donner:

I don’t know for certain that his vocal style hurt his career, but that was exactly the artist and the song I was thinking of. How weird is that?

The next song was “Suspicion” by Terry Stafford. If you’ve ever heard it on the radio, you may have said (as I have), “That’s Elvis.” But chances are it was Stafford. Elvis recorded the song in 1962, but it was Stafford who had the hit with it in 1964.

While I’m at it, if you want Elvis’s own favorite impersonator, here’s Andy Kaufman:

Listening and Reading

Some time ago, I learned from James Jordan that the sense of sight and the sense of hearing function in very different ways. With the sense of sight, who’s in control? You are. If you’re looking at a picture you don’t like, you can close your eyes or look away or turn the page or even just let your eyes go all wonky so that the “picture” you see is blurry. You’re in control.

But when it comes to the sense of hearing, someone else is in control. If I’m preaching and you don’t like what I’m saying, you can try plugging your ears with your fingers but it’s not going to work. I can talk loudly enough that you can still hear me (unless, of course, you start shouting yourself so that all you hear is your own voice saying, “La la la la la la” the way people do when someone is about to give away the ending to a movie they haven’t seen yet). If you really don’t want to hear me, you’re going to have to leave. (And if you do start shouting “La la la la la,” I suspect someone is going to make you leave.)

With sight, you’re in control. With hearing, someone else is in control. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that the Bible often speaks of the eyes in connection with judgment, starting with Genesis 1 (“And God saw … and it was good”) and running through all of those passages about people doing things that are “right in their own eyes.” All through the Bible, eyes and sight have to do with judgment. But hearing has to do with submission. In fact, the word for “hear” often has the sense of “obey” in the Bible.

This distinction applies also to our reading of the Bible. When you read something, you’re using your eyes. If you don’t like what you’re reading, you can close your eyes or look away or turn the page. But we are not to sit as judges over Scripture. Rather, we are to sit under Scripture, to submit to it. And so we find that the Bible does not command us to read the Word; rather, the commandment that we frequently encounter is “Hear!” If we really want to appreciate Scripture, we ought not (just) to read it but rather we ought to hear it, even if that means reading it aloud when we’re by ourselves.

All of this, I say, I learned several years back from James Jordan. I imagine that I encountered it first in either his Reading the Bible lectures or perhaps in Reading the Bible (Again) for the First Time. Probably both, in fact. But the other day, as I was reading Eugene Peterson’s Working the Angles, I came across some similar insights:

Listening and reading are not the same thing. They involve different senses. In listening we use our ears; in reading we use our eyes. We listen to the sound of a voice; we read marks on paper. These differences are significant and have profound consequences. Listening is an interpersonal act; it involves two or more people in fairly close proximity. Reading involves one person with a book written by someone who can be miles away or centuries dead, or both. The listener is required to be attentive to the speaker and is more or less at the speaker’s mercy. For the reader it is quite different, since the book is at the reader’s mercy. It may be carried around from place to place, opened or shut at whim, read or not read. When I read a book, the book does not know if I am paying attention or not; when I listen to a person the person knows very well whether I am paying attention or not. In listening, another initiates the process; when I read I initiate the process. In reading I open the book and attend to the words. I can read by myself; I cannot listen by myself. In listening the speaker is in charge; in reading the reader is in charge.

Many people much prefer reading over listening. It is less demanding emotionally and can be arranged to suit personal convenience. The stereotype is the husband buried in the morning newspaper at breakfast, preferring to read a news agency report of the latest scandal in a European government, the scores of yesterday’s athletic contests, and the opinions of a couple of columnists whom he will never meet rather than listen to the voice of the person who has just shared his bed, poured his coffee, and fried his eggs, even though listening to that live voice promises love and hope, emotional depth and intellectual exploration far in excess of what he can gather informationally from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Christian Science Monitor put together. In the voice of this living person he has access to a colorful history, an incredibly complex emotional system, and never-before-heard combinations of words that can surprise, startle, move, gladden, or anger him — any of which would seem to be more attractive to an alive human being than getting some information, none or little of which will make any impact on the living of that day. Reading does not, as such, increase our capacity to listen. In some cases it interferes with it (88-89).

What are some of the things you lose by reading (i.e., looking at) a text instead of hearing it (even if you are hearing it from your own mouth as you read aloud)?

Peterson seems to be suggesting that if you read instead of hear, you lose the sense of a relationship: you no longer have the sense that you are engaged with a person; instead you are examining an object, in this case a printed page. More than that, you do not have as strong a sense that the words you are reading are over you, precisely because with reading you are in charge.

Peterson also indicates that attentiveness may be also be lost. Perhaps. I’m well aware that minds may wander while someone else is speaking. Such things have even been known to happen during the sermon, possibly even when I’m preaching. My own mind has wandered even when people I love are talking to me. And I have paid close attention to things that I have read … though as soon as I say that, I realize that paying close attention as I read usually involves at least subvocalization. I have to slow down and savor — hear! — the words to pay attention to them.

But I suspect that Peterson is not talking so much about attention, which we can lose whether we’re reading or hearing, but about attentiveness, about an attitude. When we’re dealing with a person, when someone is speaking to us, we know we are to pay attention. But when we’re in charge, when we’re picking up a book and turning its pages, we feel free — or freer — to let our eyes drift a bit, to skip the dull parts, to look for something that grabs us, to skim over whatever seems needlessly complicated or unimportant. You can read Patrick O’Brian and skip all the nautical details and the love interest and read only the battle scenes if you want, though I don’t recommend it. But how much worse is it if we aren’t attentive to Scripture, if we dip into it here and there, if we approach it without the sense that someone is speaking to us and that everything He says — whether it’s obscure rules or genealogies or seemingly irrelevant stories or the dimensions of a building we’ll never see — is important, worth hearing, worth paying attention to?

Peterson doesn’t mention it, but it strikes me that if we read instead of hear, we also lose the musicality of Scripture, the patterns and rhythms of writing that was meant to be heard. If you’re reading, it’s easy to skim the repetition — Numbers 7, anyone? — but if you’re hearing it read out loud, it takes the same amount of time to say those words the tenth time that it does the first time. Reading can make us impatient: “What’s all this stuff here for? We’ve already heard this!” but hearing requires submission: “This must be important. God says it, and so I have to make the time to hear it.”

Invective

Why read Patrick O’Brian? There are many reasons. I could mention the gripping plots, the interesting characters, the historical accuracy and the air of authenticity, the many hilarious passages mingled with ones that break your heart. But here’s another reason: the quality of the language. Where else (besides Shakespeare) can you find such enjoyable invective, here from the mouth of Dr. Stephen Maturin?

They are deeply attached to one another; but since her mother, a widow with considerable property under her own control, is a deeply stupid, griping, illiberal, avid, tenacious, pinchfist lickpenny, a sordid lickpenny and a shrew, there is no hope of marriage… (H. M. S. Surprise, p. 26).

Cut-Flower Prayers

So if a minister ought not to be a shopkeeper, aiming at getting more customers to buy the church’s goods, what should he be doing? Eugene Peterson gives three answers: praying, reading (actually: hearing) Scripture, and giving spiritual direction. Working the Angles devotes three chapters to each of those tasks.

When it comes to prayer, Peterson urges caution:

We want life on our conditions, not on God’s conditions Praying puts us at risk of getting involved in God’s conditions. Be slow to pray. Praying most often doesn’t get us what we want but what God wants, something quite at variance with what we conceive to be in our best interests. And when we realize what is going on, it is often too late to go back. Be slow to pray (44).

That may sound odd, but consider Ecclesiastes 5:2: “Do not be rash with your mouth, and let not your heart utter anything hastily before God.” Prayer is dangerous, Peterson maintains, and we should not pray lightly. But so often such light prayers seem to be what people demand of pastors:

One of the indignities to which pastors are routinely subjected is to be approached, as a group of people are gathering for a meeting or a meal, with the request, “Reverend, get things started for us with a little prayer, will ya?” It would be wonderful if we would counter by bellowing William McNamara’s fantasized response: “I will not! There are no little prayers! Prayer enters the lion’s den, brings us before the holy where it is uncertain whether we will come back alive or sane, for ‘it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God.’”

I am not prescribing rudeness: the bellow does not have to be audible. I am insisting that the pastor who in indolence or ignorance is politely compliant with requests from congregation or community for cut-flower prayers forfeits his … calling. Most of the people we meet, inside and outside the church, think prayers are harmless but necessary starting pistols that shoot blanks and get things going. They suppose that the “real action,” as they call it, is in the “things going” — projects and conventions, plans and performances. It is an outrage and a blasphemy when pastors adjust their practice of prayer to accommodate these inanities (46).

What does Peterson recommend as a remedy? Saturating ourselves in Scripture, and the Psalms in particular, understanding that all of our prayers are responses, second words in response to God’s first words:

What do we do? We do the obvious: we restore prayer to its context in God’s word. Prayer is not something we think up to get God’s attention or enlist his favor. Prayer is answering speech. The first word is God’s word. Prayer is a human word and is never the first word, never the primary word, never the initiating and shaping word simply because we are never first, never primary… (47).

Two Kinds of People

The opening paragraph of P. G. Wodehouse’s novel Sam the Sudden, it seems to me, could well apply to southwest Lousiana … except that it starts in May, not August:

All day long, New York, stewing in the rays of a late August sun, had been growing warmer and warmer, until now, at three o’clock in the afternoon, its inhabitants … had divided themselves by a sort of natural cleavage into two main bodies — the one crawling about and asking those they met if this was hot enough for them, the other maintaining that what they minded was not so much the heat as the humidity. — P. G. Wodehouse, Sam the Sudden, p. 11.

Pastoral Training

For a long time I have been convinced that I could take a person with a high school education, give him or her a six-month trade school training, and provide a pastor who would be satisfactory to any discriminating American congregation. The curriculum would consist of four courses. Course I: Creative Plagiarism. I would put you in touch with a wide range of excellent and inspirational talks, show you how to alter them just enough to obscure their origins, and get you a reputation for wit and wisdom. Course II: Voice Control for Prayer and Counseling. We would develop your own distinct style of Holy Joe intonation, acquiring the skill in resonance and modulation that conveys an unmistakable aura of sanctity. Course III: Efficient Office Management. There is nothing that parishioners admire more in their pastors than the capacity to run a tight ship administratively. If we return all telephone calls within twenty-four hours, answer all letters within a week, distributing enough carbons to key people so that they know we are on top of things, and have just the right amount of clutter on our desks — not too much or we appear inefficient, not too little or we appear underemployed — we quickly get the reputation for efficiency that is far more important than anything that we actually do. Course IV: Image Projection. Here we would master the half-dozen well-known and easily implemented devices that create the impression that we are terrifically busy and widely sought after for counsel by influential people in the community. A one-week refresher course each year would introduce new phrases that would convince our parishioners that we are bold innovators on the cutting edge of the megatrends and at the same time solidly rooted in all the traditional values of our sainted ancestors.

(I have been laughing for several years over this trade school training for pastors with which I plan to make my fortune. Recently, though, the joke has backfired on me. I keep seeing advertisements for institutes and workshops all over the country that invite pastors to sign up for this exact curriculum. The advertised course offerings are not quite as honestly labeled as mine, but the content appears to be identical — a curriculum that trains pastors to satisfy the current consumer tastes in religion. I’m not laughing anymore.) — Eugene Peterson, Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity, pp. 7-8.

Revivals?

Any church which forsakes the regular and uniform for the periodical and spasmodic service of God, is doomed to decay; any church which relies for its spiritual strength and growth entirely upon seasons of “revival” will very soon have no genuine revivals to rely on. Our holy God will not conform His blessings to man’s moods and moral caprice. If a church is declining, it may need a “revival” to restore it; but what need was there of its declining? — T. L. Cuyler, Recollections, cited in P. Y. DeJong, Taking Heed to the Flock: A Study of the Principles and Practice of Family Visitation, p. 19.

Shopkeepers

The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shopkeepers, and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with shopkeeper’s concerns — how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers will lay out more money.

Some of them are very good shopkeepers. They attract a lot of customers, pull in great sums of money, develop splendid reputations. Yet it is still shopkeeping; religious shopkeeping to be sure, but shopkeeping all the same. The marketing strategies of the fast-food franchise occupy the waking minds of these entrepreneurs; while asleep they dream of the kind of success that will get the attention of journalists. — Eugene Peterson, Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity, p. 2.

This quotation at the outset of Peterson’s book hits the nail on the head, and perhaps especially for church planters (such as I was until recently), for whom the thought “How can I get more people to attend church?” is never far away. This is the second of Peterson’s books on pastoral ministry and I’ve enjoyed it even more than the first, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work, valuable as that was. I’d recommend it for every pastor. Expect more quotations from it from time to time, now that I’m back to regular pastoral work and back to blogging.

Books I Enjoyed Most in 2009

Year after year, I intend to post, early in January, a list of the books I enjoyed most during the previous year. Year after year, that list gets delayed. It’s March already, but here at last is the list of the books I enjoyed most in 2009, listed alphabetically by author’s last name:

* Walter R. Brooks, Freddy Goes to Florida. This is the first of the Freddy the Pig books, and in fact this one doesn’t focus on Freddy and originally didn’t have him in the title. But somehow Freddy took over. I read many of these as a kid, came upon them again more recently, and now have started reading them to my daughter. Lots of fun.

* Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Part Two: From Noah to Abraham: Genesis VI 9 – XI 32. As I said last year, Cassuto is a very careful commentator and, even though he’s sometimes wrong, always worth reading because he discusses and notices things others often ignore.

* Rebecca Caudill, Happy Little Family. This is the first in the Fairchild Family series, and I enjoyed reading it to Theia before bed. Too bad the local library doesn’t have the whole series.

* Dale Ralph Davis, Looking on the Heart 1: Expositions of 1 Samuel 1-14. Very helpful material on 1 Samuel, which we’ve been going through in our Wednesday night Bible study here. Supplement with Peter Leithart’s A Son to Me.

* Brian Doyle, Spirited Men: Story, Soul, and Substance. A number of very interesting short biographical essays on men such as Plutarch, William Blake, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Van Morrison.

* Keith Ferrazzi, with Tahl Raz, Never Eat Alone and Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time. The title attracted me. There’s a lot of stuff a pastor could learn from this business-related book by a master networker.

* Dan Fesperman, Lie in the Dark and The Small Boat of Great Sorrows. Two novels about Croatian detective Vlado Petric by a journalist who knows Sarajevo and its recent struggles inside out. I enjoyed the first of these more than the second, but both were gripping.

* Charles H. Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea-Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age. I first heard about this book years ago in one of Gary North’s books and have been interested in it ever since. It turns out that the Medford Public Library has a copy. Hapgood’s book is one of the most boring but fascinating books I have ever read.

It is boring in that he discusses in exhaustive detail all the various steps of his research, the mistakes he and his associates made, the failed attempts to figure out how the ancient maps worked, and so forth. If you’re a cartographer, you’ll be able to follow his discussion; if you’re like me, it’ll be pages of stuff you can hardly understand and you’re not remotely interested in. Boring.

But also fascinating: Hapgood, together with his students and aided by the US Air Force, studied Renaissance maps that seem to draw on even older maps. These maps involve both latitude and longitude, though it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that modern-era mapmakers figured out how to calculate longitude. The Renaissance mapmakers couldn’t, but the old mapmakers from whom they borrowed could. These old maps are remarkably accurate, when understood properly. For instance, if you look at an old map, you might see that Greenland is enormous, far larger than it really is. But Hapgood notes the reason for that distortion. The lines of longitude are farther apart at the equator and closer together the closer you get to the poles, but if you draw a map as if the lines of longitude are exactly the same distance apart everywhere, you end up with a huge Greenland. In fact, everything closer to the poles is going to be distorted and made a lot larger than it really is. (Note that every map involves some distortion, since you’re reproducing a rounded world on a flat surface.)

The implications of many of Hapgood’s claims, if they’re accurate, are fascinating. It appears that long, long before the Renaissance, there were mapmakers who were able to calculate longitude, who had traveled down the coast of South America (for instance) and had mapped the contours of those coasts, and who had even seen large portions of Antarctica without the ice caps. The last claim should then make you ask: How old are these maps? Don’t know. But it’s fun to think about.

* A. C. Harwood, The Recovery of Man in Childhood. Cecil Harwood was one of C. S. Lewis’s best friends. He was also committed to Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophism, which Lewis strongly rejected, and was one of the first teachers in a Waldorf school in England. So I don’t share the same philosophy, let alone theology. Nevertheless, Harwood’s book was extremely interesting and often made a lot of sense. Extremely thought-provoking.

* Jon Hassler, Staggerford. I enjoyed this novel a lot and will be reading more of Hassler’s in the future.

* Herge, King Ottokar’s Sceptre; Red Rackham‘s Treasure; The Seven Crystal Balls; Prisoners of the Sun; and Explorers on the Moon. 2009 was the year in which I reread the entire Tintin series, except for the earliest volumes which I was not able to obtain from the library. I loved them all, but the ones listed here especially stood out.

* Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train. Unputdownable. So intense that when a character sinned, I felt guilty.

* Peter Hopkirk, Trespassers on the Roof of the World: The Secret Exploration of Tibet. A couple of years back, I read Hopkirk’s Like Hidden Fire, which is the true story behind John Buchan’s novel Greenmantle. I enjoyed it a lot and wanted to read more Hopkirk. This one is the story of all the various explorers who tried to get into Tibet in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Tibet was off limits to outsiders.

* Mark Horne, Why Baptize Babies? An Explanation of the Theology and Practice of the Reformed Churches. Clear and helpful.

* Morag Joss, Half Broken Things. A well-written suspense novel. Like Ruth Rendell, Joss writes in a way that makes you sympathize with her characters, and all the more so as things start to go wrong. And they go very, very wrong here.

* Beth Kephart, Into the Tangle of Friendship: A Memoir of the Things That Matter. Good meditations about the meaning and implications of friendship, drawing on Kephart’s own life. Midway through the book, Kephart starts to talk about her former next door neighbor, a woman who was married to a Korean seminary student in Philadelphia and who eventually began to write. For a long time now, I’ve enjoyed the writing of Andree Seu in World magazine and I knew that she matched the description. Could it be? Well, I was right. That’s who Kephart’s neighbor was.

* Rudyard Kipling, The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and Other Stories. There are only two reasons this collection of stories is in this list. One is that Kipling has an amazing ability to make it seem as if he’s telling you a true story, though I can’t easily explain how he does it. It has something to do with the narrative tone and something to do with the incidental details, all of which ring true. The other is that this collection includes “The Man Who Would Be King.”

* Marsena Konkle, A Dark Oval Stone. A good novel about the very small changes that bring healing after terrible hurt. Konkle is the daughter of Ransom Fellowship’s Denis and Margie Haack.

* Ursula LeGuin, Rocannon’s World. LeGuin does a masterful job of writing richly detailed stories about other worlds.

* Peter J. Leithart, Wise Words: Family Stories that Bring the Proverbs to Life. Truth be told, the connection to the Proverbs here often seems tenuous. But these are good fairy tales, each one involving many layers of meaning and inviting rereading. I read this to Theia.

* C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It has been a long time since I read this book as a child and I deeply enjoyed reading it to my daughter for the first time. I have to admit, though, that I was surprised when Mr. Beaver says that Jadis is the daughter of Adam and Lilith. That’s weird, but it was the only grating flaw in the book.

* C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. Another book I read first a long time ago. It was far better than I had remembered, full of deep, rich wisdom.

* W. H. Lewis, Levantine Adventurer: The Travels and Missions of the Chevalier, d’Arvieux, 1653-1697. This is the first book I’ve ever read by C. S. Lewis’s brother. I found it in the Medford library. My review is here.

* Rich Lusk, Paedofaith: A Primer on the Mystery of Infant Salvation and a Handbook for Covenant Parents. Thought-provoking, challenging to me as a parent, and well worth reading.

* Stephen Mansfield, The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World. Someday, I’ll post a longer review of this book, which I received as part of Thomas Nelson’s Book Review Bloggers program (now renamed BookSneeze). I enjoyed the story Mansfield told and was charmed by his description of Guinness’s generosity toward its workers, but found myself wishing that there were a stronger and more obvious connection between that generosity and the founder’s Christian faith. I guess in general I wanted more from the book, but I did enjoy it.

* Nicole Mazzarella, This Heavy Silence. A slow-paced, thoughtful novel from a Christian writer.

* E. Nesbit, The Book of Dragons. I read this to Theia; it was a lot of fun.

* Patrick O’Brian, Master and Commander. I had read this before, got part of the way through the series, and then, for some reason, failed to continue. So I went back and started over. Having read this novel before didn’t diminish my enjoyment of it at all.

* Jeffrey Overstreet, Through a Screen Darkly: Looking Closer at Beauty, Truth and Evil in the Movies. I have long enjoyed Jeffrey Overstreet’s online reviews. Highly recommended to help you look closer at the movies and think better about them.

* Paul Park, A Princess of Roumania; The Tourmaline; The White Tyger; and The Hidden World. One long novel, divided into four volumes. I enjoyed it a lot, though I didn’t find the ending entirely satisfactory.

* Eugene H. Peterson, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work. I have a like-dislike relationship with Peterson’s books. I don’t care for his approach to Scripture, which often seems to draw on higher criticism and what I consider liberal scholarship. But his insights into pastoral work are wonderful.

* Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Some very good things here, especially on the push toward “total work” (as opposed to leisure and worship), toward defining people in terms of their work, and on worship as a bulwark against “total work.”

* Nina Planck, Real Food: What to Eat and Why. Planck, who has established farmer’s markets in various cities, argues strongly (and sometimes scientifically) for the health benefits of … well, of the kind of diet your grandparents used to have. She contends that raw milk (and cream!), cheese, butter, and other dairy products are good for you; that it’s good to eat red meat as well as chicken (including the skin!) and certain types of fish; that eggs are good for you; that cholesterol scares aren’t worth getting frightened by; and more.

* Barbara Pym, Some Tame Gazelle. The first of Barbara Pym’s novels. It’s slow, quiet, and often funny, much like the village lives she describes.

* Paul Shepherd, More Like Not Running Away. An intense novel; I eagerly await the sequels that have been promised.

* Russell Smith, Men’s Style: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Dress. A very helpful guide. Often, I asked my wife about the things Smith says (“Is that really what looks good?”), only to have her confirm his opinions again and again.

* Robert Spencer, Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions about the World’s Fastest-Growing Faith. Very well documented. Joins many other helpful volumes written by Spencer.

* Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island. A long time ago, when Theia asked what other books I had out in my office library, I used to tell her that I had many exciting books I could read to her someday. I’d name a few, but I often mentioned Treasure Island as an extremely exciting story. This past fall, I finally got to read it to her. I doubt she understood all the words, but she was certainly grabbed by the story.

One night, after I read the passage where Long John Silver falls on a good sailor and stabs him to death, I turned out the light and started to pray before bed … and Theia interrupted and said, “Pray that God would kill Long John Silver.” Do you pray for fictional characters? I did. I figure they are (as Doug Wilson said to me, when I talked to him about it some time later) “typological placeholders”: they stand in for real life people. So praying for the death of Long John Silver is praying for God to kill all such wicked people.

I prayed, and then Theia spoke up again: “Pray that God would kill his parrot, too.”

* Deborah Tannen, I Only Say This Because I Love You: How the Way We Talk Can Make or Break Family Relationships Throughout Our Lives. Very helpful. Tannen is not a psychiatrist, psychologist, or counselor; rather, she’s a linguistics professor. Her work involves careful study of how people communicate, and that makes this book extremely helpful for counseling, as well as for understanding your own communication patterns.

* John Thorne, Outlaw Cook. Fun reading, even though I didn’t attempt any of the recipes. Thorne writes well, challenges those who are bound to recipes, and interacts with (and often argues with) other famous food writers. His chapter on Martha Stewart is well worth reading (see here).

* James Thurber, The 13 Clocks. Read to Theia; a lot of fun. See here.

* Megan Whalen Turner, The Thief. A fun fantasy novel, though I do wonder why Turner set it in a Greece that never was instead of simply creating her own fantasy world entirely. This is the first in a series, and I’ll keep reading.

* Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farmer Boy and On the Banks of Plum Creek. Read to Theia. I especially enjoyed all the eating that takes place in Farmer Boy.

* Valerie Worth, All the Small Poems and Fourteen More and Peacock and Other Poems. Absolutely wonderful. Worth is now one of my favorite poets. What’s strange is that libraries put these books in the juvenile section, as if the fact that these are small poems must mean that they are (only) for small people.

* Jane Yolen, Raising Yoder’s Barn. Gorgeous. So often when I see lists of great children’s books, I’m disappointed. I go and look up those highly recommended books and find that they were published in the 1970s and the artwork strikes me as sloppy and unattractive. I’m glad that from, perhaps, the 1990s to today, more and more books are coming out with beautiful artwork that complements well-written stories. This is just one example, but now I wish I had written down more of the books I’ve been reading to my daughter.

Levantine Adventurer

A couple of weeks ago, I read W. H. Lewis’s Levantine Adventurer: The Travels and Missions of the Chevalier d’Arvieux, 1653-1697. W. H. (“Warnie”) Lewis was the brother of C. S. Lewis and his area of expertise was the history of seventeenth century France, a period he referred to as The Splendid Century. Though I have read a lot of C. S. Lewis’s works, I hadn’t read anything by his brother. And so, having discovered that the local library had Levantine Adventurer, I requested and read it.

I knew nothing about this time period nor, I must confess, about the Chevalier d’Arvieux before reading this volume, which is largely a summary of his memoirs. At first, the narrative seemed a bit dry and assumed some knowledge I didn’t have, but before long the story itself began to interest me. D’Arvieux spent most of his adult life in the Levant, both working as a representative of the king and traveling for pleasure. Lewis has read the travel memoirs of d’Arvieux’s contemporaries — Spon, Thevenot, and Lucas — as well as of more recent travelers, and he frequently compares d’Arvieux’s descriptions with theirs, in a way that is sometimes illuminating. Consider this passage:

Kinglake [a 19th century traveler] and d’Arvieux both visited Damascus and I know no more striking example of the gulf which separates the romantic from his predecessors than their respective descriptions of the famous gardens. First Kinglake:

They bring back to your mind the memory of some dark old shrubbery in our isle that has been charmingly unkept for many a day … all through the sweet wilderness a loud rushing stream goes tumbling along till … in the lowest corner of the garden it is tossed up in a fountain by the side of a simple alcove.

Now d’Arvieux:

Although rustic they are delightful. They are surrounded by fruit trees which furnish the town with all kinds of fruit, both for eating in season and for turning into conserves all the year round. Caravans carry these fruits to Seide, Beirut, Tripoli and other places … One cannot imagine how prodigious is the consumption of fruit in Damascus (90-91).

At several points, it becomes obvious that Lewis considers d’Arvieux a better memoirist than these others. As he writes in his “Foreword,”

My own impression is of a man who enjoyed every minute of the business of living, whether he was eating, drinking, money-making, sight-seeing, or engaged in the petty diplomacy of the Council Chamber; though to be fair to him he more than once showed considerable diplomatic skill on a larger stage. With all his gusto d’Arvieux was neither ingenuous nor an enthusiast, but a good-humoured cynic who observed the follies of mankind with an indulgent eye, qualities which stood him in good stead as a memoir writer, where he is crisp, vivid, and generous; not so oppressively archaeological as Spon, Thevenot, or Lucas, and mercifully lacking in the bombast of Nointel…. d’Arvieux’s work has the unmistakeable ring of truth, and I agree with his first editor, Labat, when he says that “one never tires of reading these memoirs because they are a continuous blend of the useful, the instructive, and the pleasing” (8-9).

I suspect that Lewis saw d’Arvieux as a kindred spirit. Lewis’s own good humor shows up frequently in this book. He has a knack for picking out interesting tidbits from d’Arvieux’s account, holding them up for us to wonder about (is it really possible that the lions of a certain area were so timid that the women doing their washing could simply shoo them away?) and, even better, humorous anecdotes.

For instance:

Teonge, chaplain of the English frigate Ginny — by which I suppose he means either Guinea or Jenny — records with gusto their dinner on February 4, 1676, when in the cabin the afterguard demolished “a gallant baked pudding, an excellent legg of porke and colliflours, an excellent dish made of a pigg’s petti-toes, 2 roasted piggs, on (sic) turkey cock, a roasted hogg’s head, three ducks, a dish of Cyprus burds, and pistachioes and dates together and store of good wines.” His diary for February 5 begins with the entry, “Captaine not well this day” (112-113).

Or this:

To our ideas all these ships, especially the coaster, must have been abominably uncomfortable, particularly in heavy weather. Lucas, on a two-day passage in a small craft bound from Chios to Smyrna, got no sleep, “being importuned unceasingly by the babble of ninety women passengers.” Who were they, one wonders, and how did they come to be travelling alone? Thevenot took passage in a country ship, a caique, from Chios to Egypt in 1656 where the accommodation was so cramped that though he had the purser’s cabin, when he and his servant were in bed “there was not six inches of room left”; and as a caique “was almost round” and could sail only with the wind dead aft, their progress was leisurely. In this curious craft the unlucky man endured des vomissements horribles and in the intervals “blamed bitterly my own stupidity in quitting my ease to go voyaging”; though he was a trifle comforted by a large dose of opium administered by a sympathetic Turk. d’Arvieux, a much tougher man, caught out in a gale aboard a similar craft, has little to tell us except that he restored the courage of some despondent Moslems with tots of brandy. “Is it wine?” they asked suspiciously. No, no, only brandy, said d’Arvieux soothingly, after which they drank freely. Lucky for them, he concludes, that le bonhomme Mahomet had never heard of brandy (113-114).

Once started, I am tempted to keep looking up passages to quote. One can imagine Warnie Lewis, at work in his researches, regaling his brother or all the Inklings with these sorts of anecdotes.

While the anecdotes make the book particularly enjoyable, though, its value also lies in its illuminating observations. As the contrast with Kinglake above makes clear, he was he not a romantic, loving wild gardens. D’Arvieux preferred his gardens with the trees all in straight rows, and the sight of a garden prompts him not to raptures over sublime nature but to reflections on fruit.

But D’Arvieux is also not at all a contemporary of ours and he doesn’t share our attitudes. Lewis writes:

… no place in the Empire contained a larger population of burglars and highwaymen, a fact which gives d’Arvieux an opportunity to describe in detail the ghastly punishments of impaling and flaying alive. It is this sort of passage which suddenly reveals to us the gulf by which we are separated from a man of the seventeenth century. We jog along with d’Arvieux through the Levant, appreciating his good nature, his dry humour, and feeling that we should have got along famously with him, when all of a sudden we find him watching the infliction of horrible tortures with less emotion than he would show over a Greek inscription or a ruined temple (51-52).

There is more in this volume: descriptions of customs in many lands; the strange story of the battle over which Roman Catholic sect could say mass in the building in which d’Arvieux worked; episodes of amazing incompetence on behalf of the French government’s representatives — none of which, perhaps, may sound particularly interesting in themselves. But there you would be wrong. With good humor and keen insight, Lewis tells a story that overcame my initial ignorance and indifference to that time and place and made me want to read more.