MyQuest | my thoughts on life's journey

Colossians Remixed

Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire by Brian J. Walsh
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I would have liked this book a lot if I had read it in 2004 when it was new. It would have resonated with things I was thinking and feeling at the time and depending on when I read it, may have influenced my thinking. As it stands, it simply affirms things I've already come to accept over the last decade.

This interpretation of Colossians asserts that Paul is doing anti-imperial theology, subverting the images and claims of Caesar. In the early and mid-Aughts this was refreshingly new for many of us and helped us to grapple with the issues in contemporary American life post-9/11 and the beginning of the Iraq War. In many ways the idea was not new (Wink, Brueggemann, and others had long made these claims) but I think many of us were open to it in new ways due to America's imperial ambitions.

This is not your standard commentary, but rather an interesting exercise in hermeneutics. The authors are primarily concerned with addressing the concerns of postmodern students who reject the Bible for making claims they consider to be absolute. There are some interesting epistemological discussions.

Their overall writing style is filled with imagined dialogues and targums upon the text -- either imagining the thoughts of historical characters like Onesimus and Nympha, or contemporizing Paul's language to deal with the imperial claims of our global economy.

So, this will help with my upcoming sermon series on Colossians (the first time I've preached a series on the book) but I feel that liberal mainline congregations are a little tired of the anti-imperial, social justice messages of the New Testament so I'll be looking for other approaches as well.

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Corpses in the barbed wire

Continue slowly reading Sir Winston Churchill's account of 1915 during the Great War.  I'm now into his account of the Battle of the Dardanelles.  While that was going on, he was on the Continent and records this startling set of images: 

I passed the day of the 18th [of March] in the French trenches among the sand-dunes of the Belgian coast.  Here the snarling lines which stretched from Switzerland touched the sea, and the barbed wire ran down the beach into salt water.  Corpses entangled in the wire were covered with seaweed and washed by the tides as the mouldered.  Others in groups of ten or twelve lay at the foot of the sandhills blasted in their charge, but with the sense and aspect of attack still eloquent in their attitude and order.  These dead had lain there for months, and the sand gradually gained upon them, softening their outlines.  It was as if Nature was gathering them to herself.  The lines were very close together, and in places only a few yards apart.  A vigilant silence reigned, broken by occasional guns.  The defences in the sand were complicated and novel.  They presented features I had not seen on any other part of the front.  It was fine weather, and I was thankful to keep my mind from dwelling on events that I knew were taking place on the other sea flank of the hostile line.  I returned to England during the night of the 18th in order to receive the account of the action.

The Homiletical Beat

The Homiletical Beat: Why All Sermons Are Narrative by Eugene L. Lowry
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Based on Lowry's Beecher and Self Lectures, this small book contends that all preaching is narrative preaching because "a sermon is an ordered form of moving time." Telling stories is only one form of narrative preaching, but not the only form. Preaching has long moved away from a structured argument (at least the best views of it have), and Lowry was one of the leaders of that movement. My own preaching was affected by reading Fred Craddock who teaches that the true point of the sermon should only come out at near the end, keeping people in anticipation throughout. I've corrected people before when they've used the old high school idea of how to write an essay, "Say what you're going to say, say it, remind people of what you've said." Because that is the worst sermon form in the world.

Lowry writes that the audience shouldn't be able to complete the sermon for you, but need to listen to see where you are going. I hope I'm good at that, because it is what I aim to do. And my own particular technique is leaving the end of the sermon somewhat open and not using a gimmick for closure.

Lowry says a sermon should follow a plot of oops, ugh, aha, whee, and yeah. Or, put less eloquently, upsetting the equlibirum, escalating the discrepancy, disclosing the clue to resolution, experiencing the gospel, and the unfolding.

Lowry also contends that sermon preparation should remained focused on practices of orality. He is not against a manuscript, but that we should not move to quickly to closure or the finished product and that the writing should be with a oral experience in view. I believe I do that. I always rehearse my sermons, which often greatly changes what is written or how it is structured. When an Associate Pastor, I rehearsed sermons in the sanctuary and even practiced gestures, but I don't do that anymore. My delivery of the sermon is never exactly what is in my manuscript.

So, a good refresher with some interesting new ideas I will incorporate into my practice.

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Winesburg, Ohio

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was completely mesmerized by this collection of stories. Though I have seen it listed at times as an American classic, it was not one on my radar screen (or that long virtual list we all keep) to read. I've probably even passed it by before. But last week, on a cold, rainy day at Lake Okoboji I came across a Modern Library edition in an antique store for only $5 and decided to give it a try.

And since I began it on Monday, I've devoured it.

Published in 1915 these stories are set in Winesburg, Ohio, a small town of around 1500, situated on a railroad line and sixteen miles south of Lake Erie. It is in a valley of farms, including orchards and berry farms. The time is just after the turn of the last century -- Civil War vets are still alive.

I thought it would be quaint images of small town life in a previous era. It is not. Elements of that are there, but this book is so much more and different than that.

The prologue is entitled "The Book of the Grotesque." In it a writer imagines that truths used to lie about and were beautiful, but then people came along and picked them up and distorted them. "It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood."

Reading the prologue I was both confused and intrigued about what I had gotten myself into.

What follows is a series of stories about the people of Winesburg, and each one is odd in his or her own way. Queer would actually be a great description, in its original English meaning of odd or different -- it is also a word that appears in that way in one chapter of the book, as one character doesn't want to be queer and goes insane maybe because he doesn't realize everyone else is as well.

Though there is a clear influence of the Gothic, this is realist fiction. I realized that this novel is the link between Hawthorne and Steinbeck. I caught shades of Poe and Melville (many of the characters seem as obsessed with one thing as Ahab was with the white whale) and precedence for Updike (one chapter is an early Rabbit, Run), Roth (one chapter suggests Portnoy), and more. The style of writing is closest to Steinbeck -- I kept thinking of In Dubious Battle, for instance. Realizing these connections, I contend that this is an essential American classic -- essential to understanding our literary history.

But what really struck me was the realistic appraisal of small town, Midwestern life. No sentimentality here. Anderson reveals that our quaint images are a facade for incredible violence, repressed desires, miserable lives, and mental illness. Lots of mental illness. This life seems to drive almost every character either insane or to violence and sometimes both.

But I couldn't escape the idea that there was even more in this book than everything I had yet realized. It is probably not enough to contend that this reveals the reality of Midwestern life a century ago. I think there is still great truth in it for our contemporary context. Midwesterners are very reserved and don't like talking about issues and concerns. There is some healthy understanding of boundaries in this, but it can also verge into its own unhealthiness, refusing to deal openly and honestly with problems. Midwesterners are less demonstrative and physical, indicating that levels of repression still exist. And there is a strange provincialism.

Thinking of grotesque characters calls to mind the racist, homophobic, and otherwise strange sheriff's deputy we encountered in Western Nebraska in January 2011.

I wondered if anyone is writing exactly this kind of fiction. Television, I decided. Episodic, realistic stories which present the queer and grotesque characters in American life. The best television shows, things like Six Feet Under, would seem to descendants of Anderson's book.

So, even with all of that, I feel that there is even more to this book. That I was on the cusp of some great revelation. This is definitely one which will live with me and to which I will have to turn again some years hence.

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Augustine on suicide

I haven't been able to progress very far in The City of God.  I'm only about twenty (small) chapters into book one (or about 30 pages).  In the last bit I read he discussed suicide, which he was very against.  I am intrigued by how the last three philosophy books I read by Augustine, Marcus Aurelius, and Lucretius are so concerned with death.

In my last reading, what disturbed me was his discussion of some virgins who were raped and then killed themselves.  He says that one can't judge them (even though he is against suicide) because their shame was just too great.  Gosh.  Why not question the social mores that created that shame?  Is it only modern to ask those sorts of questions?

State Violence: The Moscow Census of 1937

I'm reading the book Moscow 1937 by German historian Karl Schlogel.  It is about Stalin's purges and the terror unleashed upon Soviet society, which cannabilized those who had participated in the Revolution and were part of creating the new socialist dream.  The overall book is demonstrating the irrationality of the terror.

One chapter is on the census of 1937.  When the total population figures ended up being below what the government thought they would be -- by around 8 million -- they reacted by arresting and executing the people in charge of the census.  The numbers were low because the five year plans, the civil war, and other purges had resulted in millions dead, but rather than face reality, they eliminated those in charge of the census and accused them of being Trotskyist traitors.  

Here is a revealing section of Schlogel's analysis:

Since the census was the most ambitious, most complex and expensive attempt to draw up a balance sheet of society and to conduct a process of self-diagnosis twenty years after the Revolution--'The census was a pioneering enterprise intended to provide the fullest possible picture of Soviet life'--the suppression of its findings and the murder of those who organized it was noting less than the obliteration of the capacity for social self-analysis.  An authoritarian society, however, that is unable to form an idea of itself, whatever social engineering its leadership may have in mind, is doomed to the blind exercise of state violence.  Blindness resulting from the destruction of a society's knowledge of itself inevitably turns into blind terror.

Fabulous young lesbian

Watching this video about the 14-year-old Willa Cather, all I could think is "fabulous young lesbian."  

Cather's letters videos

I think I posted this once before, but just in case.  There is a great video series accompanying the release of the book of Willa Cather's letters.  I've not yet watched them all, but have enjoyed what I have seen.

 

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

On a short trip to Minneapolis this week, I took The Great Gatsby along and read it for the third time -- once in high school (when I did not like it) and again in 2000 (when some youth of mine were reading it in high school, and I liked it, but didn't love it). I was reading it again because I'd just seen the movie, and it seemed like a good thing to do -- to reacquaint myself with the details.

I liked it more this time, though still don't love it. This time I caught all the gay content which I wasn't paying attention for or taught to pay attention for the previous times I read it.

I enjoyed the recent film, though I had critical things to say about it. And now re-reading the novel, I realize how much more the film misunderstood or misrepresented. I was particularly struck by Nick Carraway's comment in the penultimate chapter "because I disapproved of him from beginning to end." The movie gave the complete contrary impression.

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A Cycle of the West

A Cycle of the West: The Song of Three Friends, The Song of Hugh Glass, The Song of Jed Smith, The Song of the Indian Wars, The Song of the Messiah by John G. Neihardt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Growing up in the northern plains, John Neihardt was convinced that the period from the first exploration of fur trappers through the close of the Indian wars was one of humankind's heroic ages, on a par with the ancient Greece of Homer, the era of Beowulf, etc. So, he set about to write a saga of the west in this collection of five songs published between 1915 and 1941 which were always intended to be combined into one work. It is an incredible achievement.

Which left me wondering why it is not an established part of the American literary canon. These are stories I should have had read to me as a child. Images from these songs should be familiar in the national psyche. Lines and phrases should be memorized and quoted in conversation.

The cycle opens with The Song of Three Friends about an early fur trading party that explores the upper Missouri. There they encounter an indigenous tribe and a love triangle develops. Things do not go well from there. In fact, this opening song reminded me of a Cormac McCarthy novel. The end is harrowing (Neihardt really knows how to end something, which is a skill many authors lack).

Next is The Song of Hugh Glass. I had heard the basic elements of this story before, but Neihardt has turned it into a work of art. I was surprised to encounter a gay love story (Neihardt wrote this in 1915, long before Annie Proulx wrote Brokeback Mountain). Hugh Glass was a real man who endured a horrific episode. Left for dead by friends when he came to, he was unable to walk and crawled his way back to civilization. Neihardt's description of the crawl is also McCarthy-like.

I didn't care much for the third song, The Song of Jed Smith, which Neihardt wrote last. I found the language too dense and the structure of it was unnecessarily complicated, I thought. A group of guys is sitting around a campfire years later recalling their stories of exploring routes to and from California, encountering the Great Salt Lake, the Colorado, the Sierras, the deserts. In setting this is more McCarthy-like, but I found the story mostly dull.

The Song of the Indian Wars is fourth, recounting stories of Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, Custer, Fetterman, and more. This material was most familiar to me and some of it simply read like history. Some of the chapters were nice works of art that could stand on their own, though I found the account of the Battle of the Little Big Horn to be quite confusing. I enjoyed his portrayals of the Native Americans. Neihardt did his research interviewing people who were still alive or the friends and family of his characters, both Caucasian and Native.

Finally is The Song of the Messiah which recounts the coming of the ghost dance, the death of Sitting Bull, and the massacre at Wounded Knee. Also familiar material, but here mesmerizingly well told. I think Neihardt is at his best when writing about spiritual visions (e. g. Black Elk Speaks). Two of my favourite passages of this entire cycle came near the end of this song. The death of Sitting Bull is powerfully told (I blogged some favourite lines last night) and then shifts tenderly to the perspective of his horse, who sits down beside his dead master.

But no account you've read of the massacre at Wounded Knee prepares you for Neihardt's retelling. If you were horrified reading about it in Dee Brown, you will be more so here.

I look forward to reading these stories to my children, so that these great characters and stories can permeate their imaginations.

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