Is it lunch yet?

Breakfast is an unmerciful meal. Unless you live in a house full of larks, you know perfectly well that few people are fit company at that hour. Accordingly, a completely routine meal, unvarying from day to day, is a blessing to everyone. Except for men who have already worked hard for hours, an ordinary weekday breakfast is no time for a feast. Almost as clearly as breakfast, lunch is a meal in via, on the run. To sit down as if the world were our oyster at 12:30 is to face the second half of our daily obedience pretending that the agony of the world is over already. I have long been convinced that man needs sleep more than food in the middle of the day. It is only at night, in gremio familiae...that we can properly rejoice and eat like men.

Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection

The Seeker

Whether King Solomon or some other Hebrew sage, the Preacher of Ecclesiastes is a realist. Despite his lofty position, he doesn't insulate himself from the suffering and injustice of the society around him. He's an artist, philosopher, and investigative journalist. He constantly reminds the reader that he has intently looked into everything under the sun. With apologies to The Who -- he's been looking under chairs and tables, trying to find the key to fifty million fables. He's the seeker -- a really desperate man.

I see two themes running throughout Ecclesiastes. The fear of God and joy. First, the confident belief that the one who fears God will come out alright in the end despite what the evidence shows. Second, that it's good to find joy in the everyday mundane blessings of life...even in the face of suffering and injustice. Have you noticed how people living in terrible circumstances are able to find profound happiness in the smallest blessings? Meanwhile, those of us surrounded by affluence and safety often struggle with depression and boredom. Why is that? The Preacher of Israel would call it another example of the vanity (from a Hebrew word meaning "breath" or "vapor") of human existence.

The two themes I mentioned recur throughout Ecclesiastes, but can be seen clearly in these verses from chapter 8.

11 Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the heart of the children of man is fully set to do evil. 12 Though a sinner does evil a hundred times and prolongs his life, yet I know that it will be well with those who fear God, because they fear before him. 13 But it will not be well with the wicked, neither will he prolong his days like a shadow, because he does not fear before God.

Writing centuries before Christ, the Preacher commends a life of faith and joy that looks toward a hope beyond earthly existence. "I won't get to get what I'm after till the day I die!" In this life, the wicked may prosper and the rightous may suffer, but some day there will be a reckoning. The slowness of divine justice tempts men to greater evil, but the Preacher admonishes against both lawlessness and despair. He goes on:

14 There is a vanity that takes place on earth, that there are righteous people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the wicked, and there are wicked people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the righteous. I said that this also is vanity. 15 And I commend joy, for man has no good thing under the sun but to eat and drink and be joyful, for this will go with him in his toil through the days of his life that God has given him under the sun.

I love the theme of joy throughout Ecclesiastes because it's hard-won. This kind of joy is the opposite of contemporary conceptions of happiness. C.S. Lewis wrote that "joy is the serious business of Heaven." Joy is serious business? you may ask. Yes it is, if it's Christian joy you're talking about. The Apostle Paul strikes the same note in 2 Corinthians 6: "as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing everything."

Fear God. Enjoy life. Be like the seeker.

Seeking atonement

Last night ended the ten days of repentance which culminates in Yom Kippur. Here in Palm Beach County yesterday was a school holiday. In this video David Helm, pastor of Holy Trinity Church in Chicago, talks sensitively about the relationship between Christianity and Judaism and why most Jews don't accept Jesus of Nazareth as their Messiah.

Faulkner goes west

The next few Fridays I'm going to focus on two of my favorite subjects -- William Faulkner and Hollywood. Faulkner had an off-and-on relationship with Hollywood beginning in 1932 and lasting into the 1950s. He claimed to despise the place, but his chronic money troubles made it hard to turn down opportunities to make quick cash. "Where else could he earn $500 a week? It would be like selling a short story every week for six weeks" writes Joseph Blotner in Faulkner: A Biography. The solitary writer fit uneasily within the collaborative medium that is the movie business. Writes Blotner: "If he had had money enough, like Hemingway, he would never have touched a Hollywood film script." Faulkner told his brother Jack, "Nobody would live in Hollywood, except to get what money they could out of it."

According to Blotner, Faulkner referred to his stints in Southern California as "my sojourn downriver" and "he would often use metaphors of fieldhands or slaves for his dealings with the film studios. Sometimes they would be more dramatic. He would later tell another writer, a young friend, (Shelby Foote) 'Always take the people seriously, but never take the work seriously. Hollywood is the only place on earth where you can get stabbed in the back while you're climbing a ladder.'" Throughout Faulkner's writing Hollywood became a symbol of corruption, see especially his novel Pylon or his short story Golden Land, a tale of perversion too sensational for the literary magazines that usually jumped at the chance to publish his latest offerings.

Yet, Faulkner returned again and again. While being in Hollywood exacerbated his personal demons, he made some enduring friendships and did respectable work. It wasn't all as bad as he made it sound. Despite the drinking binges and erratic behavior Faulkner remained a professional writer, and for the most part was paid handsomely for his services (putting the lie to his plantation metaphors). For better or worse his time "downriver" passed on into something approaching legend. Faulkner's experiences in Hollywood furnished some of the inspiration for the Coen Brothers' quirky masterpiece Barton Fink (1991). Here's Blotner describing the 34-year-old Mississipian's first trip west in 1932 on a 6-week contract for MGM.

In 1932, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was the undisputed leader among motion-picture companies. On fifty-three acres in Culver City, "on the dusty outskirts of Los Angeles, opposite three gasoline stations and a drug store," the studio produced forty feature films a year that grossed more than $100 million annually and played before an estimated total world audience of a billion persons.

The shortened workday of Saturday, May 7, had nearly passed before William Faulkner arrived. When he did arrive, things seemed to go wrong from the very start. The first thing Sam Marx (MGM exec) noticed was that his head was cut and bleeding. He had been hit by a cab while he was changing trains, he said--in New Orleans. To Marx it was obvious that he had been drinking. Marx wanted to call a doctor, but Faulkner said he didn't need one and that he wanted to get right to work.

"We're going to put you on a Wallace Beery picture," Marx told him. "Who's he?" asked Faulkner. "I've got an idea for Mickey Mouse." Marx explained that Mickey Mouse films were made at the Walt Disney Studios, and arranged for a screening of The Champ. Beery had starred in it as a lovable prizefighter, and now he was to play a wrestler in Flesh.

Faulkner allowed himself to be led to the projection room by Marx's office boy, who reappeared very shortly. Faulkner did not want to watch the film, and he kept talking. "Do you own a dog?" he asked the boy, who said no. Faulkner said, "Every boy should have a dog." He should be ashamed not to own a dog, and so should everybody else who didn't own a dog. The film was hardly under way when Faulkner said to the projectionist, "How do you stop this thing?" There was no use looking at it, he said, because he knew how it would turn out. Then he asked for the exit and left. Marx started an immediate search for him, but it proved fruitless.

As it turned out Faulkner had wandered off and ended up in Death Valley, 150 miles east. He reappeared a week later, apologized, and went to work in Office 27 of the writer's building with Marx's reassurance that from now on he would work exclusively on "original stories" for the studio. No more wrestling pictures for the celebrated author of The Sound and the Fury! The first script he worked on was a reworking of a short story he'd been unable to sell a dozen years earlier. It never saw the light of day, but was good practice for someone learning the conventions of movie writing. Faulkner wrote home: "I am not settled good yet. I have not got used to this work. But I am as well as anyone can be in this bedlam."

To be continued...

Happy birthday Bruce Catton

Historian Bruce Catton was born on this day in 1899. Even before I discovered Shelby Foote or watched Ken Burns' PBS series, it was reading Catton's Army of the Potomac trilogy as a boy that created a lifelong interest in the American Civil War. I was hooked from the first chapter. One critic remarked, "if every historian wrote like him no one would read fiction!" Later on I had the chance to walk the hallowed grounds of Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania where Mr. Lincoln's soldiers fought and died. Once again, it was Bruce Catton's narrative that brought those quiet fields to life. A great historian, and a great storyteller.

Our strange disorder

Human sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest things: sign of a strange disorder.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées (525)

Ryan Ferguson extols the King (Psalm 145)

It is well when the Lord's royalty arouses our loyalty, and our spirit is moved to magnify his majesty.

Charles Spurgeon on Psalm 145

Evangelism explosion

It has to be said that the most explosive means of God-inspired, theology-laden, liturgical missional activity comes by way of holy baptism. It has not been going door-to-door nor having the tent revival nor even the stadium crusade that has been the greatest vehicle of Christian evangelization. In every age of the church, baptism -- particularly infant baptism -- has been the overwhelmingly greatest means of expanding the church. Christ has built into the covenant of grace itself an evangelistic liturgical feature that ensures the propagation of the faith in such a fashion that the Lord does all the work and receives all the glory -- the baptizing of adults and children alike. If you desire to see the church grow, then break out your baptismal liturgy and start asking people in your church, neighborhood, and workplace if they or their children have been baptized, and you will find a great deal of gospel discussion taking place.

John Bombaro, Can Orthodoxy Be Missional? (Modern Reformation, September/October 2008)

Seeing things in black and white

Here's City Journal's Stefan Kanfer with a lesson in ophthalmology and film appreciation:

The civics teacher had an inspired idea: bring American jurisprudence to life by showing the class an award-winning 1957 film. Twelve Angry Men had all the requisites of instructive high drama: suspense, as one juror tries to change the minds of 11 others hell-bent on sending the accused to death row; crackling dialogue, written by Reginald Rose, a luminary of television’s Golden Age; a scintillating cast, led by Henry Fonda and directed by Sidney Lumet. The title flashed on-screen—immediately followed by a chorus of groans. One 15-year-old wailed for all his disappointed colleagues: “You didn’t tell us it was going to be in black-and-white!”

Read the whole thing

When God cancels our plans

We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God. God will be constantly crossing our paths and canceling our plans by sending us people with claims and petitions. We may pass them by, preoccupied with our more important tasks, as the priest passed by the man who had fallen among thieves, perhaps--reading the Bible. When we do that we pass by the visible sign of the Cross raised athwart our path to show us that, not our way, but God's way must be done. It is a strange fact that Christians and even ministers frequently consider their work so important and urgent that they will allow nothing to disturb them. They think they are doing God a service in this, but actually they are disdaining God's "crooked yet straight path" (Gottfried Arnold). They do not want a life that is crossed and balked. But it is part of the discipline of humility that we must not spare our hand where it can perform a service and that we do not assume that our schedule is our own to manage, but allow it to be arranged by God.

In the monastery his vow of obedience to the abbot deprives the monk of the right to dispose of his own time. In evangelical community life, free service to one's own brother takes the place of the vow. Only where hands are not too good for deeds of love and mercy in everyday helpfulness can the mouth joyfully and convincingly proclaim the message of God's love and mercy.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

This is hard truth for those of us who like to stay on schedule and hate to be late. Ask my wife about that one. Bonhoeffer reminds me that pious activity can be a way of avoiding God's (and my brother's) call on my time. I'm blessed to have a pastor who always has time to be "interrupted by God." Those readers who know him I'm sure will agree that he's a shining example of one who faithfully follows God's "crooked yet straight path."