May 1, 2024

Posts Comments

The Excalibur Murders by J.M.C. Blair

March 19, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The Excalibur MurdersThe Excalibur Murders
By J.M.C. Blair
Rating: 6 of 10

Here’s the premise: Merlin isn’t a wizard, he’s a modern day detective-scholar.  When several murders seemingly related to the supernatural rock the halls of Camelot and threaten to undermine King Arthur’s authority, Merlin and his band of students work to uncover the true natural story of what happened.  What they find is a plot to overthrow Arthur.  All of this sounds spectacular, and that’s why I picked up the book from the new bookshelves of the library.  But the execution of the story telling left me wanting more.

I’ve begun to notice something in several books I’ve read lately (Caleb’s Crossing being the most obvious other example).  Authors seem to put modern people with all their modern sensibilities into ancient settings as a way of providing contrast to tell a story and move the plot forward.  In the case of Caleb’s Crossing, which recently won a Christianity Today book-of-the-year award, the main character, Bethia, often sounds like a modern woman thrown into the early colonial period.  The contrast helps magnify the differences between then and now, but the character seems less than believable.

The same is true of Merlin in The Excalibur Murders.  He is a modern skeptic of the supernatural trying to bring education and reason to a land dominated by superstition.  I suspect there were truly people ahead of their time in the ancient world, but I would guess that they were a little less different and a little more complicated than either of these authors makes their protagonist out to be.  For example Merlin could have had one superstition that he did believe in.  That would have made him seem more like a realistic character of the day.

This ongoing issue I have with modern writers putting modern sensibilities into ancient times aside, I’ll probably still pick up the next book in The Excalibur Murders series.  It was still entertaining to read.

Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With:

All My Holy Mountain by L.B. Graham

January 28, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Binding of the BladeAll My Holy Mountain
The Binding of the Blade Book 5
By L.B. Graham
Rating: 7 of 10

I picked up the first book in this series about five or six years ago and read the first four before heading off to seminary and before the fifth book was published.  I’m finally now picking the series back up and finishing it.  I became familiar with the book because Sarah was a fellow student with L.B. Graham at Wheaton College.  He is currently the chair of the Bible department and teacher of English and ethics at Westminster Christian Academy in St. Louis.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With: ,

Conspirata: A Novel of Ancient Rome by Robert Harris

December 12, 2011 by Leave a Comment

ConspirataConspirata: A Novel of Ancient Rome
By Robert Harris
Rating: 8 of 10

If you liked (or like me loved) Robert Harris’ historical novel on Cicero, Imperium, then you have to read this follow-up book, Conspirata.  Imperium tells the story of Cicero’s rise to power from the perspective of his secretary.  Conspirata tells the story of his downfall.

I loved Imperium (Latin for “power”) in large part because you learned a lot about the ancient art of rhetoric, or the art of speech and communication to persuade, and you heard Cicero using rhetoric to build power and authority.  The big question of Imperium was, how far will Cicero go to claim power and authority?  That question is not fully answered in the first book, but by the end of Conspirata you have the answer.

Harris weaves the characters of Cicero, Claudius, Caesar, and Pompey together in a gripping plot.  Like all good historical fiction, Conspirata drove me to history.  I realized how little I actually know about these key historical figures of Rome.  I want to know more. So I’ve checked out a couple of other books on the history of Rome.

I don’t want to spoil the plot, so I won’t say much more about the book, except that I would have given the book a 9 of 10, but I found the last page or two to be something of a letdown.  Perhaps Harris was simply following history in how he told the story.  I don’t know, but I am curious whether Cicero’s fate as told by Harris is historically accurate.  I hope to find out soon.

Currently Reading/Listening
Generation to Generation by Edwin H. Friedman
The Busy Family’s Guide to Spirituality by David Robinson
Parenting with Purpose by Oddbjorn Evenshaug, Dag Hallen, and Roland Martinson
At the Still Point compiled by Sarah Arthur
Sticky Teams by Larry Osborn
Fascinate by Sally Hogshead
Talent is Overrated by Geoffrey Colvin
Conspirata (A Novel of Ancient Rome) by Robert Harris
Coffee Shop Conversations: Making the Most of Spiritual Small Talk by Dale and Jonalyn Fincher
Roman Lives by Plutarch

Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With:

Three Novels

November 8, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Original Sin: A Sally Sin Adventure
By Beth McMullen
5 of 10

I picked this book up off the new bookshelf in the library entirely because of the title.  I am heading into a sermon series on sin, and thought this might be a fun way to engage the topic.  The fun was there sometimes, but the topic was almost entirely missing.

McMullen tells the story of a mom who used to be a spy, code-named Sally Sin, and who finds her previous espionage adventures intruding on her new life with a husband and three-year-old.  This is really a chick-lit novel, and a mom with a toddler would probably find it funnier than I did.  Although I did find it humorous when the villain regularly shows up and is unable to follow the old scripts because a three-year-old is in the room.

My one big complaint about this book is that if you’re going to give a book a theological title, it seems to me that you should at least do a cursory study of what the phrase means and somehow include that in the plot.  Original sin is the theological idea that we all are unable not to sin.  Our will is bent in on itself.  I would imagine that the hero or the villain of a novel titled Original Sin would either win or lose based on someone’s inability to not mess up.  But what seems to happen is that Sally Sin always wins in spite of herself (perhaps a subtle nod to grace).  She’s not incompetent.  She’s actually very competent.  But her villain is always one step ahead of her, and she often finds herself kidnapped by him and then released by him.

I’m probably expecting too much from this book.  Or maybe I’m missing the something subtle that McMullen is doing.  The average person most likely won’t have the same motivation for reading this book as I did and will probably enjoy it much more than I did.

Pompeii
By Robert Harris
6 of 10

I was so enthralled with the first novel, Imperium, I read by Robert Harris that I had to read more, especially more of his ancient Rome historical fiction.  Imperium was so good that it was inevitable that whatever I read next wouldn’t live up to it.

The plot of Pompeii is fairly obvious: a city is buried by a volcanic eruption.  Harris manages to tell a tale of intrigue, corruption, and romance in the couple of days leading up the catastrophic event.  There were a couple of good twists and turns, but nothing like Cicero’s ability to use rhetoric, or the art of speech, to outmaneuver disaster.  Of course, I am someone who must use his voice and language skills every week to preach!

Caleb’s Crossing
By Geraldine Brooks
6 of 10

Geraldine Brooks supposedly wrote a historical novel about the first Native Americans to attend Harvard, but I think this was really a novel about a young woman, Bethia, who grew up alongside those natives.  Brooks does an excellent job describing the culture of the early settlements and how it was stacked against certain groups like women and natives.  Bethia shows more academic progress than her older brother simply by overhearing their father teach him lessons, but because she is a woman, she is not given the same opportunities to learn.  She becomes a pawn moved around for the benefit of the men in her life.  There is a particularly difficult moment when she is required to publically confess to the church the disrespect she showed her brother, which was mostly just telling the truth about him.  It makes me glad to be living in a more merciful and graceful church.

If I have one quibble it is this.  The tricky part in writing historical fiction is not allowing modern sensibilities to enter into the characters.  Overall Brooks has done a good job at keeping the characters in the 1600s, but at times Bethia sounds more like a modern woman than a woman from the seventeenth century.

Currently Reading/Listening
Generation to Generation by Edwin H. Friedman
The Busy Family’s Guide to Spirituality by David Robinson
Parenting with Purpose by Oddbjorn Evenshaug, Dag Hallen, and Roland Martinson
At the Still Point compiled by Sarah Arthur
Ignite by Nelson Searcy
Sticky Teams by Larry Osborn
Fascinate by Sally Hogshead
Talent is Overrated by Geoffrey Colvin
Conspirata (A Novel of Ancient Rome) by Robert Harris

Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With:

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Phillip Pullman

October 3, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The Good Man JesusThe Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
By Phillip Pullman
Library
Rating: 5 of 10

This book was picked for our Agnostic Pub Group as a change of pace from C.S. Lewis.  Pullman is at least an agnostic and at most an atheist.  Pullman’s book is an interesting attempt to explore “how stories become stories.”  The basic plot line is that Jesus has a twin brother named Christ.  The two grow up alongside one another, and as adults, Jesus becomes prominent in the public eye and Christ recedes into the background.  Christ begins to follow Jesus around and record what Jesus does.  Along the way Christ meets a “stranger” who encourages him “to make history the handmaid of posterity and not its governor.  What should have been is a better servant of the Kingdom than what was” (emphasis is Pullman’s).  So Christ embellishes the story because “without miracles, without a church, without a scripture, the power of [Jesus’] words and his deeds will be like water poured into the sand.”  In the end, Jesus is crucified, and Christ steps in to provide the resurrection.

Throughout this book I was reminded of two historical/theological debates.  The first is an attempt to make a distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith.  This position tends to hold that Jesus did not claim much about himself and was a wandering prophet or social critic.  Thus, claims about Jesus’ divinity were developed in the early history of the church.  This fundamental assertion lies at the base of Pullman’s story.

The second debate that comes to mind is Albert Schwitzer’s critique of the search for the historical Jesus.  Schwitzer claimed that portraits of a historical Jesus always end up looking like the individuals writing them.  Ironically, Schwitzer went on to write a “historical” portrait of Jesus that scholars now think looks a lot like Schwitzer himself!  Thus, the distinction between the “historical Jesus” and the “Christ of faith” tends to break down as one attempts to tease the two apart.

Pullman attempts to separate the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith by introducing a very fanciful plot device: the two were really twins.  Pullman is not attempting to say that there really were twins named Jesus and Christ.  The plot device is simply an experiment in exploring how a religion might move from history to faith.  The problem with this exploration is that it requires such a fantastically non-historical plot device to accomplish it that one is left wondering how the “story became a story” without the plot device: twins.  If Jesus didn’t have a twin named Christ, then how did Jesus really end up being claimed to have been God’s son?  Pullman really hasn’t helped the agnostic/atheist imagination see how the “historical Jesus” ended up becoming the “Christ of faith.”

While I didn’t find Pullman’s plot device particularly compelling, I did find his critique of the church compelling.  Pullman rewrites Jesus prayer from John 17.  In this prayer, Jesus is full of doubt and barely believes that God exists, or if God does exist, then God probably doesn’t listen.  So Jesus prays, “Lord, if I thought you were listening, I’d pray for this above all: that any church set up in your name should remain poor, powerless, and modest.  That it should wield no authority except that of love.  That it should never cast anyone out.  That it should own no property and make no laws.  That it should never condemn, but only forgive.”  The prayer continues in a similar direction.  Pullman really does provide a compelling vision for what a church might or could be.  I don’t agree with everything in this prayer, but the church has unfortunately used its power and authority in abusive and destructive ways.  It is the church’s lack of providing a truly loving community that makes books like The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ possible.  It is important for the church to listen to the prophetic voice of God speaking through those outside the church who critique her.  At times Pullman provides that voice in this book.

Note: Our Agnostic Pub Group is beginning a new book—The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life by Armand M. Nicholi, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University—on October 20th.  We meet on the 1st and 3rd Thursday at 7PM at Soup Spoon Café (a kind of coffee house/pub).  Join us for great discussion and brew.

Currently Reading/Listening
Generation to Generation by Edwin H. Friedman
The Busy Family’s Guide to Spirituality by David Robinson
Parenting with Purpose by Oddbjorn Evenshaug, Dag Hallen, and Roland Martinson
At the Still Point compiled by Sarah Arthur
Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks
Ignite by Nelson Searcy
Recreating the Church by Richard Hamm
Sticky Teams by Larry Osborn
Fascinate by Sally Hogshead
Talent is Overrated by Geoffrey Colvin

Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With: , ,

The Girl Who…by Steig Larsson

September 14, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The Girl Who Played with Fire and
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
By Steig Larsson
Audio Book
Library (Audio/Book)
Rating 7 of 10

 

A review of the first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, can be found here.

 

Steig Larsson has written an impressive and gripping trilogy about a government conspiracy to cover up a Swedish espionage agency’s abuse of a young girl, Lisbeth Salendar’s, rights.  This story is ultimately about, as Blomkvist, the key journalist who uncovers the story, says “the violence perpetrated against women and the men who do it.”

While the novel is a page turner (or driveway listener as the case may be), I found myself wrestling with parts of what I was listening to throughout books.  The violence perpetrated against women is at times hard to hear described.  I also found that the scenes of consensual sex were a bit overblown at times.  Ironically, while Blomkvist declares that the story is about the violence perpetrated against women and the men who do it” and he spends the entire book trying to uncover that abuse and expose it, he causes a kind of subtle violence against women (and men) by sleeping around with almost every woman in the story and hurting most of them.  Casual and recreational sex without commitment abound.

By the end of the book all the women with whom Blomkvist sleeps seem to end up hurt (or potentially hurt) by his lack of commitment to one of them.  Lisbeth fell in love with him and was hurt by his relationship with Erika Berger.  Erika is the woman with whom Blomkvist’s affair destroyed his marriage and who now openly continues the affair with the consent of her husband.  Erika finds herself feeling empty at the prospect of Blomkvist falling in love with Monica Figuerola, a police officer who comes on the scene at the end of the story and who and falls for Blomkvist and he for her.  Then there’s Harriet Vanger and Cecelia Vanger, both of whom end up in Blomkvist’s bed in the first book.  What’s going on here?!  Blomkvist’s sister, the lawyer who defends Lisbeth, sums up her brother’s sex life when she claims that it is disrespectful of all the women with whom he sleeps.  This kind of promiscuous sex isn’t nearly as violent as rape, but as much as we try to separate sex from commitment, this separation is a kind of subtle violence against the heart of both men and women.

Larson is a master storyteller, and the tale that he spins is amazing.  Because I was listening to it as an audio book, I found myself looking forward to or extending my next car ride.  I did wonder whether Larson ends up doing a disservice to women who experience violence by couching the story within such a fanciful plot.  Because the violence done to Lisbeth is done by a Russian spy defected to Sweden and a super secret section within the Swedish espionage department, it is a little too easy to toss off the implications as far fetched as well.   How many women are haunted by defected Russian spies?  How man women are beaten down by a government conspiracy?  Probably not many.  But many women are beaten by their husbands as they go about their average life.  If Larsson ultimately wanted to help women who are abused, he might have done better to take his amazing story-telling skills and turn them toward the average suburban household.  But that probably wouldn’t have been nearly as entertaining.

Currently Reading/Listening
Generation to Generation by Edwin H. Friedman
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Phillip Pullman
The Busy Family’s Guide to Spirituality by David Robinson
Parenting with Purpose by Oddbjorn Evenshaug, Dag Hallen, and Roland Martinson
At the Still Point compiled by Sarah Arthur
Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks
Ignite by Nelson Searcy
Recreating the Church by Richard Hamm

Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With: , ,

Little Bee by Chris Cleave

August 2, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Little BeeLittle Bee
By Chris Cleave
Library (Audio/Book)
Rating: 7 of 10

I forgot to bring a novel to read while on vacation so I went to the local bookstore and wandered around.  I came out with Little Bee by Chris Cleave.  I’d never heard of the book or the author but the endorsements on the front sold me on the book: “Little Bee will blow you away” (Washington Post) and “Immensely readable and moving…An affecting story of human triumph” (The New York Times Book Review).  Sounded like the kind of beach reading I was looking for.

Little Bee didn’t disappoint.  The basic storyline is about a Nigerian teenager seeking political asylum in the UK (United Kingdom).  Not the kind of narrative that would have grabbed my attention, but one that shows that a well told story no matter what the content is worth listening to.

The narrative goes back and forth between Little Bee’s voice, the young girl from Nigeria, and the mother of the family who is trying to help her.  There are a lot of great one-liners in this book.  Perhaps my favorite is, “No one likes each other, but everyone likes U2.”  Little Bee makes this quip after pointing out that people in her village listen to U2 as did the policemen in the detention center where she was held for two years after being caught as a stowaway on a freighter.  She wonders if the rebels in her country and the government soldiers who are fighting one another in Nigeria listen to U2 too.  She adds, “I think everyone was killing everyone else and listening to the same music.”  I’m not sure if this is a compliment of U2 or a slam.

Little Bee does put a very human face on the issue of immigration.  I have not spent much time pondering this issue, but this book makes me wonder more about how the political asylum process works.  In an interview with Cleave that is added to the end of the book, he tells the story of an Angolan father and his son who inspired part of the story.  After four years of waiting for his application for political asylum, he and his son were rounded up in a surprise raid.  On the night before they would be deported and would inevitably meet persecution and murder back in Angola, the father took his own life.  Cleave says, “What had happened was that Manuel Bravo, aware of a rule under which unaccompanied minors cannot be deported from the UK, had taken his own life in order to save the life of his son.  His last words to his child were: ‘Be brave.  Work hard.  Do well at school.’”  I felt like someone had just hit me in the gut.  Is there a better way?  I don’t know.

Whatever you think about immigration, Cleave has written a story that will make you laugh and cry and come back for more.  I was sad when the book was over.  I wanted another two or three-hundred pages of Little Bee.

Currently Reading/Listening
Generation to Generation by Edwin H. Friedman
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Phillip Pullman
Love Wins by Rob Bell
Exponential by Dave and Jon Ferguson
The Organic Lawn Care Manual by Paul Boardway Tukey
Sacred Parenting by Gary Thomas
The Busy Family’s Guide to Spirituality by David Robinson
Parenting with Purpose by Oddbjorn Evenshaug, Dag Hallen, and Roland Martinson
At the Still Point compiled by Sarah Arthur
Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With: , ,

The Shack by William Paul Young

April 14, 2011 by 1 Comment

The ShackThe Shack
By William Paul Young
Audio Book
Library (CD/Print)
Rating: 7 of 10

I’m a little behind the curve on this book.  It came out while I was in seminary, and in seminary you don’t read anything that hasn’t been assigned.  While The Shack is a little theologically off at times, I found that overall it was a compelling story.

The basic question of The Shack is the question of theodicy, which has to do with justifying God (theo – God, dike – justice).  Why does a good God let bad things happen?  This is a dangerous path to explore, but I think Young has imagined a better answer to the question through the form of narrative than others have through other forms.

The plot involves a father named Mac whose daughter was abducted and killed while on a camping trip.  Mac finds himself in a “deep sadness” for years following the tragedy.  One day he receives a mysterious letter from “Papa” inviting him to the shack for the weekend.  “Papa” is his wife’s name for God.  He wonders if it is a joke, but he decides to go anyway.  The rest of the story involves Mac’s experience with Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu, the Trinitarian God of The Shack.

I found the first half of this book very moving. I was transported into the story.  Mac’s situation grabbed my heart.  His pain and the questions surrounding it became my pain and my questions.  I, like Mac, wanted answers, and Young did an excellent job of providing powerful dialogue between God and Mac.  In the end, the answers tend not to be so much around ideas as trust in God’s goodness.  Is God good?  Is God trustworthy?  If so, then we can only trust that the pain and suffering in this world will ultimately be redeemed.  As Papa says, “We’re not justifying it [suffering and pain].  We are redeeming it” (127).

Some of the common critiques I have heard of The Shack didn’t really stick with me.  I thought the Trinitarian theology was sufficient.  Perhaps because of the plot device of having three different visible persons representing God there were times where Young missed the theological mark, but these did not bother me very much.  Then there’s Papa, God the Father, as a big black woman.  Personally, I loved this unexpected portrayal of God the Father.

While I found the story overall compelling, I do still have some critiques.  First, Young make the same mistake describing God (Papa, Jesus, Sarayu) that every search-for-the-historical-Jesus book makes: despite casting the Father as a black woman, God ends up looking and sounding a lot like the author, which in this case is a middle-class white American.  God is just a little too close and familiar (immanent) and not quite incomprehensible enough (transcendent).

Second, Young has a very low view of the church.  The church comes across as a dead and dry institution.  A relationship with God seems to be primarily about one’s personal relationship with God and has little to do with community.  The plot structure of the book is inherently flawed in this way.  Mac meets God alone in a shack.  One could imagine a similar story populated by several other human characters wrestling alongside Mac with God.

Third, Young is a little too optimistic for me about the possibility of salvation through other religions.  I don’t discount that there is much about God that we Christians can learn from other religions, but if a basic tenant of our belief is that God became a human in Jesus, I think this is a truth we must share with others and a truth we must claim has some kind of real and even eternal significance for others.

I think this book could be extremely helpful to someone who was struggling with a major loss or tragedy in life.  It is a kind of pastoral book providing comfort in the face of pain.  Young tells a powerful story to answer complex questions, and amidst its flaws herein lays the magic of this book.  In a way that other non-fiction books do not, The Shack engages not just our intellect but also our emotions and imaginations.

Currently Reading/Listening
Generation to Generation by Edwin H. Friedman
Sacred Parenting by Gary Thomas
Scandalous Risks by Susan Howatch
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Phillip Pullman
Love Wins by Rob Bell
Make Anger Your Ally by Neill Clark Warren
Leading from the Heart by Mike Krzyzewski

Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With: , ,

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

March 7, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Audio Book
By Stieg Larsson
Read by Simon Vance
Rating: 7 of 10
Local Library

Warning: This book contains some very disturbing scenes of violence against women.

I picked up this book because I was seeing it everywhere.  I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.  I just thought I needed a book that was more narrative than didactic.  I was reading too many how-to ministry books.  What I got was an audio book that kept me sitting in my car seat in the parking lot or garage wishing that my drive had been longer.

Larsson tells the tale of an outcast young woman and a fringe journalist who team up to solve a most perplexing missing person case only to end up stumbling into much deeper and nastier water than they ever expected.  The pace is a little slow at times, but the narrative is so well written that I didn’t mind the slow pace at all.  I actually even appreciated it.

I’m not sure there is a lot to this book that is of much more value than entertainment, except for the author’s unflinching gaze at the violence that is perpetuated on women in Sweden and presumably in the West in general.  I did not find his description of this violence to be intended for entertainment value, but rather to produce in the reader a visceral reaction that might motivate us to consider these issues more fully.  The only problem with his approach is that the situations these women find themselves in are so over-the-top unusual, which is not to say unthinkable or unrealistic, that we are tempted to think that this kind of violence probably isn’t happening in our neighborhood and so we can ignore it.  Meanwhile too many women are abused by their husbands both verbally and physically ever day in the house next door.

If you’ve experienced some kind of physical abuse in the past, this may not be the book for you.  If you’re looking for a story that will keep your riveted to your car seat in the garage, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is worth your time to listen to or read.

Currently Reading/Listening:
Generation to Generation by Edwin H. Friedman
Sacred Parenting by Gary Thomas
Scandalous Risks by Susan Howatch
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Jesus’ Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Phillip Pullman

Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With: , ,

Ultimate Prizes by Susan Howatch

March 7, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Ultimate Prizes
By Susan Howatch
Rating: 5 of 10

I’m afraid that Susan Howatch’s ultimate prize is accurate knowledge about one’s past.  Meanwhile, this Church of England series is getting to be a little formulaic.  The formula goes something like this:

Anglican clergy + life crisis + big sexual sin + denial of sin + emotional breakdown + spiritual director + confession/psychoanalysis of one’s past family history (especially the skeletons in the closet) = happy, healthy, and effective Anglican clergy.

This is the third in the Church of England series.  The first two, Glittering Images and Glamorous Powers, were gripping, and I couldn’t put them down.  This one sat unread for several weeks at a time.  I found the characters less compelling and the formula just a little too heavy handed.

Ultimate Prizes tells the story of Archdeacon Neville Aysgarth’s search for the ultimate prizes of life: climbing the ecclesial ladder, marrying the right woman, having the right children, and so on.  The only problem is that once Aysgarth has won the prize, he seems to no longer really value it.  Thus, when his first “perfect” wife dies, he courts and marries an eccentric socialite only to end up having an affair while she is recovering in the hospital from a disastrous labor where the child was killed in order to save the mother.  This behavior along with his increasing habit of turning to alcohol leads him to seek help from the spiritual director, Jonathan Darrow, who is the spiritual director in the first book in the series, Glittering Images, and the subject of the second book, Glamorous Powers, and who Aysgarth has had run-ins with as Darrow’s church superior.  The plot thickens.

Darrow, along with some help from his other Fordite Monk friends, help get Aysgarth back on the straight and narrow.  They do so by exploring his past.  What we come to find out is that Aysgarth has had an extremely rocky relationship with his mother, father, and uncle.  Over time his denial has grown about what exactly happened between these three key figures in his upbringing.  Darrow helps Aysgarth explore the landscape of his childhood and young adulthood so that he can give up chasing the ultimate prizes and instead have healthy relationships with less-than-perfect people.

At the very beginning of the book Aysgarth says, “I did not understand why I had wound up in such a mess, and without understanding, how could I promise that my appalling behavior would never be repeated.”  At the end of the book after Aysgarth has “confessed” the truth about his past without denial of the skeletons in the closet, Darrow exclaims, “You’ve grasped the truth.  You’ve demonstrated with every syllable you utter that you repent.  Can’t you see your demon’s vanquished, cowering with terror in his pit?”  Notice the lowercase “t” for truth.

Here’s the problem: understanding and knowledge alone can’t save us.  Yes, they can help us grow in maturity, but it was knowledge that got humanity in the pit in the first place.  It’s not knowledge alone that will get us out of it.  Rather it is only when we grasp firmly on to the Truth, capital “T”, of Jesus Christ that we will be saved.  I do not necessarily think that truth and Truth are incompatible.  It is more a question of priority.  Howatch’s books major in truth rather than Truth.  This kind of truth can only be helpful when it is in service of Truth.

There was one particularly poignant moment that I found especially compelling.  When Asygarth is meeting Darrow’s old Abbot-General, Father Lucas, for spiritual direction, Lucas says, “I presume that most of your private prayers are ex tempore?  Well, there’s nothing wrong with ex tempore prayers, of course, but at present you want to be very careful that your prayers aren’t merely a flurry of words which will mar the inner stillness you must cultivate in order not only to maintain your equilibrium but to receive the word from God which will undoubtedly come.”   “Ex tempore” is Latin for “out of the moment,” and ex tempore prayers are spontaneous prayers.  Lucas goes on to suggest mixing in some written prayers from the Daily Office, the set pattern of prayers prayed several times a day.  I have found this suggestion exceedingly helpful in my own spiritual journey.  I grew up Pentecostal where written prayers were frowned upon.  Over time I have come to appreciate both types of prayer.  I think a mix of both would help most Christians grow in the spiritual maturity.

I would likely give up on this series at this point if it wasn’t for one interesting twist Howatch makes in the next book.  She picks up the story from the perspective of someone outside the church.  I am intrigued to see what she will do with this outsider’s perspective.  I hope there will be a new formula for this outsider’s spiritual journey.

Currently Reading/Listening:
Generation to Generation by Edwin H. Friedman
Sacred Parenting by Gary Thomas
Scandalous Risks by Susan Howatch
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Jesus’ Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Phillip Pullman

Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With: , , , ,
Next Page »