Burning Books

Most people know the Nazis burned books. They most likely don't know which ones. Jewish writers, of course. But you might be surprised to know they burned Bambi because they were afraid it might make the hearts of their jungvolk too tender, Helen Keller because they were busy killing off their physically and mentally challenged and didn't want a role model for such people running loose in the German imagination. They burned All Quiet On The Western Front because it was an anti-war novel written by a German and the fascists wanted Germans ready and eager for war. They burned Hemingway for the same reason - A Farewell to Arms - but also because he supported the anti-fascist side in the Spanish Civil War of the late 30's. Some of Jack London's political works were burned, Thomas Mann was attacked because he supported the writers the Nazis had exiled, Sigrid Unset's books were torched because she criticized the Nazi regime.

The Nazis were masters at mixing nationalism with Christianity and then twisting Christianity into new and exotic shapes. I wonder sometimes if we are not becoming masters of the same thing in North America. Consider how difficult it is to get published by a Christian publishing house unless you are not only Christian but evangelical Christian and not only evangelical Christian but a certain kind of evangelical Christian. Mainstream is formula fiction, the predictable, the superficial, the politically correct. If a writer who is a Christian, even an evangelical, pens something different, however true and well done, it does not get printed because it will not sell enough and it will not sell enough because the mainstream will not purchase complexity, depth or thinking fiction. Mainstream wants a slick ride of the imagination that reinforces all traditional thought patterns, challenges nothing, and is real about very little of the human experience or the Christian spiritual experience, good or bad. It wants the same old. But not the same old God. Just the same old way of talking about a same old way of looking at God. They want safety but not safety in growth towards the real. They want safety in a reinforcement of human tradition. And above all they want to promote it - they want propganda, not exploration, not discovery, not risk. They want a calcified Christ.

And combined with this there is the belief that you must vote a certain way and support a certain political party and be a certain kind of patriot to be an acceptable Christian - this is true of the right and the left. Certain books that support left or right versions of the faith are acceptable in one camp or the other and are similarly rejected in one camp or the other. It makes me wonder which books would be burned if mainstream or off-mainstream Christianity had its way. Would some mainstreamers burn The Message? What about Frederick Buechner's writings, or Flannery O'Connor's, or Walker Percy's, or Wendell Berry's? (I mention authors who admit to a Christian bent in their lives.) We might have some nice bonfires across Canada and the United States. All the moreso if the off-mainstreamers burned books they considered too orthodox or the mainstreamers also started adding to the fires non-Christian writers they didn't approve of.

Of course there is localized burning going on anyway. CDs and DVDs go into the flames along with books pastors and churches have decided are unholy. I am aware that in Acts early Christians burned books. But these were books connected with the black magic of their pasts. Not books of poets or storytellers, not Homer or Virgil or Cicero or Herodotus. Paul himself quoted several writers and poets who were not Christians or monotheists when he was on Mars Hill. Quite often Christians will quote favourably the lines - "in whom we live and move and have our being" - and connect these words to the Christian God, thinking they are quoting scripture. In fact they are quoting Paul quoting a pagan who Paul believed got it right.

Those who embrace secularism like a religion burn their books too, they have their lists of what one can read and what one can't, many in these ranks are high priests and priestesses of what is politically correct. But just because there is fascism across the board in our society that does not mean it should be the province of those who claim they've walked with the son of God. In fact, considering Jesus's way of treating others, especially the marginalized and ostracized, it should be exactly the opposite. Christians shouldn't be starting the fires, thy should be putting them out. And Christians shouldn't be shutting people and their books down, they should be letting them speak and then disagreeing or agreeing as they choose. What they must not be are nothing more than the Departments of Mind Control or Belief Control or the Fascists of the Human Spirit. People come freely to Christ or not at all. You don't like something? Say so. But do not kill the people you disagree with or dishonour their journey or struggle. Tell me, whatever happened to grace among the Christians of North America, I don't care which camp? Whatever happened to the Jesus who touched those others considered unclean? Why has Christianity become more law and less freedom? Less about seeking and more about seeking only what others say you can? Why aren't Christians known as the promoters of the eternal quest instead of as the controllers and stranglers of it? What good is finding God if you never really found him anyway but just went along with what you were told?

Are we trying to create a Christian State, with all its rules and regulations and capital punishments, especially towards the arts, are we trying to establish a Christian Republic or Empire - or are we trying to call forth the kingdom of God? Because they are not the same. Jesus never formed an army or wrote a constitution or declared himself a world ruler. His kingdom was meant to be salt and light and yeast in dough and a seed that became a tree for all the winged creatures, no matter what a person's profession, lawyer, doctor, politician, author. But it was never meant to be Empire. Not in this world. It is one thing to influence. Another to control. Christians were never called to be despots. Never called to bring darkness and ignorance. Never called to rend and tear. They were called to bring light and liberty and the pursuit of truth, confident the true God would be found if a true quest were permitted. We are not the book burners. We are the people of the book. We are the readers and the writers and the thinkers and the wonderers.

"Dort, wo man Bucher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen." Heinrich Heine, from his play Almansor (1821).

"Where they have burned books they will end in burning human beings."

Chocolate Jesus

I had just said I was dreading the day when the confectioners would decide public opinion and public demand were in their favour and chocolate crosses and chocolate Jesuses came out at Easter. Crosses filled with marshmallow or a sticky creamy sweetness - or crosses that were hollow. Angels of white chocolate, dark chocolate or milk chocolate. Jesus - hey, I'm gonna eat his foot first, I'm gonna eat his hands, I'm gonna eat his nose, I'm gonna bite off his head. The height of the trivialization of the Christian faith. And I feared I might see them first in Christian bookstores - "It's great, just great, sales are great, and we give them a free colour booklet of the Easter Story along with the milk chocolate Christ figure. It makes the gospel message hit home with them."

So there it was as I checked the internet news at the beginning of my day. A Chocolate Jesus! Fuming, I clicked into the story. A sculptor in New York, a gallery in New York, a Chocolate Jesus entitled My Sweet Lord. The New York Catholics were up in arms. Complaints were sizzling into the gallery. Boycotts and public protests were threatened. Well, it was not mass produced little Jesus figures filled with nuts and raisins. Still, it seemed to me a bad idea at Easter to make such a figure. Imagine making a chocolate Muhammed to commemorate the day he ascended to heaven on his horse.

The controversy continued and I did not think much more about the Chocolate Jesus until I actually saw a picture of it online and on TV. The sculpture was surprising. It was Jesus on the cross though there was no cross. Somehow I had it in my head the whole thing was a sculptor's stunt to gain a day or week of notoriety and that the Christ figure would be a caricature of sorts. But it was not that. The figure had great dignity. The chocolate gleamed darkly over arms and legs and face and chest. It was simply and powerfully done.

I thought: Well, then, if this Christ figure had been done in ebony or marble or stone there would have been no complaints. It's a work of art. It's sublime. There is a quiet strength about the whole piece. But because Easter bunnies are made of chocolate, and this Christ figure has been made of chocolate at Easter time, people have reasoned the sculptor has meant to equate the son of God with Peter Cottontail and trivialize and mock what is holy and sacred. So the gallery shut down the exhibition. A mistake, I came to realize as I viewed the dark Christ.

For what the sculptor had succeeded in doing was taking a substance that is considered no more than mouth candy, and by fashioning a dying brooding Christ out of it, had ironically changed the candy into a substance made profound by the significance of its subject. Jesus had not been changed into candy. Jesus had changed the chocolate into something more, a substance capable of doing far more than sweeten the mouth, a substance capable of challenging the stone and marble and wood and iron and copper of the sculptor's art. No longer meant simply for bunnies or eggs or Pot of Gold boxed treats, a chocolate crucified Christ had transcended those shelves of Easter indulgences and made the mix of sugar and cocoa worthy of fashioning objects of excellence, reflection and, yes, veneration. It was the shallowness and frivolity of what we now call Easter that was transformed. Not the other way around.

I hope we may see the Dark Christ again and that he may be displayed properly and at length and the artist given the respect that is due. There is more of Easter in that sculpture than is found in millions of homes whose carpets are littered with the bright foil of chocolate eggs unwrapped in haste and with little inclination towards a faith of any kind.

Ashes

When it was my turn to honour Ash Wednesday among the churches of our town I went to my wood stove and scooped out ashes that were white and grey and black. They did not look any different than the ashes of my father and mother which are in two stained glass urns near the oak desk where I write. The ashes of the stove are not ashes of bones and nails and human faces loved. But they are the ashes of memory of those faces I kissed.

For the wood was burned in the fall when the weather turned cool and I spent more hours sitting in my chair across from the stove, reading and wondering and remembering. Wood was burned on All Hallow's Eve and All Saints Day. It was burned on Christmas Eve. It was burned on my birthday in January, Bobby Burns Day. It was burned on Valentine's Day.

And not only on those special occasions but whenever friends gathered and the air and stars outside were sharp. To talk and joke and drink coffee and tea. To pray. To crack a book or Bible. Even strangers came around the fire. And the dogs too, a brother and sister, snow dogs, Malamutes, sled dogs with their thick fluffy fur who value the dry wood heat in its season, who carry memories themselves of ancestors and kin who huddled around fires and around themselves for the warmth they could get on a long Arctic winter night.

All these experiences were in the ashes. All the feelings. The humour. The hard memories that can bring water to the face. Prayers. Hope. Despair. The Incarnation. Immanuel. My birth. My death. All these ashes were mixed with water to honour Christ who loops birth with death, and death with resurrection, Christmas wih Easter, our old births with new births, tomorrow and eternity, heaven over hell, light over darkness.

So I put these ashes on people's foreheads: Baptist foreheads, Mennonite foreheads, Pentecostal foreheads, Anglican foreheads, Catholic foreheads. And something different, on people's palms, remembering the nails, and people took the ashes on both of their palms too: women's palms, men's palms, children's palms.

What we burn, our nights, our thoughts and dreamings and fearings, our ashes are what we are, black and white and grey, and it is also where Christ is and where all people are.

Kentucky's Wendell Berry

Now here's a guy who was asked to come to Stanford and teach creative writing by no less a person than the late great Wallace Stegner. No, Berry said. And no he said more than once as Stegner and Stanford pressed. Years and years later, as stories continued to pour from Berry's imagination, Stegner admitted that Berry had been right to stay on his family farm and pen literature. For if he'd come to Stanford who knows but that half or more of Berry's stories might never have been written? Not only because of time constraints - the university and students and colleagues would have kept him busy - but because Berry would have been disconnected from his ancestral land, the land that nurtures the bulk of his writing.

It's a good thing for all of us to remember. Do what you know is good for you to do, what is right for you to do, and make sure you plant yourself in an environment that allows you to do it. And maybe something else - know yourself and what's good for you better than other people do.

Berry has written so many poems and novels and short stories and essays that I would have to write a dissertation on this blog to discuss half of them. So let's just put it like this: Like many writers before him, Berry has created a fictional world full of houses and acreages and plants and people and weather that goes on for hundreds of stories. This gives him the freedom to talk about everything under the sun. Suppose Emerson or Thoreau had hunkered down and created a county and a town with their imaginations and then went on to write a thousand tales about the people in that county and town? Or suppose Robert Frost or Carl Sandburg decided to do the same? Bend their poetry to prose and create an entire new world of personalities and families and all the windfall of generations over decades of living and birthing and working and praying and dying? Lots of times when I read Berry's words I think of wooden hoe handles rubbed smooth by two or three generations of hands, I think of split rail fencing, I think of soil and air and rain. So I think especially of Frost. And then I think of the eternities that such rough-hewn writing evokes. His works are all about connectedness and the tale is told in a lifetime of different ways.

Berry's spirituality is of a Christian bent. He is not shy about admitting that. The way his Christianity bends may not be to everyone's taste. But then, your spirituality is not to everyone's taste, nor is mine. In any case, good things grow out of his Christ soil. Honest things. Straightforward things. Maybe you'd like his writing, maybe not. Find out.

If you like poetry, start with his poems. There's lots of them and you're sure to find some gems that bear down well on your soul. As for his world-creating stories of fictional Port William, Kentucky, where does one start? At the beginning? Maybe not. There might be a time when it's right for you to go back to the beginning like an historian and start reading from there. Until then, why not just drop right down into the middle of the tales and see what happens? His stories stand on their own. I would tell you to pick up the book "Fidelity" and begin with the title story of that collection of short fiction. You can listen to me or not.

Berry is still with us. Keep that in mind in case you want to write him or visit him or go to a book signing. It's good to have him around. Good to have him talking and walking the land. It makes the world less lonely.


The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.