Suite Francaise

I go through phases with reading novels. For a time, I will read novels rapaciously, one after the next. Novels are the books that I cannot put down. I have stayed up all night reading: The Great Gatsby, Slaughterhouse Five, Barney's Version, The Brothers Karamazov. Then I will go through months, years! of not cracking a novel, consumed as I can get with the stuff of my last post. But recently a good friend and colleague (another Matthew), recommended Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky. She wrote it during the Nazi occupation of France, before perishing in the death camp of Auschwistz. Her daughters protected the manuscript, thinking it was a journal, only to find out later it was a breathtaking fiction. Only recently was it translated from the French. I started it last night, and read the first several chapters. It has the feel, even in translation, of a classic. So, if you're the novel-reading sort, I recommend Suite Francaise.

Chalcedon feels like a guilty pleasure...

Over lunch I browsed the stacks in the Rutherford Library at the University of Alberta. It is one of the reasons I love working on campus. (For those of you who don't know, I am employed by Athabasca University, but work fully integrated into a Government of Alberta branch, helping to protect historic buildings and other cultural landscapes). I came across this new, three-volume, critical edition of The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon. It is beautifully done. I waded in briefly to the first few pages of the proceedings of this Council, and the translation reads elegantly, conjuring up what it must have felt like, eight days before the Ides of October, 451, when the bishops and imperial officials gathered together in the Church of the holy martyr Euphemia. I have to admit, it is almost like a soap opera, with the degree of drama the opening ceremonies of the Council experienced: accusations of murder, threats, and thwarted egos. And in the midst of it, the two Natures of the Incarnate One are revealed. I feel like a fly on the wall. I want to linger.

Carve out a few hours of leisure and go read this. The Ochlophobist is the new Josef Pieper.

Better Than Life

This post, writtten by a guy I heard speak (but didn't meet) at the AAR Conference (an Olivet alumni no less!), has gotten me terriby nostalgic. I remember the first book I ever stayed up all night reading - The Great Gatsby, on Labour Day 2005, under the apple tree in my parent's back yard. When it got too cold and dark, I moved inside to the green-shag-covered living room. Daniel Pennac was right. Sometimes reading is "better than life."

The Tables of the Law

Krista and I had a rejuvenating Labour Day weekend. It got started with dinner out at Murrieta's on Whyte Ave., and then Amy's birthday party on Friday night was a convivial time with friends old and new. On Saturday we cleaned and made beet borsht (with beets from our garden), waiting for our good friends from Victoria, Mira and Matthew to arrive. Spending the weekend with them was a breath of fresh air - good food and drink, conversation, prayer at Church and home, a visit to Fort Edmonton, and also reading the whole of Four Quartets together Sunday night.

My other good friend Matthew (from work) passed on to me Thomas Mann's novel about Moses, The Tables of the Law. It has a promising beginning:

"His birth was irregular, hence it was he passionately loved order, the absolute, the shalt and shalt not.

In his youth, in a blazing fit of rage, he had killed a man; so he knew, better than the innocent, that to kill is very fine but to have killed is most horrible, and that it is forbidden to kill.

His senses were hot, so he craved the spiritual, the pure, the holy; he craved the unseen, because he felt that the unseen was spiritual, holy and pure."

I am thinking that this novel would be a good companion to Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Moses.

This image of the giving of the Law, and the accompanying Golden-calf shenanigans in the Valley, is by the contemporary Jewish artist Shlomo Katz.

The Rivers North of the Future

Last Thursday I drove over 1100km, meeting with town officials in the predominantly LDS communities of Raymond and Stirling. After our meetings, I had a good visit with one of the guys, a young Mormon from Surrey my age, about his time of mission, proselytizing in Portugese to the tiny Brazilian community of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

On the drive home up the QE2 Highway, amidst severe thunderstorms, I listened to Ideas on the CBC. It was a sort of "best of" type show, and they played an old clip of Ivan Illich (1926-2002) speaking at the University of Toronto sometime in the 80s. This mercurial priest-historian has captured my attention at various times, with his scathing critique of what passes as "development," in terms of schooling, institutions, and modern culture more broadly. Having been introduced to Illich's thought by my good friend Matt Friesen, it made me remember my friend as well. David Cayley, the Ideas contributor, was featured, along with his recent book culled from conversations with Illich. Apparently, Illich had long wanted to write about his understanding of modernity in relationship to the Christian gospel. He never had the opportunity to do that, but the transcripts of his conversations with Cayley eventually evolved into The Rivers North of the Future.



The title of the book is taken from a poem by the German poet Paul Celan:

Into the rivers north of the future
I cast out the net, that you
hesitantly burden with stone-engraved
shadows

The book contains Illich's usual spectrum of thought, which chapters on such themes as "The Gospel and the Gaze," "Contingency, Part 2: The Origin of Technology," "Friendship," and "On Knowing How to Die: The Last Days of Savonarola."

On his final day of conversations with Cayley, Illich said this:

"My work is an attempt to accept with great sadness the fact of Western culture. Christopher Dawson ... says that the Church is Europe and Europe is the Church, and I say yes! Corruptio optimi quae est pessima. [The corruption of the best is the worst.] Through the attempt to insure, to guarantee, to regulate Revelation, the best becomes the worst... I live also with a sense of profound ambiguity. I can't do without tradition, but I have to recognize that its institutionalization is the root of an evil deeper than any evil I could have known with my unaided eyes and mind."


And then, Cayley recounts this story:

"In an interview that Illich recorded with his friend Douglas Lummis in Japan in the winter of 1986-87, Lummis asks him about a "possible future." "To hell with the future," Illich replies. "It's a maneating idol. Institutions have a future... but people have no future. People have only hope." Since there obviously was, and will be, a tommorrow, I interpret this curse in two ways. First, it points to the fact that no sane person can project the future of the economic utopia of endless growth in which we live as anything but catastrophe, sooner or later. Second, and even more important, the future as an idol devours the only moment in which heaven can happen upon us: the present. Expectation tries to compel tommmorrow; hope enlarges the present and makes a future, north of the future."

The One Book - Here it is, Victoria...

1. One book that changed your life:
The Book of Revelation (in the Bible)

2. One book that you’ve read more than once:
For many years, I read The Great Gatsby every Labour Day, in honour of the fact that it was the first book I ever stayed up all night reading. And, of course, I am constantly reading Four Quartets.

3. One book you’d want on a desert island:
Jesus and the Victory of God by NT Wright or perhaps A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth (another favourite novel)

4. One book that made you laugh:
Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler. His last, greatest novel is heartbreaking but hilarious. I also stayed up all night reading this one. Killer ending.

5. One book that made you cry (at least on the inside):
Peace Shall Destroy Many by Rudy Wiebe

6. One book that you wish had been written:
The Real John Wesley: Up Close and Personal by Mrs. Wesley

7. One book that you wish had never been written:
Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled At the end of its absurd seven or eight hundred pages (or whatever), I was supremely disappointed.

8. One book you’re currently reading:
The Nicene Faith by John Behr.

9. One book you’ve been meaning to read:
Silence by Shusaku Endo

Evdokimov's brilliance

This book is challenging me and greatly helping me understand some things I've been struggling to understand for some time.

In Evdokimov's words: "We proceed from Christ, the Alpha in whom there is neither male nor female (which means that everyone finds his or her image in him); as men and women we move towards Christ, the Omega, in whom there is neither male nor female. But this time, the differentiation is overcome within the Body of Christ, the human pleroma (fullness) entirely integrated in Christ" (pp.24-25).

What does Evdokimov - or Paul, for that matter - mean when they say that in Christ "there is neither male nor female?" Obviously, the Incarnate One was male... is he saying that in Him the brokenness of humanity (male and female), created in His image, is being redeemed?

Admittedly, part of my questioning on these issues comes from my upbringing and formation in a Christian denomination which historically ordained women, from its beginning (in 1895). In fact, one of my professors in Manchester (who also grew up in the Church of the Nazarene) as a kid was sort of surprised men could preach as his childhood pastors were women! While most Nazarene clergy today are men, to this day, some of the most gifted ministers in that tradition, including some good friends of mine, are women. What I had to understand is that the understanding of the ministry is somewhat in a different key, and that the issue is not really so much about rights (on the one hand) or preaching, teaching or pastoral skill, but about revealing basic issues about Creation and the whole economy of its sanctification. Thus the liturgy is a microcosm of that, which can only be enacted by certain players. Only after reading For the Life of the World, did the maleness of the liturgical priesthood begin to make any sense to me. Thankfully, Evdokimov is filling in the many gaps that remain in my understanding.