Trudy J. Morgan-Cole's Blog, page 61

Searching Sabbath 26: Death and Resurrection

There just two more to go in this series on Adventist beliefs and while I’ve enjoyed doing it I’m glad in a way that they’re coming to an end, because I haven’t really had time to do any blogging except the Wednesday and Sabbath videos, and I’d like to get back to more actual writing here on the blog, much as I like doing the videos.

This week we’re on a topic about which I am a very traditional Adventist. I am heartily in agreement with the Biblical nature of our teaching about death and the afterlife — I don’t believe the idea of an immortal soul is Biblical, which does away with the (evil, in my opinion) doctrine of an eternally burning hell. I wrote a column for Adventist Today  a couple of years thing that talked about the odd gaps that occurrences that sometimes make me question this belief — the people who genuinely believe, for example, that they have received a sense that a dead loved one is present with them. Yet in the end I always come down firmly on the side of one of the first “proof texts” I ever learned — “The living know that they shall die, but the dead know now anything” (Ecclesiastes 9:5).

Everything else I have to say on this topic is in the video; everything you have to say can be put in the comments.

 

Writing Wednesday 49: We Need to Talk About Lily

Some authors interview their characters — and, indeed, I’ve had a shot at that in the past. This week I’m not so much interviewing Lily as going head-to-head with her on a recent change I made to her storyline. Without giving away too much of the story, Lily and I thrash it out.

Next week is my 50th episode of Writing Wednesday and I’ll be doing another Q&A video, so if you have questions about writing, books, etc.,  leave them in the comments here and I’ll try to answer them all next week.

Searching Sabbath 25: The Second Coming

As I near the end of this series exploring the beliefs of the church I belong to I come to the one that started it all: the belief that human history as we know it will end with the return of Jesus to establish His heavenly kingdom at a date we can’t specify but have been describing since 1844 as “soon.” This naturally raises all kinds of questions, “How Soon is Soon?” is, in fact, the title of the last sermon I was ever asked to preach in my home church (you can see a clip from it here and make your own judgement about why I haven’t been asked since, but to be honest, not preaching has been kind of a blessing in many ways). Still, the vlog above brings me to about the same conclusion as that sermon did: continuing to preach “Jesus is coming soon!” for over 150 years will certainly stir up a sense of urgency in some, but will lead to cynicism in many others as they look back at all the generations for whom He didn’t come. That said, I am no more convinced than I ever was by the belief that we humans don’t need rescue, that we are capable of building a better world in the here and now without divine intervention. I just don’t see human history trending that way.

Which would leave me in utter despair if I did not believe Jesus meant it when He said “I will come again.” Once again, this is one of those statements of belief that leave me feeling out of kilter with both my Adventist and non-Adventist friends … I’m sure many Adventists, and some other evangelical Christians, feel a stronger sense of impetus about the Second Coming and the need to preach its imminence than I do, but my less religious friends and even many liberal Christian friends probably think I’m crazy for believing in such a thing as a Second Coming at all. But, as so often, this is where I find myself: perched between faith and doubt, resting my hope on something that seems far-fetched and yet without which, the world makes no sense (and the Bible certainly makes far less).

What about you? What do you think about the end of the world, final judgement, and Jesus’ return to this earth?

By the way I’ll note here that last week a great discussion about the heavenly sanctuary broke out among people who’d seen the blog, but it was on my Facebook page. My intention is that when people leave interesting comments on Facebook, with their permission I’m going to copy those comments here to the blog so that later when I look back at this series I’ll be able to see the responses as well as my posts, since dialogue and discussion are my main interests in using this format to explore my beliefs.

Writing Wednesday 48: How to Drive a Writer Crazy

When you’re working towards the goal of producing a book, lots of things can make you crazy, from well-intentioned friends asking what you’re working on, to characters who won’t behave appropriately. When you’ve written and published a book and are promoting it, lots more things can make you crazy, like people who stop at your table at a book signing and mistake you for a bookstore employee. If you’re a writer, what drives you crazy? If I get enough good ideas I may make a second one of these…

Searching Sabbath 24: The Heavenly Sanctuary

I’m sorry this one lacks the passion, conviction and intensity of last week’s video, but I have to admit that Adventist teaching on Christ’s ministry in the heavenly sanctuary is not a subject that has ever gotten me all fired up. For some Adventists and former Adventists it’s a real test of faith — either the doctrine that makes it impossible for them to stay in the church, or the doctrine which absolutely must be believed if one is to call oneself a Seventh-day Adventist — but I’ve never been able to give that kind of weight to it. Any speculation about when the judgement begins or about what might or might not be happening in heaven right now (I’m more likely to get distracted by questions like “Where exactly is heaven? Is it on a planet? Orbiting what star?”) seem pretty irrelevant to the way I attempt to live the life of faith.

So, having tried to briefly explain the doctrine as I understand it in the video above, I’m going to reproduce the statement of belief here and perhaps someone in the comments will come along to tell me why this teaching is of such vital importance to them. I was quite disappointed last week that I didn’t hear more in comments from those who support the traditional point of view, but perhaps this week will be of more interest to commenters. Engaging in dialogue is what really interests me about this process.

Seventh-day Adventists believe that …

There is a sanctuary in heaven, the true tabernacle which the Lord set up and not man. In it Christ ministers on our behalf, making available to believers the benefits of His atoning sacrifice offered once for all on the cross. He was inaugurated as our great High Priest and began His intercessory ministry at the time of His ascension. In 1844, at the end of the prophetic period of 2300 days, He entered the second and last phase of His atoning ministry. It is a work of investigative judgment which is part of the ultimate disposition of all sin, typified by the cleansing of the ancient Hebrew sanctuary on the Day of Atonement. In that typical service the sanctuary was cleansed with the blood of animal sacrifices, but the heavenly things are purified with the perfect sacrifice of the blood of Jesus. The investigative judgment reveals to heavenly intelligences who among the dead are asleep in Christ and therefore, in Him, are deemed worthy to have part in the first resurrection. It also makes manifest who among the living are abiding in Christ, keeping the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus, and in Him, therefore, are ready for translation into His everlasting kingdom. This judgment vindicates the justice of God in saving those who believe in Jesus. It declares that those who have remained loyal to God shall receive the kingdom. The completion of this ministry of Christ will mark the close of human probation before the Second Advent.

Summer Book Reviews: The Hard and the Easy

This is supposed to be a review of every book I read over the summer. In fact as I scurried around trying to collect copies of all the books to show you and get this all filmed before going back to school, I left a couple out and didn’t realize it till I’d finished editing and uploading the video and it was too late to change it. But all the book reviews are on my book review blog at http://compulsiveoverreader.wordpress.com . And, as usual, if you comment here or share this video on Facebook or Twitter, I’ll put your name in a drawing to win one of these books.

Searching Sabbath 23: Marriage and the Family

As you know if you’re an avid follower of my blog (all three of you), Searching Sabbath has been on hiatus for a few weeks while I’ve been doing summer-vacation-y stuff. But I’ll be back with the last six episodes in this series over the next six weeks (I can say this with some confidence because I’ve already filmed them, which means my hairstyle is not going to change in these videos over the next six weeks, even though in real life it will). And of course I chose my single most controversial topic to come back with. Oh, go ahead, click and watch it. Along with being controversial, you’ll get to see me oversharing a bit.

First, let’s look at the SDA church’s actual statement of belief on marriage.

Marriage was divinely established in Eden and affirmed by Jesus to be a lifelong union between a man and a woman in loving companionship. For the Christian a marriage commitment is to God as well as to the spouse, and should be entered into only between partners who share a common faith. Mutual love, honor, respect, and responsibility are the fabric of this relationship, which is to reflect the love, sanctity, closeness, and permanence of the relationship between Christ and His church. Regarding divorce, Jesus taught that the person who divorces a spouse, except for fornication, and marries another, commits adultery. Although some family relationships may fall short of the ideal, marriage partners who fully commit themselves to each other in Christ may achieve loving unity through the guidance of the Spirit and the nurture of the church. God blesses the family and intends that its members shall assist each other toward complete maturity. Parents are to bring up their children to love and obey the Lord. By their example and their words they are to teach them that Christ is a loving disciplinarian, ever tender and caring, who wants them to become members of His body, the family of God. Increasing family closeness is one of the earmarks of the final gospel message.

As I say in the video above, I’m wholly in support of this statement: the only part I have a problem with is how the church is choosing to interpret the phrase “between a man and a woman.” In other words, in common with almost all conservative Christian churches, ours states that the original Biblical intent was a marriage between one man and one woman for life. However, later in the belief statement there’s an exception clause: “Although some family relationships may fall short of the ideal, marriage partners who fully commit themselves to each other in Christ may achieve loving unity through the guidance of the Spirit and the nurture of the church.”

It’s pretty clear to me that this statement is in there to allow our denomination, like many others, to get around the plain Biblical statement that re-marriage after divorce is unacceptable. In love and compassion towards our divorced members, we have chosen to say (rightly, I believe) that the church will nurture and support those whose marriages have ended and who are embarking on second marriages. 

The question I can’t understand is: why do we not extend that same grace and compassion to gay and lesbian brothers and sisters in committed same-sex relationships?

Actually, what interests me most, after I’ve been hammering away at this question for so long (and I’ve blogged about this issue here, here and here) is not even the question itself; it’s how people react to the question. If the mere fact that I’ve raised that issue and posed the question that way makes you recoil in horror and place me in the outermost ring of extreme heretics, you might want to ask yourself “Why?” Why is this one issue — homosexuality, same-sex marriage, etc — such a deal-breaker for our faith, when other issues relating to marriage and the family, like second marriages or couples who are childless by choice (which is a pretty clear violation of the purpose of marriage according to Genesis) don’t invite that same horrified response?

The answer I’ve sometimes gotten when discussing this with fellow Adventists is that, well, there are lots of issues around adultery, divorce, second marriages, etc., that we can debate and discuss how to handle them, but gay sex is always wrong, that’s a Biblical absolute we can’t tamper with. But why? Why do we take Leviticus 18:22 (“You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female: it is an abomination”) as an absolute, always-applicable statement, and take Jesus’ own words in Luke 16:18 (“Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and he who marries one who is divorced from a husband commits adultery”) as open to negotiation?

I’m pretty sure the reason we do this has everything to do with deep-seated distrust of and bigotry against gay people, and very little to do with how we actually read and interpret the Bible. Using the same texts and the same guiding principles that drive our approach to marriage and the family now, we could just as easily conclude that monogamy, not gender, is the deal-breaking factor in decided which marriages will be accepted and supported by the church.

I realize this discussion could (and probably will) go on forever, but this blog post can’t, so I want to raise two points before I go and we leave this whatever people might want to bring up in comments.

1. I do understand that the Seventh-day Adventist church is not about to change its views on homosexuality and same-sex marriage anytime soon. But even without such a radical re-thinking of our teaching on marriage and the family, there are a number of things we could be doing to be more Christlike in our treatment of our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters. We could return to our traditional stance on religious liberty and affirm that same-sex marriages or civil unions should be legal because it’s unfair to deny anyone else equal rights because of our religious teachings. We could speak out strongly against the bullying that gay and lesbian teens often face in schools and, yes, in churches. We could offer greater support and encouragement to those gay and lesbian Christians in our midst who attempt to do exactly what we claim they should be doing — living celibate lives, but who often still feel they need to hide who they are. And we could treat gay and lesbian couples who worship in our midst at least as respectfully as we treat divorced and remarried straight people. Without any serious re-evaluation of our theology on sexuality and marriage, we could be doing a lot more to demonstrate love, grace and compassion. I honestly think the vast majority of conservative Christians have no concept of the amount of judgement, hate and condemnation to which gays and lesbians are subjected — often in church and in the name of a loving God.

2. Finally, I want to put three situations before you and ask you to think about your response. As I read both my Bible and my SDA church teachings, these situations are roughly parallel in many ways.

a. Jan is married to Herb, who is abusive. Fearing for her own safety and that of her children, Jan leaves Herb and gets a divorce. Herb insists that she is still his wife and should come back to him. Jan moves with her children to another city, where she meets and eventually marries Frank, a kind and gentle Christian man who is a good stepfather to her children. Her ex-husband, Herb, remains unmarried.

b. Josh and Suzi get married right after high school. Though they are very much in love, they have a difficult time making their marriage work out and frequently argue. After five years of marriage, they simply can’t make it work anymore, Though neither has cheated on the other, they go their separate ways and get divorced. A few years later, Suzi remains unmarried, but Josh has fallen in love with Anne, a young woman who attends his church and is much more compatible with him than Suzi was. Josh and Anne get married and shortly afterwards start a family.

c. Trevor is a young gay man who has grown up in church believing that he has to keep his sexual identity a secret if he is to be accepted. In university he meets Derek, who is also a Christian. After being close friends and then dating for awhile, Trevor and Derek get married and later adopt a baby.

My question is, if these three couples — Jan and Frank, Josh and Anne, Trevor and Derek — showed up in your church along with their children, how would they be treated? According to the strictest interpretation of the Scriptures and of the teachings of the SDA church (and several other conservative denominations), none of these three relationships is a valid marriage. While most clergy today would be extremely sympathetic to Jan’s plight and her decision to leave Herb (though there are still some, regrettably, who would counsel her to stay with her abuser, a horrible piece of advice that would have been far more common in the past), she is not free to remarry, nor is Josh in case B, because in both situations their former partner has not committed adultery.

In practical terms in most Adventist churches, this means that the couples in cases A and B would have their wedding ceremony performed quietly either by a justice of the peace or a minister from another denomination, and then go on attending their SDA church. In many churches they would be welcomed immediately into an active role in church life (or allowed to continue an active role if that’s what they had been doing before). In some more conservative denominations there would be a period of “censure,” several months to a year, in which they would be obliquely punished for remarrying before their previous spouses did — the censure usually taking the form of not allowing them to hold church office. If that didn’t turn them off the church, they would generally be welcomed into full membership and participation when the period of censure was over. Either way, in practical terms, almost no-one would question the right of Jan and Frank, or Josh and Anne, to attend and participate in church.

But Trevor and Derek? In the vast majority of Adventist churches, they and their child would not be welcome as members of the congregation, much less allowed to hold church office or participate in any leadership role — not for a designated period of “censure,” but for life.

Why? What’s the theological difference between the three situations? And if, in reading these three stories, your immediate reaction is sympathy for Jan and Frank, and for Josh and Anne, but disgust towards Trevor and Derek — why? Where is that response coming from? From Scripture, or from your own biases?

I think, at the very least, it’s a question worth asking and discussing.

Writing Wednesday 47: Magic at Tatamagouche

I made this video last week at the Independent Writers’ Retreat at Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia, and tried to capture in under five minutes a little of what made that retreat so great. Without resorting to too many cliches. When that proved difficult, I talked to some of the other articulate writers there and got their thoughts about it.

Buzz Buzz

I’ve been cloistered all week at an idyllic writers’ retreat where the only fly in the ointment, as it were, is the number of mosquitos ready to feast on your flesh whenever you go outside. And maybe it’s the juxtaposition of all those writers with all those stinging insects that’s made me finally decide to write a post about something that’s been on my mind for awhile: the whole idea of Book Buzz.

Book Buzz is the weird phenomenon by which a book becomes the “next big thing,” the book everyone’s reading, simply because everybody is reading it. Everytime you go anywhere on public transit or sit in a waiting room, somebody’s reading that book. A friend calls to tell you you have to read that book. When you walk into your local bookstore you are presented with a human-high shelf display of that book.

I do not want to be one of those authors who gets all sour-grapey and insists that only trashy books ever get Book Buzz while all the great literary masterpieces remain unread. That’s patently untrue. Lots of great books get Book Buzz. So do lots of terrible ones. What seems obvious to me is that there is no correlation to be drawn — none whatsoever, either positive or negative — between Book Buzz and the literary quality of a book.

We’d like to believe there is … we writers, at least. We’d like to believe that good books get noticed and talked about because their genuine quality shines through. And maybe some of us even cherished that belief a little … until 50 Shades of Grey.

I had the pleasure once of doing a book signing in a local store right at the midst of the 50 Shades frenzy. Throughout the two-hour signing window as I sat there with my modest little work of local historical fiction, I saw at least a dozen women walk up to the that towering display and say, “Oh, look, there’s that … that Fifty Shades thing, isn’t that the one Sandra was going on and on about?” Well, OK, they didn’t all say Sandra, but many of these women knew little or nothing about the books — only that they’d heard a lot about them.

It’s so simple and obvious: what sells books is not literary quality. Or lack thereof. What sells books is people hearing about those books. Hearing about them in the media, seeing multiple copies face-out at the front of the bookstore, hearing from others who have read them.  So the real question becomes not “Why do some books sell better than others?” but “Why do some books acquire buzz and others don’t?”

I can think of three factors:

1) Author name recognition. Let’s face it, if an author is already known and already a best-seller, his or her new books will get more attention. The most obvious example of this is J.K. Rowling, and I don’t say this to discount her talent, because I am a fan of all the Harry Potter books AND of The Casual Vacancy. I think she’s a very good writer, but there are lots of other good writers, some better than Rowling, whose books don’t get the sales and the level of attention hers get because J.K. Rowling’s name is not on the cover. She’s just proven this herself with the very intriguing episode of The Cuckoo’s Calling,  the mystery novel which sold fewer than 1500 copies when it was released under the name Robert Galbraith, and jumped to the top of bestseller lists the day after J.K. Rowling revealed that Galbraith was her pseudonym. Did the book become better overnight? Of course not. What changed? People knew about it. They had heard of it, and they knew it was from a writer they liked and trusted. And millions bought it.

2) Publisher clout. It is a truth universally acknowledged — and if it’s not, it should be — that the bigger the publisher, the bigger the buzz. Small presses don’t have the money and influence to get their authors on Oprah, to get reviews in the biggest and best literary reviews, to get hundreds of copies on a big display in the major chain bookstores. And if small indie presses can’t do it, what do you think are the odds of self-publishers doing it? Incredibly slim. Not nonexistant — occasionally a book arises from the depths of nowhere to become the Buzz Book of the month — but you can bet the farm that the vast majority of the books that you hear everyone talking about and see everyone reading came from one of a handful of big publishing houses with a lot of money and a lot of clout behind them.  (By the way, this doesn’t happen for every book that comes from a major publisher … each publisher has a few books each season that they push really hard, and many, many others get lost in the bookstore just like books from indie presses do).

3) An indefinable … something. There is definitely a factor to Book Buzz that lies outside either of the two factors listed above and is uncontrollable — just the unpredictable luck that links a book to a major event or news story, or brings an otherwise-obscure book to the attention of a famous person, or sometimes just causes a book to catch on with readers in a huge way. And you can’t always define why. 50 Shades of Grey was initially self-published online; the weird phenomenon of Twilight fanfic reimagined as a kinky romp becoming so popular online that its author was offered a traditional publishing contract became, in itself, the news story that propelled the book’s buzz. J.K. Rowling has name recognition now, but when Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone came out the book was not a major release or attended by any spectacular amount of buzz — Book Buzz grew as people read and enjoyed the book. But why that book and not any one of the many other excellent young-adult fantasies out there, just as compelling and well-written? Well, who knows. That’s where the crazy and unpredictable part comes in.

Of course every writer hopes that her book will be the one to stimulate Book Buzz and make it big, but in the absence of factors #1 and #2, you’re pinning all your hopes on #3 — and it’s a very, very, very long shot.

The good news is that a lot of books that never get Book Buzz are bought, read, loved and cherished by their few thousand readers, and that can be very rewarding for an author — certainly it has been for me. The bad news is that there are millions of other people who might also have loved those books, who will never know that they exist.

Writing Wednesday 46: Adventures in Research, Part 2

The exciting conclusion to last week’s video … to tide you over while I’m vacationing/revising at a wonderful writer’s retreat. I’ll tell you more about it next week when I get home.