Philip Yancey's Blog, page 16

Jackie’s Giant Bat

Last week I saw the movie 42, the story of Jackie Robinson, the first black major league baseball player.   Critics have found fault with 42 for being predictable and simplistic, but for long stretches while watching I had a lump in my throat, a lump of remorse and shame.  You see, I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, in the tumultuous days of the civil rights movement.

The Jim Crow culture that shocked Jackie and his wife as they traveled in the South was the accepted environment of my youth.  Although Atlanta had almost equal numbers of black and whites residents, we ate in different restaurants, played in different parks, and attended different schools and churches.

By law black people could not serve on juries, send children to white public schools, use a whites-only bathroom, sleep in a white motel, sit on the main floor of a movie theater, or swim in a white swimming pool.  Motels and restaurants refused service to African-Americans, and gas stations had three rest rooms: White Men, White Ladies, and Colored.

My high school was named for a Confederate general, and when I graduated in 1966 no black student had ever set foot on campus.  We believed that Malcolm, a short kid with a crew cut who wore metal taps on his shoes and loved to pick fights, singlehandedly kept them away.  Reputed to be the nephew of the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, Malcolm had put out the word that the first black student in our school would go home in a box.When I rode Atlanta buses, workmen and maids sat dutifully in the rear section and were required by law to give up a seat if a white rider wanted it.  In neighboring Alabama, blacks had to enter the front door to pay the driver, then exit the bus and walk outside back to the rear door —until the bus boycott led by the courageous Rosa Parks.

Those who grew up outside the South may find the mean racism in 42 incomprehensible.  Actually, it was worse than the movie depicts.  As a high school student I attended a political rally held at a fairgrounds racetrack.  Sponsors had brought together such luminaries as Alabama’s governor George Wallace and a national officer of the ultra-conservative John Birch Society, as well as Atlanta’s own Lester Maddox (who would later serve as Georgia’s governor and run for President).  We waved tiny rebel flags and cheered as the speakers denounced Washington for trampling states’ rights.  A group of twenty black men, showing bravery such as I had never before seen, showed up at that rally just to observe.  They sat together in a conspicuous dark clump in the bleachers.

Shortly after a rousing rendition of “Dixie,” hooded Klansmen arose from the crowd and began an ominous climb down those bleachers, surrounding the cluster of black men.  The blacks looked around in vain for an escape route.  At last, frantic, a few of them started climbing a thirty-foot chain fence designed to protect spectators from the race cars, and the Klansmen scrambled to catch them.  The speaker’s bullhorn fell silent, and we all turned to watch the Klansmen pry loose the clinging bodies, as though removing prey from a trap.  They began beating them with fists and with ax handles like the ones Lester Maddox sold in his fried chicken restaurant.  After a time, a few Georgia State Patrol officers lazily made their way over and made the Klansmen stop.

Today I feel shame, remorse, and also repentance.  I grew up talking about “nigras,” not African-Americans, and swallowed the doctrine taught in my church that blacks were inferior, cursed by God.  It took years for God to break the stranglehold of blatant racism in me—I wonder if any of us gets free of its more subtle forms—and I now see that sin as one of the most poisonous, with perhaps the most toxic societal effects.  When experts discuss the underclass in urban America, they blame such things as drugs, changing values, systemic poverty, and the breakdown of the nuclear family.  Sometimes I wonder if all those problems are consequences of a deeper, underlying cause: our centuries-old sin of racism.

Traveling to other countries helped me see that the poison of racism is near-universal.  Finns tell jokes about Swedes, who tell country-bumpkin jokes about their Norwegian neighbors, though to a non-Scandinavian they all seem alike.  The Japanese look down on Filipinos while Chinese and Koreans bear historic grudges against the Japanese.  On my first trip to the pristine nation of New Zealand I turned on a radio station only to hear Kiwis speak about the Maoris with words that could have come from the American South: “Now, I’m not prejudiced or anything, but just look at how they keep their houses and yards.  They’re dirty people, they don’t take care of things.”

In the movie Mississippi Burning, Gene Hackman plays a good ole southern boy who says, “If you ain’t better than a black man [only he uses the N word], who are you better than?”  He adds, “Everybody’s got to be better than somebody.  It’s just human nature.”  Black people gave us Southerners someone to look down on, someone to mock and feel superior to.  My family moved every year or two when the rent went up, and lived sometimes in government projects and sometimes in trailer parks.  Sociologically, we may have qualified as “poor white trash.”  But, our only solace, at least we were white.

n 1947 a brave young man named Jack Robinson was asked to take on the racist establishment of major league baseball, which the movie 42 portrays in all its ugliness.  Branch Ricky, a cigar-chomping Methodist who understood showmanship as well as Christian ethics, selected Robinson from a pool of equally talented African-Americans because of his character.

In a climactic scene, Robinson asks, “You want a man who doesn’t have the guts to fight back?”  No, Ricky replies, “I want a man who has the guts not to fight back.”  Though the movie doesn’t show it, he proceeded to read a devotional passage about the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus replaces the age-old formula of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” with the far more radical principle “turn the other cheek.”

That first year, Robinson had much opportunity to put Jesus’ principle into practice.  Pitchers aimed fastballs at his head, opposing managers taunted him with obscenities and racial slurs, fans booed him, his own teammates organized a boycott against him.  Day after day, Robinson later admitted, he would get on his knees and pray for endurance and patience.

Observers of the South sometimes speak of it as “Christ-haunted.”  Perhaps they should speak of it as “race-haunted” as well.  All of us, white or black, who grew up in the South in those days bear scars.  Some black people, beaten by truncheons and bitten by police dogs, bear physical scars.  We whites bear spiritual scars.  Although I have not lived in the South for forty years, I live with its memories, like the medieval murderers who were forced to wear the corpses of their victims strapped to their backs.  The entire nation bears scars.  Who would suggest that we have achieved racial harmony, anything like “the beloved community” that Martin Luther King Jr. longed for?

I once visited King’s old church in Atlanta, Ebenezer Baptist, and sat in tears as I saw through new eyes the moral center of the black community that gave a group of people the strength to fight against bigots like me.  I was on the outside in those days, cracking jokes, spreading rumors, helping sustain a system of evil.  Inside the church, and for a time only inside the church, the black community stood tall.  My eyes, blinded by bigotry, could not see the Kingdom of God at work.

In November 2008 I toured the museum in Memphis built around the motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.  For several hours I revisited the scenes I had known as a teenager coming of age in the South.  I stood beside the Formica lunch counter salvaged from Greensboro, North Carolina, and watched videos of the college students who had sat on these vinyl seats as thugs stamped out cigarettes in their hair, squirted mustard and ketchup in their faces, then knocked them off the stools and kicked them while white policemen looked on, laughing.  On a nearby screen I saw the eerie scene of black children flying weightless through mist in Birmingham, Alabama, propelled by high-powered fire hoses, as snarling German Shepherds lunged toward them.

One room displayed a bus from Montgomery, Alabama, like the one in which Rosa Parks had refused to change seats, its two sections demarcated “Whites Only” and “Colored.”  Another room displayed a larger bus charred black, the actual Greyhound burned to a crisp by an Alabama mob intent on chasing away the Freedom Riders, who were trying to integrate transportation.  As the bus burned, the mob held its doors shut, hoping to incinerate the young riders inside.  With help from highway patrolmen the Freedom Riders escaped, though badly beaten with iron pipes and baseball bats, only to have the local hospital turn them away.

Looking back, it seems incredible to imagine such ferocity directed against people who were seeking the basic ingredients of human dignity: the right to vote, to sit on a bus, to eat in restaurants and sleep in motels, to attend college.  With shame I recalled cheering along with classmates at my all-white high school as Southern sheriffs arrested the “outside agitators” of the civil rights movement.

On the grounds of the museum, the hauntingly prophetic words from King’s final “I have been to the mountaintop” speech are forged in steel, words that caught in my throat on a sunny day mere hours after Barack Obama got elected: “I may not get there with you, but I want you to know that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”  The day after he delivered that speech King died in a pool of blood on the very spot where I was standing, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

The world of 2013 is a different place than that of 1947.  My high school has since been renamed for a black astronaut; my church that once barred black visitors eventually sold their building to an African-American congregation.  People of any color can eat, sleep, go to school, and drink from water fountains wherever they want.  The U. S. shocked the world by electing an African-American President.  These seismic changes in racial attitudes worldwide trace back to a few brave individuals who stood against the tide: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, and yes, in his own way, Jackie Robinson.

And what role did the church play in this the central political drama of the 1960s?  The civil rights movement had religious roots and was led by ministers like King who challenged an unjust system from the outside; in the tradition of biblical prophets they appealed to a higher law than the ones written by legislators.  Some white Christians joined the leaders on the front lines in Selma, Alabama, and Jackson, Mississippi, while others worked within the system to overturn unjust laws—but not all did so.

The church I attended while growing up in Atlanta took pride in the purity of its evangelical theology, and yet on this issue most church members came down solidly on the wrong side.  Like many white churches in the South, mine stubbornly opposed the civil rights movement.  It amazes me that slaves from Africa so readily adopted the religion of their owners and that African-American churches thrive today; surely the whites’ gospel must have sounded like bad news at times rather than good.

It took Southern Baptists 150 years to apologize for their support of slavery, and not until November 2008—two weeks after Obama’s election—did Bob Jones University admit their error in barring black students before 1971 and banning interracial dating until 2000.  “We failed to accurately represent the Lord and to fulfill the commandment to love others as ourselves,” said their president Stephen Jones.  Those words of apology apply to me and many other evangelicals who opposed the civil rights movement.

I could not help wondering, as I viewed the exhibits at the museum in Memphis, how much of the average Christian’s politics gets formed by surrounding culture rather than by the gospel of Jesus.  As Stephen Jones further admitted in his apology,

…for far too long, we allowed institutional policies regarding race to be shaped more directly by that ethos than by the principles and precepts of the Scriptures.  We conformed to the culture rather than provide a clear Christian counterpoint to it.

Thank you, Jackie Robinson and all the others, for showing us a different way, for providing a clear Christian counterpoint to a culture of violence, racism, and Ungrace.  And God, open our eyes to the planks in our eyes that still blind us on other issues.

(This blog includes portions adapted from my books Soul Survivor and What Good Is God?)

 

Farewell, Brennan

I’ll let you in on a dirty little secret.  A facility with words may make writers sound confident and wise but most often we write about what we long for.  Thus books on marriage often emerge from difficult marriages and books on prayer trace back to the authors’ frustrations with prayer.  No one demonstrates this pattern better than Brennan Manning, a friend who died two weeks shy of his 79th birthday, which would have been today.  Brennan piped a one-note tune, the melody of grace, and his own life both embodied and belied that theme.

When he got around to writing a memoir, Brennan titled it All Is Grace.  I had agreed to write the foreword and behind the scenes the publisher wondered whether the memoir would ever get written.  Brennan sank into a depression, gave in once more to his lifelong struggle with alcoholism, and suffered a broken shoulder and ribs from falls.  Several times I got calls from people who had booked him to speak to a college or church audience. “We’ve heard he drinks a lot,” they said.  “And that he makes up some of the stories he tells.”

Guilty on both counts.  As revealed in his memoir, by age 18 Brennan was drinking a dozen beers every night to wash down lesser amounts of rye whiskey and Japanese sake, and he had relapses throughout his speaking career.  He describes standing before an audience to impart spiritual wisdom just before checking himself into a motel and drinking himself into a stupor.  After several days on a bender he would fly directly to his next speaking engagement.  No wonder he sometimes made up stories—he had lost his grip on reality.

The memoir tells of a loveless, miserable childhood in a tough Irish Catholic family not far from New York City.  From there Brennan joined the Marine Corps and, after a dramatic conversion experience, made a U-turn into the Franciscan priesthood.  He served for a time as a campus minister at a college and seminary, joined the Little Brothers of Jesus in France where he worked as a mason’s assistant and dishwasher, spent six months in a desert cave in Spain, then returned to the U.S. to work with poor shrimp farmers and their families.  After settling in New Orleans, he left the Franciscans in order to marry, a relationship that ended in divorce after 18 years, yet another consequence of his addiction to alcohol.

Brennan began speaking to mostly evangelical Protestant audiences since his status as an “inactive priest” made him unwelcome in many Catholic gatherings.  A small, trim man with a head of snow-white hair, he would usually begin with this corny opening: “In the words of Francis of Assisi when he met Brother Dominic on the road to Umbria, ‘Hi.’”  But then something akin to possession would take place and with a strong voice and the poetic rhythm of a rap artist he would begin a riff about the grace of God.

Why is Brennan Manning lovable in the eyes of God?  Because on February 8th of 1956, in a shattering, life-changing experience, I committed my life to Jesus.  Does God love me because ever since I was ordained a priest in 1963, I roamed the country and lately all over the world proclaiming the Good News of the gospel of grace?  Does God love me because I tithe to the poor?  Does he love me because back in New Orleans I work on skid row with alcoholics, addicts, and those who suffer with AIDS?  Does God love me because I spend two hours every day in prayer?  If I believe that stuff I’m a Pharisee!  Then I feel I’m entitled to be comfortably close to Christ because of my good works.  The gospel of grace says, “B rennan, you’re lovable for one reason only—because God loves you.  Period.”

Rising in eloquence, he held audiences spellbound.  One university chaplain told me that no speaker had ever had more impact on his fickle students than this aging, alcoholic failed-priest from New Jersey.

Brennan reminded me of the “whisky priest” in Graham Greene’s great novel, The Power and the Glory.  Though we never learn the priest’s name, and he considers himself a failure, a  fool who “loves all the wrong things,” at the end of the book we meet those who have been changed—transformed even—by his life and witness.  You need only Google “Brennan Manning” to catch a glimpse of those likewise affected by him.  They include celebrities like Bono, Rich Mullins, and Billy Graham’s grandson Tully Tchvidjian as well as ordinary “ragamuffins” who first encountered the truth of God’s love through a modern whisky priest.

“To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark,” Brennan wrote.  “In admitting my shadow side, I learn who I am and what God’s grace means.”  He joined an accountability group called “Notorious Sinners,” which had mixed success in holding him accountable.  “In Love’s service, only wounded soldiers can serve,” Brennan also wrote, in Abba’s Child.  Those of us who loved him wished him not so wounded, because we knew the toll alcohol was taking on his liver and his mind.  In the end he lost most of his eyesight, fell often, and became nearly catatonic.

Using his best Irish brogue, Brennan liked to tell the story of a priest in Ireland who, on a walking tour of a rural parish, saw an old peasant kneeling by the side of the road, praying.  Impressed, the priest said to the man, “You must be very close to God.”  The peasant looked up from his prayers, thought for a moment, and then smiled, “Yes, he’s very fond of me.”  I think he told that story because he wanted so desperately to believe it.  He more than anyone knew his flaws.  He as much as anyone I know strove to serve God despite them.  I wonder, though, if in his 78+ years on earth Brennan Manning truly felt the love of God he proclaimed so powerfully to others.

Happy Birthday, Brennan.  Now, you know for sure whereof you spoke.

 

Why Do They Hate Us?

Like the rest of the country, I’m reeling from news of the terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon and the follow-up spree of violence and subsequent manhunt.  I keep flashing back to September 11, 2001, when I like most Americans sat glued to the television trying to absorb news that was unabsorbable.  Now, almost twelve years later, the cloud of fear and apprehension has descended again on the United States.

I was in China the day of the marathon, on the last leg of a trip that took my wife and me first to Malaysia, then to Beijing and Shanghai.  Friends and family were concerned about our safety in view of saber-rattling in North Korea and reports of a new bird flu epidemic in China.  Little did we know that the U. S. was the more vulnerable place.

It’s a different experience, hearing about tragedy from another country, especially one like China which tightly controls the news and blocks access to Facebook.  The Chinese press understandably focused on the graduate student from China killed in the bomb blast.  To most of the world, what happens in the U. S. seems very far away.  Three people died watching a race—meanwhile 42 died in Iraq bombings, scores died in Syria, and yet another mine collapsed in China.  To those of us Americans, however, it feels like a kick in the gut, wherever we are, and waves of helplessness and fear wash over.

Like a bipolar magnet, the United States attracts and repels with equal force.  While I was traveling, the Gallup organization reported that 150 million people would like to move permanently to the U. S., triple the number who chose either of the next two countries on the list (the U. K. and Canada).  Yet the U. S. also attracts hostility that sometimes boils over into acts of terrorism.  Why do they hate us so?

I heard a British historian answer that question with a shrug.  “You’re the top dog.  Look at the history of conquest and colonialism.  Romans, Germans, French, Dutch, Italians, Spanish, Portuguese, Mongols, Persians, Russians, British—they all took turns ruling large parts of the world, and they all inspired hatred.  It goes with the territory, especially if you’re rich.”  Others have a more sinister view: a majority of the world and a huge majority in the Middle East and Central Asia blame “US policies and actions in the world” for inciting terrorist attacks.

Traveling overseas, I had plenty of opportunity to think about the strengths and weaknesses of my country.  It occurs to me that both trace back to our love of freedom, the transcendent value that inspired our founders to pledge their lives, their fortunes, and sacred honor.

Much of the world views freedom with suspicion, focusing on its dark side.  As they see it, Americans have the freedom to own assault rifles that kill innocent children; to pollute the Internet, magazines, music, video games, and movies with pornography and violence; to allow greedy bankers to wreak economic havoc; to proselytize anyone of another religion; to divorce and abort at will, undermining family systems; to gobble up natural resources while billions live in squalor.

A Muslim nation like Malaysia prefers control.  Converting a Malay from Islam to Christianity is a serious crime.  Movies are so strictly censored that on a Malaysia Airlines flight I watched a movie in which a statue of Cupid had its backside blurred out.  “We are attracted to what we most fear,” said one thoughtful Muslim.  “Imagine what decadent American culture represents to a young Muslim who, outside his family, has never seen a woman’s knee, or even her face.”

As for China, it seems caught in a schizophrenic transition, with its women wearing the latest mini-skirted fashions and the bright lights and seductions of consumer capitalism out-dazzling anything in the West, even as the government clamps down on Google and Facebook and continues to persecute Christians and other religions in the hinterlands.

Salman Rushdie said the true battle of history is fought not between rich and poor, or socialist and capitalist, but between what he termed the epicure and the puritan.  The pendulum of society swings back and forth between “Anything goes,” and “Oh, no you don’t!”  Radical Islam swings one way; what its advocates see as the decadent West swings another.  On a beach in Malaysia I saw female Saudi tourists in full burqa garb, covered in black except for eye slits, strolling next to bikini-clad European tourists.

As an American, I felt better about our recent fractious election when I read the government-controlled newspapers in the buildup to Malaysia’s coming election.  The same party has held power since independence in 1956 and newspapers had at least 40 pages of bald propaganda about how great the party is with scant mocking mention of the opposition.  In China I had to read between the lines to guess at the truth behind the bird-flu scare and the perils of pollution (1.2 million Chinese die prematurely each year from exposure to outdoor air pollution).  I get tired of all the lawyer ads on U.S. television, but wouldn’t trade them for a country that has virtually no consumer rights.  And unless you’ve spent time in a country where corruption is endemic, you can’t really appreciate our ability to get a driver’s license, get accepted in university, or start a business without paying a substantial bribe.

The world increasingly faces the challenge of how to govern a pluralistic society in which some members cling to traditional values and find other subcultures positively offensive.  Not so long ago, most Islamic nations were championing the ideal of a secular state.  Now, fundamentalists are on the rise, vigorously resisting cardinal values of the West such as human rights, democracy, sexual equality, capitalism, a scientific worldview, religious pluralism.  Witness the murders committed against health workers who are vaccinating children against polio or against girls simply trying to get an education.

Meanwhile in the U.S., counter-cultural Christians face the challenge of living in a secular society which trumpets contrary values and is growing increasingly hostile to those who oppose them.

Freedom has always been a risky proposition.  It astonishes me that God entrusted us with  that gift, in view of our appalling abuse of freedom throughout history–beginning in Genesis, continuing to the present dark day, and including even the killing of God’s own Son.

The United States shines as a beacon to those who lack freedom, even as it represents a threat to those who fear it.  A few decades ago, just as China was emerging from the tyranny of Maoism, someone asked a Chinese general, “What is your opinion of the French and American revolutions?”  He thought for a moment on his own nation’s tumultuous history, spanning 7000 years, and replied, “Too early to tell.”

God, bless America.  We need it at such a perilous time.

Suffering, Recycled

Someone sent me this delightful video just as I was reading a book that explores the word redeem.  Slum children creating music out of garbage stands as a perfect metaphor for a word usually encountered in theology texts.

Some twenty years ago Jerry Sittser, a religion professor at Whitworth College, was involved in a horrific auto accident.  A drunk driver hit the vehicle he was driving, killing Jerry’s mother, wife, and four-year-old daughter—three generations at once.  Jerry survived, along with three other children who had significant injuries.  Not long afterward he published the book A Grace Disguised giving his reflections on the tragedy and its effect on his faith.

Last year he published a follow-up book, A Grace Revealed, describing what has happened since, including a re-marriage and the challenges of a blended family.  That book has a passage on “redemption,” for Jerry asks what good has come out of the difficult times he lived through.

Most English words that begin with the prefix re-, he notes, look backwards: we re-visit a thought, re-hab an old house, re-sume a school semester after the holidays.  The word re-deem points ahead, to God’s promise to re-store creation to its original design.  Sittser adds a further insight, that redemption always involves a cost.  To redeem a slave, someone must pay—or, in the case of the U.S. civil war, an entire nation must pay.  To redeem the world, Someone must die.

I would suggest one further aspect of redemption: though looking to the future, redemption does not erase the past.  A ransomed slave still bears the scars and memories of his time of bondage.  Creation “groans as in the pains of childbirth,” the apostle Paul says of the redemption process of planet Earth.  Jerry Sittser, the victims of war and persecution, the community of Newtown, Connecticut—they may find ways to endure suffering, even redeem it, but the painful memories will never disappear, nor should they.  Even Jesus’ resurrected body retained scars.

Indeed, this notion of redeemed suffering may be the distinctive Christian contribution to the problem of suffering.  Governments respond to suffering by attempting to remove it.  The U.S. invades Iraq—oops, there’s Afghanistan!  We help freedom fighters in Libya, but along come Egypt and Syria.  Where does it stop?  Medicine conquers smallpox and polio (almost), but what about malaria, AIDS, MRSA, and of course cancer?  Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Newtown—can we ever stop these tragedies?   No matter how well-intentioned and admirable, our attempts to remove suffering most often end up resembling the carnival game Whack-a-mole.

Each major religion has its own slant on the universal problem of suffering.  Islam says we should submit and accept all that happens as God’s will.  Doctors in Muslim countries tell me that parents rarely protest when their baby dies—grieve, yes, but not protest.  Hinduism goes further, teaching that the suffering we bear is deserved, the result of sins we committed in a previous life.  Buddhism frankly admits, “Life is suffering,” and teaches how to embrace it.

The Christian faith encourages protest, even to the extent of including the very words we can use in books like Job, Psalms, Lamentations, Jeremiah.  We pray along with Jesus that God’s will “be done on earth as it is in heaven,” and vigorously oppose the evil and suffering that keeps the prayer from being answered.

Despite what some prosperity-gospel teachers claim, we have no promise that suffering will be removed, only that it will be redeemed—or, to use a more modern word, recycled.  I take used and crushed aluminum cans to a redemption center in hopes that someone will make something useful out of them.  I drop off an outdated computer knowing that someone will remove the gold and rare earths and “redeem” them in new and better ways.

The apostle Paul likened his worldly accomplishments to a pile of dung; yet even that can be recycled, as fertilizer.  The sufferings of Martin Luther King Jr., of Nelson Mandela, of Gandhi, of Solzhenitsyn, were all redeemed in ways the persons themselves could not have imagined at the time.  And the hallmark crime of history, the execution of God’s own Son, we remember as Good Friday, not Dark or Tragic Friday.  Jesus said he could have called on legions of angels to prevent the crucifixion.  He did not.  The Christian way is not around pain, but through it.

In the movie Shadowlands, based on the life of C. S. Lewis, his wife Joy Davidman experiences a brief remission from her excruciating bout with cancer.  The two have a romantic interlude in Greece, a moment of exquisite grace.  Looking ahead to what awaits her once the cancer flares up again, Joy says, “The pain I’ll feel then is part of the happiness I feel now.  That’s the deal.”

Joy dies.  And in one of the final scenes C. S. Lewis tries to comfort her son David Gresham.  Lewis clung to belief in Heaven as a drowning man clings to a life-preserver, or perhaps as a starving man dreams of food.  He makes a subtle change in Joy’s words: “The pain I feel now is part of the happiness I’ll feel then.  That’s the deal.”

Oh, yes, and while thinking such forward-looking lofty thoughts, don’t forget to watch the present-day, very down-to-earth video above…

 

Winter Warmth

Those of us who live in snow lands love to complain about the weather. We tell stories about spending the night in a church basement when the highway shut down, and the time it got so cold that spit froze before it hit the ground. Local newscasters demonstrate how it’s actually possible to hammer a nail with a frozen banana, just so we watchers can feel proud of how tough we are. (Of course, we’re sitting inside as we watch the news.)

I’m half convinced we’re bluffing, though. I think we secretly love winter. I know I do. Skimming across a frozen lake on ice skates as the sun sets behind the mountains, making cross-country ski tracks through a foot of fresh powder, riding a chairlift to a summit rather than spending all day climbing—what’s not to like about winter in a place like Colorado?

So, to those of you who live in Florida, Brazil, or other places closer to the equator than to one of the poles, we up here on the tundra appreciate your sympathy. Truthfully, though, you don’t know what you’re missing.

In Chicago, where I used to live, winter seemed to draw out the best in people. I noticed that people seemed most cheerful on frigid days. Waiting at bus stops, commuters actually talked to each other! (About the weather, of course.) Entering a coffee shop, you need only stomp your feet and say “Brrr!” and a chorus of strangers would start swapping stories about the blizzard of ‘78 or the year the pipes froze. Even the buildings looked friendlier: puffs of smoke wafting from their chimneys made it look as if they were breathing, like something warm and organic.

Winter presents a common enemy that surrounds us in the very atmosphere. We huddle together behind barriers of plaster and brick, warming ourselves for an expedition outdoors. Together, we’re going to beat that enemy. We are like warriors in a cave, trying to work up courage against the herd of mammoths outside.

Admittedly, sometimes the mammoths win a temporary victory. I have vivid memories of March, 2003, when seven feet of snow fell on our house in Colorado and we went without electricity, heat, and water for a week. We had a fireplace in one room, at least, and enough propane gas to melt snow on the stove. I snowshoed up a hill and stood there listening to loud cracking sounds, like rifle fire: huge limbs were breaking off, and whole trees laden with snow were toppling over. Deer lunged through drifts as high as their heads, stopping to pant after each laborious leap.

“God’s voice thunders in marvelous ways,” said Elihu to Job. “He says to the snow, ‘Fall on the earth,’ and to the rain shower, ‘Be a mighty downpour.’ So that everyone he has made may know his work, he stops all people from their labor.” It happens every few years in cities like Chicago, Minneapolis, and New York. Trains cease running, cross-country skiers replace cars on the streets, and everyone stops from their labor.

Winter, above all, brings the human species down a notch, curing us of hubris. It reminds us of our true state: vulnerable creatures at the mercy of the elements, dependent on each other and also on God who created the planet. That’s a lesson all to easy to forget…until the next blizzard.

Talks at Newtown, Connecticut

Some of you have written to ask about my visit to Newtown.

Well, if you have the patience to sit still and watch a talk on your computer screen (I don’t!), here’s a link to a video of what I said to the community there.

You can also click the video below to see a different talk to the Bethel Congregation of Walnut Hill Community Church.

If you would like to view the videos within the context of the Walnut Hill Community Church website, click this link:

http://www.walnuthillcc.org/home/news/0000/00-00/missed-philip-yancey

 

 

Notes from the Land of Kazakhs

In January I went to Kazakhstan.  It’s a big country–ninth largest in the world and five times the size of Texas–yet virtually unknown until the 2006 spoof film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan by Sasha Baron Cohen.  Though the British comedian Cohen has no connection with the central Asian country, he invented and played the character Borat as a Kazakh TV reporter who visits the US.  The sexist, racist, homophobic movie at first enraged Kazakhstan leaders, but emotions cooled when they saw that tourism went up by 1000 percent after the movie’s release.  For an obscure country, any publicity is good publicity.

Here are a few observations from my brief visit:

 It seems strange to hear Asian-looking people (Kazakhstan borders Mongolia and China) speaking in Russian.  How in the world did Russia manage to impose its culture and language on so many different countries?  The US invades a country, stirs up a hornet’s nest, and gets out none too soon.  Russia dominated a huge part of Europe and Asia for decades, and to my surprise some young Kazakhs look back nostalgically on a time when life seemed more calm and orderly.  Two common names are Marlen, which combines Marx and Lenin, and Mels, an acronym for Marx/Engels/Lenin/Stalin.


The post-Soviet culture endures in the form of bureaucracy and sometimes-surly service.  When a waitress offers you three “specials,” you may find that your first two choices are no longer available.  Hotel staff stand around with their hands in their pockets.  It took three people to check me into the hotel’s fitness center (which doesn’t open until ten a.m.) and four calls to get a leaky toilet fixed in my hotel room.  And not once during my visit did I hear the words, “Have a nice day.”


The landscape of Kazakhstan resembles western states like Colorado, where I live: grassy plains, arid regions, snow-capped mountains.  Appropriately for such a setting, Kazakhs have a love affair with horses.  They love them so much, in fact, that horse meat is a favorite delicacy.  I declined all offers but I did sample horse’s milk, which tastes like milk that has been left out in the heat all day.  (Camel’s milk is only slightly more palatable).


Villagers still practice bride-stealing.  I heard one teenage girl’s terrifying story of being “ kidnapped” by a boy and his collaborating friends.  All night long the boy’s family surrounded her, first cajoling her and then threatening her if she didn’t agree to the marriage.  Finally, at five a.m., she managed to escape.  Some women aren’t so lucky, including those who are plucked off the street and subjected to a forced marriage.  Women’s rights have a long way to go in much of the world.


Kazakhstan pursues a “multivector foreign policy,” and so far has managed to stay on good terms with Russia, China, and the US.  I’m sure it has nothing to do with their large oil reserves…


The Russians used countries like Kazakhstan as a dumping ground.  Stalin forcibly moved and deposited 172,000 ethnic Koreans there because he didn’t want them in Russia.  When the Soviets developed nuclear weapons they used Kazakhstan as their test site, resulting in deformed animals and high cancer rates among humans.

I went to Kazakhstan at the invitation of a Christian group that I won’t name, in view of the potential for harassment in this Muslim country.  “After the Soviet Union collapsed,” a phrase I heard often during my time there, many Kazakhs converted to Christianity, a trend that has slowed in recent years.  It was fascinating to spend time among young, first-generation Christians who are concerned about their atheist or Muslim parents—quite the reverse of the pattern in the West.  Alcoholism is rampant, and most converts I talked to have stories of drunken fathers who beat and abused them.

I always find my own faith strengthened when I hear stories of listless lives turned around, and in Kazakhstan I heard plenty.  No one goes to church because of social pressure or because it’s expected—quite the contrary, in a Muslim country becoming a Christian complicates family and social life.  Christians have little influence in politics and as a result tend to focus on what matters most: living out the basics of the gospel as Good News in a land still recovering from decades of bad news under communism.

 

How Sweet the Sound

In recent years audiences worldwide have watched a drama of forgiveness played out onstage in the musical version of Les Misérables.  Now a major motion picture makes the story available to all.  I used the plot as an illustration in my book What’s So Amazing About Grace?  Often I’m asked, “Can a person be forgiven without first repenting?”  The following incident in Jean Valjean’s life indicates the answer is Yes.

The musical follows its original source, Victor Hugo’s sprawling novel, in telling the story of Valjean, a French prisoner hounded, and ultimately transformed by forgiveness.

Jean Valjean served a nineteen-year term of hard labor for the crime of stealing bread, entering the French penal system as an impressionable young man and hardening into a tough convict.  No one could beat Jean Valjean in a fistfight.  No one could break his will.  At last Valjean earned his release.  Convicts in those days had to carry identity cards, however, and no innkeeper would let a dangerous felon spend the night.  For four days he wandered the village roads, seeking shelter against the weather, until finally a kindly bishop had mercy on him.

That night Jean Valjean lay still in an over-comfortable bed until the bishop and his sister drifted off to sleep.  He rose from his bed, rummaged through the cupboard for the family silver, and crept off into the darkness.

The next morning three policemen knocked on the bishop’s door, with Valjean in tow.  They had caught the convict in flight, with the purloined silver in his pack, and were ready to put the scoundrel in chains for life.

The bishop responded in a way that no one, especially Jean Valjean, expected.

“So here you are!” he cried to Valjean.  “I’m delighted to see you.  Had you forgotten that I gave you the candlesticks as well?  They’re silver like the rest, and worth a good 200 francs.  Did you forget to take them?”

Jean Valjean’s eyes had widened.  He was now staring at the old man with an expression no words can convey

Valjean is no thief, the bishop assured the gendarmes.  “This silver was my gift to him.”

When the gendarmes withdrew, the bishop gave the candlesticks to his guest, now speechless and trembling.  “Do not forget, do not ever forget,” said the bishop, “that you have promised me to use the money to make yourself an honest man.”

The power of the bishop’s act, defying every human instinct for revenge, changed Jean Valjean’s life forever.  A naked encounter with forgiveness?especially since he had never repented?melted the granite defenses of his soul.  He kept the candlesticks as a precious memento of grace, and dedicated himself from then on to helping others in need.

Hugo’s novel stands, in fact, as a two-edged parable of forgiveness.  A detective named Javert, who knew no law but justice, stalked Jean Valjean mercilessly over the next two decades.  As Valjean is transformed by forgiveness, the detective is consumed by a thirst for retribution.  When Valjean saves Javert’s life?the prey showing grace to his pursuer?the detective senses his black-and-white world beginning to crumble.  Unable to cope with a grace that goes against all instinct, and finding in himself no corresponding forgiveness, Javert jumps off a bridge into the Seine River.

Notes from Newtown

Janet and I returned from Newtown, CT, Sunday night after a weekend that was at once poignant, meaningful, and very full. I hope to post a full report after I’ve had time to process all that happened. Let me simply mention a few lasting impressions:

Newtown is worthy of a Currier and Ives print: a classic New England town of Victorian frame houses set among rolling hills blanketed in snow.


The memorials—sputtering candles, teddy bears and stuffed animals (more than 60,000!) soggy from snow, flowers now brown and drooping—are being removed, TV satellite trucks have disappeared from the streets, and life will soon find its “new normal” in Newtown. Nothing will ever be the same.


We will never forget a session with two sets of parents. Each lost a daughter, and the daughters happened to be best friends. They were amazingly articulate about their emotions through the grief process. They choose not to watch news or fixate on any details of what happened. Rather, they want their last memory to be kissing their daughters goodbye and putting them on the school bus. Every day brings new, stabbing reminders: They reach out to hold hands around the dinner table and one is missing…they gear up to send their surviving sons (who heard everything in a nearby classroom) back to school and try to answer the haunting question, “Will I be safe?”


We talked with a nurse who waited in the trauma unit with dozens of beds prepared for the injured, only to find they were unneeded; to a fellow teacher who followed the principal out of a meeting as they heard a commotion, then heard the principal yell, “Go back—it’s a shooter!” just before she lunged toward the gunman and got shot; to counselors who waited for four hours with anxious parents in a fire house just across from the school until the state’s governor finally announced, “There are no survivors” and wails of grief swept through the hall; to first responders who burst in while the shooter still lived, probably saving scores of lives, but are left with horrific visual images that can never be erased.


At least among those we talked to, there was no spirit of revenge. Anger flares up, of course: one little girl draws pictures of the shooter and stabs them with her pencil. Mostly, though, we sensed bewilderment and deep sadness. No one has a clue to the “Why us?” questions, and evidently the shooter left none.


Despite bad weather, 600 people showed up in the community meeting on Friday night and several hundred more braved a snowstorm on Saturday. Bowl games and normal festivities around New Year’s weekend didn’t have the same appeal in Newtown this year. The questions they submitted showed their concern with more serious matters: Why doesn’t God intervene? Where can I find comfort? Why do such things happen?


Janet and I both felt good about the time we spent in Newtown and very good about leaving followup in the hands of the church that hosted us. They certainly did not ask for this calling, yet they know they are strategically placed to provide healing and comfort over the months and years to come. On Sunday I spoke directly to the challenge of that church, in two services.


We are so grateful for your prayers and emotional support, shown by the many notes and emails. We felt like the emissaries of many others. “A healthy body feels the pain of the weakest part,” Dr. Paul Brand once told me, and indeed we sense health in your outpouring of concern for Newtown. So many want to help, and we sensed that in such gestures as my publishers providing free books and United Airlines offering us free tickets. We’re deeply grateful, and felt honored to be invited into a bereaved community at such a time. Even the local liquor store displayed a sign that can be a reminder for all of us: “Pray for Newtown.”

 

Free download this weekend of “What Good Is God?”

:: Special announcement:

The Yanceys are ministering this weekend in the community of Newtown, Connecticut.

In support, the publisher of Philip’s latest book, What Good is God?, is making that book (normally $23.99 in a hardback edition) available free for download. This offer applies only Saturday and Sunday, December 29-30, and due to international copyright only applies in the U.S.

There are instructions on the website at www.jerichobooks.com/sandyhook to help you access the book. The pdf file should be readable on any computer.