jayber crow

So I’ve decided it’s about time I got back on the blogging bike. It does me good if nothing else.

I’ve been inspired recently by the title of a book I haven’t read yet. It’s a book by that wise and joyful old man, Eugene Peterson, about the parables and prayers of Jesus, and it’s called Tell it Slant. Peterson borrowed the title from a line in a poem by Emily Dickinson:

Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.

I guess the idea is that sometimes we need to speak in a way that doesn’t attack the issue directly, but comes at things sideways. Sometimes we need to slip in the side rather than battering down the front door.

I’ve been thinking about how many of the writers who have most inspired me in the life of faith have been those who come at things from a poetic or artistic slant. Fiction writers like Wendell Berry and Marilynne Robinson. Imaginative spiritual writers like Frederick Buechner and G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis. These writers move me and change me and do me good in ways that most of the books in the Christian bookshop don’t.

Most Christian books, like most sermons, come at things dead straight. They use the language of explanation and definition. They tell us what to believe and how to live. And they do it a clear, structured, systematic and logical way, with three points (each with their own subpoints) or seven steps or a 12-week programme.

The imaginative writers who most deeply feed my soul come at things slant. They don’t always define and explain everything, or reduce things to simple steps with diagrams. They hint and suggest and evoke. They paint a picture, tell a story, use a peculiar and poetic phrase. And something inside me shifts. It’s kind of hard to even write about because when you try to describe it directly it slips from your grasp. Lewsis said when he first read George MacDonald’s fantasies he fell in love with holiness or goodness, though he didn’t know that’s what it was, and his imagination was baptised. That sounds about right.

A lot of the biblical writers are masters at telling it slant. The puzzling parables of Jesus, the peculiar prophets, the delightfully strange Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs, John’s bewildering Revelation. None of these deal in neatly packaged formulas or steps to holiness and happiness.That’s why they make us nervous. We prefer to stick with books that come at things in a more direct and linear fashion, like Paul’s letters. Or if we do pick up these books, our instinct is to tame them, to explain the ambiguities and strangeness away, to reduce them to a three-point form we are comfortable with. We don’t dare just let them be wild and strange, and see how they change us as we immerse ourselves in their imaginative world.

There’s something about coming at things slant that’s more true to the richness and complexity and ambiguity of life. Neat definitions and systems can’t do justice to the mystery of being human, never mind the mystery of God.

So all this has got me wondering about a few things. I’m wondering how those of us who talk about God in front of other people can learn to (at least sometimes) come at things slant. Are there ways of preaching that don’t just try to explain and define everything to death, but hint and suggest and evoke a world that is larger and more mysterious than we imagined? How can we use stories in a way that baptises the imagination and gets past the “watchful dragons” at the front door of people’s minds (and not just as a way of “illustrating” one of our explanatory points)? How can we rise to the challenge posed by Walter Brueggeman and become “poets speaking against a prose world”? I’m an explainer and definer by instinct. In my braver moments I even think that’s one of my “gifts.” Yet the writers who most inspire me are novelists and poets and artists. Is there a way to marry together clarity and ambiguity, logic and imagination? C.S. Lewis still provides the best proof that it might be possible.

I’ve also been wondering how we make space in our church communities for those who instinctively come at things slant - the artistic and poetic and intuitive. My guess is that they don’t often get asked to preach or lead small groups or chair committees. But we need their voices. When we do give space for artistic expression, we usually prefer that it should be direct and unsubtle - basically a three point sermon in the form of a song or painting or novel. How do we make space for artistic explorations of life and faith that are puzzling and provocative and strange and messy, like life itself?

And I’m wondering how we make space for people to come to faith, and grow in their faith, in a way that is uniquely suited to their own story. Our evangelistic courses seem to assume that most people come to faith through the front door, by systematically working through various questions in biblical apologetics. I’m quite sure that plays an important role. But people also become Christians because they fell in love and then got their heart broken and then read an article in a newspaper and heard a beautiful piece of music and watched their Christian friend go through a bereavement and a hundred other strange and slanted pathways. That’s the mystery of the way the Spirit moves in a human story.

I’ve always loved Frederick Buechner’s description of how he came to faith through an almost random phrase in a sermon:

Again and again he said that Jesus was crowned in the hearts of those who believed in him.I remember thinking that this was a nice enough image, as images in sermons go…And then he went on just a few sentences more and he said that this coronation of Jesus in the believer’s heart took place among confession – and I thought, yes, yes, confession – and tears, he said – and I thought tears, yes perfectly plausible that the coronation of Jesus in the believing heart should take place among confession and tears.

And then with his head bobbing up and down so that his glasses glittered, the preacher said in his odd, sandy voice, that the coronation of Jesus took place among confession and tears and then, as God was and is my witness, great laughter, he said. Jesus is crowned among confession and tears and great laughter, and at the phrase great laughter, for reasons that I have never satisfactorily understood, the Great Wall of China crumbled and Atlantis rose up out of the sea, and on Madison Avenue at 73^rd Street, tears leapt from my eyes as though I had been struck across the face.

My guess is that most of us grow in the life of faith through a similarly slanted and haphazard pathway. How do we allow for this and encourage this in the life of the church, when it’s so much easier to assume growth happens the same way for everyone, through the right kind of sermon or book or discipleship course?

As you can see, I have a lot of questions and not a lot of answers. I’m just wondering about these things, and I’m wondering if any of you are wondering too…?

You would think that after six months of blog silence I’d be back with some devastating insights into the global financial crisis, or the future of the church in the post-Christian west, or something at least a little profound and substantial.

Instead, here are my top five lists of books, music and movies that were new to me in 2008. First, the books (in no particular order):

Andy Catlett (Wendell Berry). For me, Wendell Berry and his Port William novels are now in a category all of their own. He’s been writing about this small Kentucky town for decades, and with the last three novels (Jayber Crow, Hannah Coulter, Andy Catlett) has reached something close to perfection. He can say more in the space between two words than most writers can say in several pages. This one is short and simple but deeply moving and satisfying. On the one hand, it’s about a few days uneventful days in the life of a small boy in a small town. On the other hand it’s about all of life - family, community, work, food, faith, death, loss, war, hurt, love, longing and hope.

The Road (Cormac McCarthy). This one sneaked in at the last moment. I’m a slow reader, but I devoured this in two sittings on the last two days of the year. I think I hardly breathed while I read it. I can’t remember being so emotionally devastated by a novel in a long time. Maybe it’s because it’s about a father and his son, clinging onto some sort of kindness and goodness while the world burns around them. The end of the world at the end of the year. Astonishing.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Jonathan Safran Foer). I can see lots of reasons why I should hate this novel. It’s a self-consciously “post-9-11″ novel, narrated by a nine-year-old boy who lost his father in the twin towers. It’s full of postmodern literary quirks - pages with only one word written on them, photographs of the back of people’s heads, etc. The little boy who narrates the story is impossibly intelligent and imaginative, if a little socially autistic. But somehow it has enough heart to pull it off. It’s funny and sad and provocative and hopeful and hugely enjoyable.

Lament For A Son (Nicholas Wolterstorff). This is written by one of the most formidably intelligent Christian thinkers alive today. But here he sets aside the philosophical fireworks (though not his intelligence) and reflects on the death of his son in a climbing accident. It’s simple and poetic and gut-wrenchingly moving. It’s wiser than anything I’ve read on “the problem of evil/suffering,” and the only book I’ll ever consider giving to someone who has been bereaved.

A Community Called Atonement (Scot McKnight). McKnight is fast becoming some kind of hero or role-model for me, both through his blog (Jesus Creed) and his books. It’s not only his wise and provocative ideas, but the way he articulates them in ways that reach out with generosity and grace to those who disagree with him. While some corners of evangelicaldom tear each other apart over definitions of the atonement, McKnight calls us to be a community which embodies the message of at-one-ment, reconciliation, forgiveness, peace. (Zoomtard agrees with me, too).

Just missing the cut were some other wonderful books: Confessions (St. Augustine), Revelation of Love (Julian of Norwich), On Chesil Beach (Ian McEwan), Not The Way It’s Supposed To Be (Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.), A Holy Meal (Gordon Smith).

And now I’m losing the heart and energy to keep commenting on all my choices, so here, without comment, are the movies:

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
There Will Be Blood
Goodbye Lenin
Juno
Once

In a good year for movies, lots of great ones miss the cut: Michael Clayton, Zodiac, No Country For Old Men, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Pan’s Labyrinth, Eastern Promises.

And finally, in a bad year for new music discoveries, here is what I could scrape together:

The Rifles EP (The Lowly Knights)
The Reminder (Feist)
The Boatman’s Call (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds)
The Swell Season (Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova)
Cassadaga (Bright Eyes)

Honorable mentions for Dig, Lazarus, Dig! (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds), Evolved (Martyn Joseph), Fleet Foxes (Fleet Foxes), Garden Ruin (Calexico), Impossible Dream (Patty Griffin) and I Never Thought This Day Would Come (Duke Special).

Now I’d love to know what has rocked your boat, tickled your fancy, blown your mind or warmed your heart over the past year. I’m haunted by the fear that I’ve missed something of astonishing beauty and brilliance.

Wishing you mountains of grace and peace in 2009.

With apologies to all those sane souls who find this kind of discussion dull, this is a response to Zoomtard’s recent post about post-modernism. I don’t want to write about post-modernism. Really. But he provoked me and now I need to write or I shall not sleep.

Zoomie suggests that what we call post-modernism is really just ultra-modernism - that is, modernism taken to its logical extreme. We have a very smart Professor who is our resident expert on such issues, and he agrees (he calls it hyper-modernism). And I partly agree too.

Most of the people you and I rub shoulders with each day are relativists when it comes to questions of religion and morality (you have your view and I have mine) but not when it comes to questions of science. Religion and morality deal with values, which are personal, subjective, and relative. Science deals with facts, which are impersonal, objective, and true-for-everyone. Something like this view is held by most people in our supposedly post-modern world - and it is also the view most commonly attacked in Christian seminars about post-modernism.

As Zoomtard and the Prof both insist, this is simply modernism-to-the-max. The underlying assumption is pure Enlightenment rationalism - only what can be logically and empirically proved using scientific methods can be known as a fact. Everything else belongs to the more wishy-washy, arty-farty, airy-fairy world of “values,” which can be believed but not known. Richard Dawkins is the high priest of this ultra-modern nonsense.

BUT (and here I tentatively dip my toe into possible disagreement with my smarter friend and teacher) I’m not sure this is all we can say about post-modernism. There are lots of thinkers who in recent decades have been questioning this ultra-modernism as just described, and it is their ideas which I think deserve to be properly described as post-modern. The heart of their critique of modernism has been to show that the idea of “neutrality” and “objectivity” is pure myth, even in the hallowed realms of science. All knowledge is personal knowledge. Everything that we know, we know from within a particular context, a web of relationships, a limited and finite point of view. We can’t escape from subjectivity because we can’t escape from our humanness. (I posted something about this part before here.)

This kind of post-modernism is our friend. It demolishes the arrogance and pretentiousness (and blasphemy) of our claims to detached and objective knowledge. It calls for a humbling of ourselves, an awareness and embrace of our limitations. It calls for us to enter into dialogue with others who see things from a different point of view.

It’s here that I think the story can branch in two very different directions. These wise insights can lead to a kind of radical relativism which says that we can’t really know anything with any confidence. We can’t know anything about science because scientists are human beings who look for evidence to match their hypothesis which they formulated to gain the approval of their peers in the scientific community. We can’t know anything about historical events because history is written by the winners who pick the facts that suit their story. We can’t know anything about what this book in our hand means, because reading is a picnic to which the author brings the words and we bring the meaning.

This kind of radical relativism is disastrous for Christian faith, since it undermines all confidence in the historical events of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, and in the particular ancient books that we call Scripture. Thankfully this kind of radical relativism is also utterly unlivable, which is why it remains largely a discussion among tedious academics.

The other way to go is to accept our limitations, embrace the subjectivity of our perspective, and move forward in a humbled and chastened way - but to still insist that some kind of real knowledge is possible. By becoming aware of the baggage we bring (our presuppositions and prejudices and cultural conditioning) and listening with humility to others, we can come to provisional but real knowledge - in science, history, literature… and also in the world of religion and ethics, since this healthy post-modern view breaks down the artificial wall between facts and values. There is objectivity and subjectivity in both worlds, there is a need for humility in both worlds, and there can be real knowledge in both worlds.

The wisest and most refreshing implications of all this are spelled out in the area of mission and apologetics by Lesslie Newbigin in his stunning book, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. A lot of traditional apologetics has tried to combat ultra-modernism on its own terms, by providing irrefutable logical arguments and objective evidence for everything from the creation of the world to the resurrection of Jesus. Newbigin suggests that we should accept the limitations of this kind of argument. We will not batter or coerce or argue anyone into faith.

What we can do, is get on with living out the gospel in the midst of our culture. We can keep singing the songs and telling the stories that express what we believe, what we know - in our heads, our hearts, our experience - to be true. We can be a community that lives and loves and celebrates the story of Jesus. And as people are drawn in by the beauty of that story, we can enter into dialogue with humility - listening to their story, learning from them, and continuing to tell the truth about Jesus (in a reasoned, thoughtful, humble, joyful way).

We believe the gospel is true for all people at all times. We hold it with “universal intent.” But we only tell it truthfully when we tell it from within our limited, subjective, human perspective, within this local community, with a humble openness to being stretched and corrected and enriched, to learning and growing as we listen to others and share life with them.

This is my truth. Tell me yours.

So, God says we should throw stones at bad people so they will die. But only if they are really bad.

As espero recently reported, this was our four-year-old son’s rather wonderful summary of the moral lessons to be drawn from the story of David and Goliath. I nearly died of laughter.

But it also made me think about how we read the Bible. Caleb was taking the story in a wonderfully straightforward, literal, honest way. Yet most of us would be at least a little uncomfortable with his conclusion. I hope.

I think what his response shows is that none of us read the Bible quite as straightforwardly as we claim. If I ask, “is all of Scripture God’s Word?”, many of us would say it is. If I ask, “is all of Scripture God’s Word to us in the same way?”, we might still be tempted to say yes.

But our reaction to Caleb’s interpretation suggests otherwise. Why do we not accept his take on the story? I think it’s because we know that within the flow of the whole biblical story, the David and Goliath incident is not the final, definitive word on how we are to treat our enemies. Within the Old Testament itself, prophets like Isaiah present a vivid picture of Israel becoming a source of blessing and healing to all the nations. And then, of course there’s Jesus, who tells us (and shows us) to turn the other cheek, to return good for evil, and to love our enemies.

In other words, we read the David and Goliath story in light of the whole flow of the biblical story, and especially in light of Jesus, who is the centre and goal and focus of the whole story. And we decide that, whatever this story means for us, it doesn’t mean that we should throw stones at bad people, even if they’re really bad.

What this example shows is that, in practice, we don’t treat the Bible as the Word-of-God-for-us in a flat, uniform way. We read some things in light of others - OT narratives in light of the prophets, the OT in light of the NT, and everything in light of Jesus.

And I think this is right and proper. It’s what we all do, whether we admit it or not. And it makes all kinds of sense. Before the Bible is the Word of God, we believe that Jesus himself is God’s Word. He is God’s ultimate, definitive, self-expression and self-revelation. So it’s natural and good and right that everything else is read in light of him. All Scripture is read in light of the good news about Jesus, in light of the grace and forgiveness and healing and new community and new creation which flows into our fractured world through him.

I believe, as the famous text says, that all of Scripture is in some way God-inspired, and useful for shaping our lives to reflect God’s goodness. But I don’t think all of it is inspired and useful in the same way.

I’m only now finding the courage to think these thoughts out loud. I remember a few years ago, sitting in a coffee shop in Greystones, Co. Wexford, with an older Christian I had great affection and respect for. I casually threw out an observation that, within the canon of Scripture, the gospels have a certain priority and centrality, and that within the gospels, the Sermon on the Mount has a certain priority. I don’t know where I’d picked up that idea from, but my friend nearly choked on his latte, and told me in no uncertain terms that I was barking up a dangerous tree. He told me that all of Scripture should be written in red ink, because all of it is the words of Jesus in the same, direct sense.

Well, I’m sometimes a little slow at on-the-spot responses. But I am now officially ready to announce that I think my wise and thoughtful friend was wrong. Scripture is not a flat, uniform book. It is a story which twists and turns and flows towards a climax and pinnacle and centre in the person of Jesus, his life and teaching and death and resurrection.

When I get troubled and sidetracked by the slaughter of the Amalekites and the general violence of the OT, this principle is pretty important to me - I can look forward to the centre of the story in Jesus and find my bearings and orientation there. Or when I get confused by Paul’s detailed instructions over head-coverings and speaking in tongues, I can look back to the centre, to Jesus and his message of the kingdom and new life in him. This is not a cop-out, it’s just the natural way to read the story around its centre. And we can and should continue to wrestle with the trickier questions, but with a sense of peace and perspective drawn from looking at the beautiful life and words and actions of God-with-us.

The gospels have a certain priority only because the gospel, the good news about Jesus has a certain centrality and priority. Everything else, including the rest of Scripture, is relativised, reconfigured, re-imagined and re-interpreted in the light of him.

To some of you, this will seem so obvious it’s hardly worth saying. To others, it may seem a little controversial. My sense is that this is how many of us instinctively read Scripture, but we’re not entirely honest about it when we talk about the Bible as God’s Word. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Don’t ask me exactly how it works in practice. But my son is helping me stumble towards a more honest reading of this strange book which reads and shapes and questions our lives.

I recently read The Crucible for the first time. It took my breath away, with its relentless portrayal of humanity and religion gone horribly, madly wrong.

The copy I read included some extended passages of commentary by Arthur Miller, and it was in one of those passages that I came on a sentence that has followed me around since I read it:

These people had no ritual for the washing away of sins.

Miller suggests that this lack of a ritual of forgiveness leads inevitably to hypocrisy. He was talking about the Puritans of New England, and in many ways they are the spiritual forefathers of our evangelical culture. Catholicism has at least two rituals for washing away sins - the mass and the confessional. But in Puritanism and evangelicalism, we’re not too keen on rituals.

We like to believe we have a higher view of forgiveness than in Catholicism. All our sins - past, present, future - are washed away at the moment of conversion, as an act of unconditional grace. It’s a wonderful, liberating idea, a grand and high and beautiful theology.

The problem is that in the course of day-to-day life we gather guilt and shame like moss, because our days are full of selfishness and pettiness, weakness of will, failures of love and courage and generosity. We feel the grubbiness of our hearts, and we long to be washed clean. We try valiantly to remember our high and beautiful theology, to remember that this, too, has already been forgiven. But it often doesn’t get past our heads and into our hearts, into our emotional and psychological felt experience. We don’t feel forgiven or clean or free. So we carry around a secret bundle of guilt and feel like the world’s biggest hypocrites.

I still believe in the beautiful idea of total and unconditional forgiveness. But I’m learning that forgiveness needs to be received as a fresh gift for the sins of this week, this day. It needs to be reaffirmed and renewed in our felt experience

Rituals are powerfully effective at reaching our deeper parts. They involve our bodies as well as our minds. They involve other people and not just our solitary introspective prayers. We confess our sins together and then kneel to receive fresh mercy for today as we taste the bread and wine and take them into the core of our being. We speak our guilt aloud to another person, and hear them speak words of absolution, announce in the name of Jesus that we are forgiven and free.

I’m enough of a puritanical evangelical to hold on with all my heart to the conviction that these rituals don’t have to happen in a set manner, in a church, under the watchful eye of a priest. They can happen in a thousand creative ways - we can write our sins on paper and pin them to a wooden cross, burn them in a fire, shred them in a shredder. Any of us can speak the words of absolution for each other, in any time and place.

But I wonder if we need to recover the place of ritual, of dramatising and acting out our confession and forgiveness. Communion needs to be a place where we not only remember a forgiveness received in the dim and distant past, but where we receive fresh grace for today. And we need to recover the practice of confession, not in a darkened confessional, but in homes and pubs and parks, wherever we can find enough time and peace to speak our guilt aloud and hear a friend speak words of freedom and grace. Then our hearts might have a chance to catch up with our heads, and we might actually start to feel and live and look like forgiven people.

So this one has been brewing for a while. I was finally provoked into writing by some interesting discussion over at kicked by an elephant. I didn’t see the programme in question, but I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how we pass on our faith to our children without manipulating, brainwashing or indoctrinating them.

For a while there I got pretty squeamish about the whole thing. I was so nervous about the danger of indoctrination that I almost started to think it was my responsibility as a parent to lay out all the options for my kids impartially and let them make their own independent decision.

I soon realised that was a little insane. At what age do I sit down and give Caleb a bluffer’s guide to Islam, Buddhism and secular humanism? And how on earth do I give a fair and balanced account of views I don’t hold?

Some nonreligious people come close to implying that any passing on of the faith from parents to children is brainwashing, no matter how it’s done, and I guess I was buying into that assumption.

Forgive me a little philosophical diversion here. I’m coming to realise that a lot of my anxieties are based on a hopelessly simplistic view of human beings which is a legacy of the Enlightenment and modernist rationalism. This view sees human beings as essentially isolated thinking machines. These thinking machines take in information and data from the world around them and then come to some kind of conclusion about what to believe and how to live. Children are like blank slates, or computers with empty memories, before they start to take in data from their parents and the rest of their environment.

It’s all nonsense of course. Thankfully some wise postmodern thinkers (like Michael Polanyi) have helped us realise that human beings are fundamentally and inescapably relational. We come to all of our beliefs and values within a complex web of relationships, in the context of community. So children don’t look at the world as little objective observers and philosophers. They come at the world from within a particular community. And that’s OK. It’s good.

So I’m learning to relax about this. Children growing up in a Christian home will grow up within a Christian wordview. They’ll sing the songs and hear the stories. They’ll take in a certain way of living and believing, a way of praying, a way of loving and being loved. This isn’t indoctrination - it’s natural and human and organic.

And it’s the same in a Muslim home or a Buddhist home. And yes, even in a secular humanist home (though the songs and stories aren’t quite as good).

The issue of indoctrination kicks in as the child starts to become aware that not everyone lives and believes in the same way as the community they come from. If the parents encourage the children to close their ears and refuse to listen, or to force their own beliefs aggressively on others, then we’re into something dangerous and abusive. But if we teach them to listen with humility and respect, we’re in a very different world. Listening with respect doesn’t mean always agreeing, or thinking all views are equally valid (a form of tolerance which respects nobody). But it does mean expecting that we always have something to learn and we can always be enriched by these encounters.

At some point our children need to become aware that they have a choice to opt out of the community of faith into which they have been born. I hope I’ll have the courage as a parent to help my kids face that choice with honesty and integrity. But I’m increasingly convinced that the choice for our children is to opt out rather than to opt in.

Which, lets face it, can be kind of controversial in our evangelical world, where we’re so obsessed with bringing everyone to a moment of conversion, where they say the prayer and cross the line. I’m more and more convinced that our kids need to be allowed to grow up in a community of faith and soak up the songs and stories, the ways of living and loving and praying. They’ll understand various aspects of Christian doctrine at different points in their journey - God’s love first, later the way of life he invites us into, then maybe sin and forgiveness. At some point they’ll start to understand how the life and death and resurrection of Jesus fits into all this. But at what point in this journey do they become a Christian? The question is a little absurd, a little ugly.

Let them grow up in a community of faith and hope and love. Let them know they belong. Encourage them to engage with those outside the community with humility and generosity. And at some point let them know that the door is open, and they are free to leave if they want.

Of course, if they walk away, it may break our hearts. But there is no value in faith that is coerced and manipulated by guilt or fear. Faith is only faith if it is rooted in freedom and love

Thanks to crookedshore for pointing me in the direction of this.

It does me good to lay down the cynicism and embrace the hope.

If you hang around with Christian parents for long enough, you’ll start to hear the same comment coming up in conversation repeatedly. “Isn’t it amazing how quickly you can see that they’re wee sinners?”

Now, I have no desire to downplay the depths of human sinfulness. I tend to agree with G.K. Chesterton that original sin is the only part of Christian belief that can actually be proved. We don’t even need to open a newspaper to find the evidence, since we don’t need to look any further than our own little bundle of selfish desires and habits.

But there’s something about how quickly and how often this comment is made that makes me a little uneasy.

More accurately, what disturbs me is our failure to say something else first.

The Christian story doesn’t begin with original sin. It begins with something like original goodness and original beauty. It begins with a garden, a good creation, and human beings who have been made in the image of their good creator. This is the breathtaking dignity and glory which the Christian story gives to all human beings. “He made us little less than gods,” the psalmist says.

Of course that original goodness and beauty has been fractured by the fall. But it hasn’t been completely destroyed. It still comes through in whispers and glimpses. The image of God has been smudged, but not erased. We are this strange, paradoxical mixture of dignity and depravity, glory and grime.

There’s something badly wrong if all we can see in our children is the grime - if we fixate on their failures and their sin, while the happy pagans down the road marvel at their child’s capacity for playfulness and unfettered joy, their moments of spontaneous kindness and generosity, the unique personality and gifts and quirks which they bring to the world.

It’s one of the great strengths of the Christian story that it faces with honesty the ugly side of human nature, and refuses to hide it or excuse it or rationalise it away. But when we start there, something gets horribly distorted. A story which is meant to be good news becomes harsh and abusive.

And too often, that’s exactly where we start. It’s where many of our evangelical statements of faith begin. It’s where we often begin with our children, and in relating to people who don’t share our faith. More and more I’m wondering if this is the thing which most often goes rotten at the heart of evangelical Christianity - the failure to recognise this original goodness, the image of God in all people.

There’s a cliche which rightly insists that the good news of redemption only makes sense against the backdrop of the bad news of sin. But we also need to insist that this bad news in turn only makes sense against the backdrop of the good news of our creation in God’s good image. The bad news comes sandwiched between a good beginning and a good end.

The full tragedy of our sin is that we fall short of the high calling we were created for. The tragedy is that we are rarely as good as we are in our best moments, that we don’t live out in reality what we aspire to in our best dreams. We fall short of the glory.

But the glory is what we need to notice first, in each other, and especially in our children. We need to look for the glimpses of goodness, of beauty, of God’s image, which point to what we once were, and what we can be again.

Of all the parents in our street, we should be the ones who are quickest to notice and celebrate these glimpses of glory in our children.

And then we can turn to face the grime, with joy and hope as well as honesty. And the story we tell may actually start to feel like good news to our children, and smell like good news to our neighbours.

New Year is a strange time. Some like to take time to reflect on the year gone by - mistakes made, lessons learned, wisdom gained - and shape some intentions for the year ahead.

Others prefer to trivialise the complexities of the past year by parcelling it up into simplistic and banal lists of the best and the worst of whatever.

In that spirit, I’m delighted to present you with my own, entirely subjective and highly opinionated opinion on the top five records and books of the year. They weren’t all released or published this year, but they were all new to me. First the music:

1. The Trumpet Child (Over the Rhine). One of the few bands that Espero and I are equally taken with. We caught them live here in Vancouver last year, and were totally floored. This album was a surprise - jazzier and more playful and, well, sexy, than anything else in their back catalogue, or in my music collection. But by far the most enjoyable album of the year. And plenty of thoughtful hooks under the playfulness - “His final goal, to fill with joy/ the earth that man all but destroyed.”

2. Sky Blue Sky (Wilco). I’ve loved this band for a long time, but at first didn’t know what to make of this. It’s simpler and happier than anything they’ve ever recorded - the first song has the cheesiest guitar solo and I still have no idea if they’re taking the piss or not. But if you go with the album it’s just lovely. Musical sunshine.

3. The Shepherd’s Dog (Iron and Wine). This guy has gone in the opposite direction to Wilco. His last record was a thing of gentle, quiet beauty - this one is noisier and more complex and ambitious, a more difficult listen. But he hasn’t lost his gift for haunting melodies and strange, evocative lyrics. It gets better with every listen, and if you ask me in a few weeks I’ll probably regret not making it my number 1. I’ll just have to carry that regret through 2008.

4. Boxer (The National). Dark, textured, weary, articulate, beautiful.

5. The Broken String (Bishop Allen). Maybe I should be growing out of it, but I still have a soft spot for a good bit of tuneful indie pop. Belle and Sebastian still light up my life. This New York band’s album was a highlight this year - it collects together the best songs from a project they took on in 2006 to record an EP every month of the year.

Narrowly missing the cut were The Innocence Mission (We Walked in Song), Calexico (The Black Light), Whiskeytown (Faithless Street), Brian Houston (Sugar Queen) and Stars (Set Yourself on Fire). Biggest disappointments of the year after being hailed as returns to former glories were Ryan Adams (Easy Tiger) and Radiohead (In Rainbows).

And now the books. This will inevitably be extremely random since I’m refusing to separate fiction from non-fiction, sacred from profane, and academic from bed-time-reading. It’s more fun this way.

1. The Violent Bear it Away (Flannery O’Connor). This is the least celebrated of her writings (she only wrote two novels and about 30 short stories) and has been out of print for a while. But it blew me away. I never understand everything that’s going on in her stories, but her strange characters on their bizarre spiritual journeys just draw me in, stir me deeply, and live in the memory long after I finish. Absolutely unique.

2. Reflections on the Psalms (C.S. Lewis). Most of you know that in my list of favourite writers this Belfast boy is out in front on his own. I read pretty much his complete works in uni, but it’s about time to revisit them. Every page is provocative and refreshing and surprising. Reading this reminded me that I don’t love Lewis primarily as an “apologist” or defender of the faith, as he’s usually depicted. For me he’s above all a spiritual guide - what he does for me is call me to a lifelong pursuit of the beautiful and the good and the true.

3. The Sacred Journey (Frederick Buechner). Buechner writes better than nearly anyone else alive today and he writes about life in general and the spiritual life in particular with disarming honesty and deep insight. His short memoirs are my favourites among his writings.

4. The Love of Learning and the Desire for God (Jean Leclerq). OK so this one was a textbook for a class I took. And it’s exploring the culture of medieval monasticism. But it is really, really good. Seriously.

5. A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson). This is a really fun and engaging read. Bryson does a great job of condensing the history of science into a readable and entertaining paperback, without trivialising the subject matter. He clearly loves science, and it’s infectious. But he also does a great job of showing the humanness of science - that it often advances through colossal egos and petty rivalries, creative leaps, blind alleys and lucky accidents, as much as by the clear-headed and methodical pursuit of knowledge. And that, although we know a lot of amazing things, there’s still a whole heap we don’t know.

Now it would be appropriate and traditional for you to tell me I’m out of my mind and wouldn’t know a masterpiece if it bit me on the bum, and offer your top fives as a corrective to my ignorance.

Happy new year.

Ambiguity can be good.

Ambiguity in a story can make it richer, funnier, more provocative, more profound. And it nearly always gets lost in translation.

Take Jonah, for example. God told Jonah to go and speak against the city of Ninevah because he had become aware of its wickedness.

Or maybe God wanted Jonah to go and speak to the city because he had become aware of its misery. The Hebrew words are a little ambiguous. Was this a mission of judgment or of compassion? Of anger or of love?

I wonder if Jonah had been sure it was a judgment mission, would he have gone without argument? It’s pretty clear that he hated the Ninevites. And with good reason - they had a reputation for violence and cruelty and general nastiness. Surely Jonah would have been delighted to announce their impending doom?

But the ambiguity is enough to plant a seed of doubt. In the back of Jonah’s mind is a chorus, a refrain, a song that keeps rising in the stories of Israel.

Yahweh is gracious and compassionate

slow to anger, abounding in love

Jonah didn’t like even the vaguest hint of a whisper of a possibility that he might be asked to be the messenger of compassion to his enemies. So he ran away.

Whatever we make of the idea of God’s anger, it seems that we can’t separate it from his love. It’s not an opposite impulse, the flip side of his schizophrenic character, something in tension with his love. It’s an expression of his love. As CS Lewis says, anger is what love bleeds when we cut it.

God was angry with the Ninevites because of their stupidity and selfishness and violent cruelty. God had compassion on the Ninevites because of their self-inflicted misery and suffering. Maybe we don’t have to choose. Maybe the ambiguity is wiser than the clarity of our English translations.

So after a short interlude involving a ship to the edge of the world, some pagan sailors, a storm and a sea-monster, Jonah goes to Ninevah and preaches. “Forty days and the city will be destroyed.” At least, that’s probably what his words meant. Its just that there’s a little ambiguity again, and his words could be taken in a very different way. “Forty days and the city will be transformed.” Is this about destruction or renewal? Is it a threat or a promise?

There’s no doubt what Jonah meant it to mean. He was all about unambiguous destruction. But in the most ironic twist of the whole story, this is the moment at which Jonah speaks more prophetically than he realizes. The people have a change of heart. They change their lives. The city is transformed and renewed.

And we’re left with Jonah, grumpy and bitter and pathetic, wishing he was dead. Maybe that’s where too much clarity and definition always leaves you. Certainly that’s where we end up if we take delight in a message of anger and judgment and destruction which is not somehow part of a larger story of love and compassion and renewal.

At least in this case, clarity kills. And ambiguity brings life.