Book Notes

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The Brothers Grimm: King Thrushbeard

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An unfamiliar tale, “King Thrushbeard” tells the story of a beautiful princess who is less than beautiful inside. She has many suitors, all of whom she turns away with mocking. One such is a king with an pointy jaw, whom the princess mocks as “King Thrushbeard”. In his anger at his daughter’s refusing all her suitors, the princess’s father vows to give her in marriage to the next beggar that comes knocking at the castle door.

And so he does.

This particular story reminds me a lot of “The Taming of the Shrew” – in which a proud and sarcastic woman is tamed by an uncouth husband (although with a bit less spousal abuse!). I would love to see this story retold more frequently.

King Thrushbeard illustrated by Felix Hoffman

This is the only retelling my library had of this tale – and it’s a quite faithful retelling. The illustrations are nice but not amazing – the people are quite angular and their garments are an odd mix of Renaissance-style tunics and jerkins and 1920’s cut flapper dresses. It’s really quite odd. However, since I like this tale so much, I think it’s worth tracking down a copy (even if the illustrations are odd).

Categories Book Notes

The Brothers Grimm: Hansel and Gretel

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The tale of Hansel and Gretel is one of the more familiar of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

Prior to actually reading the tale, I knew that the children were left in the woods, couldn’t follow their trail of breadcrumbs home, discovered a gingerbread house occupied by a witch who intended to eat them, and ended up locking the witch in her own oven.

What I didn’t know was the level of detail found in the original story (or stories). The children were left in the woods at the urging of their mother (stepmother?) who feared there wasn’t enough for the whole family to eat. The children found their way home by way of dropped moonstones. The first time they were left in the woods, Hansel tricked the witch into thinking he wasn’t gaining weight by giving her the same old animal bone to feel when she came to check his finger for fatness. After they were free of the witch, the children were carried across a pond by a kind duck (what?) They arrived home at last to find their mother (stepmother?) dead.

It was fun to see how different translators and retellers tell this story, and how different illustrators illustrate it. It is certainly a dark tale – but each version has its bright moments.

Hansel and Gretel illustrated by Sybille Schenker, text edited by Martin West

Visually, this book is gorgeous. You can recognize it by its black cover sewn together with orange thread. The illustrations are typically black and white with stark contrasts – but with great depth thanks to a multitude of vellum overlays layering page upon page upon page. The illustrations are beautiful, but creepy. The text is fairly detailed, but translational choices emphasized the relationship between brother and sister – and decreased the forboding nature of their abandonment by having the stepmother (as opposed to the mother) doing the convincing and then the actual abandoning (the father is apparently there, but it is stepmom who marches the children into the woods and tells them that their father and she will return for them – which, of course, doesn’t happen.)

Hansel and Gretel illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky, retold by Rika Lesser
This book received the Caldecott Honor in 1985 (it’s as old as me!) for Zelinsky’s beautiful illustrations. I wish I knew enough about art history to be able to place them in some artistic school – but I’ve seen paintings in this style in museums. They are perfectly suited to the tale and to the historical setting of the tale. The story is told well, with lots of dialogue between characters. Interestingly, about half of the book addresses the period before the children found the gingerbread house.

Hansel and Gretel retold by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Lorenzo Mattotti
A relatively wordy version for slightly older children, this retelling increases the spook factor rather than playing it down. Trees claw at the children in a forboding manner; the old woman (never named as a witch) tells the children that she hopes their arrival heralds the coming of meat to her kitchen again. The additions to the story fleshed it out but didn’t feel contrived or moralistic like some of the other versions (that I didn’t like so much.) Mattotti’s illustrations are stark, black and white with lots of tangled branches and the occasional eye poking out. The people are the clearest of all the forms, but even they are merely black outlines against a white splash of light. The illustrations and story alternate with each double page spread, making this a better choice for reading to oneself than for reading aloud (since you can’t look at the pictures while someone else is reading.)

The Cookie House by Margaret Hillert, illustrated by Kinuko Craft
This is unique among the retellings because it is a first reader, with just 59 words. The text primarily consists of Hansel and Gretel’s thoughts as the events of the tale occur: “Mother is not here. Father is not here. I do not like this.” This leaves the illustrations to tell the story – which they do quite well. As with all first readers, this is a book best read by a child (since it doesn’t have the rich text that makes parental read-alouds so beneficial) – but it really is a nice version of the Grimms’ story. I can certainly see a child reading it to her parent and then having dialogue about what was happening in the pictures (to flesh out the story).

Hansel and Gretel illustrated by Susan Jeffers, retold by Amy Ehrlich
A straightforward retelling of the story – with one new-to-me detail: a white bird led the children to the witch’s gingerbread cottage. The stepmother is often referred to as “the woman”, helping to make the betrayal a little less personal. Illustrator Susan Jeffers has two different illustration styles (it seems to me). The woodland pictures are in great detail, with individual leaves on the trees and lots of lovely wildlife. The indoor pictures and those prominently featuring people seem to be almost in the style of American Country Crafts (you know, the kind from the ’80s and ’90s, round faced dolls with peat moss hair and painted on cheek circles?) This wasn’t a bad picture book, but it’s not my favorite either.

Nibble, Nibble Mousekin retold and illustrated by John Walsh Anglund
A quite wordy version with lots of text on each page and a fair bit of extraneous description. This one has Hansel fill his pockets with stones on the mere suspicion of his stepmother’s wickedness, without having overheard her plan (in fact, she never shares the plan with the father – thereby freeing him from the guilt of weakness.) Furthermore, the stepmother runs away rather than dies, leaving the children and their father to enjoy each other in the end. The illustrations alternated between color and black and white on every other two-page spread. The children remind me of Precious Moments dolls – but the rest of the illustration is different enough that it’s only a passing reminder. I generally prefer the more faithful retellings found above.

Hansel and Gretel retold and illustrated by James Marshall

The retelling was neither bad nor spectacular – but the cartoon-like illustrations didn’t really suit my fancy. My library also had a video version of this, in which the illustrations are lightly animated (the stepmother is always munching something). While the generally very story-book like manner was appealing (that is, a narrator read the story while each page was shown on screen versus the flash-from-one-scene-to-another-very-quickly nature of typical cartoons), I still wasn’t impressed with the storytelling or the illustrations.

Hansel and Gretel retold by Cynthia Rylant, pictures by Jen Corace
Generally speaking, the retellings of “Hansel and Gretel” have been faithful to the extent that my commentary has focused on omissions or on illustrations. This retelling is an exception, for while the illustrations are interesting, what stands out is what Rylant has chosen to ADD to the story – explanations. She explains the stepmother’s selfishness, explains the father’s weakness, and explains the moral she wants children to derive from the story.

“It has been said that guardian spirits watch over and protect small children, and that may be so. But there are also stories of children who find the courage to protect themselves.”

“Perhaps this is when guardian spirits finally intervene, when small children have already been so brave.”

I would much prefer that retellers keep to the story and let parents and children talk about what the story means. In this case, I am all for children being brave – but I want my children to know the bravery that comes from complete reliance on the Holy Spirit, who intervenes when we can do nothing, granting us supernaturally a spirit of “power and of love and of a sound mind”.

So this is one retelling I don’t recommend.

Categories Book Notes, Following Christ

C.S. Lewis to Bloggers

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In his masterful turn-the-world-upside-down book The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis has his diabolical character Screwtape write the following:

“It remains to consider how we can retrieve this disaster. The great thing is to prevent his doing anything. As long as he does not convert [his conviction and subsequent remorse] into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance. Let the little brute wallow in it. Let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book about it; that is often an excellent way of sterilising the seeds which the Enemy plants in a human soul. Let him do anything but act.”

I felt the sting as I read.

But will I convert the conviction of the Lord into obedience?

“But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.”

~James 1:22-25 (ESV)

Categories Book Notes

The Abridged Screwtape, part 1

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Foreword from the editors

In the short years since its publication, Screwtape’s correspondence with his nephew has become something of a classic. Part training manual, part cautionary tale, it regularly tops the novice demon’s recommended reading list.

Unfortunately, with the human population growth explosion being such as it is, young demons are being pressed into service earlier and earlier with less and less opportunity to read even such short works as this. A great need exists for concise training materials that can be quickly read by novice demons overtaxed by the strain of managing multiple patients.

To this end, we, the editors, have put together this all new abridge collection of Screwtape. We hope it serves Our Father Below well.

Letter 1: Avoid reasoning and science

“The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy’s own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propoganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below.”

“…the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is ‘the results of modern investigation.'”

Letter 2: Keep him disillusioned with the church

“All you then have to do is to keep out of his mind the question ‘If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?”

Letter 3: Promote little annoyances and disharmonies within the home

“Let him assume that she knows how annoying it is and does it to annoy – if you know your job he will not notice the immense improbability of the assumption. And, of course, never let him suspect that he has tones and looks which similarly annoy her.”

Letter 4: Keep him from praying

“Whenever they are attending to the Enemy Himself we are defeated, but there are ways of preventing them from doing so. The simplest is to turn their gaze away from Him towards themselves.

Letter 5: Do not rejoice overmuch in times of war, for the Enemy uses war to his own purpose

“Consider too what undesirable deaths occur in wartime. Men are killed in places where they knew they might be killed and to which they go, if they are at all of the Enemy’s party, prepared.”

Letter 6: Teach him to be anxious and to focus on his feelings

“[The Enemy] wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.”

Letter 7: Encourage extremes or keep people complacent, depending on the age

“All extremes except extreme devotion to the Enemy are to be encouraged. Not always, of course, but at this period. Some ages our lukewarm and complacent, and then it is our business to soothe them yet faster asleep. Other ages, of which the present is one, are unbalanced and prone to faction, and it is our business to inflame them.”

I’ve been reading (and haven’t yet finished) C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters with the Reading to Know Classics bookclub. Thanks Barbara for choosing this month’s read. Follow the links to find out what other readers are saying about the Letters.

Categories Book Notes

Why do I study God?

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J.I. Packer begins his modern-day classic Knowing God with an apologetic of sorts for the practice of theology.

He quotes a Spurgeon sermon to say that the study of theology humbles us, expands us, and consoles us. He attempts to convince us that the study of God is essentially practical and relevant. He tells us what he intends to cover in our study of God: the Godness of God, the powers of God, the actions of God, and the character of God. And, he begs us stop and consider our motivations.

“We need to ask ourselves: what is my ultimate aim and object in occupying my mind with these things? What do I intend to do with my knowledge about God, once I have got it? For the fact that we have to face is this: that if we pursue theological knowledge for its own sake, it is bound to go bad on us.”

The truth of Packer’s caution was driven home when I began to inspect 1 Timothy, the book I have taken up for study after finishing Titus last week. In 1 Timothy 1:3-7, Paul writes of the reason for which he has left Timothy in Ephesus.

“As I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine, nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations rather than the stewardship from God that is by faith. The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. Certain persons, by swerving from these, have wandered away into vain discussion, desiring to be teachers of the law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions.”

Paul contrasts his motivation in giving the charge to avoid teaching false doctrine and spurious matters with the motivation of those who are teaching false doctrine and devoting themselves to spurious matters. Paul is motivated by love, by a pure heart, by a good conscience, and by a sincere heart. The “certain persons” have swerved from these, wandering into vain discussions, making confident assertions about things they don’t understand.

It makes sense. When am I most bound to misunderstand or misrepresent the gospel? When am I most bound to spend my time fighting about nonessentials? Is it not when I am seeking self-glorification (the opposite of selfless love)? Is it not when I am seeking to gratify impure desires? Is it not when I am seeking to assuage a guilty conscience? Is it not when I am trusting self rather than God?

So what is my motivation in studying? Is it love for God and my fellow man? Is it a pure heart, a good conscience, a sincere faith?

Maybe. But not always. Often, my motivation is to feel good about myself. To have something to blog about. To show how much knowledge I have or how deep a thinker I am. I swerve all too often from love, a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith.

Does that mean that I ought not study the Scripture, since I am bound to go wrong?

Certainly not.

Instead, it is a call to start my study where I’d rather not. It is a call to start my study on my knees, acknowledging my sinful desires, my sinful motives, my sinful actions. It is a call to start my study at the cross, begging God to yet again replace my heart of stone with his own heart. It is a call to approach my study as one who desperately needs for the Scripture to change me.

And, having studied, I must purpose to confess my sin as revealed in light of God’s truth. I must purpose to be obedient to God’s instruction as revealed in God’s word. I must purpose to glorify the One who is the object of my study.

Packer writes of it thus:

“Our aim in studying the Godhead must be to know God Himself the better. Our concern must be to enlarge our acquaintance, not simply with the doctrine of God’s attributes, but with the living God whose attributes they are. As He is the subject of our study, and our helper in it, so He must Himself be the end of it. We must seek, in studying God, to be led to God. It was for this purpose that revelation was given, and it is to this use that we must put it.

How are we to do this? How can we turn our knowledge about God into knowledge of God? The rule for doing this is demanding but simple. It is that we turn each truth that we learn about God into matter for meditation before God, leading to prayer and praise to God.”

May we ever have a heart to do so.

I’m reading J.I. Packer’s Knowing God along with Tim Challies’ “Reading Classics Together” bookclub. You can find Challies’ post on the first two chapters here. A couple bloggie friends are also participating and have posted this first week (I can link to them because I’m a day late in posting!) – Check out what Barbara and Lisa have to say about chapters one and two. And…it’s not too late to read along – we’re reading just two chapters per week and this is just the first week :-)

Categories Book Notes

There is no land called Narnia

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I was shocked, in rereading The Silver Chair for this year’s Chronicles of Narnia Reading Challenge, to realize how much I’d forgotten from this book. It’s never been one of my favorite of the series, but I’ve still read it at least a dozen times. So why had I forgotten so much?

One scene, though, that I could not at all forget, is the scene where the Lady of the Green Kirtle aka the Queen of the Underworld returns to her throne room to find Prince Rillian free from his chair and in his right mind.

She throws some powder on the fire, filling the room with a sickeningly sweet aroma. She begins thrumming a mandolin with a repetitive, mind-numbing thrum. And at last she speaks:

“Narnia?” she said. “Narnia? I have often heard your Lordship utter that name in your ravings. Dear Prince, you are very sick. There is no land called Narnia.”

The Prince, Puddleglum, Eustace, and Jill all try to counter the sweet smell, the repetitive thrumming, the queen’s patronizing derision. There is a Narnia, they say. They’ve been there. But the queen’s questioning makes clear she thinks it all a childish game, a dream. Since they describe Narnia in terms of what she knows, in terms of the Underworld, she presumes that they are only looking at her world and dreaming of something bigger and better.

Eventually, between the mind-fogging effects of the music and the odor and the scorn of the woman, all the travelers begin to relent.

“No, there never was a sun,” said the Prince, and the Marshwiggle, and the children.

In this scene, Lewis has the witch play the role of the Enlightenment scholar, who declares no need for god now that reason is king. Once upon a time, people needed to create myths of gods to explain their world – but now that we have science to explain, we need no God.

And here Lewis makes one of his most compelling arguments for the existence of God: joy. And the seemingly joyless Marshwiggle is the one to make it.

“One word, Ma’am,” he said… “One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder….So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones….And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”

You see, science might be able to explain a lot about how this world works – but it doesn’t explain the unfulfilled longing for joy that rests in each human heart. It doesn’t explain the hunger that every experience in this world serves only to deepen. A purely naturalistic world would ultimately have us all as nihilists – since we are mere pawns of impersonal natural forces.

One must say that, if religion is a story, it is a much better story than the one naturalism tells. And if there is no heaven, at least the tale of heaven goes further to quench our forever longing than does the naturalistic story of death.

If this be a game, it’s a play-world which licks your real world hollow.

As C.S. Lewis said in prose:

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

~C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

So even if there is no Narnia, I shall live like a Narnian.

I choose joy.

Categories Book Notes, Following Christ

Down from the mountain

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When I was in high school, our youth group talked about “mountaintop experiences”.

Mountaintop experiences were when we had some sort of emotional experience with God or His word, usually at a camp or other special event. We would get all hyped up about one thing or another – evangelism, personal holiness, being in the word, whatever.

I don’t remember if we had any direct teaching on the Biblical basis for the term, but it hearkened to Moses on the mountaintop receiving revelation from the Lord or to Peter and James and John seeing Christ transfigured on the mountain. Away from people on the mountaintop, each of these had very special encounters with God.

And each of these ran into difficulties when they returned from the mountaintop to face everday life. Moses found the camp worshipping a golden calf. The disciples came down to discover their compatriots unable to cast out a demon.

We were given warnings about life off the mountaintop. We were warned that we’d come home from camp only to be tempted to get into a fight with our parents. And, amazingly enough, the warnings were usually right. It was a lot harder to be obedient, to be in the Word, to tell others about Christ once we were back in everyday life, once we had to clean our rooms and do our homework and get along with our siblings.

I was struck, as I re-read The Silver Chair last month for the Chronicles of Narnia Reading Challenge, that Lewis describes a mountaintop experience as well – and describes the difficulty of coming down from the mountain.

Jill meets Aslan on a vast plateau that sits high, high, high above the land of Narnia. She receives a task from Aslan: to find the lost prince of Narnia. And she receives four signs by which to complete the task.

Before Aslan blows Jill off the mountaintop to meet Eustace, he gives her a last warning – a warning about life off the mountaintop.

“Stand still. In a moment I will blow. But, first, remember, remember, remember the signs. Say them to yourself when you wake in the morning and when you lie down at night, and when you wake in the middle of the night. And whatever strange things may happen to you, let nothing turn your mind from following the signs. And secondly, I give you a warning. Here on the mountain I have spoken to you clearly: I will not often do so in Narnia. Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind. And the signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them there. That is why it is so important to know them by heart and pay no attention to appearances. Remember the signs and believe the signs. Nothing else matters. And now, daughter of Eve, farewell — “

Aslan gives two instructions on leaving the mountaintop, but they are really one.

“Remember, remember, remember,” Aslan said. Lewis has Aslan almost quote the words following the Hebrew shema in Deuteronomy 6:

“And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”

~Deuteronomy 6:6-9 (ESV)

Aslan was telling Jill that she needed to remember what he had spoken. She needed to repeat his words to herself multiple times a day. She needed to return to his word again and again and again.

“Let nothing turn your mind”, Aslan said. He was telling Jill that she needed to purpose to be obedient to Aslan’s word. What’s more, she needed to keep on purposing to do Aslan’s word, whatever the inducements otherwise.

“Take great care that it does not confuse your mind,” Aslan said. He was telling Jill that she needed to guard against distraction. I am reminded first of Titus 3:9 (I’m in Titus now, so that’s on my mind quite a bit), where Paul warns the Cretans: “But avoid foolish controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels about the law, for they are unprofitable and worthless.” When Jill told bits of their quest to the lady of the green kirtle, she laughed them off with what seemed like enlightened words, dismissing Aslan’s words as myths. Eventually, under the power of the lady’s smoke, she would make Jill and her companions doubt that life above the ground even exists. Confusion was everywhere – but Jill needed to guard against distractions from her purpose – and from what Aslan had said.

“Pay no attention to appearances,” Aslan said. He was telling Jill that she needed to value Aslan’s word above her interpretation. How easy would it have been for Jill to have paraphrased the third sign “You shall find a writing on a stone in that ruined city, and you must do what the writing tells you” as “Follow the directions on the stone sign”? Very easy, I think. And when she saw the words “Under me” inscribed on the stone? She would have been looking for a stone sign, not writing carved on the stone underfoot. She could have missed (and nearly did miss) what Aslan had directed if she’d allowed herself to fixate on her interpretation of the sign rather than the sign itself. The Pharisees of Jesus’ day did exactly that, fixating on what they thought the Messiah was supposed to be and missing the Messiah when He came. “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.” (John 5:39-40 ESV)

Lewis’s advice, given by the mouth of Aslan, is good advice, I think, for those of us who live on this side of divine revelation. We have the signs, they are written in the Scriptures. But as we live our busy lives, if we are to live out the purposes for which God has called us, we must:

  • Remember what God has spoken
  • Purpose to be obedient to what God has spoken
  • Guard against distractions
  • Value God’s word above our interpretations

If we do these four things, I think we will avoid many of the traps that lie in store for us in this world down from the mountain.

Categories Book Notes

No other stream

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Who from among the lovers of Narnia has not quoted Mr. Beaver’s famous words: “Safe? … Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”

I certainly have, many a time.

Beaver was, of course, responding to Susan’s initial fear upon hearing that Aslan was a lion, not a man. When she had thought Aslan was a man, she had experienced that strange feeling – “like the first signs of spring, like good news”. But now that she knew she would be meeting a lion, she felt apprehensive. When the time came that she would actually meet Aslan, she felt apprehensive as well, begging Peter to go greet Aslan – Peter was the eldest after all.

Jill Pole’s initial experiences with Aslan were completely different. Her classmate had just fallen down an enormously high cliff and while Jill was prostate on the cliff in terror, an animal had rushed over and was breathing right beside her, so close she could feel his chest vibrating. She couldn’t move at first, but once she could, she saw that it was a lion. At that very moment, the lion stalked away.

Jill became thirsty, and when she did, she rose from her place on the ground and began to search for water, moving cautiously for fear of the lion. She safely tiptoes her way through the trees and at last finds her heart’s desire. Water. At this point, the thing she wants most in all the world. The thing she feels sure she will die without.

But the lion.

The lion was lying right there, between her and the stream.

She stopped short in terror. She could not advance towards the stream. The lion might kill her. She could not run away. The lion might kill her. She was desperate.

This was no lovely thrill of spring or good news. This was only terror.

And then the lion spoke. He offered her drink.

She asked him to move. He refused. She tried to negotiate for her safety. He refused. She tried to reassure herself that he wasn’t as dangerous as she felt he was. The lion would have none of it:

“Do you eat girls?” she said.
“I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms.”

He couldn’t get any more unsafe.

Jill decides to forgo the stream. The lion reminds her that she will die without it. She tries to find another way, another stream – one that she would not have to go through the lion to get.

“Oh dear!” said Jill, coming another step nearer. “I suppose I must go and look for another stream then.”

“There is no other stream,” said the Lion.

And such is the crux of Jill’s dilemma.

There was no other stream. And this stream was accessible only through Aslan.

Aslan the great and terrible – the swallower of children, of adults, of kingdoms.

The only way she could live was to throw herself at His mercy.

And so she did, with no reassurances of His goodness.

Her situation was completely different than Susan’s – she had no assurances that this unsafe god was good. She would learn that, but she didn’t know it now.

For now, her only reality was that

“There is no other stream.”

I’ve been reading The Silver Chair as part of Carrie’s Chronicles of Narnia Reading Challenge. Don’t forget to check in there to see what others have been reading this month.

Categories Book Notes

Book Notes: Christy by Catherine Marshall

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Nineteen year old Christy Huddleston wanted to make a difference, wanted to be someone. Someone beyond the daughter of a well-to-do businessman, that is. And when she heard a missionary speak of the needs among the Appalachians just hours away from her city, she was determined to go.

What she finds in Cutter Gap, Tennessee is even more foreign than she’d ever dreamed. She is full of grand plans for helping – but soon discovers that being “someone” and making a difference doesn’t necessarily mean what she thought it had.

This wasn’t my first reading of Catherine Marshall’s Christy. Anna and I owned a copy when we were teens and I know I read it at least once. I think I saw the TV miniseries too – although I might be getting it mixed up with Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman (I know, not at all similar). Needless to say, by now you probably realize that while I read it I really didn’t remember anything from it. I was glad when Stephanie from Simple Things selected Christy as May’s Reading to Know Classics Bookclub reading.

I enjoyed reading the ambitious Christy’s story, thinking back to my own ambitious teenaged and young adult plans for saving the world. I think the desire to make a difference, to be somebody is a common one. I also think that being disappointed with how your well-intentioned efforts turn out is also a common experience. I remember taking an impoverished middle schooler under my wing, determining to share the gospel with her and to train her into a godly girl. I drove her places, taught her how to do various crafts, studied the Bible with her. And I quickly became disillusioned when she and her family began to expect that I’d drive her places on a moment’s notice, wanted me to buy her things, and generally took advantage of my good intentions. I struggled to know what to do when I wanted so badly to help but it didn’t seem to be working the way I thought it would work.

How I wish I’d had someone like Christy’s Miss Alice to mentor me in the ways of giving myself away. I loved reading Marshall’s descriptions of Miss Alice – a woman whose theology I didn’t particularly agree with, but whose gentleness and devotion are absolutely praiseworthy. Miss Alice is described as pretty much a saint, although she avers that she is not, and even the sordid tale she eventually tells does little to sully her reputation. Yes, wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a saint who always knows the right thing to say and to do to mentor one along the way?

Alas, we are much more like Marshall’s other characters – flawed humans with quirks and quibbles and mixed motives.

Christy marvels, in one section, at one woman’s wisdom mixed with superstition. I do too.

Opal went closer to Bird’s-Eye, took his empty plate. “Looky-here, Bird’s-Eye, whilst you was fixin’ that fawn’s leg, you was a real man. You know that? It’s plumb foolish for you not to let more folks in the Cove see a heap more of that Bird’s-Eye. They have the wrong idea ’bout you.”

The man looked at her in genuine astonishment. “That must be woman tease-talk. Are you a-joshin’ me? Fixin’ animals’ legs ain’t no man’s work.”

“Fixin’ onything is man’s work,” came Opal’s firm answer. “Tearin’ down or killin’, that’s easy. Any addlepated fool kin pull the trigger of a rifle-gun or fling a rock. It’s fixin’ that’s hard, takes a heap more doin’.”

Listening to this, I could see again the baby girl’s tiny body lying in the middle of the big bed. How amazing that this homespun mending philosophy and the awful liver-grown superstition could be part of the same woman.

We humans are a mixed lot – with God’s image stamped on world-played clay. Try as she might to smooth the edges and impress them into a new mold, Christy never managed to truly change those she worked with. And neither can we.

The answer, of course, the way to truly make a difference is not in “fixing” or “cleaning up” but in the gospel – as Miss Alice admonished the young pastor David Grantland:

“Clean up a pigsty,” she commented one evening, “and if the creatures in it still have pig-minds and pig-desires, soon it will be the same old pigsty again. Preach the gospel, David, teach it, preach to the hearts of men. That’s your business. Then the fruits, including the reforms in other areas, will follow as fruits. But it’s no good tying apples onto a tree. Soon they’ll be rotting apples….The question at issue, David, is how to get rid of the evil in men. Attacking corruption in the environment won’t do it. That’s like cutting weeds in a field. In a fortnight the weeds will be grown again. And attacking the men themselves won’t work either. Whatever separates men from love can’t be of God.”

Though David was stubborn, at last humbly, he asked the question Miss Alice must have been wanting him to ask, “Well then, how can we deal with evil?”

“By demonstrating to the people a way that’s more powerful than evil. And that’s good news! Let’s get on with living and teaching and preaching that good news with all the verve and enthusiasm we have.”

“Then,” David said, “if that’s the technique, why aren’t people changed more drastically by today’s preaching?”

“Could be because we don’t often have the courage to give the good news to people straight. Most of us are still talking religious theory that we haven’t begun living, and talking in worn-out cliches at that. A watered-down message is as futile as applying rose water to a cancer. When you heart is ablaze with the love of God, when you love other people – especially the ripsnorting sinners – so much that you dare to tell them about Jesus with no apologies, then never fear, there will be results. One of two things will happen. Either there’ll be persecutions, or the fire will leap from your heart to catch and blaze in the depths of other men’s being. I’ve watched the process over and over. And then when the blaze starts, the reforms will follow as surely as the flower follows the bud, or the fruit comes after the blossom on the tree.”

“It’s too slow a way.”

“No David, it isn’t too slow a way. The other is no way at all.”

Amen and amen.

This girl, at nineteen, dreamed of making a difference, of being someone. Life has taught her that her grand dreams don’t necessarily produce grand outcomes. But Miss Alice’s charge echoes in this woman’s heart, reminds her that the gospel is the only way to make a difference, that losing oneself for the gospel is the only way to be someone.

May I have a heart ablaze, a tongue unstopped, a love unfettered – a life that would make a difference.

Check out what other readers are saying about Christy at the May Bookclub wrap-up post

Categories Book Notes

Going Green with Greywater (or not)

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Greywater. It’s not sewage, but we send gallons of it into our sewers daily. It’s the water we wash our hands with, shower with, bathe in. We can reduce the amount we create but we can’t eliminate it entirely. We’ve got to get clean.

But we don’t have to send it into our sewers. It’s not sewage.

I’ve been doing the most low-tech of greywater recycling for years – dumping my dishwater out the door instead of down the drain – but when we bought ourselves a piece of land and started thinking about building on it, I started thinking about a more elaborate greywater system.

A little bit of research brough me to Art Ludwig’s Create an Oasis with Greywater, the definitive resource on greywater systems. Art describes the value of greywater, helps readers set goals for their greywater system, and helps them design a greywater system that fits their context. It’s a great (if not very pretty) book.

It also made clear that a greywater system is not for us.

Really? You might be asking. How’s it a great book if it convinced you to not go with a greywater system?

That’s the thing. Ludwig (unlike a lot of so-called green gurus) is an environmentalist with his head screwed on straight. He’s not interested in designing or implementing something that seems green but really doesn’t do any good. He spends quite a bit of time helping his readers to scale down their expectations of a greywater system and to evaluate what sort of system makes environmental and economical (he makes the excellent suggestion that economics can be a proxy for environmental soundness, which I wholeheartedly agree with) sense given their individual context.

In our case, our soil demands that we put an advanced septic system on our land. All our wastewater (greywater and the “black” water from our toilets and kitchen sink) will be sent through a dual-chambered system where aerobic fermentation will purify it before it is pumped through a series of tubing to irrigate our lawn from below. So we’ll already be getting one of the primary advantages of a greywater system (without installing separate pipes) – we’ll be irrigating with our water instead of sending it into a sewer. Furthermore, since the “irrigation” step is an important part of the septic process, we cannot add extra irrigation on top of the irrigation field (which will cover most of the area close enough to the house to be feasibly irrigated with greywater). In addition, a septic system requires a certain amount of “dilution” water to work – so it is possible to remove too much water from the septic through a greywater system.

So a greywater system isn’t for us.

Does that mean I won’t be using anything I learned from this book?

Actually, no. Ludwig points out that there are some forms of greywater reuse that can be done without a fancy system. Using your bathwater and a bucket to flush the toilet? Go for it (I fill our low-flow toilet with bathwater to rinse Tirzah Mae’s diapers in – and then flush it with more bathwater.) And throwing my dishwater out the door after I’m done with it? Well, that’s a tricky one. Kitchen sink waste is actually considered blackwater, since it contains organic matter that can feed icky bacteria, causing them to proliferate and make you sick. Even ordinary greywater is not encouraged for vegetable garden use, since it can can contain pathogens. The compromise I make is to discard my dishwater down the drain but to apply the rinse water to my garden. An even better choice would be to use that water on non-edibles, but I currently don’t have any nonedibles that require water.

If you’re at all interested in greywater reuse, I highly recommend Ludwig’s Create an Oasis with Greywater as a resource to help you evaluate a system. Ludwig’s website is also a great resource.