Everything's OK

Yes, that's the title of a Chris Rice song. But it's also indicative of my mood. Today I taught 3 hours of high school literature (exhausting, but a great joy) and had a well-earned frappuchino. There's something special about the first frappuchino of spring, you know? Especially if you drink it while tooling along with the windows down, tra-la-la-ing along to worship music. Sunshine also helps.

I love being a teacher. I get to ask outrageous questions. My first question to the new class I taught this morning was "Okay, let's all be honest. Who here either hates literature or really couldn't care less about it?" Eleven out of twelve students raised their hands. Boy, that was a moment. I just grinned at them. "I'm not going to try to convince you that literature is cool," I said. "It's kinda like God. God is way cool, whether or not we recognize it. Ditto for literature. I hope you realize the coolness of literature someday--maybe today, maybe not--but it's your loss if you don't." And on we went.

I told them that my main goal for the morning was to get them to ask questions they'd never had to ask before, and think in ways they may never have thought before. As far as I could tell, it worked. The boys, at least, began to pay attention right about the time I started explaining that bouncing basketballs and rap are rhythmic, which means artistic, which relates to sound patterns in poetry. I also compared Jerusalem vs. Athens literature to Terps v. Duke basketball. O di immortales! I dunno if I'll ever be forgiven for that one, but in a class with 10 boys and only 2 girls, something's gotta give. :-P

My afternoon class, which I teach pretty often, was more fun in some ways, though less challenging. Another thing I love about being a teacher---I can arbitrarily decide to have class outside. We lounged around in the sun, comparing Aristotelian views of literature to biblical and Christian views, talking about what aspects of the Gospel we would portray in our stories if we were writing them. It was fascinating to hear their thoughts: we would up with two allegories, an epic, a long and gentle sanctification novel, and a class-struggles novel, all based on our individual answers to the question "What aspect of the Gospel is most amazing to you?" We also talked about whether or not Christians can find a use for the genre of horror story, and about whether writing literature is "self-expression" or "communication". It was a great discussion!

I am now "all mellowed out," slightly sunburnt, and ready for a weekend of garden work. Happy, happy, me--saved, graced, and in the process of being sanctified. There is no gladness like living under the Gospel.

Hell and Auditors -- by David and Casey

David on Dante’s Commedia, for which he is making diagrams…

“Well, if we blow up Hell…” – David, meaning graphics magnifications

“Wouldn’t that hurt Jerusalem’s tourist industry?” – David, upon realizing that, in Dante, Hell is immediately beneath Jerusalem.

“You always want to talk about something else when I want to discuss Jerusalem’s tourist industry!” – David

“Oh, I’ll bet Dante had them rolling in the aisles with his ‘comedy’” – David, working on diagrams for the Inferno part of the Divine Comedy.

“Christy, tell me the truth. Was Dante one of those guys who wrote poetry on opium?” – David

“A giant rose? Well sure! What else would there be hanging in space!” – David on Dante’s Paradiso

“Oh Dante, what have I ever done to you?” – David, dealing with the difficulties of rendering the Commedia graphically.

“I said we should kill the auditors and eat their liver.” – Casey
“They’re not auditors.” – Mom
“What are they?” – Casey
“They’re computer people, and we need them.” – Mom
“Oh.” – Casey

“What is your impression of life after the fall of the Roman Empire?” – Casey, reading aloud
“Are you asking me?” – Christy

“They married a whole tribe!” – Casey
“Who married a whole tribe?” – Christy
“No one, dear.” – Mom

“Even if it wasn’t I wasn’t going to change it anyway.” – Casey

De Amore Christiani: Collected Thoughts II

My previous collection of thoughts on this subject has elicited quite a number of comments, both on my blog and via email or conversation.

Good. I like discussion. At the same time, I wish I had not waxed quite so wroth in my last. I do not recant the principles, but the expression might, I think, be softened to reflect a more Christlike attitude. I have myself written some exceedingly bad fiction on romantic themes (in high school, which is only somewhat of an excuse), and I should hate to be judged as harshly as I judge those who were my models. At the same time, it is true that not many should be teachers (or models), since they must give an account to God for their teaching.

This was my retraction or mollification. Let us now proceed with the inquiry.

I have said what, in my opinion, a Christian romance is not. But now we must ask what it is, for negative definition is only useful up to a point, and I prefer a positive identification whenever possible. What a shame it would be, if one could only recognize one's friends by comparing them with one's enemies!

My friend Maple sent me the following questions, which I should now like to take up as a means of continuing. I do not expect this to be my last post on this subject, but it will do admirably for a middle. In my last I dealt with negative definition; I shall now deal with positive definition; and in a third collection (provided that nothing unexpected comes up) I shall try to apply that positive definition to the Christian fiction market in useful ways.

A brief preamble...

I respect the suggestions of Peter and Sarah, who both seem to be to be arguing (in their comments on my last) for a view that sets the biblical romance (you understand: the sweep of the epic love affair between Christ and his Bride) at the pinnacle of Christian romances. Obviously this is THE Christian romance, and anyone who says differently is selling something.

But. I cannot at present accept (which I am not sure that they were arguing, but which was where my thoughts wandered after reading their comments) the notion that a great Christian romance must necessarily be patterned on THE great Christian romance. I am persuaded by my brother Mike---I had not thought of the "domestic novels" as examples (Anne of Green Gables and the like), but the idea of them strikes me quite forcibly. They are so entirely human, flawed, mutable, and yet radiant. In a conversation with Mike and Jess earlier this afternoon, I was startled to hear these comments from him, which I will try to quote as perfectly as I can, though in a condensed fashion:

"But how," I asked, "how can you have complete love for God, and yet completely love your wife? Don't the two collide?"

His reply: "My thought on this is that the older I get, the less I believe in completeness. I don't have complete love for Jessica. I don't have complete love for God. Instead, I think of the word 'sufficient.' I pray for enough, and I think of the Lord's Prayer---'give us this day our daily bread.' It's never perfect or complete, which means there's always more. I don't love Jessica as well now as I will five years from now."

What I took away from this, and what fits so well with the humorous, sometimes tragic, thoroughly imperfect tone of the "domestic novels," is that life on earth cannot ever attain to a complete human love. We are locked, for now, inside a great tragedy. We have a great hope, but it is like Dante's Inferno...one has to climb all the way down to Satan himself, at the very bottom of Hell's hole, before the whole world will be turned upside down and be righted. We have to live out the five acts, right up to the death of Earth and the last groans of mankind's sin nature, before things are remade in perfection and completion. A human relationship on earth, no matter how we---I----wish it, simply cannot be perfect. Completeness cannot be made out of incompleteness.

What I love about, for example, the Anne books, is the skill with which they portray the tragicomedy (tragedy moving towards comedy) in which we live at present. To sum up this part of my thoughts in a line from a song, they portray "this crazy, tragic, sometimes almost magic, awful beautiful life."

On to Maple's questions.

What is a good ending for a truthful romance, if not the altar?

To which I insert the word "human" before "romance," and answer: "Death." I would say "Heaven," but even the imagination must fail somewhere. The altar is the beginning of legitimate human romance. All before it is a preamble, and all after it is the real romance. Mike and Jess often look at David and Casey, who are now thoroughly enjoying their engaged state, and smile. "They think engagement is fun," Jess says, "because they have no idea how much fun marriage is." Her amusement was sympathetic, but definite.

For David and Casey, romance is still limited. David might say that "the plant is still in a pot." On April 29th we will transplant it to a flower bed, where its potential for growth will be unlimited. Romance is still a hothouse plant during engagement. If it survives the transition to marriage and remains unblighted by the years, it will grow into a tree at which others marvel for centuries. How silly, then, to cut off the story of the tree at the moment when it is planted! And yet it is so often done---why? Because once marriage is attained we are sure that everything will come out "happily ever after" and no longer have a sense of suspense? Anybody who has observed marriages knows better than to make such a foolish assumption.

I can only presume that we think this way because we have marriage as an end in itself, whereas we ought to have it as a means. God gave Eve to Adam, and that was not the end of the human story. On the contrary, it was the beginning. One of my pastors recently put it well, and I will approximate him: "Marital status is not the ultimate issue." Marriage, properly understood, is like unto two pilgrilms meeting together on their way to the Celestial City. They decide to travel together, bearing with one another's laggings, helping one another on, encouraging each other, because of their mutual need for such assistance. But their decision to travel together is only the beginning of the story, and creates a strong suspensful interest in the reader: "what will happen next? Will the pilgrims help each other? Will one prove false to the other? Will they suceed in their great adventure? Will their friendship grow, or will one abandon and the other be abandoned at the first sign of trouble?"

What the ending of the story is depends largely on what question the reader is led by the author to ask. If the question is simply "how will these two people get together," then it is a question that ends at the altar. If the question is more extensive, more will be required in order to answer it. This storytelling principle reveals, with stark clarity, the real heart of the matter. The truth is that where a story ends is a definitive statement on what the story is about. If a story is about courtship, it will end at the altar. If it is about romance, and if it is about Christian romance, it will end only when the powers of imagination fail, which is at the gate of the Celestial City. It will end, as Reepicheep says, when one can neither sail nor swim any farther East. At least, that is my opinion.

Why do even non-Christians have the climactic event of marriage (even if only the wedding) engraved on their makeup?

In order to avoid future reiterations, I here make the blanket statement that all previous and following statements are to be taken first as merely opinions, and second, as present opinions, that is, not fixed.

Non-Christians have the event of marriage "engraved on their makeup" for two reason: one low and one high. The low one is that which I have outlined above---they fail to realize that romance begins at marriage, and content themselves therefore with a description of courtship, which is only a kind of restricted or infantile or potting-shed romance. The other is as high as one could wish---it is that the human soul knows its end. We know that we are made for God, and made to be in intimate relationship with God. We know that such a relationship would by the climax of any existance that we have or hope to have. And, being metaphorical creatures, we liken that which we cannot express to that which we can. The union of two persons is as exact an image (woefully inadequate though it is) as we possess of what it will be like to be in unity with our God. Every human must feel this, however little they recognize or accept it.

What does that teach authors about how to approach romance writing?

It doesn't teach non-Christian authors anything, because they have no framework within which to profit from the lesson. Even if they recognize (as some have) that the altar-ending is a cliche, they are unequipped to make anything better out of a story that ends later.

Is the view that fiction is an escape an excuse for depicting unrealistic romances?

Undoubtedly. I can quote at least one author who makes that very statement (Perrine). But, in light of my earlier comments, it should be clear that fiction as an escape is just as bad as an aborted (yes, aborted may be the best word yet) romance.

In other words, should romance novels ever be only an escape?

What are you escaping from? Your marriage? What will that breed except discontent? Or are you escaping from your single life? To what purpose? You are breathing poison that will infect your future spouse at the first kiss. It was a common fancy of the older poets that people who exchange kisses are exchanging breath and even souls thereby. Will you give your future husband, your future wife, a kiss of discontentment and bizzarely exaggerated expectations? If you do, you will soon be trying to escape your own marriage, which brings the whole experience back in a full, vicious, heartsick circle.

What should be the Christian writer's measuring stick for depicting realistic situations in his work - his own experience? the experience of others? other novels?

They say "write what you know," which is fine advice for novelists. Those who do not prefer to stick to literary realism (in other words, those who want to write as people wrote during all the centuries before 1800 A.D.) should also write what they "know"---that is, they should write what they know to be true, usually because they have experienced it. How they clothe the truth is their own affair. Lewis spoke truth in fairy tales and Dante spoke it in epic poetry and Bunyan spoke it in allegory and Shakespeare spoke it in drama. I suggest that we impoverish ourselves by taking "realism" as our exclusive slogan, but that is a topic of its own and deserves to be put aside until I can devote my full attention to it.

What would be the main message of a truthful romance?

Assuming that we mean a truthful Christian romance, I answer that the greatest claim to be made for human love is Piper's definition which I will paraphrase in a slightly expanded form: "Human love is that attitude of the whole person towards another whole person (including heart, mind, strength, spirit, will, etc.) whereby the one seeks to direct or draw the other towards that which is most satisfying to the human soul, namely, God." In other words, a great Christian romance affirms that human beings are capable of helping one another towards God. If you think for a moment what a claim this is, I think you will not find it too little. Think: that I, a human sinner, should be so privileged (beyond angels in this, by the by) as to actually be capable of drawing another sinner's attention towards God, of increasing the clarity and strength of another person's affections toward Him by so much as an atom, is a thing of joy beyond expression, and possible only through the enabling work of the Holy Spirit. It is a vast theme, a mighty, grand, tender, magical statement. It is human, but transformed. It is, in a word, Christlike.

Should Christian romance novelists be overt in their comparisons of earthly romance and the romance of heaven?

Some have been, and those who could do it well, did well to do it. I think of Hannah Hurnard's Hind's Feet in High Places. But it is difficult, and extremely susceptible to mismanagement. In addition---and here I tread with the greatest hesitation and temerity---I wonder sometimes whether we Christians tend to emphasize the ways in which human marriages are like THE MARRIAGE, to such an extent that we ignore important differences. True, the husband is the head of the wife, and her leader, and she his follower, and he must love her and she must obey him and in all this they together are a picture of Christ and the Bride.

But do not forget the picture of the two pilgrims. The man is like Christ in his position in the relationship and in the attitude he is to have towards his wife. However, unlike Christ (and like his wife), he is also a human sinner. Two imperfect humans must help one another on towards Christ, neither stopping overlong to gaze at the other, because their attention must be fixed primarily ahead. A wife must not orbit her husband as the Church orbits Christ. Milton was wrong when he said "He for God only, she for God in him." What a calamitous system, in which "he" is so fixed on God that he pays no attention to his wife (for whom God has commanded him to provide), and "she" is fixed on him, not God at all!

No, they are both for God, and also for one another, but their individual relationships with God are primary, and the marriage is contracted as a means to the end of a successful journey Heavenwards.

I daresay all this talk of pilgrims sounds dreary and unromantic, perhaps even calling to mind a chaste nun and monk who travel together under strict instructions from Higher Up that they walk in silence, separately focused in meditative prayer. That is entirely the wrong picture. Imagine instead the best friends in the world, embarked together upon the greatest of quests, with nothing earthly to lean upon but one another, and the most beautiful thing of all to go towards, which they have been trying to get to their whole lives, and have now found each in the other the same passion that spurs them on, and are friends because of it, and have sworn to keep faith together under joy or peril, gladness or pain, sickness or health, plenty or want, in good and bad, until their Guide brings them to it.

Literature has given us few examples of such a journey, and where it has, the travelers are both men. Think of Roland and Oliver, Achilles and Patroclus, Christian and Hopeful, etc. But because past ages have perhaps thought it too hard to write of women enduring such frightful ordeals, this does not mean that women have not done it. They have. And because of this I might perhaps say with Mike (and with the High Queen, who asked me whether the greatest Christian romances are only to be found in fact, not fiction) that domestic novels are the most faithful portraits, and that the highest art our Christian authors have yet devised is the homeliest.

A Week in The Red House

One week. Seven days. One hundred and seventy hours. Ten girls. One house. The Red House.

Daily Schedule: I wake at or around 7 in the morning. Kaylyn is my Red House Roommate, now nicknamed by me "Scarlet" and "Chiara," depending on mood and personality-aspect. We usually come to at the same moment, exchange a few lazy comments on the sunshine pouring through our east-bound windows, and roll out of bed to go for our morning trip to the water. This is our room...

We have a bathroom en suite, and the railings in the first picture are actually the top of a small privy stair that leads to the kitchen (complete with cupboard-door and iron latch at the bottom). Kaylyn and I usually roll out of bed, pull on sweatshirts over our pyjamas, and either walk (barefoot) across the street to bid the ocean good morning, or else drive ten minutes to the skyswept beach on Assateague and perform our orisons to the sun as it rises from the sea. Here is a view over Assateague Beach, and another from it:

Yesterday I stripped off my socks in spite of the cold, and played tag with the waves.

These outings are invariably cold, but with an early, light-filled purity, which we find invigorating. Since Kaylyn had never met Atlantic before this trip, I took it upon myself to perform the introduction.

"Only one thing, Kaylyn," I said solemnly. "You must have a certain fear of the sea. Otherwise, it can kill you." This was wisdom that I had learned from my seafaring grandfather as a small girl. Kaylyn nodded. "Not a tame lion, then? But is she good?"

"No," I replied, decidedly. "She is not good. She is not even friendly. But, she is beautiful."

So we went. After a half hour on the dawn beach at Assateague, Kaylyn said, driving back, "I love the sound."
"Yes."
"What kind of poetry would the sea be?"
"All kinds," I said at once, for it is something I have thought of before. "She is free verse and metrical verse. She is unity in variety, more than anything else I know of on earth. And she is utterly indifferent. She is what the gods of old were---she neither needs nor wants us."


When we return, I brew hot cocoa and Kaylyn makes tea. We assemble our breakfasts on a tray and take it up to our room by the privy stair. All the rest of the house is still sleeping. The breakfast tray is set between us on the bed, and we have our quiet times, occasionally reading a snatch aloud or sharing a thought about God. I have been reading about God's holiness, and Kaylyn is studying Psalm 29 and Romans 5.


We wash up (both ourselves and the dishes), then settle in for a morning of reading and writing. I spread my things across the bed, but Kaylyn uses one of the wicker chairs and the sitting-room area attached to our room. Sometimes we are quiet; sometimes we play music; sometimes we read aloud and toss a question or an idea across the intervening space.


Lunch is a quiet, get-your-own affair, and the afternoon proceeds much as the morning did. There is absolutely nothing to do on Chincoteague---one is not distracted by so much as a movie theater. We see no one. Few cars pass. It is a place bound in the quiet of early spring. Though not nearly so pretty as the villages of Cape Cod (as I wrote in my last), it is a place that has the dignity of hard work about it. I read the Delmarva magazines strewn about The Red House, and from them I feel that I have come to know these people. Locally-written short stories and poems illuminate them---the sea is in their blood and brain and fingers, together with a homespun realism and love of simple pleasures. Their words are like their grocery store, having few sophisticated luxuries (we could not find any Dove chocolate or Italian cocoa) but plenty of efficient, hearty food, good in itself and good for the body.


My reading and writing consists of Beowulf and Dante's Commedia. I have fallen in love with the Italian poet's vision---he wants to encourage Christians with a description of the soul's progression to Paradise. In my eyes he has joined Bunyan as a great Christian artist who "puts heart" into one. That is what "encourage" means: "To put heart into." His final canto, describing the vision of God, brought me indeed into full delight, awe, joy, and worship.


The girls take turns preparing our evening meal, and we gather between six and seven-thirty. Sometimes conversation is exceedingly silly, and I am glad we have made a rule that what is said in this house stays in this house. Other times our talk revolves around God, the Christian life, the Gospel, and hard questions (such as Soul-force's impending visit).

The early evening is usually taken up with a movie; some of us return to our work in the later evening, whereas others choose to sleep.


That is the sum of our time here, now almost at an end. I write from the living room, surrounded by three other girls whose computers also sit on their laps. We are in sweats, jeans, t-shirts... no one is presentable in the dress-code sense of the word. No one cares. There is nothing to do and no one to see us. We are lost to our lives, and though we will return to them tomorrow, this space and time of contemplation has been a graciousness that I think we all feel.

Lisa entered a description of us into the guestbook: Ten girls who have come to study, to write stories, and to keep house.

Five of us got up at 6 this morning to watch the sun rise at Assateague Beach. We are in the morning of life, and as we stood there on the beach singing hymns to God, I thought that surely there is nothing that so pictures joy as the long molten pathway to the sun, flung by its rays to us across sea, space, time, and eternity. How can joy, ancient as it is, be eternally young?

I Think I'll Like It Here

My first thought was, "This isn't Westport." Former associations with that most beautiful island town in Cape Cod forced a comparison between it and The Red House, Chincoteague, which came out decidedly in favor of the former.

But that was only at first.

The Red House is home this week to ten PHC girls on Spring Break, who all hope to be productive while enjoying the aesthetic qualities of Chincoteague Island. For this week we have outlawed dress clothes, social engagements, and men. We are to be a sort of merry home-keeping convent.

The house is charming, though I was too tired to notice it at first. Kaylyn and I have a room equipped with en suite bathroom, sitting area, and a funny little staircase to the kitchen. The Red House reminds me very much of the hundred-year-old farmhouse of my childhood. It is not precisely beside the sea, but the sea is just across the road, next to a cafe and screened from us by some sort of Comfort Inn.

Behind the house there is a yard (long, narrow, and surrounded by other houses' yards) that terminates in a graveyard. Reader, I did not fall in love with this place until I strayed into the graveyard at sunset. The first thing that caught my eye there was a large, beautiful white conch shell, lying like a sea-bouquet in front of its headstone. There were more of these scattered about. "How like sea-folk!" I thought. Then, looking up, I caught a glimpse of rose-red light falling across the bay. The magic of the sea crept all at once into my blood, and I stood utterly enchanted.

I think I'll like it here.