Do Have A Most Joyful Christmas

Earlier this week I had a delightful conversation with my granddaughter about Reepicheep, a mouse character from C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia series. Reepicheep is a large, talking mouse who carries a rapier and wears a red plume tucked in his golden circlet. He is quite pugnacious and quick to defend any affront to his honor. It was fun to think about that little squirt again.

As we talked I suddenly realized that it has been too long since I've read any of Lewis' books. I must get back into them, because they meant so much to me in my college years way back in the 50s.


I have also been pondering how so many are trying to rob me and you of the joy of Christmas and the wonder of it all.
Then I remembered something hidden back in a dusty corner of my brain. I went there and could only find the rag ends of a quote from Lewis' Surprised by Joy. I had to Google to find it:


"A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere—'Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,' as Herbert says, 'fine nets and stratagems.' God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous."


It's not that I ever was an atheist, but I must confess that in those years I wasn't feeling very close to God. He seemed to me to be so full of rules to keep, rules that I wasn't very good at anyway. So I felt more and more distant. Besides feeling quite guilty about all that, I felt rather bored by the whole religion thing.


And then I discovered Lewis! I must agree. One cannot be too careful of his reading if he wants to remain an Atheist—or become one. And so I too, with Lewis' help, was surprised by joy. How amazing it has all been, this journey since those days.


Well, that's what happens when one approaches the end of another year. You start to look back and then wonder what lies ahead. Of course, I know what lies ahead somewhere down the road. I remember this especially as I celebrate Christmas and ponder how that great, wondrous mysterious HE who is the source of all that is, became one with me in my rebellion, confusion, anxiety and death. And I gaze upon Him in His mother's arms and know not what more to say. The only words I can find are from the faithful apostle:


"If we have been united with Him in a death like His, we shall certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like His," (Romans 6:5).


Oh what will that be like, that resurrection, that renewal? Like the little child gazing at all those wonders packaged up in bright paper under the tree, I can hardly wait. Do have a most joyful Christmas! 

Written in the Book of Life

I cannot resist a good book. What about you? I did a brief look into the history of books and found an interesting article on Wikipedia—where else? I learned that wood was the first medium to take the guise of a book. The words biblos and liber first meant "fibre inside of a tree". In Chinese, the character that means book is an image of a tablet of bamboo.

So now I come to the words of Daniel 12:1-3—"But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be found written in the BOOK."

What book? Who wrote it? Who reads it? When was this book written and why?

Read about Moses arguing with the LORD about the inappreciative Israelites after their horrid golden calf idolatry (Exodus 32:31-33),

"So Moses went back to the LORD and said, "Oh, what a great sin these people have committed! They have made themselves gods of gold. But now, please forgive their sin—but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written."
The LORD replied to Moses, "Whoever has sinned against me I will blot out of my book."

Moses understood that the LORD keeps a record of sins in His book.

King David speaks in similar terms as he prays to the LORD about his adversaries (Psalm 69:28),


"May they be blotted out of the book of life and not be listed with the righteous."

One of the frightening things I have learned about Nazi Germany was their ability to keep detailed records of the people they determined should be detained and murdered in their concentration camps. And how were they able to pull that off, especially since we're talking about millions and millions? They did it with the help of IBM. This has been carefully documented in Edwin Black's book, "IBM and the Holocaust." At the heart of Black's argument is that information technology—in the form of IBM's Hollerith punch-card machines—provided the Nazis with a unique and critical tool in their task of cataloguing and dispatching their millions of victims.


Thus they blotted millions and millions of Jewish people from the book of life by keeping records with the then newly developed technology of punch cards, precursor to today's computers. I can distinctly remember punch-card machines.


Using the same imagery, Daniel speaks about another kind of record keeping, the record the LORD keeps of all who put their faith in Him and in the forgiveness won for all mankind by the cross of Jesus Christ. As Jesus said to his excited disciples (Luke 10:18-20),


He replied, "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you. However, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven."

What Books Are You Currently Reading?

I've always loved to read books. In fact, I'm quite unhappy if I do not have three or four or more I'm working on at any given time. One of the temptations I have to fight continually is the temptation to buy yet another book. I'm somewhat like Desiderius Erasmus, who is purported to have said,“When I get a little money, I buy books, and if any is left, I buy food and clothes."

Here are a few of the books I'm currently into and some of the things I'm learning:
What's So Great About Christianity by Dinesh D'Souza. D'Souza points out that the whole science versus religion story is a nineteenth century fabrication. To this day many people believe that the medieval church held that the earth was flat until modern science demonstrated that the globe is round. In fact, the ancient Greeks and medieval Christians knew this. Dante's medieval cosmology, for instance, was based on the idea of a spherical earth.

I'm enjoying D'Souza, especially because he explodes many such false ideas about Christian faith and history.

Women Pastors? The Ordination of Women in Biblical Lutheran Perspective, edited by Matthew C. Harrison and John T. Pless. I have written much about this topic, especially since there is a very strong opinion in our modern world that men and women are equal. These Lutheran theologians from around the world point out that this begs the question. That's not really the issue. The point is that clergy are appointed by Christ to be His public voice and Christ chose to become incarnate in the male gender. Why? So that he might demonstrate that His Father is the Giver and that through Him the heavenly Father gives forgiveness and grace. We of the church are the receivers, the Bride to whom Christ gives life and mercy. It is Christ's intent then that the public ministers who preach, teach and administer the sacraments be of the male gender so that by their very persons they demonstrate this gift of God's grace.

The Return of The Prodigal Son by Henri J.M. Nouwen. This is really Nouwen's reflections upon a reproduction of Rembrandt's The Return of the Prodigal Son. I'm dismally trained to study and reflect upon painting and know so very little about it. This is why I've been so grateful to Nouwen as he not only takes me into the mind of Rembrandt, but helps me to reflect upon the wondrous parable and learn how this applies to my life. For instance, he writes, "The joy at the dramatic return of the younger son in no way means that the elder son was less loved, less appreciated, less favored. The father does not compare the two sons. He loves them both with a complete love and expresses that love according to their individual journeys."

George MacDonald: The Best From All His Works, The Christian Classics collection, vol. 1. I won this volume in a draw at a writing group meeting. I accepted the book gratefully because I know of the influence MacDonald had on C.S. Lewis, one of my all-time favorite authors. I'm enjoying a couple of MacDonald's fantasy writings in this volume. Here's what he says in one of his unspoken sermons, published in 1886. "The life the Lord came to give us is a life exceeding that of the highest undivine man, by far more than the life of that man exceeds the life of the animal the least human. More and more of it is for each who will receive it, and to eternity. The Father has given to the Son to have life in himself; that life is our light. We know life only as light; it is the life in us that makes us see. All the growth of the Christian is the more and more life he is receiving."

There you have them, four that I'm currently into. What books are you reading? I'm always looking for good recommendations.

Is The Book Dead?

I was fascinated by a comment (below) by Mark Booth, publishing director of Century, an imprint of Random House. He has a new book out called The Secret History of the World: As Laid Down by the Secret Societies. He presents his book as an alternate history of the cosmos and humankind, with the early chapters relating the creation of the world and later chapters devoted to all of crankdom's usual suspects: "Egyptian" hermeticism, Neo-Platonism, the Knights Templar, the pineal gland, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry -- you name it. I totally agree with Laura Miller's review of his book: "It is a mess of a book, disjointed and rambling, rife with puzzling non sequiturs that are obviously meant to be suggestive or evocative but that more often read like the symptoms of an advanced case of Attention Deficit Disorder."

As much as I found Booth's book about secret societies a bunch of drivel, I was still challenged by another comment he recently made. He says that the book is dead.:

"The evidence in 2008 ... suggests that book reading is in decline. I have worked in publishing for some 25 years and have also recently published a book of my own, conscious that it may be one of the last books. I think some people in the business don't want to admit that it's happening. To them it seems a betrayal of skills and standards that generations worked hard to maintain. They see apathy, short attention spans, illiteracy – what Auberon Waugh called the "proletarianisation" of Britain. . .

"Now the work of the novel is finished, and a new form of consciousness is emerging. It's easy to misread the signs of the times. What we're dealing with here is not a decline in reading, but a decline in reading printed books. I am fascinated to learn in The New Yorker that a recent survey in the States shows that a TV in a child's bedroom lowers academic grades, but a parallel survey shows that time spent on the internet encourages better grades!"

"Clearly interactivity is the key. Perhaps the creative things my children do on the net are less passive than reading books? If Caxton's was a revolution in reading, what we are seeing now is a revolution in reading and writing combined.

"The great new literary form that will replace the novel will, I believe, arise on the net and will take on its wild frontier spirit, its intellectual risk-taking, its two fingers at academic control-freakery. But it will also help forge a new form of consciousness in a much more fundamental way that has to do with the form of the internet.

"Because we are all plugging ourselves into one great electronic mind, we will gradually lose the sense of each being shut off in a private mental space, as esoteric philosophy has long predicted. Our mental space will be out there and, as with Facebook, everyone else will have access to it. I don't know what this new literary form will be, but I suspect it will be co-operative and as slinkily responsive to whoever is looking at it as Schroedinger's cat. I can't wait."

So much for Booth. Sorry for the extended quote. The problem is that I lean in his direction. Note the links I inserted above as examples. I found the comment by Booth by Googling. I knew nothing about the man until I stumbled (is that a good word?) upon his Blog. And then with further Googling I learned what Laura Miller had to say and I agree with her. Add to that Booth's reference to William Caxton, the 15th century British historian and printer who incredibly advanced the publishing of books. I didn't know that. Guess how I found out. The same thing is true with Schroedinger's cat. I read about that some time ago, but had forgotten about it until Booth lifted it up in his book. But now I can refer you to it with a yet another link.

And so it goes. Wonder upon wonder. We have all this immediately available to us on the Net. And add to that the email I got this morning from my granddaughter, writing from Facebook. Yup. Something is happening. Perhaps the book, as we know it, is indeed dead and is being replaced by--well--this very medium you and I are using to communicate with one another.