Mr. Ives Christmas

As spring starts (at least in South Carolina!) to show signs of coming, here I am writing about a Christmas novel for a slightly embrarassing reason.  I started it in the fall, got about 3/4ths of the way through, life intervened, then I rediscovered and finished it.  Then writing it about took some real and lengthy consideration.

Mr. Ives' Christmas is about grieving and faith.  The topic drew me first.   The writing held me.

I tend to find other reviews before I write my own, probably to keep from embarassing myself by making some off-the-wall declaration, but despite the fact that I have some weird things to say about the book, things nobody else has hinted about, I'm going to say them anyway:

In a way, it made me think Slaughterhouse-Five meets the Book of Job.

First, for the Slaughterhouse-Five likeness, nothing deep, just a structural likeness.  Just as Vonnegut's Billy is "unstuck in time" and we bounce around his life at different points, so Ives' life comes to us in short non-sequential chapters and often memories, driven by what's on his mind and heart at the moment. Some critics disliked the patchy recanting of Ives' life events, but it seemed to me to be simply the way we remember, and the way we make sense of the present, with whatever pieces of the past our minds connect to.

Some critics say Edward Ives is too Good, but really, he's a believable good man, not a perfect one.  If Hijuelos intended a parallel to Job, Ives would have to be essentially blameless and yet have a gut-wrenching loss visited on him.  And he would be perfectly entitled to question, be baffled by God and "whys." He'd have to feel tormented and damaged.

And he is, both.  But in saying Ives is too good, I think some reviewers miss the very plausible fact that some people turn outward with pain and grief, but some turn inward.  From his unknown birth parents, to the kind, but somewhat emotionally distant, nature of his adoptive father, to, possibly, Ives' innate nature, Ives is clearly drawn all through his life to be one who turns pain inward.

He tries to forgive the killer of his son, and yet tries to keep that at an intellectual level, writing to the kid in prison, sending him books and encouraging him to change the path he was on, but resisting any meeting.  And when the meeting finally happens, he is quite believably untouched by it.  Ives is trying to find redemption through his support of the young man, and it works.  The man does turn his life around, and so Ives has succeeded at making some good come out of the tragic shooting, but it's done with the mind, and isn't a real solution to his pain.

His inner torment over the senseless death of his son manifests in troubled dreams in which he tears at and bruises his own skin.  Healing comes from a dream of his son -- who appears at the age he would have been, 43, not the 17 he was when he died -- questioning him: "Why are you doing this to yourself?" and pouring water on his arms. Ives awakes to find all the damage healed.

The power of God, the existence of the soul and afterlife, are concepts well-supported by the plot, but Hijuelos is way too good a writer to answer the question of faith with a bumper sticker (God did it and that settles it!).  Rather, when faith itself helps to heal, any reader can insist on this being the power of mind.  Whatever.

It's not Ives' only mystical experience, or the only one felt by several other characters.  In fact, his earlier, pre-tragedy, vision of God's loving presence in the world remains undeniable even during the decades that Ives remains emotionally numb over his son's murder.

This novel is not comfortable.  Characters are complex.  Answers are ambiguous.

What makes a novel wonderful?  Different things, to different people, but to me, those ambiguities are what let a varied audience of readers intersect with the characters and with the story, some in very different ways and at different points than do others.  I'm kind of in awe of the power a novel can have to be a place where some people together who otherwise never would, and am more thankful for fiction that grows from someone's soul, than I can quite put into words.

The Profit-Driven Life

I know I'm not the only person who hasn't read The Purpose-Driven Life, though its sales have topped 30,000,000 copies. This is phenomenal for any book.
 
Those of us who've skipped it so far may simply be non-readers, or may be indifferent to Christian self-help, and some would rather be hung by their toes and fed Ex-Lax than read Christian self-help.

As for me and my house, it's fiction.  Or history.  Hell, I think I'd generally rather read High School Algebra 4U!  than any self-help book, and most Christian self-helpers I've tried said nothing deep, complex or...well....helpful.  To me.

But I'm a Book Person and feel both the need to know something about a book so huge-selling, and a personal curiosity as to what it might have to offer. So, armed with TWO delightful B&N gift cards received this Christmas, I thought, Hey, I could get an e-reader copy. And not pay any of my own money!

I've tried e-reading and still prefer real books, but e-reading can be great, especially in the dark of an insomniac night.  If I'm going to read self-help at all it will be then, deep in a sleepless night.

Come to find out that, though the book is years old, there's no lower-price this-has-been-around-awhile e-reader version for under 15 bucks.  Kindle's version is only slightly lower at almost $13, and I don't have a Kindle anyway, I have a Nook app.

I see many decade-old or older books that have come out in e-formats at mid-price range, $5-8 or so.  Not The Purpose-Driven Life.  Well, OK, it has too -- if I could read Spanish.  Spanish e-readers can have it for almost half of the English version's price, at 7.99.

If you're thinking this is either an anti-Spanish "We all pay more so fer-uh-ners can pay less!" rant, or a complaint about free market selling, you'd be wrong.

As a bookseller, I sell Bibles and Christian books for profit, and so I (grudgingly) have to allow publishers their right to do what I do.   Apparently, the publisher has priced the e-version at what they think they can get, and they seem to think they can get $8 from Spanish readers, but $15 from English readers.  They have a right to try.  I'd love to see sales plummet and see them shrug and say, OK, we screwed THAT up, and drop the price to something I have to call much more reasonable, considering that the e-version costs the publisher vastly less in materials, manufacture, storage or shipping.

The ball is in their court when they decide on a price.  Then it's in ours.

Any consumer can, and should say, "That's a rip-off" when they think it is one.  And I do.  It's OK, because this is a commodity for which I have options, like, it's not critical care medication, so I can live without it, and I actually can get it cheap if I change  formats and go to Goodwill for a hard copy instead.  The book shows up there fairly regularly, for 50 cents.

But I will point out those whose publishers offer reasonable prices on e-book versions, whether it's out of customer love or just what they think the market will bear:

Philip Yancey's Where Is God When it Hurts? is excellent and 5 bucks.

A Year with C. S. Lewis for 3.99 (as of this writing)

The Courage For Truth by Thomas Merton is geared particularly to writers, but there's a BUNCH of Merton available in e-format, priced from 7.99 to 9.99.

If these prices are good enough for Merton, Lewis and Yancey, it's hard to know why Warren is so much more costly, but hey, if people pay it, they're welcome to do that.

Look these guys up in your Funk & Wagnalls!

I can't stop grabbing books that others bypass. Like this :

The New Archeological Discoveries : and Their Bearing upon the New Testament and upon the Life and Times of the Primitive Church. By Camden M. Cobern, D.D., Litt.D. Third edition: Funk & Wagnalls, 1918.



The used bookstore valued it at $12.50. They know their business and I usually find their prices distressingly fair and realistic. From what I see of used copies on amazon, the price is about right. Mass-printed undergraduate or popular level archeology books this old don't seem to sell for much, I guess because more recent discoveries have made many old finds obsolete. But while original copies of its several editions are dirt cheap, an academic reprint company made it available last year. For big bucks.

The photos alone (all pix in this post come from it) were worth 12.50 to me!


Cobern covers a lot of other finds, but Oxyrhynchus is one of his book's major focuses. I'd never heard of it, nor of Grenfell and Hunt, who thought the place might be a worthwhile dig, while other archeologists passed it by. I decided Nag Hammadi, Qumran and the like must have eclipsed Grenfell-Hunt's then-revolutionary finds, and that Cobern's enthusiasm was kind of an endearing display of Academic Nerd joy from a more innocent era.

In that I did the find, and the author of this book, a great injustice.


This fragment of Matthew from the third century is now only one, and no longer the oldest, of several gospel fragments from the early centuries when Christianity was an outlaw religion. But in 1897 it was the first one, the only one, and to scholars of the topic it was a real "Where were you when __?" event. Cobern was one of many who were blown away by the find:

The writer was working in London University when the first sensational discovery was made of a leaf from a pocket Bible which had been carried by an Egyptian Christian of the third century. [...]

Only those who have come personally into close touch with supremely important discoveries can understand with what eagerness this discolored leaf was examined by every one interested in the authenticity of the New Testament writings. It had been written generations before the great council of Constantine.

Another Very Big Deal at the time was the finding of fragments of previously unknown "sayings of Jesus" gospels. Grenfell and Hunt found an 8-verse fragment in 1897, another in 1903, and other small non-canonical gospel fragments over the years. Here's one verse, from the 1897 find :

Jesus saith, Except ye fast to the world, ye shall in no wise find the kingdom of God; and except ye make the sabbath a real sabbath, ye shall not see the Father.

Dr. Cobern loves the whole 8-verse passage, and explains what this verse meant theologically, which was to keep pure in heart and act, not to merely observe the seventh day. And he says:

When properly understood, this new "saying" seems an eternal word, a word for all time, and is in beautiful harmony with the teachings of Jesus recorded in the gospels.

They didn't know it for sure until years later, but this passage turned out to be -- uh-oh! -- the Gospel of Thomas! Banned and (a different, complete, copy) buried at Nag Hammadi, along with many Gnostic texts, where they were found in 1945.

Cobern likes it so much. The 1903 fragment was clearly from the Gospel of Thomas, and even then, some experts thought that the 1897 bit might be the same document. Cobern dutifully reports this, but you catch his tone. He's moved by the 1897 passage and really wants it to not be associated with that known-to-be-heretical Thomas thingy. However, he's a true scholar and doesn't close his eyes to the fact that it could be from Thomas.

At this point I still thought this delightful book about artifacts was pretty much an artifact itself. It was fun to visit a time when these discoveries were a glimpse of first light, when no Christian testaments earlier than Constantine's era had been seen, and when so little was previously known about life in those days, presented by a writer who manages to be both scholarly and emotionally engaged with it.

In search of more, the Wiki articles on Grenfell and Hunt are mere stubs, but an article on the site is pretty informative. Over on amazon, I used "search inside this book" and was kind of surprised to find only brief mentions, or none at all, of Grenfell, Hunt or Oxyrhynchus in Werner Keller's The Bible as History, Bart Ehrman's Lost Christianities, or Gamble's Books and Readers in the Early Church. It's a spot-check only, but, still...

More scholarly books cover Oxyrhychus more often. I didn't expect to be familiar with them, especially at scholarly book prices. Others more affordable still were specialist publications and flew below my radar.

But the short shrift given to Oxyrhynchus and to Grenfell and Hunt by the popular literature seems odd. The academic books make it sound important. OK, OK, discoveries that are "revolutionary at the time" do get superseded, but Edison and the Wright Brothers are still famous.

Oxyrhynchus is actually very important. Even now. More googling turned up a great website, Oxyrhynchus Online.

The director of the publication project at Oxford clearly has access to some great personal materials on Grenfell and Hunt. I liked Grenfell's not-so-adventurous brother who wrote to him that he must be off to that "beastly" Egypt again.

It looks like the attention Oxyrhynchus got at first was for its Biblical texts. When later finds pushed them to the back burner, the site's fame died off, when, in fact, it yielded unique material about non-Biblical matters. They're still publishing Oxyrhynchus texts. According to wiki, the project is up to 71 volumes. They're still deciphering things they couldn't read before, thanks to new imaging technology. Some of its classical lit is still the one-and-only source: part of an unknown play by Euripides, and a biography of him; a play by Menander; unknown poems by Pindar and Sappho - one was published for the first time in 2005.

And the everyday life documents (wills, deeds, lawsuits, wedding invitations, horoscopes, and lots of personal letters) which make up the bulk of the papyrus, are loaded with light on real people and how they lived, loved, complained, prayed, begged, and sued.

A little boy named Theon writes to his father, who did not take him along on a trip :

It was a fine thing of you not to take me to the city! If you won't take me to Alexandria [next time] I won't write you a letter or speak to you or say goodbye to you.

But his father had better bring him back a lyre, or else!

If you don't, I won't eat, I won't drink; there now!

Another scholar of typical Victorian sensibilities finds Theon to be a rather impudent child, but Cobern delights in this letter too, and thinks the boy and his father had a wonderful relationship.

And I delight in Cobern. Maybe I've just caught his infectious enthusiasm for Grenfell and Hunt's finds, but it sure looks to me like a lot of it still stands. I think Grenfell and Hunt deserve a holiday. Or at least a postage stamp.

Bread and peace

[NOTE: This is a previously published entry, copied from my original blog.]
-------


Universal Prayer
Alexander Pope, 1738

Father of All! In every Age,
In every Clime adored,
By Saint, by Savage, and by Sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!

Thou Great First Cause, least understood:
Who all my Sense confined
To know but this, that Thou art Good,
And that myself am blind;

Yet gave me, in this dark Estate,
To see the Good from Ill;
And binding Nature fast in Fate,
Left free the Human Will.

What Conscience dictates to be done,
Or warns me not to do,
This, teach me more than Hell to shun,
That, more than Heaven pursue.

What Blessings thy free Bounty gives,
Let me not cast away;
For God is paid when Man receives,
T'enjoy is to obey.

Yet not to Earth's contracted Span
Thy Goodness let me bound,
Or think Thee Lord alone of Man,
When thousand Worlds are round:

Let not this weak, unknowing hand
Presume thy bolts to throw,
And deal damnation round the land,
On each I judge thy Foe.

If I am right, thy grace impart,
Still in the right to stay;
If I am wrong, oh teach my heart
To find that better way.

Save me alike from foolish Pride,
Or impious Discontent,
At aught thy Wisdom has denied,
Or aught thy Goodness lent.

Teach me to feel another's Woe,
To hide the Fault I see;
That Mercy I to others show,
That Mercy show to me.

Mean though I am, not wholly so,
Since quickened by thy Breath;
Oh lead me wheresoe'er I go,
Through this day's Life or Death.

This day, be Bread and Peace my Lot;
All else beneath the Sun,
Thou knowst if best bestowed or not,
And let Thy Will be done.

To thee whose Temple is all Space,
Whose Altar Earth, Sea, Skies!
One Chorus let all Being raise!
All Nature's Incense rise!

Arithmancy 101

[NOTE: This is a previously published entry, copied from my original blog.]


When I started my original blog, I didn't intend a real focus, just whatever I felt like yammering about. But I did figure a theme that would pop up now and again is how I juggle being a Christian and a liberal. Not a problem, till you get to St. Paul. Paul has been evoked to keep women out of the priesthood, to say slavery isn't so bad, to call gay relationships an abomination. He's not the only, or the original, source of any of this but mention his name and lots of people understandably look daggers at you.

And that meant at some point explaining why I think St. Paul is neither God-appointed, nor Satan spawned. A half-done version has been sitting here in my word processor, inspired by a neat history book I found and wanted to share. Then the subject came up elsewhere, so maybe its time to dust this off.

I wondered for a long time why exactly we're supposed to treat Paul's words as The Word of God. There are plenty of sources on the formation of the New Testament canon, but I ran into some clues by accident, in this nifty little book that I read for a whole different reason, i.e., that I like book stuff.


BOOKS AND READERS IN THE EARLY CHURCH: A HISTORY OF EARLY CHRISTIAN TEXTS. HARRY Y GAMBLE. YALE U. Pr. 1995. (All quotes are from it, unless otherwise indicated.)

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Nascent Christianity was a scattered and, in the Roman empire, an outlaw movement. So. How do you keep a group not only going, but on the straight-and-narrow? Pressure and influence are comin' at it from all sides. Authorities who want to wipe it out. Local gods. The general tendency for any belief system to evolve and fashion new interpretations and rituals. You have to train it like a vine.

Today you'd keep your movement in-touch and on-message by internet and cell phones. In the 1st-to- 3rd centuries it was done with writing.

These numerous and far-flung Christian congregations, large and small, nevertheless retained a sharp awareness of their collective identity as the ecclesia katholike and affirmed their mutual relations through frequent communication.

Till the second century CE, the book as we know it barely existed. A "book" was a scroll. Cumbersome, single-sided, you needed both hands to hold it, you had to rewind afterwards (!) and forget leafing back to a previous passage if you needed it. It's not real hard to see why the codex --the bound pile of leaves between covers, essentially the book as we know it -- took over, and early Christianity had a lot to do with that. Codices had been used for books before, but hadn't caught on much, and were primarily a way to make early blank books for people to take their own notes in. Then the Christian movement came along.

The short version is that their literature needed to be easily portable, easy to reference, and easily hidden. You could get more text in the same space using a codex than using a scroll. If nothing else, you used both sides. You could also more easily flip to whatever passage dealt with a specific question.

Enter Paul. Advantage number one: he was one of the very earliest to write to far-flung congregations and guide them.

Advantage two: He struck exactly the right note:

One of the most urgent tasks of the Christian movement in its infancy was to support its convictions by showing their consistency with Jewish scriptures. ... Proper interpretation of scripture was...vital to their identity and agency as "the true Israel."... Paul frequently resorts to Jewish scripture in writing to Gentile Christian congregations.

Advantage three: He was considered just as "apostolic" as the Twelve. Eusebius says as much (Church History 3:24, written before 325 CE).

By Paul's self-proclamation, he equated his experience on the road to Damascus as delegation by God of the same level of authority that the Twelve had been given. His --to church authorities-- unimpeachable personal conduct and theology supported this. But another little factor plays in here.

Advantage four: The Mystical Number Seven

There is an old theory, mentioned in a number of ancient Christian sources, that the apostle had written to seven churches and that therefore, because the number seven symbolized totality or universality, Paul had addressed the church at large.

(This would have been an early ten-letter collection [1], some of which were attributed to Paul at the time but were later disproved.)

If the edition had consisted of a group of codices or scrolls, even so small a group as two, it could not have signified Paul's catholic relevance, for nothing would prevent the individual codices or scrolls from being taken separately and the sevenfold disposition of the letters thus being obscured or lost. ... The very nature of this edition therefore required its presentation as a physical unit, a single book.

This reverence for the number seven was pretty powerful stuff to the ancient world mentality. Heck, we're not over it yet. That Paul had been moved to address all of Christiankind only enhanced his reputation as one chosen, set apart.

Paul's Greatest Hits collection was too big for one scroll. Its total length would have been at least double a useable size, and triple the size of an average scroll. It was almost certainly passed around as a codex, a non-traditional format at the time, but one that allowed the collection to maintain that mystical seven-based integrity by existing in one volume. There's evidence -- though no surviving full copies -- that a single-volume "seven churches" edition of his letters was a familiar book by the early 2nd century when the pseudonymous writer of II Peter proclaimed Paul's apostolic status in 3:15-16.

Glimpsing what's behind the canonization of Paul's work actually helps me like the guy better than most liberals probably do. The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but we pretty much all do the best we can, and Paul felt pressured. He believed the second coming was imminent, and -- now we're into my opinion here -- that changing societal or gender roles was pointless. Get the message out people, we do not have time to quibble about who teaches and who does the cooking when society is about to end anyway. While he tells one community not to allow women any authority, he acknowledges woman deacons in others (Romans 16, and possibly 1Timothy 3). What does it add up to? To me it makes sense as an instruction to not waste time sweeping a house that's about to burn down. However things are, leave them be, and put the effort into the real job.

His condemnation of same-sex relationships stems, I think, from the idea that God creates things to operate exactly One Correct Way, and that any small population that statistically diverges is "unnatural" and has to be the work of Satan. On this I have no trouble dismissing Paul without despising him for it.

Sometimes letting daylight fall on and dissolve the magic is a very good thing. Till we do, the choices falsely appear to be: take his words as those of God Himself ... or dismiss him as a power-mad fraud. Neither is necessary.

[1] Corinthians (1 & 2); Romans; Ephesians; Thessalonians (1 & 2); Galatians; Phillipians; Colossians & Philemon (grouped together).