Culture

Whose Home, Whose History?

/ JRLonas / Leave a comment

I’ve spent a good deal of time in recent years contemplating the bloodguilt of America’s treatment of her native people, from wars to removal and beyond. In Chattanooga, this ought to be impossible to ignore. So many of our place names (Chattanooga itself, Chickamauga, Ooltewah, Sequatchie, Catoosa, even Tennessee) were given before a white foot ever came to this area.

And yet, we do a good job of ignoring it.

I live five minutes from the home of the last Cherokee chief before removal. A scant hundred yards from the library branch where I’m typing right now is an historic cemetery, all that remains from a huge mission (named in honor of the great David Brainerd) to the Cherokee that was shuttered in 1838 at the start of the Trail of Tears. Both of these sites are in limited repair, at best, and neither is visited by more than a handful of people any given week. The numerous Civil War sites around here are incredible to behold, with impressive monuments and reenactments to keep the past ever alive before us. We’d rather not remember the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and others we so unceremoniously evicted, though.

This is just a musing, but I have to believe examining our past in this regard will come up in my work in a big way. And its something I want to be sure my children understand and wrestle with (growing up, as they are, on land obtained by high legal crimes).

For now, here are a few pictures of the Brainerd Mission Cemetery I took just a couple of hours ago. What are we losing when we forget. Certainly less than the Cherokee lost, and therein is the problem.

Continue reading →

For Further Review…

/ JRLonas / 1 Comment

A brief update to “The Curious Difficulty of Numinous Fiction”

A friend (who serves as a missionary in Latvia) shared this comment via my wife’s Facebook page (I, myself, still a Zuckerberg denier):

“Here are a couple thoughts in reaction: 1) Maybe one reason American Protestants (I think really it is more of an “evangelical” problem than a protestant one) don’t write better fiction is that there is insufficient market for it. I mean, why does LifeWay sell Thomas Kinkade prints and not better art? 2) Here I am just thinking out loud; this is just an idea for conversation/controversy. You ask: ‘Why is it that those who take the Bible most literally and believe Reformed doctrine most fully write fiction most dreadfully?’ Maybe that is the problem? Evangelicals (again, I think it is more of an evangelical problem than a Protestant one) have a need to read too much literally and insufficiently value symbol, indirection, “telling the truth slant” (to borrow a phrase from Emily Dickinson). And perhaps Reformed doctrine thinks everything can be systemetized into neat boxes, or sees too much in black and white, instead of shades of gray in which real life is lived. I would suggest that neither of those two ways of thinking are helpful for good fiction. By the way, it seems to me that John Updike, John Irving, and Frederick Buechner should figure in the discussion.”

Continue reading →

The Curious Difficulty of Numinous Fiction

/ JRLonas / 6 Comments

Why do so many Protestant writers on the numinous (or even the religious) come across disingenuous, cloying, or false? If, as Joseph Bottum and others have suggested, the novel is essentially a Protestant art form, why is it that those who take the Bible most literally and believe Reformed doctrine most fully write fiction most dreadfully?

Of course, there are manifold exceptions (Defoe, Austen, Brontë, etc.). Perhaps the better question is to ask why the world of doctrine and spiritual life, of a real and active God, so brilliantly articulated in Protestant sermons so often fails to animate our works of fiction? Bottum argues that the form itself, so encoded with the Protestant understanding of the individual’s relationship to God and the world (in which the inner, spiritual life is paramount), collapses under its own weight when too self-consciously attempting to portray spiritual realities. He writes, “To write a Protestant novel is, instead, to do something a little unnecessary, a little verging on the redundant. And when a deliberately Protestant novel fails, it often fails because it seems didactic and preachy, engaged in what the art form itself promises that readers can take for granted.”

In the twentieth century, particularly the post-war era, the literary voices in Britain and America most able to capture the realm of faith  were overwhelmingly Catholic—Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, William M. Miller (A Canticle for Liebowitz). The best “Protestant” writers of the period were mostly secular in life and work—Robert Penn Warren, Harper Lee, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, etc. Serious Protestant writing flowered in extremes of abstraction or concretion: poetry (Eliot and Auden) and theology (Lewis, Stott, etc.).

City scenes--St. Paul's Chapel

Looking heavenward in a material world.

Among these Catholic writers, themes of faith are handled in very different ways. Greene’s The Power and the Glory is a very Catholic story about a very bad Catholic, but God comes across convincingly (though subtly) as the main actor. Miller imagines how the Church can continue and rebuild society after a nuclear holocaust. O’Connor’s short stories are memorable for the violent intrusion of grace into the lives of smugly self-satisfied characters (through the theft of an artificial leg in “Good Country People” or a high-velocity book to the forehead in “Revelation”). Waugh and Percy’s characters (Charles Ryder, Binx Bolling, Will Barrett) explore dead-ends of selfish personal fulfillment, reaching beautiful resolution by the merest hint at conversion.

Why in this barbaric, scientistic, hypersexualized modern world (to which Scripture has so much to say) have Catholics rather than Protestants (particularly Bible-drenched evangelicals) handled the interaction between God and Creation so much more believably? This is a line of questioning that I’ve wrestled with for a long time (as a member of that most insufferable class–aspiring writers) and one that seems of peculiar importance in a day that promises less and less attention to traditional modes of Christian discourse.

Continue reading →

Being There: A Vision for Family–Part 2

/ JRLonas / 2 Comments

Read Part 1. Standard caveats apply.

Much as we imagine ourselves teachers and teachable, so many of the most important things I’ve learned have come by chance. Comments overheard, asides, throwaway phrases that, for a peculiar moment, sank deep in my soul. I’m too busy (or too proud) to ask for advice, and these snippets disperse that self-assured fog.

Several years ago, I was representing my organization at a large international missions conference hosted here in Chattanooga. Hours of shaking hands and repeating talking points while standing on concrete in dress shoes left me jelly-kneed and looking for a seat. I ducked into a breakout session with a local pastor, Joe Novenson. If Brother Joe reads this, he may correct my recollection of this story, and he’d certainly point all the credit away from himself, but it sticks with me nevertheless.

I couldn’t tell you what he actually spoke on that hour, but in a brief Q&A, I was floored with a reflection on parenting (I don’t even remember what point he was illustrating). In the midst of sermon preparation, he had a flash of wonder as to the outcome of life for his kids. One at a time, he asked them into his study, looked them in the eye and inquired, “What is the most important thing you’ve learned from me as your father?” His oldest son answered, “Do the right thing.” His second child likewise. Seeking signs of the Gospel of grace working in their lives, he was despairing at hearing his own moralistic instruction coming back to him. When his youngest, a daughter, came in, though, she replied, “Oh daddy, to love Jesus, of course.”

A sweet story, out of context, trite. To me in that moment, wrestling with the challenges of how to “do the right thing” by my young family, it was a devastating blow. A call to die to selfish worry. That was two kids ago.

With young children, it’s easy to believe the doctrine of original sin. There are days I’d give my left leg to have them say that “doing the right thing” even registers as a good idea. In spite of that, I have never doubted for a moment that they love me. They can refuse to obeyGals-4-15 over a thousand petty grievances and go to bed in a huff; but at breakfast all they want is to smother me with hugs.

Discipline and order (how I love order!) are most needful, but they will come with training. Love is something that must be cultivated and allowed to flourish. It is ready to grow, but is so easily trampled. The long race of raising children is completed by the daily steps of acknowledging their love for you and making sure they know you love them back. Without that foundation, all the moral instruction in the world will, at best, produce well-mannered pharisees.

Neither does breadwinning alone constitute faithful fatherhood. Professing your love and devotion while working every waking hour to “prepare for the future” is not the strategic move it seems. A friend quipped, “I can’t be a provider for my family if I don’t provide them with myself.” Financially, settling for less may give you more than you ever dreamed.

Of all the roles and responsibilities of dads, loving presence is both the most important and hardest to maintain. Time spent with your children is its own reward. Truth can be taught, food and clothes can be bought, but all the truly worthwhile skills in life only come through apprenticeship.

The kids are watching.