It seems an eternity ago since going to the theater was still a functional part of my daily routine. This became all the more apparent when revisiting the Sam Mendes Directed 1917, a cinematic experience built for the big screen experience and a much celebarated part of the 2019/2020 film season.

One thing that I distinctly remember about Mendes’ film is the vivid imagery of these trees, or a tree that bookend the film, functioning as the starting point in the narrative and forming the end of this visual, and in many ways very spiritual journey from death to life. I remember noting the presence of the trees but finding myself a little bit lost in how to properly contextualize them within the larger narrative, a curiousity that I hoped to give attention to on rewatch.

A little while after seeing the film I encountered one of the most startling articles that essentially narrowed in on the functioning symbol of these trees as the heart of the film’s thematic awareness.

You can read the article here:
https://providencemag.com/2020/05/keep-your-eyes-trees-1917-movie-review/

This was not only one of the most exceptional film reviews I have read in some time, but it also offered a rebuttle to some of the misinformed critique that had labeled this film as all trick (in reference to it being edited to appear as one long, single take shot) and no substance. I highly recommend giving this article a close read, and then bringing it with you into a rewatch of 1917. It will help blow the narrative wide open and see the richness of the story it is telling.

Shane Woods’ Between Two Trees: Our Transformation From Life to Death and The Bible Poject: The Tree of Life
Every since reading this review I had been wanting to give some time to both a rewatch of the film myself while also considering the potential ideas contained within this review in line with Shane Woods, “Between Two Trees: Our Transformation From Life to Death”, a book I had recently read.

Similarly, I also finished a lenghty series from The Bible Project team in which they walk through the Biblical imagery of trees contained within the Biblical story with a sharply defined emphasis on the reigning image of the “Tree of Life”.

You can find the series here, or on any podcast platform:
https://bibleproject.com/podcast/series/tree-life-podcast

Along with an accompanying summary video here:
https://bibleproject.com/learn/tree-of-life/

As host and Biblical Scholar Tim Mackie suggets, when it comes to scripture, “Trees are not passive objects. They play an active role in the Biblical story.”

Mackie refers to the inclusion of trees as representing bookends in the Biblical narrative, as design patterns intended to say something important about the God-Human-Creation relationship. Where you encounter a tree in the Bible we typically find a time of “testing” and “choice” paired with an intimate concern for “communion with God”.

“People meet God at trees in high places and either succeed or fail at tests.”

What Woods then does in his book, “Between Two Trees”, is he narrows down the essential narrative of the two trees that frame the Genesis narrative and bookend the Biblical story, beginning in Genesis and culminating in Revelation, into a question of union- union with Death and union with Life. If we begin with creation and end with the promise of the new creation, what forms the essential tension of this life giving, creative movementini the present is the reality of Death itself, or what scripture refers to as the Powers of Sin and Death.

This becomes a movement then of a singular created purpose, but from death to new life in Christ, a return to the Garden setting the forms this narrative bookend. Approaching the Biblical narrative then is about making sense of thie God-Human-Creation story between these two trees, a place where New Life is being created but death still wields its destructive force. For Woods, this notion of living life “between two trees” isn’t about God controlling our story, but rather about God creating His story according to this declaration of God’s good creation. From the tree of life flows the life source that gives this its worth. And as God promises to stay faithful to this declarative creative purpose, we are likewise invited to participate in this life giving creation as God’s image bearers, to give allegiance to God’s story rather than Death’s story. If life declare our true identity as part of the good creation, Death affords us a false identity of a sin marred and self destructive reality. Tansformation, this movement from death to life then, is marked by this notion of planting and cultivating within creation with the tree, revealed in the Person and Ministry of Christ, planted at its center, calling us to take up the mantle of being image bearers of the Creator.

I’m reminded of this wonderful quote from Makoto Fufimura in his book, Art and Faith: Theology of Making.

“It’s important to note that God does not obliterate the darkness; rather, God names it and limits it—puts boundaries on it. The boundary is the light.. Just as Caesar’s portrait is stamped on a coin as an icon to represent earthly power, God places God’s “face” upon our hearts. God’s presence is real, even in the midst of oppression and darkness. God is the light that shines and places limits on evil and injustice on the earth. What if, in response… we began to paint (or write songs, plays, and poems) into the darkness with such a light? What if we began to live our lives generatively facing our darkness? What if we all began to trust our intuition in the Holy Spirit’s whispers, remove our masks of self-defense, and create into our true identities hidden in Christ beyond the darkness? What if our lives are artworks re-presented back to the Creator… Proper stewardship is part of our poetic responsibility to Creation… One aspect of our stewardship is to become poets of Creation, to sing alongside the Creator over Creation.

God’s Word is the Light; Jesus told us that he is the Light. If light places boundaries over the darkness, then our art needs to do the same. God is not just restoring us to Eden; God is creating through us a garden, an abundant city of God’s Kingdom. What we build, design, and depict on this side of eternity matters, because in some mysterious way, those creations will become part of the future city of God.

In seeking justice and fighting against injustices of the world, if we do not depict future hopes, as Martin Luther King, Jr., did in his “I Have a Dream” speech, we will be constantly defined by the opposition or the power of oppression. Art can be a means to liberate us from such oppression by depicting the world through beauty and truth, to point to the New.”
Similarly, Mackie reminds us in The Tree of Life series, Humans and Trees are deeply intertwined in terms of carrying this vision for creation. “Both are described with the words seed, fruit, uprooted (infertile), cut off, water, and leaves. The biblical narrative sets us up to see how humans will act as either trees of testing or trees of life to one another.“


Matthew Sleeth’s Reforesting Faith: What Trees Teach us About The Nature of God and His Love For Us
Since seeing 1917,, reading Woods’ Between Two Trees, and working through the series The Tree of Life by the Bible Poject people, I recently encountered and finished this book by Sleeth which brings the trees that bookend the Biblical narrative into even greater focus.

As Sleeth writes,

“Other than God and people, the Bible mentions trees more than any other living thing. There is a tree on the first page of Genesis, in the first psalm, on the first page of the New Testament, and on the last page of Revelation. Every significant theological event in the Bible is marked by a tree. Whether it is the Fall, the Flood, or the overthrow of Pharaoh, every major event in the Bible has a tree, branch, fruit, seed, or some part of a tree marking the spot…. every major character in the Bible appears in conjunction with a tree.”

Sleeth basically walks through the Biblical story from start to finish using the construct of a tree as a signpost to guide our way from Creation to Exile to the Cross and towards the grand proclamation of the New Creation vision in Revelation. He submits that,

“As I first began uncovering trees in the Bible, God’s underlying reason for choosing them to be the workhorse metaphor of Christian life was not immediately apparent. I’ve come to understand that God chose trees because at every stage of their lives, trees give.”
Going on to apply this directly to Jesus’ work on the Cross.

“First, Jesus came to act as Jacob’s ladder— to be a bridge between heaven and earth, between God and humanity. Adam and Eve hid themselves using fig leaves; thus, the fig became a symbol of the separation between God and man. Jesus came to deal with this symbol and the sin it signifies… When Jesus died on the cross, he balanced an equation. He took the sins of all humankind on himself. The crown of thorns around his head represented the curse of the earth— the thorns and thistles Adam was burdened with in Genesis 3— and
this curse was absorbed by Christ.”
As he suggests, “When you spot a tree in the Bible, you can be confident that heaven is on the way.”


The Lost World of Genesis One and Genesis (Biblical Commentary) by John Walton
To gain a true appreciation of this notion of trees as Biblical imagery, this necessary academic work helps to outline the structure of the Genesis story, especially as it relates to the God-Human-Creation relationship.

As Mackie suggests in the Tree of Life series, borrowing in fact from Walton, each day unfolds in two acts, with Day 6 coresponding with Day 3 in the poetry of the Genesis text. This connects the second act of Day 6 with the second act of Day 3, humans and trees, both of which have seed. This self replicating life that mirror’s God’s life. Trees are commissioned to reproduce, as are humans.

What Walton and Mackie do is give this narrative force a context, which flows from the Exodus story to the mountain top on which Moses stands in communion with God, establishing this marriage or this covenant between God and His Creation, the very embodiment of this promise breaking through in the story of Noah and Abraham, to bring about the New Heavens and the New Earth, all while the people remain down below taking the name of Yahweh and turning it into idol, making God in their own image rather than bearing out the image of God as witness to this life giving, creative purpose. It is from here that we move from the vision of the Promised Land to this contrasting picture of the exile, the fundamental picture of these two trees taking root as opposing ideas amidst the God-Human-Creation relationship.

The tree becomes an embodiment of our origins as God’s good creation, our present reality found in the perpetuating and tension filled exile, and the hope of what God is building, that which calls us forward towards allegiance to this life giving promise emerging from the replanting of this tree in the New Creation, the tree that culiminates in the life giving reign of Christ. We embark on this journey in the midst of this present darkness, with the light breaking through in the incarnation and the establishment of Jesus as the new Adam, the new Moses, the new Temple being raised at the center of the cosmos, and God’s witness subsequently bearing itself out in our participation within this new Kingdom reality.

Sam Mendes’ Film 1917

Sleeth basically walks through the Biblical story from start to finish using the construct of a tree as a signpost to guide our way from Creation to Exile to the Cross and towards the grand proclamation of the New Creation vision in Revelation. He submits that,

“As I first began uncovering trees in the Bible, God’s underlying reason for choosing them to be the workhorse metaphor of Christian life was not immediately apparent. I’ve come to understand that God chose trees because at every stage of their lives, trees give.”
Going on to apply this directly to Jesus’ work on the Cross.

“First, Jesus came to act as Jacob’s ladder— to be a bridge between heaven and earth, between God and humanity. Adam and Eve hid themselves using fig leaves; thus, the fig became a symbol of the separation between God and man. Jesus came to deal with this symbol and the sin it signifies… When Jesus died on the cross, he balanced an equation. He took the sins of all humankind on himself. The crown of thorns around his head represented the curse of the earth— the thorns and thistles Adam was burdened with in Genesis 3— and
this curse was absorbed by Christ.”
As he suggests, “When you spot a tree in the Bible, you can be confident that heaven is on the way.”


The Lost World of Genesis One and Genesis (Biblical Commentary) by John Walton
To gain a true appreciation of this notion of trees as Biblical imagery, this necessary academic work helps to outline the structure of the Genesis story, especially as it relates to the God-Human-Creation relationship.

As Mackie suggests in the Tree of Life series, borrowing in fact from Walton, each day unfolds in two acts, with Day 6 coresponding with Day 3 in the poetry of the Genesis text. This connects the second act of Day 6 with the second act of Day 3, humans and trees, both of which have seed. This self replicating life that mirror’s God’s life. Trees are commissioned to reproduce, as are humans.

What Walton and Mackie do is give this narrative force a context, which flows from the Exodus story to the mountain top on which Moses stands in communion with God, establishing this marriage or this covenant between God and His Creation, the very embodiment of this promise breaking through in the story of Noah and Abraham, to bring about the New Heavens and the New Earth, all while the people remain down below taking the name of Yahweh and turning it into idol, making God in their own image rather than bearing out the image of God as witness to this life giving, creative purpose. It is from here that we move from the vision of the Promised Land to this contrasting picture of the exile, the fundamental picture of these two trees taking root as opposing ideas amidst the God-Human-Creation relationship.

The tree becomes an embodiment of our origins as God’s good creation, our present reality found in the perpetuating and tension filled exile, and the hope of what God is building, that which calls us forward towards allegiance to this life giving promise emerging from the replanting of this tree in the New Creation, the tree that culiminates in the life giving reign of Christ. We embark on this journey in the midst of this present darkness, with the light breaking through in the incarnation and the establishment of Jesus as the new Adam, the new Moses, the new Temple being raised at the center of the cosmos, and God’s witness subsequently bearing itself out in our participation within this new Kingdom reality.

Sam Mendes’ Film 1917

Now coming back to 1917 and the above refrenced review. As the author, Owen Strachan, suggests,

“The movie is at base a stirring philosophical meditation on the meaning of life; it is an aesthetic inquiry into the good, beautiful, and true.”

All merited on this uttered line in the film, “Keep your eyes on the trees”

He goes on to write,

“Throughout the movie, where trees flourish, there is rest; conversely, where trees have been hacked and hewn to evil ends, there is ruin and pain. In a manner consistent with the lush arboreality represented by Frederick Law Olmsted in design, J.R.R. Tolkien in literature, and Terrence Malick in auteur cinema, Mendes (and Wilson-Cairns) are telling us something vital. I mean “vital” in the deep sense, not the cursory. Bearing fruit, trees “manifest life” (from the Latin vitalis, fourteenth-century origin). Trees show us something of the created order as designed by God: it was not fashioned for death, but for life.”

In line with Woods, Sleeth, Mackie and Walton, Strachan speaks about this death-life, darkness-light reality bearing itself out in this marriage of God’s covenant and the beckoning call of our participation in this new Kingdom work as a working tension that flows from the Garden imagery. “Nature stewarded in celebration of life yields still more goodness, while nature sublimated to purposes of needless destruction makes creation nothing less than a witness to hell.”

One of the more profound observations comes from Strachan’s noting of the Cherry Trees, something Blake notices but Schofield doesn’t in the unfolding story. In the reference to them wading through the destructive reality of death that surrounds them, and in light of the hopeful notion of new life that persistently pulls them forward, we hear this statement.

“They’ll grow again when the stones rot. You’ll end up with more trees than before.”

As Strachan notes, “Man does terrible things to man, and to creation besides. But even with evil loose in the world, bringing desperate suffering to living things, beauty will win in the end”, going on to say, “The death of the grove means the flowering of a much greater forest. Transposed in theological terms, evil is not only overcome; evil’s purposes are turned on its head, and goodness expands in ironic fashion because of evil’s destructive schemes” Here he notes the persistant imagery of the cherry trees as an image of hope, be it in this picture of life emerging with this mother and child from the ruins, or the use of the cherry tree leaf falling on Schofield and reviving him following this flirting with death’s destructive force. Humans and Trees sit side by side in this good creation, destined to give life but also marred by death. It is in light of the promise that God is still at work in this world that we can then rise up in allegiance to this greater vision for the world. This becomes the choice between these two trees that plays itself out in the corners of our lives.

“Existence is not merely a test of survival. The created order is not intended for consumption, least of all for mindless destruction. Evil is everywhere, but the cherry trees—representing civilization—will grow back, and in greater number. Goodness, truth, and beauty are all around us, and will be found in greater measure in the age to come.”

This arrives with the notes of a song ringing through the fabric of this war torn countryside. “But golden fields lie just before me / Where God’s redeemed shall ever sleep”, ringing in line with the Biblical narrative.

“It was a tree misused that damned us. It was a tree fitted for torture that saved us. Like Schofield at the end of his journey, sitting in peace beneath a tree, a living thing that is itself a witness to the goodness of God’s creation, so it will be a tree’s leaves that heal us weary pilgrims in the New Jerusalem (Revelation 22:2).”

Terrance Malick’s Tree of Life
Given how Strachan incorporates reference to another film, Malick’s Tree of Life, I figured a good way to bring this all together would be to pull from my own reflection on that film’s materful and majestic view of trees and life’s creative force. As the tagline for this film suggests, in process “nothings stands still”. As the tagline for 1917 suggests, “Time is the Enemy”. Time moves forward with or without us. But that shouldn’t leave us as a people without hope. The power of this realization comes in the truth that it is in process that we can begin to trust that we are growing into grace, and growing towards a greater understanding of the ways grace and grace alone is given the final word. The film utilizes the art (or gift) of silence, allowing the visuals to speak through the absence of dialogue. The scenes jump quickly, and then slow, only to be given over to the chaos again and again in almost frustrating fashion. The performances submit, seemingly intentionally, to this same movement, their performances a prisoner to this same degree of chaos. If we gain a glimpse of grace, a break in the unending cycle, it is in the nature of the relationship between Jack and his father.

It is this relationship that allows the film to take the unfathomable, the unseen, the uncertainty, the unknown of life’s great mystery, and to allow it to take concrete shape as a deliberate human process, one that happens on the inside even if not always visible on the outside. Through this relationship we are encouraged, in the moments between the silence and the chaos, to find glimpses of our own inner struggle that pulls between our fallen nature and the grace and love that exists in the often unseen parts of our human (and spiritual) formation. It is this grace that gives worth to what can otherwise appear to be a meaningless endeavor of living in the chaos. And ultimately for each of us, this is what life is. Life is an ongoing battle between these two worlds, these two tensions, with the idea of hope being our single anchor. And the more we learn what it means to hope or to have hope, the more we can learn to see in the silence a means to live above (and in the midst of) the chaos, a vision and idea this film helps bring to the forefront of our own imaginations. In other words, the silence can help us see what the chaos is trying to teach us. And what this teaches us is found in the image of a tree of life bearing itelf out against this competing notion of death. The order formed from the chaos, the order undone in the chaos, order restored in its created and creative process.”

If, as the Gospel according to Mark declares in light of the arrival of the one who “will baptize with the Holy Spirit” and thus fufll the words of the prophets (1:8), “the time is fulfilled, the Kingdom is at hand” (1:15), this declaration becomes the basis by which we encounter the ensuing invitation of Jesus to “follow me” in the way of this new Kingdom being established in our midst. What’s striking about how this movement towards the Kingdom enfolds into a call for the “participation” of the people is precisely how Mark already imagines and frames this kingdom vision within the opening verses of his Gospel account.

“The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”

Mark 1:1

This word “beginning” becomes even more pronounced in the Gospel according to John, where it fleshes out the phrase “In the beginning was the Word.” (John 1:1). Or in the Gospel according to Matthew where the opening geneology places Jesus both at the beginning and at the end of this family lineage, forming a working reference often recognized by scholars to Matthew’s vision of a new Pentateuch being established around Jesus as the embodiment of “the Word”, similar to what we find in Luke’s geneology which ends with Jesus as a “new Adam”, echoed in Matthews vision of a new Moses and a new Temple.

All of this points to this idea of the new creation. This is the beginning point of this Gospel vision found in Mark. The vision of a new creation story shaped not by the violence that permeates the nation building of Genesis, but on the self serving, self giving love of Jesus who is seen as the fufillment of the covenant promise God established with a created order given to perpetual disorder.

And what was this covenant promise? It is a promise anchored in the source of life itself, guarded by a flaming sword as the whole of humanity is driven “eastward”, that perpetual symbol of exile that emerges over and over again throughout the scriptural narrative. It is a promise that breathes through the creation and eventual decreation narrative of the flood, a covenant that speaks to the promise to restore not to destroy, standing as the very antithesis of the violence that builds the nations of the world through thes story of Cain and Abel and once again through the sons of Noah.

The promise of a Kingdom built on love.

This is the same covenant that is shaped by the promise to Abraham through which “all the families of the earth shall be blessed”, the same covenant established with Moses and the people of God raised up to be participants in this new Kingdom building as a light on the mountain shining the truth of this love to all the earth.

This is the promise of the new creation.

I am reminded of the most recent series by The Bible Poject called The Family of God. The series tracks this covenant promise, this new creation vision, as the bringing together of the family of God. This is what lies at the heart of the Biblical narrative- the healing of the division that happened in Cain and Abel. The establishing of life giving peace on earth rather than death wielding violence. The series refers to the Biblical story as one long standing “sibling rivalry”, with all of the nations that stand in contest with later Irael emerging as the picture of a divided family rooted back to the story of Cain and Abel and Noah and his sons. In its vision for the new humanity, the very heart of the Isaiah proclamation that follows Mark’s new “beginning” in 1:2-3, estalishing “the way of the Lord”, Isaiah 60:5-6 gives us the context for the magi and the gifts who surround the birth narrative absent in Mark’s Gospel but neverheless entirely present in its understanding of Jesus as the revealing of God’s self to a world in exile:

“Then you will see and be radiant, and your heart will thrill and rejoice; because the abundance of the sea will be turned to you. The wealth of the nations will come to you. A multititude of camels will cover you, the young camels of Midian and Ephah; all those from Sheba will come. They will bring gold and frankincense, and will bear good news of the praises of the Lord.”

Isaiah 60:5-6

The Bible Project people describe this Kingdom vision as “the nations streaming to the place where heaven and earth are unified.” N.T. Wright, who has done a lot of work on the topic of the new creation, imagines a vision presented in the pages of scripture not of “escaping this wicked world and going to heaven”, but of heaven being brought down to earth where rewnewal can then take place. This is what allows him to say in his article, “The Road to New Creation”, “God will make new heavens and new earth, and give us new bodies to live and work and take delight in his new creation. The good news of the Christian gospel (then) is that this new world, this new creation, has already begun.” And as becomes clear in the Biblical narrative, the primary vision of this new creation is bringing back together a divided people. The divided creation once again being made whole. The family of God.

The great truth that Wright goes on to posit in much of his work echos this great vision in the opening chapter of Mark. As it reads following Jesus’ baptism, a myserious act that seems to hold this grand proclamation of new creation in its grip,

“And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being “shaken” and the Spirit descending on Him like a dove.”

Mark 1:10-11

This is the bringing down of Heaven to earth, the Kingdom being known on earth as it is in Heaven. The shaking of heavens that brings down the goodness of God in the fullness of the person of Christ. And as God looks on this moment we hear the words, “With you I am well pleased.” Make no mistake, these words are intended to bring us all the way back to God’s good creation imagined in the pages of the Genesis. As the full revelation of God’s vision for this world, the fulfillment of this covenant promise, God’s dwelling with and amidst this creation, the swords guarding the source of life have opened up and made itself known in this very moment. New creation. Recreation. This is the grand statement that follows the deconstruction process represented within the Biblical narrative of Israel. This is the fully constituted reconstruction process. In the image of God taking the form of humankind, which in Genesis is made in the very image of God’s self, we are awoken to our great vocation as the image bearers of God within the whole of this good creation. The inference of Christ as “the way” offers us the clarity of vision for this vocation to then bring and bear this good news to a broken and hurting world.

The time is fulfilled, the Kingdom is at hand (1:15). As we follow along the way, what will open up for as readers of the Gospel according to Matthew at the foot of the Cross and this grand witness to the promised Resurrection that becomes Mark’s startling and concice proclomation point “He is Risen”, a statment left to the mystery of the now unfolding new creation story, is the idea that the same spirit decended on Christ in the baptism narrative of Mark 1 decends on us as the people of God made participants and empowered within this grand vocation of a people for the world.

There is a curious aspect to this vocational vision within Mark 1 as we come to the final verses and the story of the healed leper. As the leper is healed Jesus tells him “to say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the Priest and offer yourself for your cleansing what Moses comanded, for a proof to them.” (Mark 1:44). The man doesn’t listen and instead goes and tells everyone about what Jesus has done in his life. What’s important to note here is the immediate interruption this has in terms of what Jesus came to do. In verse 1:35 we see Jesus going to the “desolate place” to pray, and when his disciples “seek him out” because of the crowd of people trying to track him down in need of their own healing, Jesus says that they should go to the “next towns” because that is what he came to do. (1:38). Following the man’s healing in Mark 1:44, Jesus is now forced to return to the desolate place as He “could not longer openly enter a town.” (1:45). This interupts the mission that is said to begin in Jerusalem (tell the Priest) and moves to the ends of the earth, the essential story of the book of Acts.

This is the new creation vision. It is a vision without borders. It is a vision that sets this grand contest between the demons and the spirit of God, death and life, division and unity, violence and love within the ministry of Christ. It is a vision that imagines us as Kingdom participants, image bearers of Christ, doing the work of the spirit as we continue on the way to seeing God’s Kingdom pronounced. The time is fulfilled, the Kingdom is at hand, two phrases that accompany Jesus’ arrival as a way to say, the new creation is now, so get to work imagining it in the work that you do today and in the life you live now for the sake if this unifying, love defining, heaven shaking work.

With this in view, I am reminded of the words of Wright’s further words in his wonderful article “The Road to New Creation”.

“The work you do declares, more powerfully than mere words can do, that there is a different way to be human, a way which shows up selfish individualism for what it is, a way which answers brilliantly our current questions about childhood and education, a way which declares, in the face of all the postmodern cynicism and deconstruction, that there is such a thing as self-giving love, and it’s glorious and it works. What you do, and what you are, stands as a sign of contradiction to the follies of our world, because it stands as a signpost pointing along the pilgrim way, the holy way, the highway to Zion, the road along which you travel looking for those in need of healing and hope: the road, in fact, to God’s new creation.”

N.T. Wright (The Road to New Creationi

Pixar’s Soul was my number one film of 2020, and not just for the exceptional animation, which blends abstract and surrealist style with some genuine attention to detail. To echo the words of Chicago film critic Josh Larsen, “when I watched Soul, I needed Soul.” After an extremely difficult year, Soul offered a timely message about the beauty to be found in a struggling world. A reminder that life is still worth living.

But there is a curious aspect of the conversation surrounding Soulthat has been troubling me. Certainly it has been widely embraced and largely praised by both audiences and critics alike, but for all of that embrace, what has been troubling me has been the seeming refusal of movie viewers to actually talk about the “soul”.This despite the fact that the film is literally called “Soul”. That it tells a story about the soul. This despite the fact that they spent countless hours researching the idea of the soul represented in different faith traditions. This despite the fact that Director Pete Docter is a commmited and still searching Christian who set out to make a film to deal with existential questions regarding the soul.

I’ve experienced Christians avoiding the subject matter because they think its bad theology. Safer to consider it a simple story or parable about our material existence.

I’ve heard atheists avoid it becuase it would be entertaining the film’s spiritual components. Better to keep it relegated to the real world.

And nearly everthing inbetween.

Which has left me, as a Christian, feeling somewhat frustrated and defeated. Here we have a film that is actually tackling the subject of the soul and no one wants to actually talk about the nature of the soul. Instead it feels like a deeeply spiritual film has been stripped of it soul and turned into a materialist, feel good mantra about living your best life. Ironically, I feel like this is actually the very message the film is looking to deconsustruc. As the Director suggests in his own words,

“I think where we come to in the end (of the film) is existentialism,” Docter says of Soul’s own journey. “[Purpose] is not just meant to be localized over here and then the rest of my life happens. All of life is spiritual. Everything you do contributes to who you are as a person and to the overall meaning of your life.”

In other words, this disaassociating the soul from the body, or the spirit from the material, or this treating the body as fair game for discussion while limiting the soul to the outer reaches of a fantasy or parable is the kind of thinking that needs to be challenged, especially here in the West. This kind of dualism is damaging, especially when we consider how readily it is recognized that this film brings attention to and works to celebrate the black experience. To disconnect a concern for the spirit from social concern is a dangerous business.

“Those really aren’t purposes, 22. That’s just regular old living.”

“The truth is, I’ve always worried that there is someting wrong with me, like I’m not good enough for living.

Expectations, Jazz and the Story of a Life
The film follows the story of Joe Gardern, a middle school music teacher who struggles with what he sees as a lifeless job, one that stands in contrast to his true passion- being a professional jazz musician.

The offer to turn a term position into a full time job at the school brings to light the tension that exists at home between Joe and his mother regarding his career and his passion. His mother sees the full time job and financial security, while Joe sees what his mother refers to as “dead end” gigging. Underneath this is the face of his father, no longer alive in the physical sense but very much alive within Joe’s ambition to follow in his footsteps. As we find out later in the film, it was his father that first introduced him to jazz and inspired his own love of the form.

The ever growing tension emerges even more sharply when he is suddenly handed an opportunity to play for popular jazz musician Dorothy Williams. As he says, “I would die a happy man if I could perform with Dorothy Williams”, a statement that not only foreshadows what is about to happen to him as he subsequently falls down a manhole, distracted by visions of grandeur and ending up in a coma. But it also foreshadows his later confession where he admits to his mother, “I’m just afraid that if I died today, that my life would have amounted to nothing.”

After falling down the manhole, Joe finds himself on this grand and gradually ascending escelator in a strange dimensional world, initially alone but ultimately joined by a mutitude of others as they head towards a bright light above. He refers to this light as “death” itself, and later it is redifined as the Great Beyond. Not ready to die and feeling he is on the cusp of realizing a life long dream, Joe’s desperate attempts to flee the bright light eventually land him in a place called the “Great Before”.

The Great Before and Jewish Thought
The concept of the great before actually comes from an ancient Jewish tradition regarding the nature of the souls creation. As opposed to the idea that the soul predates creation, the Jewish idea sees the soul wrapped up in the creation of humanity, the very breath of God breathed into the physical body and giving it life. In Jewish thought, and equally so in Christian Tradition, soul and body are interconnected, much in the same way that heaven and earth are mutual expressions of the whole of the created order. A cosmological reality. And while heaven is an expression of God’s great vision for this cosmic creation, God’s very dwelling place being made known and being established here on earth, so a soul is the very real expression or manifestation of God’s very image being endowed within the person and giving them life. In this sense, neither body nor soul can live apart from the other but rather become fully alive in their mutuality.

As Rabia Simlai puts it,

“Just as the Holy One of Blessing fills the world, so does the soul [neshamah] fill the body. Just as the Holy One of Blessing sees but cannot be seen, so does the soul see but cannot be seen… Just as the Holy One of Blessing is pure, so is the soul pure”

Further to this he says,

“The midrash Tanhumah tells us that all souls were made during the six days of Creation. Before the birth of each person, God calls forward the proper soul and has angels show that soul how earthly existence benefits spirit by allowing for spiritual development.”

As the old story goes, once a soul is given a body, the angel taps it on the lip causing an indent, leading the baby to forget all that it had learned. Living then is meant for recovering all that has been lostin this movement from heaven to earth. The rediscovering of the truth of this world, of God and personhood.

Created Versus Given Knowledge
One of the things that really struck me about this film’s intentional delving into the nature of the soul is its emphasis on this kind of “given” knowledge. One of the problems with seeing Soul through a purely materialist point of perspective is that it essentially imprisons the films message within the idea of “created” knowledge, the very foundation of modern western approaches to progress and enlightenement.

Consider the story of 22, the new “soul’ that Joe gets paired with as a default mentor in the Great Before.


His job is to try and prepare him for life on earth. As the film suggests, again in a very Jewish sense, the great before has been rebranded as the “You Seminar”. This evokes that ancient idea of being taught all there is to know about God, the world and ourselves before being sent to earth to forget and thus to live. Once the young souls have a complete personality, only then they can go on to earth and begin living.

What emerges from Joe’s endeavor as a “mentor” is that the most allusive thing about this personality training is what they call a “spark”. Joe interprets the spark as that thing which gives life meaning and purpose, something he finds in his pursuit of becoming a jazz musician. This, he believes, is his spark. Encountering a montage of his life  in one of the seminar rooms, we as viewers are let in on his backstory. Life didn’t go the way he wanted, leaving him with a trail of rejections and failures that have left him feeling like he is worthless. Which is why this gig means so much to him. It means he is worth something, and thus getting 22 to complete his/her personality means a better chance of finding a way back to his own life on earth.

The Lessons of a Young Soul
As 22 says at one poing, “You can’t crush a soul here, that’s what life on earth is for.” 22 has chosen to skip life altogether, being fine with the mundanity of his/her existence in the great before. But Joe changes that for 22. “I’ve neer seen anything that’s made me want to live” he/she says. Then you came along. Your life is sad and pathetic and you’re working so hard to get back to it.” The curiousity of why this is leads 22 to want to stick with Joe in his efforts to return to earth, and together they find a way to get Joe back to earth where. Only Joe’s soul ends up in a cat while 22’s soul now occupies his body.

As they try to find a way to fix this mishap, what ends up unfolding is an often funny but also deeply revalatory journey. As 22 begins to engage with the art of living in this strange, overwhelming and completely foreign land, he/she begins to discover the true nature of this spark they have been learning about in the Great Before. At one point the question is asked, “is all this living really worth dying for?” We see this from 22’s still to be born perspective and Joe’s almost dead perspective. Where the initial sentiment finds 22 exclaiming “I can’t believe I’m in a body on this hellish planet”, this sentiment eventually leads to a revelation about life’s ultimate beauty.

“The truth is, I’ve always worried that there is someting wrong with me, like I’m not good enough for living. But then you showed me about purpose and passion… Maybe skywatching can be my spark. Or walking. I’m really good at walking.”

This emerges from 22’s growing awarness of the small things. This fresh perspective of a foreign world has awakened this sense of wonder in the seemingly mundane, things that no longer seem beautiful or wonderous to those of us conditioned to life’s harsher edges. We see this in his/her’s awareness of the little girls’ passion for jazz. We see it in the interest 22 pays to the barber’s life and story. We see this in experiencing things ike the smell and taste and emotions. We see this in the simple joy of a falling leaf that breaks into the monotony of their existence and pushes 22 to want to live.

These are all of the things that Joe has been failing to see in his own life causing him to respond to 22’s sentimental reactions by saying, “Those really aren’t purposes, 22. That’s just regular old living.” In other words, that’s not life. For Joe, this gig, this opportunity to be a real jazz musician is what defines him. That is his purpose. His spark. That is what life, or his life, is meant to be about.
The Interconnected Stories of our Lives
What’s so exceptional about the way the Director draws this out in the narrative is that he essentially binds these two stories together as an interconnnected journey. The lessons that 22 learns by “walking a mile” in Joe’s shoes become the same lessons that Joe needs to learn as his own life is given a greater awareness through the fresh perspective that 22 brings to his life. Seemingly mundane moments like drinking coffee, walking down the street, a falling leaf, this pocket full of seeming trash comes alive for Joe later on through this beautiful rendered montage that imbues them with meaning, meaning that affords these simple things context and perspective from 22’s eyes. By seeing life through the other’s eyes, both Joe and 22 discover what it means to live with the kind of meaning and purpose that the Great Before affords them. Life becomes the means by which they discover what they’ve learned in the seminar, giving it purpose and meaning in the context of their lives.

What Joe learns is that in his obsession over being a somebody in the jazz community, he has missed the beaut and meaning of life itself. Jazz is not the spark. The spark that infuses his world with wonder is  a matter of perspective, an idea that poetically moves us in the film from the earth and outwards to the heavens where we can see the earth and life in its fullness. And as he gazes back down on the earth, he discovers that he does not need to make his life meaningful, his life has been given meaning, beauty, worth. It’s his job to live into this truth. To discover it. This is the spark that can inspire his love for jazz, not the other way around. Becoming a professional jazz musician doesn’t make his life worthwhile, jazz is a beautiful expression and outpouring of the truth that he already has worth in light of the Divine.

Life and Jazz: Playing the Same Notes
In terms of the films larger motif, which uses jazz music to symbolize life, there is a good deal of power to be found in this idea that jazz can only function the way it does if it has a foundation. All the improvisation, all the creativity and personality and exploration that comes with “jazzing”, be it in life or in jazz, is free to express itself because it has its roots in this foundational structure, the thing that holds it together and gives it its shape. Getting lost in the music, being in the “zone”, is getting lost in the beauty of this process so that it can then reveal some of this beauty and meaning and purpose to us. We can allow this truth to find us and shape us as we participate in its creative force. As Joe insists at one point, “Music and life operate by very different rules.” What he comes to discover is that they actually operate by the very same rules, and this truth is what living and jazzing is all about.

“Just as the Holy One of Blessing fills the world, so does the soul [neshamah] fill the body. Just as the Holy One of Blessing sees but cannot be seen, so does the soul see but cannot be seen… Just as the Holy One of Blessing is pure, so is the soul pure”

The Mystics and the Mystery of God
I’ve heard some dismiss this film as superficial because it incoporates an element of meditative practice, the only place where we actually hear mention of a kind of religion (Eastern religions). This is described as the intersection between heaven and earth. These “mystics without borders” also help lost souls without a home rediscover their spark, indicating that the spark is easy to lose and that we need to reorient ourselves heavenword constantly in order to regain perspective.

If you are someone who sees this is a problematic idea because of your Christian faith, one thing I would say is that this idea of meditative practice is also very present with traditions like the Jewish and Catholic mystics. I would also say that one of the things that both the Jewish and Christian tradition push back on is the idea of the englightened or the glorified self, this idea that we gain the necessary knolwedge ourselves and create meaning for ourselves. This is actually more a Western, individualist and stridently humanist idea than it is a religious one. It has to do with differing worldviews. If you look carefully at Soul, it is telling a story that is very much concerned with the nature of “revealed” or given knowledge. It is about the coming together of heaven and earth as a fuller image of the good creation. It consistenly points us outside of ourselves and towards communion with God and others. And yes, the Director made a key decision not to speak God’s name directly. And the closest thing we get to God is this ambiguous reference to something (the Jerry’s) that we cannot see or comprehend or understand. Therefore it appears to us in a form that we can understand in order to communicate its truth to us. This idea is actually a very Jewish and Christian idea at its heart. God and the Divine is a mystery to be revealed and an idea to be uncovered, and we find this in the idea of God with us, in the images of God revealed to us.

Transformation and Longing For The New Creation

As well, underneath the idea of this revelation or this notion of enlightenment in the film is this intentional focus on transformation, not just of the person but of the community and the world. As well, Joe’s living leads to the willing sacrfice of himself for the sake of another, which is the means by which he is granted this kind of rebirth, this new life. Sacrifice is the one thing that has the power to conquer death, and we see this motif represented as an image of the divine nature. This becomes the means of renewal and restoration, a glimpse of what The Great Beyond is all about as it takes root in the here and now. A manifested beauty within the confines of relationship to one another.

One moment in the film that I also found kind of striking is when Joe first lands on this ascending escalator and discovers there are others there with him. A clearly older lady tells him as he looks upwards towards “death” that she has been waiting for this for a long, long time. That she anticipates the Great Beyond. Even seems to long for it. A materialist approach to this film would find in this statement a simple allusion to living life the fullest so that when we die, we die happy. Not only does this undercut the suffering that Joe is experiencing and his decision to sacrifice himself for 22 amidst his contending with a failed life, it immediately diminishes the Great Before as having any forming power in our lives. What informs Joe is this larger persepective of God, the world and himself. This becomes the measure of his growth.

Rabbi Benjamin Resnick I think says it best when he suggests,

“One of the movie’s central messages is that true personhood is rooted in the union of body and soul, that they are both indispensable ingredients of life’s confection. If Joe Gardner’s adventure with an unborn soul named “22” yields any concrete moral, it is that corporeality and spirituality are intimately bound up with one another. Each is incomplete, perhaps woefully so, without the other. And of the many ideas that Pixar gracefully bandies about in “Soul,” it is this one that strikes me as the most profoundly Jewish.”

Just as 22 finds purpose in feeding into the life of a young girl struggling to see herself as good enough to be a musician. Just as 22 finds meaning in the story of the Barber. In the same way Joe comes to discvoer that 22 is not “only loving this stuff because” he’s “in my body”, but rather 22 is discovering what it is that brings us together as people, a people created for something more than visions of material success. Gaining perspective grows our empathy for others, which allows us to find the beauty in the story of this grand creation outside of ourselves. “Get ready Joe Gardner, your life is about to start” is a phrase that has a two fold meaning in Soul. It represents his flawed vision of what it means to live, and it represents the revealed truth that he gains from 22’s own journey from feeling meaningless and worthless to being worthwhile and ready to live. But we cannot forget that this worth comes from outside of 22. This worth comes from the empathy and love and concern and investment of an other. It comes from that which the Great Before has endowed him/her with- God given personhood. Given meaning, not created meaning. This is what it means to be truly freed from the constraints of life’s expectations and our flawed visions of success and material longing. Free to discover the beauty of this created world.

As Rabbi Simlai says, “God makes Himself discoverable in small ways, called hashgacha pratit, or divine providence”, and this divine providience is made most aware through relationship, through awareness of the greater reality that exists all around us. This is why Rabbi Simlai goes on to say, speaking about hte covenant or the oath made with the new born as they begin their life on earth,

“You are righteous” – be in your own eyes like a wicked person [i.e. don’t become complacent because of other people’s praise of your good deeds – always be aware that there so much more that you can grow]. Be aware that the Holy One, Blessed Is He, is pure; and his Heavenly servants are pure, and the soul that He has placed in you is also pure. If, throughout your sojourn on earth, you guard it in purity, fine; but if not, I shall take it back from you.”
Is all this dying worth the living. When death holds agency over us, life becomes meaningless. When we become free to live, death becomes transformed into something more. The Director has been on the record saying the reason he chose to only show this by way of a bright light is to leave that something more to a mystery ready to be uncovered. The greater message is that this truth is already being made known and being revealed in our midst, on earth as it is in Heaven.

Is all this dying worth the living. When death holds agency over us, life becomes meaningless. When we become free to live, death becomes transformed into something more. The Director has been on the record saying the reason he chose to only show this by way of a bright light is to leave that something more to a mystery ready to be uncovered. The greater message is that this truth is already being made known and being revealed in our midst, on earth as it is in Heaven.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab

• 

At the heart of this book is an existential concern for what is a very human question, at least one that I have long asked and wrestled with in my own life. It’s a question that I think anyone who has faced feelings of lonliness and despair, the burden the characters in this story carry with them through their journey in this world, can understand. And that is the question of whether a life has meaning if someone is forgotten. Or whether life in general is meaningful in light of the idea that we live, if we are lucky, we die, and we are in fact forgotten and erased from history. This is the truth of the kind of nihilist perspective that struggle and suffering seems to point us towards. And it is a question this book explores through some memorable characters, a well crafted and well structured story, and some really excellent prose.

Why would anyone trade a lifetime of talent for a few years of glory?” Luc’s smile darkens. “Because time is cruel to all, and crueler still to artists. Because vision weakens, and voices wither, and talent fades.” He leans close, twists a lock of her hair around one finger. “Because happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end,” he says, “everyone wants to be remembered.”

What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind?

SPOILER WARNING
This question is folded first into the story of Addie LaRue, a woman we meet in the 1700’s on the brink of a traditional engagement and yet, as we come to know, feeling very much alone and in despair. She feels her life fleeting away, and in desperation says a prayer to that uncertain, invisible space that lies above and beyond her.

Freedom is a pair of trousers and a buttoned coat. A man’s tunic and a tricorne hat. If only she had known. The darkness claimed he’d given her freedom, but really, there is no such thing for a woman, not in a world where they are bound up inside their clothes, and sealed inside their homes, a world where only men are given leave to roam.

It is uncertain where this prayer is targeted to, and this uncertainty now folds this question into the character of Luc, someone who might be a god or might be something other. Luc is revealed to be the devil, having taken the form of someone from Addie’s past. Addie’s prayer for freedom and life, the things she feels she does not have in this lonely life we find her living in the 1700’s, and this prayer is answered in the form of a pact with Devil, a deal that demands her soul. The deal is that she is now both free and immortal, but the price is that she will never be remembered.

It is here that the book now shifts back and forth from the present (300 years later) and the past, with the present telling the story of Addie’s relationship to a third central character (Henry), and the past moving through her ongoing relationship with Luc, someone who returns to visit her once every year and in times of urgency. As we gain a fuller scope of how it is that this new found freedom has impacted her now immortal life over these 300 years, we begin to understand the dual nature of this pact. Her lonlieness and despair led her to ask for freedom and a long life. This is the price of not being able to invest in relationships. This becomes an image of individual immortality being played out without much of a context. As it turns out, relationships are what give life its context, but relationships are a risky endeavor. As Addie lives through these 300 years, we see her adapting in ways that feel counterintuitive to what she truly desires- to be known by another. To be remembered by another. We see this in the superficial ways she deals with sex, in the ways she is forced to live without an identity, resorting to stealing and living in transient ways without a place to truly call home. Since people immediately forget her after she leaves, and since she is unable to say her real, true name, time simply moves forward for her in a kind of aimless fashion. She sees progress, and progresses herself with time, learning all kinds of things that time has afforded her. And yet she does this alone.

Until Henry shows up and remembers her name. Here the book folds this central question about life and being remembered into his story, as it emerges that there is obviously something different about him. He remembers her and with him she is able to say her name. And as they begin to form this connection, seemingly unbound by the contraints of time immortal or limited time, what emerges is that Henry and Addie share two things in common- feelings of lonlieness and despair, and a pact. Only for him, his pact moves in the opposing direction from Addie’s. His prayer is for love. For connection. In trade for his soul he gains a short life but also love, a love that contrasts with the rejection that left him alone and which led him to say the prayer.  That this would lead him to love and be loved by Addie is where these two prayers find themselves ultimately coinciding. His prayer becomes the true answer to Addie’s prayer.

Which brings us back to the central quesiton of the book. Being remembered leads Addie to not want to let go of Henry. For Henry to live, it would require him to have never loved Addie. In both cases this causes an unanswerable conflict between this love and this loss, this lonliness and this togetherness. The question that comes to Addie is, is the suffering that strains to steal away life worth the intermittant joys that emerge along the way? Or from the angle of their relationship, is the pain of the loss worth the love? Is the loss of her immortality worth the suffering that love would require? This is where I expected the book to dig into some familiar lines of reasoning and philsophical surmising. The answer of course would be yes, the joy is worth it, the love is worth it. That’s the kind of answer one would expect from a story like this. In many ways that is the easy answer, a way of reasoning worth and meaning into this life where we don’t make pacts with the olds gods or the devil. Where we create meaning out of our brief and limited time on this earth. For someone who is actually lonely though, and for someone facing despair and suffering, this is a pat answer. A false promise. A romanticized vision of a world that simply is not true. Ask Addie or Henry this same question in the midst of suffering and it inevitably would come back in the form of this prayer, this longing for something more. Ask them in the moment of love and togetherness and it would come in the form of knowing that what they are together means something because now they are remembered by someone and their lonliness is forgotten, if for the moment. This is revelatory to their experience, to this interconnecting of their shared experience of struggle, but what this doesn’t do is offer a way of making sense of the bigger picture, one that looks back on it from that eternal perspective. This doesn’t make sense of the question in the grander picture of life as a whole. From that vantage point, the 300 years vantage point, these two things, if we are being honest, are simply an irreconcilable tension. There is no true way to answer it when the tension of these two things are taken together, when removed from the moment and the context of either happiness or sorrow momentarily, we can take stock of what one has to say about the other. To this book’s credit, it tries to circumvent pat answers by writing the story into a more complex and compelling ending, one that can offer us that larger perspective and perhaps the chance to think about what this tension of the immortal and eternal truths and the nihilist and temporary nature of earthly existence holds in its grip.

This exploration comes in the form of the ending of the book that Henry is writing, a book that intends to tell Addie’s full story. This book reveals how these two pieces fit together in perspective of her struggle and her joy. The ending is the part she hasn’t shared with Henry as she laments the tragedy of their fleeting love. The ending brings us back to her relationship with Luc, one that has been revealed as a complex entity in its own right. Here I think we gain a sense of that difficult notion of faith, a relationship with god that can be difficult and allusive in the face of lonliness and despair and struggle, that common human experience. As the form of a god, the devil takes on an ironic “human” form. Luc is someone who is upfront by his desire to “break” Addie through her lonliness, her own humanity, to own her and make her fully dependent on him through the lies he posits in the shape of her true desire, her true longing. In this pact the devil becomes her true affair through the years, the desire of her heart, the only one who can truly know her and the only one she can truly know. Through this relationship though, what becomes clear is that the devil is made vulnerable by the same thing he preys upon in humanity- lonliness. His motivation to break humans, or Addie, is driven by the same rooted tension that he carries in his own life, something he desires to conquer through power and control. Find people in their lonliness and make them his own.

What emerges though is that love, in its truest form, has the power to break these chains the devil has over Addie. Love in its truest form emerges as sacrifice, a giving of onesself for the sake of another. This becomes the ending of Addie’s story, which is reflected as a new beginning for Henry as she trades her soul for his freedom. This is where the devil’s seeming victory becomes foiled, as it is this very form of love that forms the small print of this new pact she makes in exchange for Henry’s life. The small print qualifies her giving herself to the devil “for as long” as the devil wants her, or for as long the devil truly loves her. She knows that this pact will break because the devil’s form of love, based on power and control, cannot sacrifice his own life for her. And thus eventually she will be freed.

Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.”

There is a sense in which the book that is written and published by Henry, this fictional book about Addie LaRue, is what immortalizes Addie and gives her life meaning. This is the very thing that says to her, I remember. I remember your name. Thos speaks to the books concern for the power of the artist, the creative, and the ability for art to capture our struggles and a person’s story in an immortalized form.

This becomes the measure by which Henry learns to now live his life with greater purpose and greater reward, this new found love afforded him by her love for him. Her sacrifice. What’s interesting about the way the author writes this is that she doesn’t exchange life for death. Her new pact doesn’t fully answer the tension of that life-death equation, that eternal perspective being shaped by the briefness of time. The author holds this in play, not simply looking to slot it back in through personified and phillosiphied forms of natural philosophy, but as a larger truth worth wrestling with. Relationship within time is what gives life meaning on one hand, but as that life breathes out into the broader scope of the relationship between humanity and the gods, humanity and the further expanse of time eternal, that question of meaning begins to form into something altogether different. We need both perspectives to make sense of the tension that exists here between being forgotten and being remembered. It is not enough to simpy say, the moments matter because they matter. This is not enough not only because it is not a universal truth- some lives do not get these moments and do not have the luxury of creating these moments, it is also not enough because it has no way of making sense of the larger “human” story. What we gain from 300 years is that question, why are we here and where is it going. Because the flipside of Addie being forgotten is that she watches everyone else get forgotten in time and progress as well.

I really appreciated that the book didn’t devolve into a typical humanist doctrine when it so easily could have gone there. It doesn’t simply demythologize the old gods and the promise of the eternal perspective by establishing this as a grand modern metaphor for living life in the moment, the gift of the temporary, the finite, the dying. So often those stories exist to demythologize, but then they write their own mythology of human existence in its place, a romanticized and idealized form that has no way of dealing with actual suffering, actual lonliness and despair. These are questions that actually emerge from awareness of the broader picture, not the finite form. It is in some ways easier to accept the finite if we blind ourselves to the larger reality. Much more diffiuclt to face the larger reality- we will all be forgotten, our lives are but an aimless and temporary ficture in a largely meaningless trajectory, when life itself is caught up in the suffering of the moment. There is a reason why this pushes Addie and Henry to prayer. In the context of their relationship, it is the intimate and personalized picture of this love between them that then opens up the larger picture of life and humanity from a fresh perspective. One that uncovers in the fleeting moment an eternal truth.

The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price…And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.”

And what I find super interesting is that in Addie’s assumption of the old gods, gods whom she describes in complicated and at times hostile ways, she is projecting the reality of her struggling experience onto the gods as a way of saying, if you are god why am I here suffering. Why am I lonely. Why am I dealing with this depression. The god she finds is in fact the devil. In reality, the love that she finds through the power of this self giving relationship is a reflection of the true god. The book doesn’t go so far as submit this in the form of a concrete answer, but it leaves the door open to consider this. To ponder this. To perhaps wrestle with this as a given, universal and eternal perspective. Which is precisely what allows Addie’s story to hold power. It points us to something greater than her life, greaterthan our life, which is the direction that her struggles and suffering was trying to point her towards all along.

“Being forgotten … is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered

Questions to ask yourself about your reading life:
1. What books have made the most impact on your reading life in the last year, or five years, or twenty years? 
2. Are you should-ing yourself to death?
3. Are you a planner or not?
4. When is the best time for you to read?
5. What is the best way for you to read?
6. What are your personal rules around reading?
7. Who are your reading people? Who do you want to talk to and listen to about books?
8. Is there a genre or an author or a topic that you just need to quit?
9. What books have you been meaning to get to but never quite make it?
10. What does reading bring to your life?

On a recent episode of the podcast What Should I Read Next for the Modern Mrs. Darcy book club (Ep 265: 10 questions to ask yourself about your reading life), host Anne Bogel interviews guest and fellow podcaster Laura Tremaine about her favorite books (and one book she hates). Given that Tremaine’s podcast is called “10 Things to Tell You”, Anne decided to borrow that same template as a way of using this episode to kick off a new year with a kind of resolution or goal oriented leaning focus. They walk through 10 qesttions to ask yourself about your reading life with the aim of fostering reflection on how to make it more fruitful and meaningful.

Near the top of the episode Anne encourages listeners to take the time and walk through these questions for themselves. And so I figured that I would take the time to do just that:

• What books have made the most impact on your reading life in the last year, or five years, or twenty years.

I took the long form approach to this question, reaching back into my early days as a reader and locating significant reads that had a profound impact on my reading life.

The first book that comes to mind is Charlotte’s Web. As a young reader this grew my love not just for human-creature relationships like Call of the Wild, Hatchet, Where the Red Fern Grows, My Side of the Mountain and Beautiful Joe, or more recently The One and Only Ivan, but for stories with an interest in examing the constant push and pull between childlike wonder and adult cynycism. I love stories with a fantastical edge but still with an element of what one might call “realism”. I love stories that are not afraid to entertain the idea that there is more to this world than just what we can see on this surface, that our modern, Western enlightenment ideals don’t and can’t capture the entire narrative of human existence and spiritual truth. For me, this story about a pig who grows up into a world where things like death and loss and very real sparked a sense of wonderment about how we must then seek the innocence of hope and faith in the everday miracles. These miracles hold meaning because they point us to something greater, something universal, and something eternal.

This same love for fantastical realism allowed me to get swept up into a book called the Paradise War, the first book in a series by Stephen Lawhead, my favorite author. Lawhead has a passion for seeing the fantastical in the ordinary, something that drives his interest in celtic mythology, mysticism and history. Every time he releases a new book it returns me to my safe place, to the comforting idea that there is more to know about this world than what we see on the surface. That it doesn’t have to be simply fantasy to believe in fairies and magic and gods (or God). I love stories with a mystical and spiritual dynamic.

This love of wonder and the fantastical also drove me towards a love for those darker edges as well. Horror became a cherished genre when I read The Green Mile by Stephen King, and those same horror elements were definitey present in one of my favorite series as a young boy, Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, with Over Sea, Under Stone being the first one.

As I got older I also came to embrace stories with a more obvious existential concern. like Enders Game by Orson Scott Wells and The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, and later books like Silence, Never Let Me Go, The Sense of An Ending, Children of Men, The Son, The Road, Anxious People/A Man Called Ove and most recently a book like The World To Come.

And of course I love grand adventures like Narnia and Lord of the Rings along with personal favorites like 100 Cupboards, Mortal Engines, The Knife of Never Letting Go The Hunger Games, The Sisters of The Winter Wood, Exit West, The Girl Who Drank the Moon, Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children, and The Luster of Lost Things.

Lastly, I love time travel narratives (11/22/63 is my favorite as a big King fan), and as a kind of outlier, the book The Brave really hit an expected sweet spot with its fusion of the western with an examination of the relationship between our stories and the creation of art. I haven’t found any other books that are quite like it yet, but if I did I would be all over it.

• Are you shoulding yourself to death?

Whe I first started to consider this question my initial answer was no. But a more recent example popped into my mind. Well, two recent examples really, the first one being my struggle to get through Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, and secondly struggling through Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, both classics and much celebrated within their old world language and their poetic prose. I appreciated the prose, but that is different than enjoying them, something that made me feel guilty or less intellectual for not connecting with them the way I thought I was supposed to. I think it is alright to accept that these kinds of books and narratives just weren’t necessarily for me, even if I appreciated the challenge.

• Are you a planner or not?

This one was easy for me to answer. What I have come to understand about myself is that I don’t like to plan out my reads, nor do I necessarily need a plan to get my reading life into gear. Rather, what works well for me is simply planning a starting point and then letting the year unfold from there. I like the sense of adventure that comes with not being tied to a list or a reading plan or a set number of must reads.

• When is the best time for you to read?

I can also say I have a pretty good system in this regard. As a school bus driver it is easy for me to work reading into my down time during the days, which is where I tend to do most of it. As well, with my recent embrace of audio books, those work very well for me while I’m driving.

• What is the best way for you to read?

For the longest time I resisted any form of digital reading. This past year I finally caved and made a purchase through my kindle app. The reason I did is becuase a title I wanted to read was exponentially cheaper in digital form. And then I discovered the ease with which I could highlight and keep notes and document my study. What I have discovered for myself is that the Kindle app works best for non-fiction philosophical and theological and academic books, largely becuase they are so much cheaper and also for the ease of notetakaing and documenting. When it comes to fiction books, it just isn’t the same experience unless I am holding a book in hand. And when it comes to audio, my mind wanders listening to fiction, whereas when I am listening to non-fiction books like history and autobiographies where I don’t have to take notes, audio works perfect.

• What Are you personal rules around reading?

I don’t have too many rules, except that I have become more and more willing to skim or put down books I am not enjoying, depending on how much value I find in getting the scope of the sttory or the idea. I typically have one audio, one non-fiction on my kindle and one physical fiction book on the go at the same time.

• Who are your reading people? Who do you want to talk to and listen to about books?

This is sad to say, but I don’t actually have any. Finding people who are avid readers who like to discuss books is difficult enough. Finding similar tastes or even conversations that are willing to discuss across different tastes and genres that much harder. I am in a couple reading groups, but those are mostly just posts of the moment, not real discussion. And I listen to a couple podcasts, but that’s not really reading people. So that is an element that desperately needs attention. How that happens in a digital age, who knows.

• Is there a genre or an author or a topic that you just need to quit?

Old world poetic prose the likes of Blood Meridian maybe? I’m fairly open, and generally am good at avoiding stuff that I know I won’t enjoy. But I do sometimes get caught in the trap of feeling like I need to read something I won’t enjoy just becuase it is prestigious or high art. I need to be okay knowing that those aren’t always my thing and don’t bring my joy or fulfillment. Also, I know that I need to avoid nihilsim in books. Life is too short for that to steal away the life I feel I do have.

• What books have you been meaning to get to but never quite make it?

I am three books into Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children, a series that I wasn’t initially over the moon for after reading the first book, but upon the advice of someone to keep going I fell in love them after the second. Why they keep falling off my radar after I finish the next in the series I have no idea. But the good news is I have book four ready to go and book five on order and in the mail. I have a couple series on my list as well that for some reason I have just never pulled the trigger on, and another one on my shelf (Children of Blood and Bone) that keeps getting pushed off my reading agenda. This is the year.

• What does reading bring to your life?

Joy. Escape. Wonderment. It expands my view of the world, broadens my perspective, allows me to travel to different places in the world, to see the world through different eyes. It is also therapeutic in many ways. A chance to understand that imagination is still possible in a harsh world. Reminds me that hope is still real in a cynical world, that light is still visible in a dark world, and that faith is still possible in a nihilistic culture.

“How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” For Jews do not share things in common with the Samaritans” (or “Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans”) 

– John 4:9

“Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain (Mt. Gerizim), but you say Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship. Jesus said to her Woman, believe me, “the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation comes from the Jews. But the time is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship  the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.

– 4:20-24

• 

One of my first reads of 2021 is a book by Reinhard Pummer called The Samaritans: A Profile, one of the most foremost scholars on Samaritan culture and history. A quarter of the way through and I am finding that it is really reshaping my understanding not just of a people and a culture I knew very little about, but is also reshaping the ways in which I have tended to understand their inclusion within the Biblical narrative and the scriptures. The book begins with a confession that what most people know of the Samaritans they tend to know from a select few popular passages from the New Testament, later suggesting that one of the biggest reasons for this being so is the lack of historical research available due to difficulty of reclaiming and piecing together the historical evidence.

In light of the above verses from one of the more popular passages referencing the Samaritans, the author talks about how these two ideas have led to much misconception about the nature of the Samaritans and their relationship to Israel:

1. The fact that there existed a feud between the Samaritans and the Jews
2. The idea that salvation comes from the Jews (which is all about location and lineage)

What’s interesting about reading the above verses in line with the other most popular NT passage regarding the Samaritans, the Parable of the Good Samaritan, is that both passages underscore this idea of this existing division between the two groups, an us versus them mentality that reaches back to this historical disagreement “about the place of worship- Mt. Gerizim or Jerusalem”. The elect versus the unsaved. The true worshippers versus the false worshippers. In the passage about the woman at the well in John 4 it is a Samaritan woman asking Jesus why he is hanging out with her after he asks her for a drink of water. Jesus says to the woman, if you knew the gift of God (standing in front of you), you would have asked and I would have given you spiritual water. This connects to the contrasting idea that Jesus then makes with the Jews who worship what they “know”, but the time will come when the “true worshippers” will worship in spirit in truth, emphasizing the revealed knowledge of the Christ being made available in her midst (which contrasts of course with the Gospel depiction of Jesus’ Jewish followers absolutely not getting who He is repeatedly).

In the Good Samaritan parable (Luke 10:25-37), the question being posed to Jesus is “what must I do to be saved”. What is interesting about Jesus’ answer to this question is that before telling this parable he pulls from the law in its recognized abbreviated form- love God and love others. It is the second question that leads to the parable, “who is my neighbor”, a question that it says was asked in order that lawyer might “justify himself”. As if to say, alright, I “know” what the law is, but narrow this down for me a little bit more. This leads to a parable with a bit of an unexpected twist. Jesus places the Jewish lawyer in the side of the road and makes the Samaritan, these percieved dissenters from the “truth”, the ones who don’t know, as the ones demonstrating the truth of the law. The Samaritan is the good neighbor in this story while the Jewish laywer was the neighbor being shown mercy, shifting the lawyer’s perspective as a way of erasing the divided lines that he is using to obtain his salvation as a Jewish man.

I think what’s telling is that later on in John 8 we find the Jews calling Jesus a Samaritan, one who is possessed by a demon and who does not have the truth. We miss the fact that earlier in John’s Gospel Jesus is essentially driving a wedge straight down the middle of these percieved divisions, between these two sects who declare the same “father” and ancestors, establishing Himself as the truth, the one who can heal the divide. This is what he is saying to the woman at the well, is that one day you will be made whole, and you, being the true united Israel, will be made whole by way of Christ’s unifying work. If we look at our modern day Christian sects, now divided across a multitude of lines according to this denomination and that domination, the message becomes one of Christ driving a wedge between our divisions and calling us towards a unified whole in line with the true Israel.

I think far too often we interpret the Samaritans in scripture purely through the lens of the precieved conflict. We prop this up because not unlike the laywer it helps our own position to maintain an us versus them mentality. It gives us a claim on the truth that the other does not have, even if we are, as the lawyer was, willing to extend mercy to the other. In the story of the woman at the well the Jews are the ones who worship what they know and the Samaritans are the ones who don’t. This Samaritan woman was used to be seeing as the heretic, the one who joined the wrong denomination so to speak. Today, many of us far more readily imagine a Christianity that lays claim to the exclusive knowledge of “our” denomination” and are thus called to be a neighbor to those who don’t know the truth that is ours to give. We slot ourselves into the position of the lawyer, neglecting the ways in which Jesus’ ministry looked to abolish this kind of positioning altogether precisely by turning us inward and asking us to take stock of Christianities far reaching and very fractured state. When asking “who is my neighbor, the last thing we want to think are those Presbyterians down the road or those Mennonites on the other side of town.

Understanding the history of this relationship between the Samaritans and the Jews can help shed light on how “Jew” was not a singular idea but rather an eclectic mix of people and groups that had different ideas about how their faith worked, often with disputes happening across ethnic and familial lines, but ultimately shared in the idea of an expected “messiah” who would come and fulfill the covenant promise. There were many sects within Judaism, and what is of interest for the historical study is figuring out why and if this partiuclar sect became recognized as being polarized. What poses further interest for Christians is that Christianity can also be considered a “sect” of Judaism, and in the scope of John’s Gospel there seems to be a special interest in how this connects to a divided Israel looking and waiting to be made whole. It’s worth mentioning the recent podcast series from The Bible Project on the “family of God here, as one of the things that series brought to light is the idea that the entire Biblical narrative is essentially one big sibling rivalry born out of these ethnic and familial divides. All of Israel’s neighbors, the nations they continue to battle against, are essentially nations established as coming from the line of these sons (of Cain, of Noah, of Abraham, of Isaac, etc). This kind of division reaches back to the beginning of the story and stretches into today.

This is about being called back to what it is that we share in comomon as children of God- hope and faith in the idea that what is divided will be made whole. As Christians, this is the point of Jesus’ ministry, out of which a healed and undivided Church is then able to bear witness to this kind of unity as Christ imitating people. The light on the hill. The city on the hill. The danger becomes when we make that hill, as the story of the Jew-Samaritan conflict underscores, an our hill versus your hill battle. These hills can only be brought together at the hill upon which Christ died and rose again, the very space on which Christ estbalished Himself as the new temple, the true embodied Israel shining a light on all the world.

Some early thoughts from the book.

• 

For those who follow the film industry at large here in North America, what’s abundantly clear right now is that things are a long ways from what they were in pre-pandemic times. Not that things weren’t heading in this direction before the pandemic hit, but Covid has certainly fast tracked the industry’s evolution exponentionally, creating at the very least an allusion, if not the reality of an industry currently in chaos.

This is doubly true in Canada where, as we attempt to function as our own independent entity, we are still entirely dependant on our neighbors to the south. Changes in the American industry has meant that the changes in release schedules, release patterns, streaming services and theatrical runs translate to at best confusing, at worst an inconsitent mess north of the border. The recent release of Wonder Woman 1984 is an example of this confusion and inconsistency. When the announcement was made south of the border of the day and day release in theaters and on HBO Max, the streaming service connected to WB thus making it free to already subscribers, the immediate question was, where and when will we be able to see it in Canada. We don’t have HBO Max here, and so any deals made with Crave, which have the rights to HBO product, are made external to the HBO Max and WB relationship. WB has no investment in Crave, so any agreement for WW 1984 will come from expectation of its release reaping some form of financial return.

And so, the decision finally came down to WW1984 releasing in still closed Canadian theaters and on early access VOD in December (which is the reigning term for the present state of new releases bypassing theaters or going for day and day release on both big screen and digital platforms at the same time). But for a $30 VOD price tag.  But hey, at least we still have access.

As is the case with the present state of things in Canada, even trying to roll the dice on when and how and where the film will eventually become available for a regular rental price or on a streaming service is an impossible endeavor. Consider the recent release of Happiest Season, a release that was made available through early access for that $30 rental price tag before suddenly being made available out of nowhere for the regular $5.99 rental price tag, before mere weeks after that being bought up by Amazon Priime where it was made available for free on that streaming platform. Now try and make a decision on renting the much anticipated Sound of Metal for $7 when south of the border Amazon Prime has the rights to put it on their service for free right now, even though its not available on Prime here in Canada. Confused yet? Count me in that anxiety inducing camp.

I say all this to suggest that while I, like many, have been craving a good, old fashioned blockbuster in what has been a long, long year of their absence in the midst of lock down and reduced social gatherings, I had made up my mind to wait until who knows when to see Wonder Woman 1984. $30 for one person was just not a price I was willing to pay to watch the film at home. When a gifted Cineplex card and a family looking for a way to celebrate New Years “at home” pandemic style presented itself, the decision to take advantage of its early access at the price tag finally seemed a reasonable investment. And so for it’s lengthy 2 and a half hour run time I was able to throw off the mess and inconsistencies of the pandemic year and just escape in the way film is meant to do.

And it turned out to be the perfect antitidote to the crazy. The tonic for a year best left behind. The ability to lose myelf in an old fashioned story about the relationship between the gods and humankind, and perhaps an opportunity to find again on the other side some fresh perspective of the mess.

• 

The first 10 minutes of the film thrusts us straight into life in Themyscira, featuring a thrilling race sequence that brought me back to what I loved about the first film. It’s big and bombasitc in the way that one hopes a blockbuster can be.

And then we hit a complete tonal shift where we are suddenly in oh so colorful 1984 era America where we encounter life as normal in a world where superhero’s and supervillains exist in the form of the gods that govern us and the gods that save us. The place where Themyscira and earth meet. This is a world where Wonder Woman lives among us as a god and where our central antagonist exists to challenge her embodiment of true virtue by wanting to become like god.  It’s here in this everyday world that we come to anticipate that somehow and in someway these two forces, at once human and at once divine, are going to clash in an epic showdown of comsic proportions.

• 

• 

Another tonal shift has it bringing us back down to earth, dialing things down into a slow and steady character study as we get introduced to Kristin Wig’s character (who is fantastic in her role as the earthly, human embodiment of this unfolding war of the heavens), and I’m loving Patty Jenkin’s allegiance to some good old fashioned storytelling to compliment the bombast of the thrilling beginning? An intimate portrait of humanity being drawn out with a cosmic viewpoint.

At this point in the film I’ve already decided I’m all in for the ride. I had intentionally tried to avoid spoilers and later trailers, so I actually had no idea what the premise was and where the film was headed. Which was great, because I still didn’t really know how this was all going to unfold even an hour in. The way Jenkins builds the anticipation and the stakes, from this earthbound perspective looking outwards before drawing our attention back towards earth with the implications of this cosmic battle in tow is really astute and really well imagined. It affords her the time she needs to really discover and nurture the necessary context and make this relationship between heaven and earth come alive with purpose and perspective. In truth, I am a sucker for strong themes in film, and Wonder Woman 1984 is chalked full of timely thematic interest, especially given the nature of 2020.

The film is similar in many ways to the first film in that it utilizes some CGI that is intentionally campy while also finding ways to take itself seriously and draw out some intimate and smaller earth bound moments. I appreciate this about both films, because it feels different from other super hero films. I know when I’m in a WW film simply by the look and the feel of the world the film is imagining. The film is also structured similarly, in that we have that famliar three act structure that culminates in a big finish, featuring a showdown of cosmic proportions. It’s worth being said though, particularly because not everyone was a fan of the third act in the first Wonder Woman, the extra added run time is given to balancing that third act with an effort to capture its essence and importance and reapply that to a clearly drawn and emotionally rendered earth bound context. She takes the cosmic battle and draws it back into the character study in a way that really worked for me personally.

• 

• 

But it’s also quite different from the first one in other ways too. Not having to be an origins story and being able to take much of Diana Prince’s backstory for granted allows this film to stretch it’s legs and explore new territory, using a narrowed and brief moment from her childhood as the foundation for the story it wants to tell. Watching Diana in this opening race before she becomes Wonder Woman imbues us with a targeted message about learning the necessary lessons that come from loss, challenging us to consider what it means to grow in our perspective of what matters and what true virtue is. This theme plays into both the return of Chris Pine’s character (Steve Trevor) and the larger contest between her and Maxwell Lord and Cheetah (Wiggs eventual evolution) that follows, both pawns for the unseen Duke of Deception whom preys on humanity’s penchant for self destructive behavior. In the lore, The Duke of Deception can be literally rendered as the father of lies, with the rock in the film operating as the forbidden fruit, the allure of self interest, power and knowledge. There is a scene in the film in which the ancient book (scriptures if you will) sheds light on this origins story, positioning the father of lies in service to the god of war, someone who plants seeds in the form of these image bearing entities (be it animal or person) who spread messages of misinformation and self deceit all by means of a false god who goes by different names. This becomes the powerful backdrop for the cosmic battle that unfolds, playing out equally into the central premise of the stone’s all consuming power, which is all about exposing the true desires and intentions of the heart. In its ability to grant one their very desire, it confuses and corrupts the true nature of their desire, replacing that which holds true virtue, the love and value of others, with a self serving and self destructive narrative. This self destruction feeds back out into the world at large in apocalyptic proportions, being recognized as the perpetuating “cycle” of humanity through all of history.

• 

And honestly, while I know this was made before 2020, the message couldn’t be more timely. I loved the way the film draws out these ideas of learning from loss and gaining perspective within this working relationship between Diana and Kristin Wiggs character. Here we have humanity looking upon a god and wishing to be “like” them, mirroring the words of the garden in which they gaze on the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And yet to become like god by way of this knowledge, this wish, distorts her true identity, who she is as the image or god or virtue. What a powerful picture of this eternally set struggle. What she gains in her pursuit of her wish comes at a tremendous cost, something that comes to a head in the film’s climatic moments.

• 

The whole climatic sequence operates out of the richness of this idea, blending a thrilling showdown with some really unexpected emotional moments that capture not only its cosmic concern, but our present current crisis. What we find in Wonder Woman’s own choice to wish for that which she had lost in her abiding on earth with humanity becomes contrasted with her later self sacrifice. It’s a compelling picture to consider that in her love for humanity, for Steve, she loses or gives up her power as a god. She gives up something of herself. Even on this level though this sacrifice comes at the cost of someone elses life. This is the end result of self serving desire. Her decision then to sacrifice her wish for the good of all humanity becomes the means by which the cosmic forcees are defeated, something she calls humanity to then imitate, to follow in as the way to heal the self destruction on earth.

• 

There is something profound about the way Jenkins plays out our antagonist not as a villain but rather as a matter of shifting perspective, to use her words. A matter of two kinds of wisdom, to reach back into the great tradition of the ancients. These aren’t so much villains as much as they are pictures of a much needed transformation. These competing or contrasting pictures of god, or being like god, or even our understanding of the character of god, feeds back into the image of humanity’s worth in a beautiful, declarative, and powerful way, conjuring up ideas of being made in the image of our maker in order to bear witness to this virtue that Wonder Woman embodies for them. We find this in this picture of the incarnate god choosing to dwell in humanity’s midst, bearing the weight of this self sacrifice for humanity’s sake. An act of love and grace that bears the weight of that self serving desire in its darkest and self consuming reality. It is in this way that the cosmic battle is won before turning our gaze earthward once again as a way to declare its true worth, its true value and the hope and promise of its restoration. On earth as it is in heaven.

This mess and confusion of a film industry in the midst of a pandemic is only a small and superficial picture of the weight of a difficult and dark 2020 that we experienced all over the world. I can only imagine while watching this film God looking down on earth and seeing the mess of its racial strife, the sruggle of a ruthless virus and the seeming unending uncertainty of violence and economic turmoil. As God is looking down on us, I imagine us looking upwards in wonderment, asking how it is that we got to where we are. Asking where God is and desiring to make ourselves god in the seeming absence and silence. How it is that we make sense of this world as it is in light of God’s existence. It seems to me to be an astute and natural question and obersvation, which is which character of god, of a god at all, emerges from this mess, this confusion? Is it the one played in sevice to the father of lies, or the one played in service to the sacrficial nature of the incarnate savior. Is it the one that seeks to become like god in our own strength and according to our own desire, or is it the one that seeks to dwell amongst humanity as its very image and its very emodiment of a given virtue. Is it the one determined to give humanity over to its own doing and self destructive behavior, or the one that seeks to turn our gaze towards this great image and hope of a humanity healed and restored and flourishing, the one who extends grace and love into a world full of hate and violence. What seems to be at stake in the god we imagine is the god we also image. One gives us something, and one demands something of us. This is the truth that prevades Wonder Woman 1984’s story.

I’ll end with this quote from the film as a way of seeking an answer to the god we seek, the god we imagine.

“All we have is the truth. And the truth is the enough. The truth is beautiful. 

What is it costing you? Can you see the truth?”
– Wonder Woman

• 

Here were the top 40 albums that filled my 2020 soundtrack. There are lost of singles that I could have included, but I stuck with albums, save for my honorable mention of a collobration between The Choir and Leigh Nash and Father John Misty’s two track album.

40. Father John Misty- To S./To R.

39- August Burns Red- Guardians/Underoath- Define the Great Line Live

38. Glenn kaiser- Swamp Gas Messiahs/Kevin Max- Revisiting This Planet

37. We The Kingdom- Holy Water

36. Chris Stapleton- Starting Over

35. LeAnne Rimes- CHant: The Human and the Holy

34. Ellie Goulding- Brightest Blue/Lights 10

33. John Legend- Bigger Love

32. Future of Forestry- We Can’t Breathe

31. Faozuzia- Stripped/Minefields with John Legend

30. Lecrae- Restoration

29. Kim Walker Smith- Wiild Heart/

28.The Struts- Strange Days

27. Pearl Jam- Gigaton

26. The Killers- Imploding the Mirage

25. The Neighborhood- Chip Chrome

24. Oh Wonder- Home Tapes

23. Beck- Hyperspace

22. Haim- Women in Music Part 3

21. Terra Lightfoot- Consider the Speed

20. Jack Garrett- Love, Death, Dancing

19. Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors- Live at the Tennessee Theater

18. Social Club Misfits- Good Day

17. Josh Garrells- Peace to all who Enter Here

16.Dallas Smith- Timeless/Dean Brody- Boys

15. Sufjan Stevens- Aporia

14. Johnnyswim- Songs With Strangers

13. Alanis Morissette- Such Pretty Forks in the Road

12. Chris Tomlin- Chris Tomlin and Friends

11. 1975- Notes on a Conditional Form

10. Eminem- Music To Be Murdered By

9. Bahamas- Sad Hunk

8. Keith Urban- The Speed of Now

7. The Trews- No Time For Later

6. Aloe Blacc- All Love Everything

5. Andy Mineo- Happy Thoughts

5. The Grey Havens- Rest/Autumn Sessions

4. Sam Hunt- South Side

3. Lone Bellow- Half Moon Light

2. Taylor Swift- Folklore/Evermore

1. Needtobreathe- Out of Body

Honorable Mention: (Single) The Choir- What You Think I Am with Leigh Nash

A few years ago I began a New Years Resolution Plan called Rosebud. I heard about it on one of the travel podcasts that I follow. The process essentially looks like this:
Step 1: List Three Roses-
This is the stuff that I would consider the greatest strengths, successes or accomplishments of the past year, the stuff that has managed to blossom into a Rose.

Step 2: List One Thorn
This would reflect my greatest personal struggle of the past year.

Step 3: List Three Buds
Based on my “thorn”, this is a list of what I would like to “bud” into potential Roses in the coming year.

Step 4: Come up with a word for the year
This should be a single word that can help reflect the direction I want to head in the coming year, a single word that can give my year a theme or a recognizable focus and narrative.

So, why Rosebud?

I have been asked in the past, why three Roses but only one Thorn. There is a reason for this actually. Most of us often don’t realize it, but when we peek behind the masks we wear, it is often much more diffciult to come up with roses than it is thorns. Also difficult is learning how to speak about thorns in a way that imagines forward movement, seeing it in light of one’s potential for growth. It’s kind of like that old adage that says, when you are in an interview for a new job and they ask you about your weaknesses, always give a weakness that you can do something about. That said, one can always add two more thorns or flip the thorns and the roses if that worked best for them.

The great part of the Rosebud system is that it allows one to document these things by year as a kind of working and interactive diary. You can build on the previous year and form a kind of ongoing narrative out of your life. This is not about resolutions, it is about making space for introspection and observation and forming that into goals and hopes. And it allows one to not just make goals, but to examine what those goals are about.

With this in mind…

LOOKING BACK ON MY THREE POTENTIAL BUDS IN 2020:

1. Invest in Family Traditions

One of the biggest questions on my mind this time last year was looking back on the idea of ministry work. I have a B.A. Degree in Youth Ministry and I am a few courses short of my Masters in Christian Studies. Just over 7 years ago I left my last payed ministry position and started driving a School Bus for a local private school. I’ve often called it youth work without the politics.

A chance to volunteer and drive a group of students to Tennessee for a youth conference in 2018 had sparked some questions in my mind about whether youth ministry as a vocation was done with me or if it had more to say. The decision to sign up as a volunteer for the youth ministry at my Church in fall of 2019 was a result of visiting this question about vocational ministry and my future.

This year has been an interesting one on the potential vocational ministry front, not the least of which has been a year of Covid and distanced relationships in all facets of my life. What is important for me to recognize though are two key conversations that I had on this front with my pastors. Heading into 2019 a conversation with a Pastor had left me anticipating that maybe it wsn’t done with me. Volunteering with the youth ministry was supposed to be a stepping stone towards this end. Heading into 2020, and even more so heading into the start of a new school year this past September has found me asking some different questions. I find myself wondering if it is time to put vocational ministry behind me. I struggle with the notion of being payed for minisry. I struggle with ministries competitive edge mixed with my own lack of self confidence. And I still wonder whether the damage done from my last ministry position will ever be something I can reconcile.

At the same time, the question I was focusing on looking into 2020 was a need to reengage family life. This came from some struggles with our adopted son Sasha in terms of reflecting on our sense of family as he moved into graduation and a new phase of his life. This seemed like it was someting that needed equal and balanced focus with the youth ministry questions. There were things at play in our relationship that left us uncertain about where his attachment to this idea of family was, a common struggle for any adoptive family. And for me personally, I felt like I had numerous challenges on that front as a father that didn’t really have a lot of answers. The one thing that I thought could help that was coming back to some of those shared tradtions from his new life in Canada and his Ukranian heritage. Sadly, I feel like 2020 has been a lost opportunity on this front as a whole.

2. Grow my sense of place, home and perspective

I laughed when I read this one. Home in 2020 has become all too familiar, for better and for worse. Things have been scaled back, responsibilities and activities have all but disappeared, and there has been a ton of time to reflect. If anything, this was a prime opprotunity to reinvigorate some of those family traditions, but I feel like things swung in the opposite direction with the feelings of increased anxiety, isolation and depression that followed shut downs.

3. Read more and write more intentionally

In 2019 I had a record year in terms of one of my passions- film. My passion for reading had dropped way off though. My desire for 2020 was to scale back on my film watching while also being much more intentional with what I watched and to get back into reading in an intentional way.

There were two primary ways I planned to do this. First, I decided to embark on what I called my #filmtravels2020. My plan was to make my way around the world by watching films from specific Countries, researching that Country’s film history, and reflecting on what I experienced and learned. Likewise, I wanted to pair this with reading books on film and on films that I love to help bolster and restart my reading habits again, and reflect on it in order to encourage writing.

A bit of irony on this front. While this was intended to bring together my three primary passions- film, literature and travel, 2020 proved to be catastrophic for any potential physical travel goals but perfectly suited (given the lockdowns and the time off of work) for this kind of travel goal. I travelled through more than 25 Countries, watched a ton of international film, and I had a good deal of fun researching these different film industries and exploring the world from this vantage point. While there are a couple of desired Countries I failed to get to (mostly because their films were not readily accessible where I live), this personal challenge exceeded my expectations.

On this same note, any perceptions I had of dialing down my film watching went out the door with Covid. Thankfully I also had a record year when it came to reading as well.

Total Films Watched in 2020: 1175

Total Books Read in 2020: 111

One Word: Stability

My one word for the year was “stability”. This overlapped with my interest in gaining perspective on my future in “ministry” in the previous year, travelling the world in film and reading and writing more intentionally in 2020, and attempting to be dilligent in increasing my sense of home and traition. If 2020 has been good for anything, there has definitely been a dialing down of business and a focus on home. This was also good for offering a foundation for building traditions into our daily life given that 2020 demanded us to get creative on staying engaged. Spoiler alert, my one thorn heading into 2021 is feeling defeated. So I’m not sure this was something I was fully successful at, which is interesting considering my one thorn coming into 2020 was cynicism. For as much as I tried to attend to this thorn through my three buds, 2020 pushed back HARD.

ROSEBUD 2020

Three Roses-
1. Commitment: to my film travels and reading plan and youth ministry

Even though there is a ton I feel I failed at in 2020, I was proud of how far I got in my film travels, and that I have stayed connected at youth, coming on for a second term this fall despite my struggles and challenges. Still figuring that out, but the best way is to be in it.

2. Survival

This sounds silly, but its the one word that I cling to. Sometimes surviving is the best we can do. Covid, social struggles, feelings of failure, health problems. It’s stuff that has followed me through this year. And if I have been able to adapt positively over Covid, I’ve stayed engaged with walking every day and routine and trying to manage my mental space.

3. Taking control of my social media habits

This was a late game endeavor, but I feel there was success in reaching a breaking point and finally deciding to do something about it.

One Thorn

Feeling defeated

Three Buds
1. Redefine priorities, especially with social media

For as much as social media keeps us connected, I’ve definitely felt its negative side in 2020. The over saturation, the exhaustion, the ineffective ways that it fosters dialogue and relationship, the all consuming aspect of groups that draw you in to lengthy debates and heated conversation about all things politics, religion and even film, travel and books. It’s a I can’t live without it and it’s hard to live with it kind of sentiment.

One thing that I did do coming into this new year was curate my social media so that negative posts, trigger points for me personally, and groups that encourage constant arguing were taken out of my feed. This has been recent, but so far it has reaped rewards.

Knowing where to spend my extra attention will be a question for the early goings of 2021, especially considering some of the ways in which I am feeling defeated.

2. Rebranded website

Recently in December I decided to rebrand my website. I started this blog when I was turning 40 to help attend to my anxiety over that number. Coming up on 45 it felt time to change my focus from 40 to something more positive or forward thinking. Changing the name to The Stories of My Life was an attempt to use this site as a way of engaging rather than just reflecting. Of seeing the years ahead as an opportunity to see, hear, listen and discover the stories of people, film, places, books, etc that are meaningful for me. At the same time I invested in an upgrade to get rid of ads and have my own personalized site. The hope is that this can continue to foster dialogue and conversation with others. Hoping to use 2021 as a way to really define this

3. Work on a research project and book

I started working on a personal project on memory and the role of memory in faith on a collective and personal level. Potential plans for this to maybe become a book down the road are in the back of my mind, something I’ve always wanted to do. But 2021 is a chance to begin this process and to do some research.

My Word For The Year

Story

Favorite Reads of the Year


Fiction
12. The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate
11. Howls Moving Castle by Diana Jones
10. The Girl Who Drank The Moon by Kelly Barnhill
9. The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue
8 . The World To Come by Dara Horn
7. The Institute by Stephen King
6. News of the World by Paulette Jiles
5. The  Golden Key and the Day Boy and the Night Girl by George McDonald
4. Children of Men by P.D. James
3. The Kingdom of All Tomorrows
2. Pans Labyrinth by Guillermo Del Toro
1. Anxious People and A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
Honorable Mentions: Storybound by Marissa Burt and Babyteeth by Zoje Stage


Non-Fiction
12: Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi’
11. Reading While Black: Esau McCaulley
10. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
9. Seven Storey Mountain By Thomas Merton

8. Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey

7. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

6. How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind by Thomas Oden
5. The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ by Fleming Rutledge
4. The Non Violent Atonement by J. Deny Weaver
3. Becomming Mrs. Lewis by Patti Callahan
2. Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible by Rachel Evans
1. Broken Signposts: How Christianity Makes Sense of the World by N.T. Wright

Honorable Mentions: On The Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey and At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson

Every year I make a reading goal through my Goodreads account. I don’t like to plan what I’m going to read, so usually what I do is pick a few options for books as my starting point and then I let it play out naturally from there, seeing where it takes me. The best way to do that is to have a sense of where my reading took my in the previous year, as usually that can give me a good sense of a helpful starting point. To that end, I thought it would be a fun exercise to look at my past reading year as a “narrative” journey, seeing where 2020 took me. And then list some books that I have chosen for a possible starting point in 2021.

A Narrative Journey Through 2020: A Year in Books
I started the year with three books, Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove, Pan’s Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro, and P.D. James’ Children of Men, three spiritually driven narratives with a strong, existential concern for human worth and human purpose against the backdrop of real struggle and darkness of the internal and external kind. I picked these books because the word I had given myself to help shape my year in 2019 was “perspective”. These books related to three films that had inpired me to think differently about living in a world filled with both joy and struggle and helped carry that over into 2020.

I had gotten a gift card for Chapters book store for Christmas, which led to a chance encounter of a book called Becoming Mr. Lewis by Patti Callahan. I picked it up because it looked like an interesting way into the familiar story of C.S. Lewis from a slightly different perspective. It quickly became one of my favorite books not only of the year, but of all time. As it follows Joy Davidman on her own journey through points of existential crisis towards a humble but impassioned belief, the beauty that Joy begins to find in the world of her own struggles dug deep into my own spirit. This is especially true as Callahan gives her story the weight and focus that it deserves, shedding light on Joy’s poetry, writings and reflections.

This notion of beauty started to find a common theme as I moved from the tear inducing redemptive final picture of Pans Labyrinth and Joy Davidman’s life and began to work my way through Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved By Beauty and Lisa Gungor’s autobiographical work The Most Beautiful Thing I’ve Seen. Both of these books take an honest look at life through their  own questions and struggle and at times very real tragedy. Together, the perspective of these women offered me a way to consider and reflect on the early weeks of those cold, dark, January/February Days.

It is fitting then that in the closing days of 2020 I would eventually come to N.T. Wright’s latest work, Broken Signposts: How Chrsitianity Makes Sense of the World, in which one of the dominant signposts of faith is this very notion of beauty, something we know is present even as it can be a struggle at time to see it in a struggling world. This was of course well after Covid had hit and changed the world as we knew it. In looking back on the idea of now learning to find beauty in the death, isolation and turmoil that Covid has caused, I am struck by the beauty that I found in these works, a beauty that continued to surface in books like Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom, Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, and Bradley Jersak’s A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel.

From Beauty to Recapturing a Biblical Vision For the World
It was actually Jersak’s book that branched me off into rediscovering and reclaiming the Christian narrative as one that can, as Wright’s book so aptly suggests, try and make sense of a world that often doesn’t make a lot of sense. The way Jersak walks through the narrative of the Biblical story from creation to the hoped for Kingdom come, the New Heavens and the New Earth helped bring the Biblical narrative alive in a fresh way, reminding me of N.T. Wright’s call to Kingdom participation as witnesses to the beauty of this narrative truth. However, to reclaim scripture as a source of beauy also meant facing some of the harder truths, and there were four books that really helped me to able to enter into a genuine reflecting on the darkness over the Easter season and beyond, expanding my perspective of the Christian narrative especially where it had to do with the Cross and atonement theories, something I found myself wresting with quite a bit over 2019. In Rutledge’s classic treatment on the Cross, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus, she works through this darkness by asking the question, why did Jesus have to die. Or more specifically, why did He have to die on a Cross. In my mind she brilliantly and passionately draws out the cruxifixion within its context, shedding light on some of the ways long held beliefs here in the West have clouded the narrative and have missed both the darkness and likewise the beauty of the Cross, especially in terms of the Exodus story that informs it. From a slightly different vantage point, Joseph Blenkinsopp’s Abraham: The Story of a Life offered me a new way of seeing his story in light of the broader Judeo-Christian story. As Blenkinsopp suggests, the best way to understand the Abraham story, and thus the story of Israel and the Cross, is to recognize the original narrative as that of Jacob and Moses framed around the Exodus narrative, with Abraham and the entire thrust of Genesis leading back to the Creation story best read backwards as a way of giving an origins for their current circumstance in this oppressed-oppressor paradigm. The story that would have informed these origins is this picture of Moses up on the mountain establishing a covenant relationship and the the people down below making an idol out of God’s very name, with the Adam and Eve and Cain and Able stories starting the patterned history that flows through this divided picture of the world that the Biblical narrative is looking to heal and bring back together.

With this in mind I came to two books that kind of blew my perception of the Biblical narrative wide open, Thomas Oden’s How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Chrsitianity and J. Denny Weaver’s The Non Violent Atonement. With Oden, my common perception of the essential Christian divide existing across East and West shifted towards considering more appropriately a South-East-West divide, shedding light on how my understanding of the Christian narrative here in the West has played a large role in the continue oppression of the African people and the rich heritge and legacy of the African Christian Tradition. Weaver’s book tackles a similar topic but narrows in on the relationship between this common Western narrative and violent atonement theories as the fuel for this oppression. This would fit well with the book Paul: A New Covenant Jew, which gave me a new way to consider Paul within this larger conversation of the relationship between the great Tradition of the faith and the Western Protestant movement.

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez would follow later on in the year, proving to be an excellent and eye opening journey through our more modern and very American (and in some sense Canadian) history. With the larger perspective of these other books in tow, Du Mez’s book was able to find some very real context for me as I continued to reflect on some of my own assumptions of the Biblical narrative that desperately needed reform. This journey led me to another one of my favorite reads of 2020 in finally getting to check off Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible by Rachel Held Evans. Evens has a way of circumventing the academic parts of this journey, although her wealth of knowledge is very evident, and speaking as someone who has very ordinary and very common questions and struggles. And she is so very hopeful in the way she imagines reconstructing a faith and a love for scripture in the face of these questions. Building a bridge between a genuine faith while making room for the questions.

This picture of a bridge emerged again on a narrative level in the book The World To Come by Dara Horn. Immersed in Jewish mythology and Jewish belief, it follows the story of individuals bound by time and conditioned through faith over the storied history of this God-Human narrative. There is a literary device that she employs to establish a unique narrative concept, a unique way into the Biblical narrative and the human story, one I won’t spoil here but will simply say the book has a lot to say about coming to see our life as a story, a story in perspective and one that enfolds us in it as Children of God, allowing us and giving us the freedom to navigate that space between two worlds, or as it says in Shane Wood’s wonderful book Between Two Trees: Our Transformation from Death to Life, living life between two trees, an idea that came alive to me in reading Storybound from the perspective of a life lived within the world of the pages.

From darkness to light, from struggle to beauty.
Given that I read three books that take place within a pandemic, The Pull of the Stars, The Lost Monkey God, and the Year of Wonders, thinking about this difficult space inbetween is something that has very much occupied my mind in 2020 and the neverending pandemic. Embracing the darkness of the Biblical narrative and the human experience, especially as we approach the Cross, becomes a necessary and important part of the journey. This is partly why I enjoy horror as a genre. It reminds me of both the darkness and the hope that is able to come from wrestling with the darkness. I got to read two new books by one of my favorite horror authors, Stephen King, The Outsiders and the The Institute, two books that look at darkness and hope from slightly different angles. What binds them together though is their focus on the struggle as a collective reality.

A new author from the horror genre that I encountered this year was Zoje Stage, who wrote Wonderland and Babyteeth, two books that looked at this idea of the darkness and the struggle from the perspective of family, while the classic Something Wicked This Way Comes, an imaginative and poetic work of horor fiction brings both this personal and collective reality to a kind of meeting point in a vision for a world that can emerge from the darkness of its reality in a more informed way, more attuned to the beauty.

The kind of beauty that I found in the simple yet profound story of News of the World, following this man delivering this news from around to world to places willing to hear it, broadening their perspective of the world even as his world gets broadened by this new found relationship. The kind of beauty I found in getting to be whisked away to the grand imagination of that rich Celtic past with my favorite author Stephen Lawhead. His final book in hs most recent trilogy, The Kingdom of All Tomorrows, offers a profound vision of a new world emerging from struggle and oppression. Or the fantastical The Girl Who Drank the Moon and Howl’s Moving Castle, stories that infuse its narrative with the necessary magic to awaken that childlike spirit of hope and renewal and broaden our perspective and awarness of the world, the same magic that envelops Tolkien’s Letters From Father Christmas.


What wrestling with the darkness also does is give us a foundation of hope through which to then attend to the darkness and struggle in the lives of others. This lies at the heart of reclaiming the Biblical narrative. This is what Thomas E. Ricks sees in his book First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country, a call for Americans to retrieve the true narrative of the past that has been coopted by the West much in the same way as Christianity. A concern for the oppressed-oppressor paradigm once sat at the heart of both the American and Canadian origins story as well as the Christian narrative, and this is something that is anchored in matters of socialist concern. Unlike one of the worst books on both Country and Christianity that I read this year, Live Not By Lies by Rod Dreher, to reclaim this means looking past the enlightenment and into the foundational realities of the human condition that formed the ancient world’s view of both darkness and beauty. We see this in the story of The Crucible by Arthur Miller, a powerful story about oppression being brought to light against two competing visions of the world and social response. We see this in Esau McCaulley’s Reading While Black, which talks about how to reclaim this oppressor-oppressed paradigm in the biblical narrative so as to find liberation for POC’s, and in Coates’ Between the World and Me, a beautiful and hope filled longing that echos the cries of persons of colour hoping for a new world. I even saw it in a less exciting but equally interesting book like Mary and Early Chrsistian Women: Hidden Leadership, which walks through how this persistant push Westward essentially muddied and covered up the powerful witness of women in scripture who took on deeply rooted liturgical traditions and which, as Abraham: The Story of a Life points out, looks all the way back to the one humanity in Adam (literally rendered “humanity”) made known in its diversity through the covenant promise equally given to both Abraham and Sarah. How often we bypass this similtaneous covenant that arrives without gender lines, and how quickly that leads to darkness and oppression.


I find myself then reflecting back on George Macdonald as this narrative comes full circle. There is magic to be found within the pages of The  Golden Key. As one reviewer put it, “this is sort of a cross between a religious allegory and Plato’s ‘parable of the cave’, where  “two innocents, one of whom finds a golden key at the end of the rainbow, go on a quest to find the ‘land from whence the (sublimely beautiful) shadows come.’ Out of the shadows we find hope, and hope is what sets us on this journey together, reminding ourselves of this shared journey called life. In my favorite book of the year, Anxious People, there is an equally powerful story about people finding their way out of the anxieties of this world into the power of relationship with one another. This is where they find hope. In one of my most unexpected thrills this year, The One and Only Ivan, a childlike perspective, one willing to imagine the possibilities of a world reframed by beauty, is able to wrestle with the darkness by entering into the struggle together, helping to create a new vision of their world.

A powerful truth indeed. And as one who loves to travel, and who dreams of expanding my view of the world once again, I echo the sentiment in the two Bill Bryson books I read this year. In At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson, he walks us through the history of our personal stories, our movement from a shared world to  a walled off existence. This isn’t bad in and of itself, but one of the effects that this does have is narrowing our perspective of the world, something he blows wide open in On The Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey by Bill Bryson, a road trip he embarked on at a time when he thought he was done with travel and writing and which totally reframed his perpective of both the struggle and the hope of this long road along the American-Mexican border.

Here is to 2021 continuing to broaden perspectives and bring new hope and wonder and stability in the midst of a long year of struggle and darkness. A new world is being established, ready to be uncovered and brought to light, this is the promise of my reading year.

LOOKING AHEAD TO 2021
Given my 2020 narrative journey, the word I chose for 2021 is “story”. A personal research project on the topic of faith, memory and collective and personal identity in shaping our stories has led me to put a couple books on my potential to read list that I am still filtering through:

Lost Time: Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture by David Gross
A Theology of the Old Testament: Cultural Memory, Communication, and Being Human by J.W. Rogerson
The Shadow of God: A Journey Through Memory, Art, and Faith by Scribner Charles 3
As I Recall: Discovering the Place of Memories in Our Spiritual Life by Casey Tygrett
The Persistance of Memory: A Faith Interpretation of Art Forms by Ragsdale William Sr.

On allowing the darkness to put hope into practice:

A Church Called Tov: Forming a Goodness Culture That Resists Absuses of Power and Promotes Healing
Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Chrsitian FaithWinsome Conviction: Disagreeing Without Dividing the ChurchHope In Disarray: Piecing Our Lives Togther in FaithThe Supper: New Creation, Hospitality, and Hope in Christ by Ronald Hesselgrave

On Living the imagination and reclaiming the wonder of living between the two worlds:

The Space Betwen Worlds by Micaiah Johnson
Be: the Journey of Rol
Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac NewtonThe Little Shop of Happy Ever After by Jenny Colgan
The Night of Wishes by Michael Ende
Adoring the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making
Honest Advent: Awakening to the Wonder of God With Us Then, Here, and Now by Scott Erickson

On the power of Story:

Opening The Covenant: A Jewish Theology of ChristianityArt and Faith: A theology of making by Makoto FujimuraThe Neverending Story by Micheal EndeThe Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan GottschallThe Storyteller: Tales out of Lonliness
How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories by Holly Black

On expanding my view of the world:

The Orchard by David HopenTheology of the Womb by Angelie BaumanThe Library at Mount Char
Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason by E.H Smith
Accidentally Wes Anderson by Wally Koval
The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
Blood Meridian by Cormac Mcarthy

Continuing with George MacDonald

Hope of the Gospel
The Gifts of the Child Christ: Fairytales and Stories for the Childlike
The Princess and the Goblin
The Light Princess
The Diary of An Old Soul

Continuing with Thomas Oden

A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir
The Transforming Power of Grace
The Rebirth of Orthodoxy: Signs of New Life in Christianity
After Modernity… What? Agenda for Theology
Life in the Spirit
The African Memory of Mark: Reassessing the Early Church Tradition
John Wesley’s Scriptural Christianity
Johon Wesley’s Teaching