All posts by Lars Walker

Music, Religion

A theology of Broadway

1 Comment

I’m fairly sure I’m losing my mind. You read about it often in artists’ biographies – at the end of their lives they descend into some kind of mania, growing obsessed with astrology or spiritualism or organic food or bitcoin or something. “He was always a little oversensitive, a little unstable,” friends will report. “But at the end he seemed to lose all touch with reality.”

Of course, in the cases of many of those artists, that fatal condition had something to do with syphilis or alcoholism or drugs. And last time I checked, I don’t have a problem with any of those. No, my descent into unreason can only be blamed on my home-grown neuroses and manifold phobias.

All the verbiage above constitutes my quaint method of introducing an idea I’ve conceived, one that’s just silly enough to embarrass me. But that doesn’t make it wrong.

What if the Kingdom of God is a musical comedy?

You may recall my recent theological speculations. In one line of thinking, I posited the theory that the created universe is a Story.

In another, I suggested the universe is Music.

And I asked myself, “Is there any way to fuse those two ideas into a single, Grand Unified Theory?

And then it hit me. What if the universe is a Musical Comedy? That would be perfect! (The argument works for ballet and opera too, I suppose, but I’m a little lowbrow for those metaphors.)

I’m not a major fan of the musical stage – though I once played Mordred in an amateur production of Camelot, and was, it goes without saying, brilliant. But I’ve seen a fair number of the older, classic productions – The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, etc. They can be pretty enjoyable.

But one thing that always troubled me was the moment – so common in musicals – when people are conversing in a normal way, and then somebody suddenly bursts into song, and a few moments later the whole crowd is singing and dancing in intricate choreography. (I embedded a clip of that sort above, a scene from the Marx Brothers’ film, “A Night at the Opera,” featuring Allan Jones with Harpo and Chico.)

I always had trouble with that moment. There are points – occasionally – in real life when people do burst spontaneously into song. Back when I was in a musical group, my friends and I sometimes even did it in harmony. But nobody ever started a chorus line.

But what if the problem isn’t with the musicals, but with the fallen world?

How often have you experienced a sublime moment in life, when your feelings surpassed mere words? When only song and dance would really have been sufficient to adequately celebrate what was going on?

Maybe that was what the world was meant to be like. Maybe Adam and Eve were doing taps and high kicks in the Garden of Eden (perhaps with animals backing them up, as in an old Disney film). Maybe that’s one of the things we lost at the Fall, and we enjoy musicals now because we’re longing for our unfallen state?

It’s just a theory, of course. But let me add this kicker, which I consider weighty indeed –

The American musical comedy was invented, in part, by P. G. Wodehouse. That would make Wodehouse a kind of prophet.

And that wouldn’t surprise me one bit.

Authors, Religion

Owen Barfield

1 Comment

I was casting about (nice English idiomatic expression, that) for a subject tonight, and it crossed my mind that Owen Barfield was the longest-lived of the original Inklings, and he traveled extensively in his later years, lecturing in the US. There must be footage of him around somewhere.

And behold, the video above surfaced on YouTube. It’s the great Lewis promoter Clyde Kilby with Barfield, in a location which I take to be the Marion Wade Center in Wheaton, Illinois. They chat a bit about his friendship with Lewis, and then we get to see just the beginning of one of Barfield’s lectures.

I forget which book about the Inklings it came from, but I was interested to learn that Barfield was an enthusiastic dancer all his life (or as long as he was able, I suppose). Everyone who’s read Surprised by Joy knows he was an Anthroposophist, but he also joined the Church of England later on.

Goofing, Religion

‘Cabrini.’ Also, elves.

2 Comments

First of all, I want to share the movie trailer above. It’s for “Cabrini,” a film directed by the director of “Sounds of Freedom.” Lukas Behnken, son of my old college roommate Dixey Behnken, was unit production manager and line producer for this film (he was also, if you recall, director of the excellent “Mully” movie, a few years back). Dixey himself appears for a microsecond here, as an extra.

Looks good. (I mean the film, not Dixey, who of course has always been a living gargoyle.)

Do you ever wonder what it’s like inside Lars Walker’s head?

Of course you don’t. But I’m going to tell you anyway.

Yesterday morning, I was thinking about an experience I’ve had occasionally in my life and times – one you may have had too.

On a number of occasions, I’ve found information in a book that I wanted (for one reason or another) to remember, in case I needed it again. But when I did need it again, and looked in the book, it wasn’t there. In one particular case, I remember going through the book page by page, and still not finding it.

Of course, there are reasonable explanations. I might have remembered the right information, but assigned it to the wrong book. Or I could have remembered the information wrong.

But I choose not to believe those facile explanations. I think the truth is much simpler.

I blame the Underground Folk.

If you’ve read my novels, you know about the Underground Folk. They’re the Scandinavian elves, but they don’t like to be called by that name. You call them the U.F. (as above), or the Hidden Folk or the Good Neighbors, or some circumlocution like that.

In the classic novel, Troll Valley, we learned that they continue their activities in modern times. Their great purpose – their calling from God according to Miss Margit, the hero’s fairy godmother – is to change history. Real events include all those wonders and miracles and magic that we read about in the legends, but then the Underground Folk come in and remove most of the evidence. That way, most of the proof of the supernatural is gone, and people are left to believe or not based on reason and the calling of the Holy Spirit, not unanswerable manifestations of the supernatural.

I think what happened to me with those books was that the Underground Folk sneaked in and changed the text (this scenario actually plays a part in my work in progress, The Baldur Game).

And why would supernatural beings change the content of books just to mess with me? What divine purpose would that serve?

I say, sometimes even elves just play practical jokes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Fire, Burn!’ by John Dickson Carr

Leave a comment

I’ve read a little John Dickson Carr in my time – mostly short stories. An American who set his stories primarily in England, Carr is most famous for his characters Dr. Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale. He was one of the foremost mystery writers of his time, but I’ve always found his work a trifle dull, like most of the “Cozy” subgenre.

I’d never heard of his character Inspector John Cheviot before. A web search told me little about him. I get the impression Cheviot is the hero of at least one other book, and that both involve time travel as well as murder. I would like to know more about the underlying science fictional rationale for the time jump, because while this book, Fire, Burn!, was intriguing, I have questions.

At the beginning of the book, Inspector Cheviot gets into a London cab in the mid-1950s, and suddenly finds himself riding in a hansom cab in the late 1820s. He’s not exactly an intruder in the past – he seems to be a well-known figure in London Society – not always in a positive way. One of his scandalous activities is applying to be part of the newly organized London Metropolitan Police – the very first iteration of Scotland Yard. His application to be their new Superintendent is shocking, as Yard detectives are definitely not supposed to be gentlemen. They are essentially thugs, thieves set to catch thieves, and the population despises them.

But Cheviot – still conscious of being a 20th Century man – is galvanized. He’s long been a student of Yard history, and he’s often dreamed of the things he could have accomplished there with his modern knowledge and investigative techniques.

He soon gets a chance to show what he can do. Sent (rather contemptuously) to investigate the theft of bird seed from exotic bird cages belonging to a prominent society lady, he witnesses a young woman’s murder. The woman is shot to death, but he hears no gunshot, and no one seemed to be in a position to fire the fatal bullet.

On a personal level, Cheviot finds himself already in a relationship with a beautiful, passionate woman. He also makes a deadly enemy – an arrogant and cruel military officer who challenges him to a duel.

Where Fire, Burn! really excelled as a novel (in this reader’s opinion) was in its vivid recreation of early 19th Century London. The author had clearly done a lot of research, and the descriptions were highly convincing.

The mystery was also pretty good. The solution was clever, and I didn’t see it coming – though I thought I did. The book moved a little slowly (by the debased standards of this present age), and the female characters seemed a little stylized, the kind of languid females who are always getting the vapors in old dramas. Nevertheless, all in all, I rate Fire, Burn! high as an original historical mystery.

I do wish we were given some clue as to how Cheviot travels through time, though. Is it a dream? A rift in the Third Dimension? No clue is offered, and the book ends very abruptly.

Non-fiction, Publishing, Reviews, The Press

Sacramone on ‘God, the Bestseller’

Leave a comment

Over at Gene Edward Veith’s Cranach blog (which is, lamentably, paywalled), he linked today to Anthony Sacramone’s review at acton.org of Stephen Prothero’s God, the Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion a Book at a Time. (I’ll let you order it, if you like, from the review. I came to praise Sacramone, not to pick his pocket.) I had never heard of the book’s subject, Eugene Exman:

… “who ran the religion book department at Harper & Brothers and then Harper & Rowe between 1928 and 1965,” and who published some of the most recognizable names in the world of religion (and quasi religion) of that period, from Harry Emerson Fosdick and Albert Schweitzer to Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bill Wilson, co-founder of AA.

…if there’s one phrase that’s repeated mantra-like in God the Bestseller it’s “hidebound dogma” (note the modifier). The books Exman would publish at the helm of Harper and Rowe’s religion division would seek that which transcended mere doctrine, a “perennial philosophy,” as Aldous Huxley’s own bestseller would be called—a common thread that supposedly runs through all religions, tying the earthly to the heavenly, matter to the spirit.

Exman, raised a Baptist, had an intense spiritual experience, but it led him, not into the Bible or orthodoxy, but into a generalized search for spiritual truth, which he believed he could find in all faiths.

His greatest star was Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, a hugely influential writer in his time, almost forgotten today (a fact which gives me hope for the future). I once borrowed a book on the life of St. Paul from my elementary school library. My mother noticed that Fosdick was the author, and cautioned me against it. This was wise. I did notice a tendency to downplay the supernatural.

As a short history of the American religious publishing game in the mid-20th century, and the signal role one man… played in that history, virtually transforming what passed for religion in the broader reading public’s imagination, Stephen Prothero does yeoman’s work in God the Bestseller. Anyone in the publishing trade will find this an enjoyable, if somewhat repetitive, read.

Music, Religion

Once upon a time in an epic

Leave a comment

Nothing to review tonight. I’ve had the misfortune to start reading two books in a row that I had to give up on due to lousy writing. Too painful to finish, even for the base pleasure of shredding them in reviews. And a third, which I just started, is looking a little dubious… (Fortunately, I got these books free or at very low cost through online deals, so my cost was minimal.)

I had a topic all teed up for blogging about, though. Entirely trivial and haphazard. And then I watched the video above, and it sparked some actual thoughts.

I do love Once Upon a Time in the West (except for the massacre at the beginning). It’s a case study in what you can achieve through blending visuals with music. The movie has been called operatic, and its effect has been lodged under my skin ever since I saw it in a theater back in 1969, when it was new. It’s even affected my novel writing – I try to mix poetry in with my big dramatic scenes, striving for the same kind of sublimity.

But it occurred to me to wonder about Charles Bronson’s character, known only as “Harmonica.” In the scene you see above, Jill (Claudia Cardinale) makes it about as obvious as she can (I think even I would have picked up on the hints) that she wants him to stay with her. But no, he’s gotta be on his way. Gotta ride off into the sunset, in the tradition of the Western hero (I think it has something to do with Manifest Destiny). Sergio Leone was explicitly doing homage to Western movie traditions here, and riding off alone, like Shane, is definitely part of that tradition.

But – in terms of this story – why? Why is Harmonica leaving? Up to now, his whole life has been devoted to a single goal – getting his revenge on the evil Frank (Henry Fonda). Now he’s finished that job. He’s got the whole rest of his life before him. Here’s an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of building a railroad town. Not a bad job. Not to mention THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE throwing herself at him. Why not stick around a day or two, just to see if it could work out?

I suppose Cheyenne (Jason Robards) explains it, when he tells Jill that men like Harmonica have got something inside them – “something about death.” Maybe Harmonica has killed too much. Maybe he’s got PTSD, and has lost his sense of belonging anywhere.

Then I pondered epics in general. In epic terms, I think we could say Harmonica is already dead. It’s the epic hero’s job to die at the end, like Beowulf. Like Hector. The very concept of the epic involves a battle with death – a battle no man can win. Epics teach us how to die.

And that’s a mythopoeic thing. The epic hero, in a dim and reflected way, foreshadows the great Hero of the Gospel. The epic hero may have no virtues at all except for courage – like Harmonica and Siegfried the Dragon Slayer – but his iron refusal to let Death break his spirit anticipates Christ passing through Death and finishing the job at which all the others have failed – killing the Great Enemy.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Wood’s Reach,’ by Steven Becker

Leave a comment

As I’ve confessed before, I seem irrationally compelled to be forever searching for another fictional detective to fill the gap left behind by John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee. So when I discovered there was a series character named Mac Travis, who’s involved with boats and lives in Florida, my old obsession could not be stifled. Steven Becker’s Mac Travis, hero of Wood’s Reach, however, is nothing like Travis McGee (though the name choice has to be intentional). I hope my disappointment didn’t sour my attitude to the book.

Travis McGee, for all his coolness, was essentially the ultimate Peter Pan, a boy who never grew up. He took responsibility as he took his retirement – in installments. He cared deeply about his clients (often damsels in distress) for the duration of his cases, but never took on the burdens of conventional family life.

Steven Becker’s Mac Travis is the diametric opposite. The owner of a struggling diving business, he frets over his debts and yearns for the woman he loves, who has decided they have no future. When an unethical fortune hunter offers Mac a lot of money to help him find a fabled treasure site, he feels as if he has no choice but to take the job. But when he realizes the kind of deal he’s signed up for, Mac starts planning to plunder the plunderer.

I’ve often said that I like boat stories, which was another reason I should have relished Wood’s Reach. But somehow it didn’t work for me. Maybe it’s sailboating stories I actually like. This book mainly involved people rushing around in power boats, alternately pursuing and fleeing from one another, and intersecting now and then to fight, threaten, or palaver. It all seemed kind of frenetic and implausible to this landlubber.

Still, there was a lot of action. The writing wasn’t bad.

Religion

Cheek, turned

1 Comment
Photo credit: Dan Burton. Unsplash license.

Here’s another thought of mine, free of charge. I wonder if I’ve written about this before. It seems to me I’ve pondered it repeatedly over the years, but never actually sat down and verbalized it.

And as many have said before me, I don’t really know what I think until I’ve written it down.

It seems to me a lot of people misunderstand Christ’s command about turning the other cheek.

First of all, let’s quote the passage here, for the sake of our younger readers:

“But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” (Matthew 5:39, King James Version)

Seems pretty simple, but of course it’s not, in practice. It’s kind of like a command not to ever fart – easy to say, not so easy to live by. How are we supposed to act, in light of this and all the Lord’s other commandments about non-violence? Is self-defense always forbidden? What about defending our families? Our country? Are the wicked to be left completely unrestrained in the world?

But that’s not exactly what I have in mind tonight. What I’m thinking about tonight is what I see as a common misinterpretation of this passage. As far as I can see, this is a simple command, without any promise concerning consequences.

Too many people think there’s a corollary there, one that’s not actually in the text. They think what Jesus is actually saying is, “If you turn the other cheek, then your enemy will be so impressed with your kindness that he’ll change his ways and stop being violent.”

This misapprehension was born, I suspect, in Sunday School stories. Sunday Schools used to provide little papers (maybe they still do; I haven’t been involved in one in a while) where they printed nice little stories with moral lessons. And often those stories were about Christian kids who showed kindness to other kids who’d bullied or hurt them, and in the end the villains saw the light, because of that kindness.

Now I won’t deny that such things can happen. People who treat others badly have been known, now and then, to change their ways, after experiencing forgiveness and kindness from their victims. And that’s wonderful.

But this is in no way promised or guaranteed.

I think that, in the political realm, some people think a Christian (or moral) policing or foreign policy would be based on doing kind things for people who attack and kill us. Naïve people believe that if we’re forgiving and passive enough, our enemies will be shamed into reforming.

Jesus did not promise that. When He told Christians to return good for evil, He knew perfectly well that a lot of them would end up getting martyred for it.

My own belief is that the government (which “bears the sword” according to Romans 13:4) is tasked with protecting its people, not evangelizing through acts of kindness and self-sacrifice. Governments can’t be saved, and make pretty poor evangelists.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Drowning at Dyes Inlet,’ by D. D. Black

Leave a comment

At Dyes Inlet, an estuary in Washington state’s Puget Sound, a woman walking her dog discovers the body of a drowned, middle-aged woman. The corpse has a crude heart carved into its back. Because the local police department is stretched thin, they call in Thomas Austin, a semi-famous former NYPD detective who has moved there in the wake of his wife’s murder. Austin agrees to help out. He is paired with a new partner, a prickly but attractive female detective recently imported from Los Angeles. So begins The Drowning at Dyes Inlet, by D. D. Black.

It’s soon apparent that this murder is identical to an old unsolved case from the 1970s. A suspect quickly appears – but unfortunately this man is the brother of the sheriff, who is running for governor and desperate to avoid a bad press. It will all build up to a final, tense hostage situation at a wedding.

Thomas Austin has one intriguing characteristic as a fictional character – he has synesthesia – the condition where people experience tastes and smells in response to visual stimuli. This was interesting, though I didn’t see that it contributed to the plot in any noticeable way. Austin himself was not a very interesting character – and in fact, none of the characters here were very interesting (to this reader). They had their quirks and eccentricities, but I didn’t recognize them as people. They didn’t talk like real people – they opened up with personal information where real people wouldn’t. The dialogue simply didn’t remind me of anything I’d ever heard. And the villain’s motivations didn’t strike me as plausible.

I got the impression that perhaps the author is on the autistic scale, and doesn’t understand personalities. Alternatively (and more positively) he might just be such a nice person that he doesn’t understand how bad people think. One way or the other, I didn’t find The Drowning at Dyes Inlet very well-written. This is the sixth book in an eight-book series, so somebody must be reading them, but I can’t recommend them.

Religion, Uncategorized

The city and the sea

4 Comments
Photo credit: Milad Fakurian. Unsplash license.

The city lies foursquare, its length the same as its width. And he measured the city with his rod, 12,000 stadia. Its length and width and height are equal. He also measured its wall, 144 cubits by human measurement, which is also an angel’s measurement. (Rev. 21:16-17, ESV)

Amateur theology tonight. (“I’ve had a thought,” he said, as readers sighed in disappointment and scrolled on.)

Way back in 2010, I blogged about how the Book of Revelation (21:1) says that in the Kingdom of God, the sea will be no more. That always troubled me, because I like having the sea around. I come from a long line of sailors and fishermen, and I find the ocean beautiful and romantic.

But I’d learned that for the ancient Hebrews, the sea symbolized chaos, the depths of despair, the place where there was no safety or certainty. The opposite of God’s order. The Old Testament uses the sea as a metaphor for death and Hell (as in the Book of Jonah). So there’s a strong case to be made that when St. John says in Revelation that the sea will be no more, he’s talking about chaos and disorder being wiped out.

And it occurred to me today that the image used in the passage from Revelation at the top of this post, about the “city foursquare,” is in fact a contrasting image. They complement each other. The chaos (sea) has been taken away, and instead we have this huge, perfectly square city. Now, even though I was born to be a city boy, and I moved to the city as soon as I decently could in my life, the idea of a great big square city never appealed to me much. Sounds kind of Bauhaus, kind of Brutalist. Not much scope for green spaces. Most of us would have interior apartments, and one assumes the view and the ventilation wouldn’t be great.

But it occurred to me that, if the deletion of the ocean is metaphorical, that cube of a city is just as likely to be metaphorical. It means everything’s going to be squared away, put right.

This brings us into the realm of mystery. I think it’s beyond question that we are promised that at the very end of God’s story, all things will be made right. Sin and evil will be swept away. Wrongs will fixed. Injustices will be balanced. Tears will be wiped away. Nobody will have any reason to complain about the raw deal they got.

How that will work out, I have no idea. I absolutely reject Universalism. It’s a snare. But I do believe there will be Big Surprises.

A twist ending. That’s what you want in a good story. And as I’ve written here before, I think it’s all a good – no, a great — story.