Best of Cerulean Sanctum

The Desperate Need for Heroes

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Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings trilogyThe annual Christian Booksellers Association convention (now with the utterly ghastly new name “International Christian Retail Show”—boy, that’s a blog entry in itself!) is running this week and it’s started off with a bang due to a speech given by Andy Crouch (who?) that called Christian fiction writers to abandon writing escapist novels and start addressing “reality.” His assertion comes from watching airline travelers; he observes that they have traded their books for playing solitaire on a notebook computer or cell phone. From this he posits that too many of us have traded gritty life for virtual reality:

It’s worth pausing and asking ourselves whether what we are looking for when we read, what our readers are looking for, is not escape and seclusion. This is a constant Christian temptation. We are prone to create our Christian virtual reality. I’m sure that right here at the International Christian Retail Show you’ll be able to meet good-hearted folks creating Christian video games. Isn’t that appealing? A world, suitably tweaked and put at your disposal for your entertainment, where Christianity actually works! Just obey the Christian rules and you win the game. A world where prayers are always answered! A world where sin doesn’t weave itself so tightly around even our best efforts! It is so tempting to strategically simplify, to create a fictional reality in which things just seem to work better than they do in this world.

But to do that is to deny the Incarnation, to deny that God became real in this world, in this very world where God does not seem real to many people much of the time. To create Christian virtual reality is to choose escape and seclusion and thus become entirely irrelevant to the heart of the gospel, which is God entering into this very world in order to liberate it from its captivity to itself.

So I plead with you, as a reader, as a fellow follower of the Incarnate One, as someone who daily wonders how this gospel to which I am giving my life can possibly be true, I plead with you not to tell me stories which improve on the world. Instead, tell me stories about the world as it is, strange and real and full of grace.

Like so many Christian commentators today, Crouch understands a problem exists. However, I believe his analysis and solution are profoundly wrong. It is not that people have abandoned books and movies (box office numbers continue their free-fall, too) because they are escapist, but because they aren’t escapist enough!

I’ve given up on most mainstream fiction because I can no longer stomach anti-heroes. Every character in every novel I have read lately is an amalgam of relativistic “ideals” that amounts to nothing more than a shell inhabited by moralistic flotsam and jetsam. You can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys because the bad guy has his subversively “noble” cause, while the “good guy” has more moral failings than the denizens of Sodom.

Now we might live in a postmodern age that attempts to call black “white” or even “chartreuse,” but I can tell you straight up that people are bored stiff with fictional characters that have few admirable traits, no transcendence over the rest of skulking humanity, no divine fire in their bellies that compels them to rise up and let the world know that they are different.

I’m shifting to film here because it provides a more concentrated and widely-known pool of examples to choose from, but why do people love the Star Wars movies and flock to them even when Episodes 1-3 were acknowledged by everyone as having awful dialog, wooden acting, and ham-handed direction? After watching a great musical like Singing in the Rain or The Sound of Music, why do so many people let their first comment be, “Why don’t they make movies like that anymore?” Why did the first Matrix movie inspire devotion, the second ambivalence, and the last one contempt?

It’s all about heroes. People are dying for heroes. People long for happy endings in which the clearly drawn hero with a heart of gold vanquishes the bad guy—a bad guy so bad he’d even eat his own mother for breakfast. The average guy in the average house in the average suburban tract has had his fill of anti-heroes. He doesn’t want someone who looks like him, struggles like him, and in the end is no better for any of his trials. He wants to see someone grow and learn and kick the bad guy’s ass in the last scene. If Yoda had a penchant for picking up little green call girls and knocking back the Tatooine hooch whenever he had the chance, no one would be cheering, and no one would be standing in line to see another Star Wars film. The Wachowski brothers forgot that the reason people liked The Matrix was more than just the cunning special effects, it was the fact that the good guys were good and believed in something greater than themselves. When in The Matrix Reloaded Morpheus’ altruism was demeaned as being little more than religious fanaticism, you could feel the collective audience sigh of “Well, there goes the series!”

What some label as mere escapism, the majority of people consider to be their one chance to see the good triumph over evil. When our TV news programs depict one hopeless scene of brutality, disease, and loathsomeness after another, why would we want to subject ourselves to reading the same in our fiction or watching it on our screens? People don’t want to see any conflict in a character like Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings other than Do I kill that orc with my broadsword or with my dagger? We don’t want all his moral failings paraded before us; we want him to grow into his kingship. Because if he can, maybe we can, too.

Has anyone asked the solitaire player on Crouch’s flight why he plays solitaire instead of reading the latest novel? Could it be that the solitaire player prefers an electronic card game because it contains the promise that the game could be won? Virtual reality at least allows the one immersed in it to possibly come out on top, to vanquish some imagined foe, to live out the heroism that is so lacking in our daily lives.

This is no endorsement for John Eldredge’s fatally flawed Wild at Heart, but the reason that book resonated with so many disaffected men is that it put out a call to heroism, a call lacking in much of our culture because we have for too long ceded our imaginations to anti-heroes and protagonists of questionable morality. Our culture screams, “There are no heroes!” We are told by the media elite that happy endings are for simpletons. Yet, who reading this today would want to come to the end of his/her life and NOT want it to end happily?

I find Crouch’s appeal to Christian writers to write more fiction that is rooted in the funk of this world and to avoid obvious happy endings to be a capitulation to the spirit of the age. It is to take our injunction to think on what is noble, pure, and right and turn it into just another dark day in the gutter. You can claim that it’s all about mystery and grace, but if that amazing grace doesn’t lead us to a heavenly home where we’ll be for a lot longer than ten thousand years, then Christian writers will be offering their readers the same bankrupt worldview that the world is offering. Our identity as Christians will be lost amid the many secular and religious voices that take a look at the vagaries of our existence and can only shrug and say, “Man, life is tough, isn’t it?”

The incarnation that Crouch uses as his proof text does not end with the dead Christ hanging on His cross. Paul himself said that if that is the whole of it, we are people to be most pitied. No! That dead Christ—our very archetypal hero—overcame Death itself! The stone is rolled away from the tomb! Jesus was the victor then and will be the victor to come when He and His righteous legions destroy all the powers of Darkness!

If our creative writing doesn’t regularly reflect this final triumph of good over evil, then all we have handed our readers is another maudlin dose of despair. I for one am not willing to write books that fail to offer this triumph; I know that you are not wanting to read them, either.

{Image: Aragorn of The Lord of the Rings trilogy from New Line Cinema}

Isolationism, Materialism, and the Evils of Our Age

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Just a monkey in a cageIt doesn’t take a genius to see that something is drastically wrong at the very heart of our daily living. After reading Brad over at The Broken Messenger blogging about the American Dream and how it is destroying us through our materialism and outright stinginess toward tithing, I have to wonder if the cure we Christians are offering is just a Band-Aid pasted over something gangrenous.

Though I want to charge ahead in this post, let’s first consider Brad’s lament:

We blend the definitions between “need” and “desire” such that they are indistinguishable so that we can justify not giving to the Body of Christ our time and or money; yet somehow we find the means to set aside regular portions of our wages and time in our lives for our dreams – all with the expectation that once the allotted time has passed, we will reap the rewards for our patience and self sacrifices. But in the same manner that we pursue our earthly dreams, Jesus has asks us to abandon them along with everything else. He asks that we sacrifice all for a little while, for inconceivable and imperishable riches later.

With all respect to Brad, there is a far deeper problem here. Not only do we suffer from the very things Brad so rightly accuses, but we cannot NOT suffer from them because of the way we’ve setup our societal structures.

I’ve blogged about this many times before, most recently in part in my business series, but it bears repeating. I own a large farm tractor. I bought it when we moved to our property with the idea of having a small farm. All my neighbors own farm tractors, too, in various sizes, capabilities, and vintages. There are five families that live on about sixty acres of land. We all have need for a tractor, but do each of us have to have one that is strictly ours?

With our island mentality of existence, each man must have his own self-sufficient world supplied with things that keep him isolated. A man must have his own tractor because he rarely interacts with his neighbor at all, so it makes borrowing an issue.

It goes beyond sharing commonly used items, too. If fifty acres of wheat need harvesting, he, his wife, and his 2.1 children can’t do it by themselves if they try to do it by inexpensive hand labor—they need the machinery that will enable them to work alone. The machinery costs money—a lot of money. Now they’ve got to work even harder to make more money to afford the expensive machines, the fuel to power them, and their upkeep. Maybe the wife takes an outside job now. And the kids wind up latchkey kids because he’s moonlighting at night and there’s that overlap when both he and his wife are gone. It’s all too common and the reason is that there is no community left that will come to his side to eliminate his need for the expensive equipment in the first place.

What if instead of going bankrupt trying to buy a $75,000 combine, all his neighbors came over and helped harvest the wheat using little more than a horse-drawn scythe or two? Inexpensive and communal, too. The labor is divided. Repeat that pattern over a number of families and many hands make for easier work.

Sure, that may work for organic farm communities, hardcore Amish-types, and the like, but what about the VP of Operations at the soap making company? Well, what about him? What are we Christians failing to work through when it comes to problems like this?

Brad’s issue over the American Dream and how it afflicts us Christians will NEVER go away no matter how hard we try unless we jettison our self-sufficiency. If you aren’t part of a community that strategically works to see that no one gets left behind in the grinding wheel of modern life, then each one of us has to have a complete set of stuff to be self-sufficient enough to live. Even Saint Francis could not have been Saint Francis unless some person out there included him in the life of a community. Yes, a few people can drop out altogether and live like hermits, but all of us can’t do that. The only answer is for Christians to start abandoning the pie-in-the-sky idea that we will somehow stop with the self-sufficiency and the requisite materialism that naturally attends it without covering each other’s backs!

Initially we put our parents into nursing homes when they were aged not because we have hard hearts, but because no one would be there to support us in our support of them. Pull the right stick out of the Kerplunk game and all the marbles will fall. Name a problem in our society and I bet you can trace it back to our misguided belief in self-sufficiency.

Ever wonder why there are a hundred different types of breakfast cereal in the grocery store? Self-sufficiency breeds self-centeredness. Self-centeredness naturally evolves into the concept that I am the master of my own kingdom. As a king, I need something that sets me apart from the commoner. They may eat cornflakes, but I need the organic muesli with non-GMO, freeze-dried ollaliberries added. The common becomes despised because I require something better. Whining for “better” promotes greed. Need I say more?

Folks, being more holy won’t fix this. We’ve tried that route and failed miserably. Nor will attempting to live a simpler life get us out from under the burden that reinforces the very complexity we try to avoid. The brick wall awaits and we’re going ninety even with the brakes on. The system is broken at a fundamental level: We lack real, connected community and our need to overcome that lack results in our becoming self-sufficient. If I don’t need you, I need everything that is not you that might replace you. And soon enough, the thing that replaces you is viewed as more essential than you are. Is it any surprise then that we live in such an angry society? If I don’t need you, then all you are doing is competing against me. There’s that Darwinian ethic again—seems to crop up everywhere.

Our self-imposed isolation is destroying us on the inside and driving us to lengths that dishonor God. But a Christian community founded upon the ideals that no one is ignored and that your problem is my problem will not succumb to isolation, self-sufficiency, and materialism. It will naturally avoid living out a disconnected, stingy, ungrateful life before God.

Trying to undo entrenched societal structures that diminish our potential for the Lord takes brave men and women. Any of them still out there?

Rock { Christian Author } Hard Place

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Mightier than the swordI'm a writer.

I know it may not show in the slapdash blog posts I toss up here, but it's true. As part of a testosterone-laden men's writing group—The Write Brothers—I have actual published authors attesting to the fact that I can string a few words together intelligibly. Even more to that point, I own a freelance writing company that covers everything from tech manuals to marketing copy to s/f novels. You name it; I write it. I've even been known to pen a highly regarded poem now and then. (Although the state of "poetry for cash" is more like "You pay us and we'll publish your poem." Somewhere, a red wheelbarrow is rusting.)

The allusion in my not-so-subtle title does not mean I will go the way of Hemingway, but it does mean that to be a Christian writer is to be a denizen of a tiny world on which a civil war rages. Piper, Sproul, Grudem, Warren, Hybels, and all those name authors don't have a clue because they're writing NON-fiction. They're oblivious to the artillery, the bloodshed, and the cries of the wounded. But as for me, well, I got drafted into the the war simply for my desire to write novels. And it ain't pretty.

I've got three novels at various stages of development, with one soon to see the conclusion and final edits, so even writing this on my blog could forever doom my work to the dark drawers of my Sixties-era desk. Yet I have to say it: being a Christian fiction writer is a lesson in compromise and multiple personality syndrome.

The irony of all this is that the market for Christian fiction is absolutely booming. These are the glory days for anyone trying to sell into what is known as the CBA (Christian Booksellers Association) market. Publishers are scrambling to pump up the Christian novel jam, so if there's a genre you like to read, expect to see it soon. Someone realized a couple years ago that Christians actually READ fiction, and with the Lord of the Rings series of movies/books reaping big press in Christian circles, two and two fused together. Mix in a little Mel Gibson movie and even the secular publishers starting thinking, You know, that's a pretty substantial market we've been ignoring. They're even starting up Christian imprints just to tap the 22 million people who bought a copy of that little book called The Purpose Driven Life.

So Dan, why the "tortured artist" schtick?

My current novel project started out in the secular counterpart to the CBA, the American Booksellers Association (ABA.) I was hoping to write a science fiction title that would bring strong Christian themes and symbolism to secular readers first and Christian readers second, all without suffering from what I call "The Sledgehammer Effect." If you read enough Christian fiction, I don't have to explain this. Wink, wink—we've all had that little Gospel train steam out of the book and roll right over our cerebrums.

But along the way, this novel changed. Every time I wanted to portray my believing heroine doing the kind of things that Christians regularly do—pray, read the Bible, and so on—the scene automatically excluded the book from the secular market. Any editor reading the work would say, "But this belongs on our Christian imprint!" and there it would be sent to be branded a work of "Christian fiction," forever shuttled out of reach of the very readers I was trying to capture. The mere mention of the devoted acts we do every day and that's all he wrote.

It struck me that if C.S. Lewis were writing his Space Trilogy (the inspiration for my market ploy) today, there would be no chance that a secular publishing house would touch the books. Out of the Silent Planet would be on Tyndale or Zondervan faster than you could say, "Peretti," and that would be that. Despite the fact that your average Barnes & Noble or Borders has been increasing their Christian non-fiction titles, Christian fiction still has a long way to go for shelf space in a secular market.

So I quit the battle and went for a CBA title. It's so CBA right now that Stephen King himself could not modify it into an ABA title. However, while I managed to avoid The Sledgehammer Effect magnificently, I only opened another can of worms.

The ABA is tough for Christian novelists to crack unless they're willing to veil all their religious references. But the CBA presents its own problems because now you have to be all things to all Christians. I think you can already see the problem.

Even as the romance genre has an iron-clad list of essentials, both do's and dont's, the Christian fiction list of acceptable novelist behaviors resembles the U.S. Tax Code in its complexity. The list of traps is endless and just finding an audience that won't stab you with your Mont Blanc for violating a key doctrinal belief of theirs is nightmarish.

Want to write a novel that features a positive Christian character who speaks in tongues? Well, if you think that being tarred and feathered on John MacArthur's Web site is great PR, then go for it. Or how fast and loose do you want to play with doctrine when it comes to fantasy or s/f? My wife just read a novel that asked, What if Jesus first came in the 22nd century AD? What would His first advent look like in an age of interplanetary space travel? Although that's a great premise, you know someone out there would object. As much as I want to embody the mythopoeia that Lewis and Tolkein championed, I don't want my publisher to deal with irate letters and bad reviews on Christian Web sites because I asked "What if?" of a treasured doctrine and people felt that my treatment of it was "off." (In my novel, I do explore a major doctrine by envisioning a more drastic expression of it than what the Bible states, adding s/f elements and conjecture.)

Even Lewis is not sacrosanct. I know he'll come under new scrutiny if Disney makes references to alcoholic drinks in their upcoming Narnia films. Any readers of that series will recall that Lewis was a virtual spokesperson for breweries and vintners. So how many teetotalers have objected to Lewis's world? Quite a lot, if a quick Googling of this issue is any indication. Well, I guess I would at least be in good heretical company.

Recently, I read a post on the Brandywine Books blog from a published author who no longer seeks publication. I was told to write the very best book I had in me. That's the best kind of advice, but sadly, I don't know if that advice belongs to another, less picky age. With publishers dwindling every hour, and market realities forcing every title to be a bestseller, the pressure to appeal to most of the people most of the time is enormous. Where that leaves Christian novelists is anyone's guess. Lowest common denominator is what I fear. The Christian fiction I've read lately surely bears that out.

Truth be told, I've been utterly incapable of making it through any of the Christian fiction I've bravely attempted in the last three years. A few folks contend that the quality is rising, but I can't see it. From my perspective, should some Christian publisher decide to purchase my novel, I can view this as my joining the larger pool of books I cannot bring myself to read to the end OR I can see it as my attempt to bring something better to the pool. I guess only a publisher can determine that direction. Considering what I've said so far in this post, my chances of getting that letter that sets every hopeful author's heart a-flutter have probably already dropped at least fifty percent.

Here's another truth: this post has been sitting in draft form on Blogger since April. Only this and the previous two paragraphs are new. Why you ask? For the very reason I just stated. Biting the hand that potentially feeds at a time when publishing houses have consolidated down to the number of toes on my left foot is not all that bright. But given that some are trumpeting the new wave of Christian fiction…well, I had to add my two cents.

I'm a writer; it's what I do.