I finished reading “Pillars of the Earth” by Ken Follett, and I was really conflicted about whether to say anything about it or not. It’s a hot-selling fictional treatment of how a 12th century English cathedral might have been built. That could have been a great book … heck, judging by the sales, a lot of people thought it was a great book. My problem is that it seemed like three books rolled into one — one of them was mechanical but fascinating, one of them was surprisingly inspirational for a non-Orthodox work … and the third one was so revolting to me that it may negate any good I’d derive from the other two. So what were those three books? 1. How to build a Gothic cathedral in only 974 pages This third of the book is fantastic. Ken Follett, who is known for thrillers, was someone who simply got the cathedral-visiting bug at some point and got curious to know why they were built. According to his preface, he’s not a spiritual person, just a storyteller who found something that so many others have missed. It is impossible to go inside these magnificent structures and not wonder at the cost in human capital — passion, labor, raw strength, love expressed in craftsmanship, not to mention money — that went into them. There have been books that explained the engineering behind a cathedral, and those are amazing enough. But by delving into people’s lives and taking the narrative over the course of 39 years, Follett is able to show the human side of the story — the politics, the courageous stands, the false starts, the unexpected triumphs, the catastrophic miscalculations and the devotion that provided the reason for everything. So far, so good. But then … . 2. Medieval times meets “Gone with the Wind” This third of the book I detested. This was the juicy part, the kind of stuff that gets a book about building cathedrals to the top of the bestseller list. It’s “The Young and the Restless” with plagues and castles, “Beverly Hills 90210″ with peasants and torture chambers. And rape … lots of rape. Let’s not spare any detail. This is the 21st century and this is a book from Oprah’s Book Club, so for goodness sake, let’s have some rape scenes in graphic detail. Oh, and let’s throw in some torture, mutilation and gratuitous cruelty to men, women, children and beasts. Unenlightened people would call that sadism, but today’s bookworm just considers it the hallmark of “serious” fiction. Now, I will admit two very relevant facts here. First, I don’t read much modern fiction — for some reason, I had gotten the impression it was all hog-swill (can’t think why). Second, it is absolutely historically accurate to include brutality in a book about the middle ages when most people’s lives were, as Hobbes said, nasty, brutish and short. I would say that it would possible to allude to that fact of medieval life without sliding so close to the realm of pornography. But maybe that’s just me. On a lighter note … . 3. A saint in the making Given my disgust with the “corset-ripper” third of this book, I was downright shocked to find that there was a character that I really liked — Prior Philip, the monk-priest of Knightsbridge Abbey who ends up commissioning the cathedral and negotiating his way through devious politics, civil wars and times of chaos. It’s so very, VERY common for non-Christians to write about these sorts of individuals as if they must be either repressed sickos, hypocritical control freaks or benign weirdos. If they are given credit for true Christian faith, it’s usually just a set-up to frame their obligatory crisis when they are either don’t get what they want or just come to their senses. But Follett’s Prior Philip didn’t behave according to any of the religion-challenged stereotypes, and for that, I am grateful to the author. I could’ve done without the flamboyantly atheistic witch-heroine-nymphomaniac that seems to appear lest we have too much sympathy for a devout clergyman, but I hate to nitpick. . So there you go. Three books in one. As with so much of what passes for literature these days, if someone would just separate the good from the bad, there might be something there a person could read.

Too bad, because that allegory is a unique narrative about how one extraordinary person navigated the trendy philosophies at work in the world and made it to mere Christianity. The fact that Lewis wrote the entire book in a short period of time almost immediately after his conversion shows both a great mind and a generous nature at work. Unfortunately, that haste is also one of the reasons that “Pilgrim’s Regress” is impossible for many to make out. Lewis remarked later that the book was needlessly obscure and subjective. For those that haven’t picked it up in a while, or ever, “Pilgrim’s Regress” is in the form of a dream and follows the narrative of a sort of everyman individual named John as his spiritual life unfolds. Subtitled “An Allegorical Apology for Christianity Reason and Romanticism,” the book follows John from the first Sunday-School-calibre information about God to his Christian conversion and beyond. After his baptism, John has to face all of the schools of thought that had contributed wrongfully to his spiritual state — this is the ‘regress’ in the title — to eventually combat the demons that lay at the heart of them. It could be a powerful weapon in understanding how the world’s culture entrapped so many in the last century and give us one great thinker’s prescription for how Christian victory is possible. The problem with the book, as Lewis acknowledged later, is that he wasn’t clear enough about what those trends of thought were. When Lewis has John encounter a bohemian character named Mr. Halfways, his sanguine daughter Media Halfways and his angry son Gus Halfways, Lewis assumes:

1. that we will be able to figure out that Mr. Halfways is the sort of idealistic spirit of the early 1900’s that Lewis called Romanticism, that Media Halfways is that spirit expressed in art, music and poetry, and that Gus is the angry off-shoot of beatnik poetry and abstract art.
2. that we will know what Romanticism, Romanticist culture and the beatnik subculture were all about.

The latter issue is just a matter of education, and we could all feel worse that we’re not up to snuff on this until we remember that C. S. Lewis had degrees in literature and philosophy from Oxford and knew more than we could be expected to. The former issue stems from a mistake that Lewis made. In an afterword written ten years after “Regress” came out, Lewis said:

There were two causes, I now realize, for the obscurity. On the intellectual side my own progress had been from ‘popular realism’ to Philosophical Idealism; from Idealism to Pantheism; from Pantheism to Theism; and from Theism to Christianity. I still think this a very natural road, but I now know that it is a road very rarely trodden. In the early thirties, I did not know this. … The second cause of obscurity was the (unintentionally) ‘private’ meaning I then gave to the word ‘Romanticism’.

So enough about Lewis’ mistakes, what about this “Guidebook”? Well, all I can say is that a person would need a guidebook to make it through the guidebook. It’s just downright weird to me that when the “Guidebook” author undertakes to interpret the difficult character of Mr. Sensible, for example, she translates all of the classical Greek quotations, restates obvious parts of the chapter and then says, “Lewis wrote to his American correspondent that Mr. Sensible is the type of person of which Montaigne was the best literary specimen.” Who? I hope I’m not a complete dunce, but replacing one esoteric name with another is like a dictionary that offers to explain the word ‘Brobdignagian” by telling me to see “antidisestablishmentarianism.” So what can you do? I’ve already taken more words than I meant to with this. It just seems like a bit of a shame to me, that’s all. And I think there’s still room for the book that this “Guidebook” should have been. Because there’s still a great need for the book that “Pilgrim’s Regress” is, if only someone could translate it for the rest of us.

Ugh! I had just been boasting to Greg that I hadn’t had a cold in a long time when whammo. The Theophany troparion hadn’t left my mind before some nasty germs decided to take up residence in my poor old body. As things have progressed, my head has gotten stuffier and my voice has gotten lower and huskier. Yesterday I was Suzanne Pleshette. Today I’m just a lush who smokes cigars. Definitely a time to hole up in the den and try to recover a little humanity. So the room heater goes on in the den (bringing the dog from anywhere in the house to plop directly in front of it). An afternoon pot of tea gets brewed up — something special, I think. This is a job for the intense orange-spice Russian tea that I bought in Alaska — a tea of such a strident pungency that I’ve had to store it in a heavy glass container just to keep all my more delicate teas from smelling like cinnamon and cloves. And the book to read? Well, it just has to be one of “The Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency” books. I’m up to the sixth in this series — “In the Company of Cheerful Ladies” — but as those who have read the books know, it doesn’t matter all that much which one you read. They’re all good, they’re all pleasant, they’re all meant to be read and savored like a visit with a friend or a good cup of tea. For those who haven’t read them, the books detail the comings and goings of Precious Ramotswe, a woman in Botswana who comes into a small inheritance and decides to open a detective agency. That could make the series like something on the PBS’ show “Mystery” except … well, it’s just not. Mma Ramotswe — all the women are referred to as ‘Mma’ — doesn’t generally deal with the kinds of major mysteries solved by Hercule Poirot, or even Hettie Wainthrop. You might have an entire book where the most difficult problem anyone brings to her is whether an employee of theirs is stealing or not, or whether Mma Ramotswe’s good husband, Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni will follow through with the parachute jump he promised to do to benefit the orphanage. Other things might happen, other characters might go through different things, but in the end if someone asked you want the book was about, you may really not be able to say. Or you might say what you could say for all of the books in this series, “It’s about Africa (or at least Botswana). And goodness. And happiness.” The Scottish author, Alexander McCall Smith, was born in Zimbabwe and taught at the University of Botswana, so he obviously knows the way things feel and the way people talk in Africa. And besides these details, there’s a pacing to things that is distinctly non-European. But I can save words. Here’s the opening paragraph of “In the Company of Cheerful Ladies”:

Mma Ramotswe was sitting alone in her favourite cafe, on the edge of the shopping centre at the Gaborone end of the Tlokweng Road. It was a Saturday, the day that she preferred above all others, a day on which one might do as much or as little as one liked, a day to have lunch with a friend at the President Hotel, or, as on that day, to sit by oneself and think about the events of the week and the state of the world. This cafe was a good place to be, for several reasons. Firstly, there was the view, that of a stand of eucalyptus trees with foliage of a comforting dark green which made a sound like the sea through the leaves. Or that, at least, was the sound which Mma Ramotswe imagined the sea to make. She had never seen the ocean, wich was far away from land-locked Botswana; far away across the deserts of Namibia, across the red sands and the dry mountains. But she could imagine it when she listened to the eucalyptus trees in the wind and closed her eyes. Perhaps one day she would see it, and would stand on the shore and let the waves wash over her feet. Perhaps.

If your response to that paragraph is “Huh. Does the pace pick up later on?” then you don’t need to bother getting any of these books. Because it doesn’t really. Even when there are big jobs, life-changing decisions and cobras in the office, the storytelling is as gentle and unhurried as one of Mma Ramotswe’s frequent tea-breaks with her favorite bush tea. If your response to the paragraph, on the other hand, is “How can I go to that place?” your path is clear. There are eight in the series. They’re all good. Oops. My tea is cold. I’ve got to go. Mma Ramotswe would understand.

Finished “HP and the Deathly Hallows”. And this is what I can say safely opine on without giving away anything for those who haven’t read it yet:

• Not that my opinion matters in the ocean of opinions out there on this book, but still, I give it great marks. I don’t read a lot of recent fiction, so I don’t have a lot to compare it to. But as near as I can tell, I think it’s really handled well.
• Specifically, I feel like I’ve been through a series of real disappointments with pop culture finales recently (”Sopranos” blackout, anyone?), so I was glad to note that J. K. Rowling was up to the task of keeping this last book readable without going for cheap tricks like insulting the reader, pointlessly abusing the characters, inventing convenient things to wind things up or any of that stuff.
• In some ways, the previous books had reminded me of the kinds of things a young person would go through as they started to have a sense of God and of life’s great questions. Not that I thought Rowling had that in mind, just that it’s how any mythic tale that involves transcendent worlds is going to appear to me.
• If that’s true, then this book continues the growing tension she has presented in the last two, and might correspond to a nascent Christian’s crisis of faith. Harry has been having to figure out who to trust — he hasn’t always handled it well. He doesn’t always know who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy. He often confuses emotion with fact, bias with intuition, and guesswork with revelation. The joy he initially experienced in the magic world has given way to hard work, serious choices and heavy responsbilities (which is why I said I thought Rowling was imitating what it feels like to go through adolescence). He has a lovable way of finally reverting back to a childlike trust and humility just as he’s about to screw everything up, and thank goodness for that. There are quite enough jerk-characters in books already.

There are some other themes that came up that I thought were very intriguing, but I can’t go into ‘em without giving things away. So it looks like I’ll have to do a separate entry for that.

It seems certain that I’m going to start quoting this one as I did with “Diary of a Russian Priest” so I might as well give a bit of introduction and information to anyone who isn’t already familiar with this Orthodox gem. “My Life in Christ” is a volume full of snippets from a short paragraph to 2/3 of a page in length. They aren’t categorized or ordered in any way. Each one is the reflection written by Fr. John of Kronstadt a married parish priest who lived in a small village in northern Russia from 1829 - 1908, and was consecrated a saint in 1988. I won’t go into his lifestory — which is worthy of an article (or maybe a blog) all its own — but here is a short excerpt from this hagiography that gives an indication of why St. John is so revered:

The Wonder-Working Father John Sergiev is another of the great elders and saints who were a part of the spiritual revival started by St. Paisius Velichkovsky. Widely venerated as a saint even during his lifetime, and the only married parish priest in the Russian calendar of saints, Father John is known for his spiritual gifts of powerful prayer, healing, spiritual insight and great love for all people. He also reawakened the Russian Orthodox Church to the Apostolic tradition of receiving Holy Communion at every Divine Liturgy. This is why he is most commonly portrayed holding a Communion chalice.

On the title page of “My Life in Christ”, St. John writes:

I do not precede my book by any introduction: let it speak for itself. Everything contained in it is but a gracious enlightement which was bestowed upon my soul by the all-enlightening Holy Ghost during moments of deep self-concentration and of self-examination, especially during prayer. When I had time, I noted down the edifying thoughts and feelings that came to me, and from these notes, continued for many years, this book has now been compiled; the contents are very varied, as will be seen by the readers. Let them judge of them for themselves. “He that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man.” (1 Corinthians ii,15)

The book is a little hard to come by in the complete volume — I was tickled pink when a friend thinned out his Orthodox library and I inherited this copy. But if you want to get the feel of it without paying the $39 or so that people on Amazon wanted for used copies of the whole 560-page book (Link HERE), there is “Spiritual Counsels” (Link HERE) that is a much shorter selection out of “My Life” set into categories to make it more reader-friendly. I started out with that, but found that I just wanted more when I got to the end. And so now it’s an addition to my daily readings, and at the rate I’m going, I probably won’t be done till 2015 or so. I’ll try not to keep quoting it ALL the time, but rest assured, I’ll want to. PS: I will mention the one aspect of “My Life” that might be a little problematic, probably not at the time St. John was writing but because of a certain downhill slide in current Christianity. Saint John is especially emphatic about the need for a strong and active prayer life, and as part of prayerfulness, he believed that it was important for Christians to place total faith that God would hear their prayers. Here’s a typical example from “My Life”

If you wish to ask of God in prayer any blessing for yourself, then before praying prepare yourself for undoubting and firm faith, and take in good time means against doubt and unbelief. For it will go ill with you if during the prayer itself your heart wavers in its faith and does not stand firm in it. … Remember that God, during your prayer, is waiting for your affirmative answer to the question which He is inwardly asking you: ‘Believe ye that I am able to do this?’

It is a great and a loving sentiment, and coming as it did from a man who was diligent in ascetic labors it is surely good advice. The danger for 21st century Americans, IMHO, is that we are living in a time and place that already tends to cheapen prayer to a magic wishlist and turn God into ‘a celestial butler’ (as Dennis Prager puts it). It wasn’t all that long ago that “The Jabez Prayer” was a best-seller, and TV evangelists strut the stage telling hapless viewers that God is just dying to give you stuff. It is a sad denigration of what intercession in prayer can be, and St. John can hardly have expected that it would have come to this. But since that cultural message rings so strongly in my ears, I found that I had to be careful with St. John’s very good advice on that one issue.