|
Dear
Friends,
I have been struggling to find a clever way to
begin this essay that at least would delay the
knee-jerk dismissal of my concern as hopelessly
dated, completely out of step with the realities
of modern communication technologies, and, worst
of all, dangerously elitist. Lacking a clever
opening, however, I shall simply blurt it out:
I am concerned that our reading and our writing
is gravitating to the lowest common denominator
so completely that the great themes of majesty
and nobility and felicity are made to seem trite,
puny, pedestrian.
See, I warned you that this would sound elitist,
or at best simply a matter of personal preference.
But I assure you that my concern is miles away
from such things. In reality, I am concerned about
the state of the soul in the midst of all the
cheap sensory overload going on today. You see,
without what Alfred North Whitehead called "an
habitual vision of greatness", our soul will shrivel
up and lose the capacity for beauty and mystery
and transcendence.
Can you stay with me long enough so I can fill
in my concern a little? Then you can decide for
yourself whether it has merit or is just the prattling
of an old sentimentalist who likes musty libraries.
Substance Counts. I am constantly amazed
how the "people of the Book" so cavalierly toss
words about. Words matter. Ideas matter. To write
and read on themes of substance matters. Frankly,
many books today have all the tell-tale signs
of regurgitated pablum. In this day and age having
nothing at all to say does not disqualify a person
from writing a book. The sad truth is that many
authors simply have never learned to reflect substantively
on anything. (How well I know that everything
said here I must take to heart myself, double
and triple.)
It is no secret how to write a best seller in
the contemporary religious marketplace. Simply
play to the human need market, mask the hard call
of the Gospel, and give people the sun, the moon,
and the stars in four simple laws or five easy
steps. It also helps to tap into the fears of
people by connecting all these things to a conspiracy
theory or two.
Friends, substance is important. Amy Carmichael
writes, "It matters a good deal that your book-food
should be strong meat. We are what we think about.
Think about trivial things or weak things and
somehow one loses fiber and becomes flabby in
spirit." You see, if we give our attention to
tabloid thinking and the peddlers of gossip, we
become small, petty souls. But if we give sustained
attention to the great themes of the human spirit—life
and death, transcendence, the problem of evil,
the human predicament, the greatness of rightness,
and much more—the windows of the soul will open
to the invigorating breezes of splendor and valor
and courtesy and magnanimity.
Some
Christians today are beginning to rediscover the
novel. We can be glad for the interest, but pitfalls
abound. Much that passes today under the rubric
of "Christian fiction" is either Harlequin romances
with a few moral lessons sprinkled on top or religious
propaganda tracts put into story form.
One publisher unabashedly explained to me that
their line of fiction did indeed have a formula—"gutter
to the cross". Fortunately, this individual seemed
totally oblivious to the shock, horror, and gut-wrenching
revulsion that shook me from head to toe as I
replied lamely, "That's nice". Frankly, we would
do better to go back to the first novelists—they
were nearly all Christian—and allow them to drag
us out of our cramped, little world of TV soaps
with their Xerox plots and usher us into a vast
universe of majesty and terror and sublimity.
Once having read the masters, our eyes will be
sharper and our ears more attuned to the good,
the true, the beautiful. Then we can more fruitfully
return to modern novelists.
(You may be wondering why I am not addressing
such media as radio, TV, and the like. The answer
is simple: I am not qualified to do so and, therefore,
must defer to those who are professionals in these
fields. Besides, while radio is the most pervasive
medium in our culture and TV has the greatest
impact, writing is the most precise medium, and,
when done correctly, controls what happens on
both radio and TV.)
The
Crisp, The Clear, The Imaginative. But it
isn't just the substance of what we say (or write
or read or hear or see) that concerns me. It is
the way we say it. To write pedantically about
radiance or infinity or ubiquity stunts the mind
and cramps the soul. To find the right word, to
capture the perfect image awakens the spirit and
enlarges the soul.
Mark Twain noted that the difference between the
right word and the almost right word is like the
difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
I ask you, How can we be so at ease with linguistic
lightning bugs when our universe sparkles with
such wonder and splendor and unmanageable ambiguity?
How can we who have experienced the Word become
flesh be so flippant with words? How can we .
. . . How dare we!
Oscar Wilde once commented that his day had been
particularly strenuous: he had spent all morning
taking out a comma, and all afternoon putting
it back in. Unfortunately, most contemporary writers
hardly care which noun they use, and punctuation
is completely off their radar screen.
Do you think I am speaking only to writers in
all this? By no means! Readers have a prime-time
obligation to demand better. It is your soul that
is being stunted. I urge you, gentle reader, rise
up and stand against the tide of monosyllabic
mediocrity. Complain, resist, reject the dumbing
down, elementary-school simplification of the
works that hit our best-seller lists with monotonous
regularity. Speak out and tell us how insulting
it is that we pitch our message so low. Give voice
to your love of words—how you love their sound
and rhythm, how you love their meaning and history.
Declare your abhorrence of the cheap sentence
that prostitutes words for the purpose of propaganda.
Tell us how words that are animated with love
and terror and pity and pain and wonder make your
life dangerous and great and bearable.
Cultural
Lift. One more aspect of my concern. I care
about cultural lift, and my guess is that you
do, too. The bastardizing of language carries
with it the degeneration of culture. If all writing
focuses on reaching people "where they are", we
have done precious little for them. We must also
seek to lift people from where they are to where
they can become. Writing is more than communication;
it also educates and enriches and beckons us to
new vistas. For several centuries the King James
Bible (bursting as it was with the linguistic
brilliance of the Elizabethan Age) exerted a centripetal,
unifying, and lifting force on religious and social
discourse. William Shakespeare did the same thing
as a dramatist, as did John Milton as a poet,
and Samuel Johnson as an essayist.
The
ancient Hebrew prophets cared enough about their
message that they frequently delivered it in poetic
form. May new prophets arise in our day that will
call us to faithful living in words that are crisp
and clear and imaginative.
And they are rising. Change is in the air. The
dumbing down of the mind is not the wave of the
future. The human spirit will endure today's gossip-laden
trivial pursuit for only so long. We are created
for more, and with centripetal force we will push
toward the more dense, the more real, the more
substantive. (God, the Divine Center, is the heart
of this pursuit, of course, and, as he said through
the prophet Jeremiah, "you will find me; if you
seek me with all your heart".)
But change is not a foregone conclusion. The forces
arrayed against cultural lift are substantial.
With regard to words, perhaps the most hostile
influence is talk radio where words are cheap,
volume is valued over logic, and truth is not
even a consideration.
Praxis.
So what can you and I do? Allow me three simple
suggestions that can be implemented immediately.
Read.
The brain is a muscle and without exercise it
will atrophy. We can exercise our brains in many
ways, of course, but reading is certainly a good
place to start.
Read
two old books for every modern one. The
old writers have a track record—they have proven
themselves to be valuable. It will take a century
or two until we will know if recent writers, like
myself, will endure. (By the by, "contemporary
classic"—a term used more and more by publishers
nowadays—is an oxymoron, and we should disallow
its use.)
Read
after and value our good poets. In an
ocean of phonologic babble, they are little islands
of light, preserving for our culture a love of
language. Good poetry gives us an economy and
density of words which, image for image, sound
for sound, word for word, represents the purest
possible product of the fiercest refining heat.
Finally,
in the midst of these high-minded ideals, I want
to encourage you to be easy on yourself. Take
the long view. Start with something that will
lift your heart and hone your mind, and stay with
it for a while. It is far better to soak in five
pages of substance than to read five hundred pages
of fluff. Your life will be richer for the effort.
Peace and joy,
Richard J. Foster
P.S.
I have promised to keep you informed of our financial
status. It has been eighteen months since we asked
for monies to replenish our reserves, and as of
this writing they are dangerously low. We need
$26,000.00 in order for us to continue our work
with integrity. Fortunately, several friends of
RENOVARÉ have set before us a $13,000.00 matching
challenge gift. Therefore, every dollar you give
to this work in the days ahead will be matched,
thus doubling the good you do us. If RENOVARÉ
has helped you, will you consider a generous gift
to this ministry now? Thank you. — RJF
|
