Ecklian Reviews: In Bruges

Mark Eckel, Director, Mahseh Center, Lake Bruce, IN

 Hobbled by guilt yet bound by principle, the souls of men long for redemption.  One can rent any number of gun-fight thrillers that splatter the screen with blood (Shoot ‘Em Up, Smokin’ Aces) while enjoying comedic releases of tension.  Dark-comedy suspense full of bullets and mayhem (Lucky Number Slevin, Crank) are also available.  It is hard, however, to suggest a film quite like In Bruges for its dedication to all the above mentioned elements which have their foundations sunk into human shame. 

Bruges, Belgium provides a thousand year backdrop to the movie’s setting.  After a hit, two gunmen (Ray and Ken played by Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson respectively) are instructed by their boss (Ralph Fiennes) to cool off in the ancient town.  Awaiting further instruction, Ken encourages Ray to enjoy the beauty and culture of the old European municipality.  Here viewers may find themselves wondering in the first twenty minutes of the movie “I thought this was a gangster flick!”  The elder Ken inspects canals, architecture, and the interior of cathedrals.  The connections to Catholic culture should not be missed as there is some unspoken connection to the church throughout the film.  

But what bothers the younger Ray, is much more than boring tourism.  After gazing upon an artwork depicting man’s eternal judgment, we discover that Farrell’s character is concerned about his afterlife.  The hit (against a priest, no less) has also felled a little boy with an errant bullet.  Ray’s conscience plagues him for the rest of the movie, because of this horrendous act: so much so that he intends suicide.  Layers of angst are peeled away as we find out Ken questions his own life’s work, having killed so many men.  Even the sadistic Harry has principles.  The reason for instructions for Ken to kill Ray is based on the bosses’ analysis, “We have to draw the line at killing little boys.  If I had done it I would have blown my own head off on the spot.”

Woven within the fabric of Martin McDonagh’s brilliant directorial debut is a cast of characters who deliver untold delights.  Jordan Prentice plays a dwarf, anxious to enjoy all life’s pleasures.  Clémence Poésy is love interest to Farrell’s Ray whose smile lights up the screen.  Add to this wonderful mix, a film is being shot within the city during the time of Ray and Ken’s stay which intermittently plays a role of its own. 

Comparisons of McDonagh’s work to the Coen brother’s violent comedic strains are not far off.  Yet underneath the ageless set design, haunting musical score, tremendous character development, and exceptional script the core of the movie resides in the inner struggle of human life.  Ray’s crying jags and Ken’s conflicted wisdom are at the center of us all, our desire to be good, while knowing goodness is impossible.  In the battle with our own sins, knowing we must die, we wish with Ray, “I hope I live, I hope I live.” 

Rated R for pervasive profanity, bloody sequences of death, drug use, and violence.

A former student, now a PhD scholar in his 30′s, asked me to send him ideas for biographies to read.  After reminiscing, I had written four single spaced pages on books about people that had moved me.  I ended my self-imposed assignment by telling the story of my reading Ernest Gordon’s To End All Wars on a plane flight from Chicago to southern California while a professor at Moody Bible Institute.  It was impossible to hide the tears that flowed while sitting among two hundred passengers in the fall of 2002.  No other book in the last twenty years of my life has so impacted my person.     

Alastair Gordon recounts his life-changing experiences that began with fellow captives practicing John 15:13.  Australian, English, Dutch, Scottish and other allies suffered deprivation and death in the Wampo, Thailand, Japanese prisoner of war camp.  It was the “no greater love” of Jesus which began a chain reaction among the POW’s who were being forced to build the Burma-Thailand railroad. 

Our regeneration, sparked by conspicuous acts of self-sacrifice, had begun . . . it might be thought that, this [was a] change in atmosphere . . . it was dawning on us all-officers and other ranks alike-that the law of the jungle is not the law for man.  We had seen for ourselves how quickly it could strip most of us of our humanity and reduce us to levels lower than         the beasts . . . we were seeing for ourselves the sharp contrast between the forces that made for life and those that made for death . . . love, heroism, self-sacrifice, sympathy, mercy, integrity and creative faith . . . were the essence of life.^[1] 

Hope found exclusively in the Christian lifestyle of self-sacrifice changes people.  Alastair Gordon reminds us, 

Through our readings and discussions we gradually came to know Jesus.  He was one of us.  We understood that the love expressed so supremely in Jesus was . . . other-centred rather than self-centred, greater than all the laws of men.”^[2]  

“Heart surgery” in the biography of Alistair Gordon moved me.  I want to read books that open my chest, operating on my affections.  George Steiner agrees: “To read great literature as if it had upon us no urgent design . . . is to do little more than make entries in a librarian’s catalog.”  He then quotes a letter from Franz Kafka at twenty years of age: 

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? . . . What we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love . . . A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.[3] 

Reading ice-ax books should bust soul-ice.  At some point, a book should knock our socks off.  Tears should flow.  Assumptions must be reexamined; trite thinking trumped by tight thinking.  Discoveries from facets of the diamond of true Truth are obliged to dazzle.  Excitement then prompts others with the call, “Listen to what I just read!”  

“Is not my word like fire, declares the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?”[4]  Jeremiah 23:23-32 concerns prophets who do not tell the truth.  God says His Book shatters leadership lies which steer His people astray.[5]  The indictment reaches a climax: “the burden is every man’s own word, and you pervert the words of the living God.”[6]  God says His word, the hammer, will fall.[7] 

The Book that breaks rock should break us.  John Stevens, director of the Great Books Program at East Carolina University, wrote a response to some faculty objections against time-honored tomes from Greece and Rome.  His comments about virtue as internal change-”moral education”-are not possible without true Truth from The Book: 

One ancient argument suggested that if virtue were easy and pleasant, everyone would be virtuous. Virtue is something that requires effort both to understand and to begin to desire. Moral education seems to come about better from books that require active attention, close comparison of patterns of action, and repeated application of critical judgment; that is, engaged reading and re-reading.[8] 

I cannot think of a statement that more resembles a Christian in earnest study of Scripture anxious for its application to life.  Thomas Aquinas implores me from “A Prayer Before Study” under the glass on my desk 

Pour forth a ray of Your brightness
into the darkened places of my mind;
disperse from my soul
the twofold darkness
into which I was born:
sin and ignorance. 

Books worth our attention should be a pick-axe to the frozen sea, our internal sin.  But books that move us are impossible without God’s Book, His Word.  Scripture shattered the culture of a prison camp with the love of Jesus.  That story made me weep to see The Word in action.  If Jesus was astonished to hear the story of one who acted on the authority of His Word,[9] how much more should I read books that swing The Hammer. 

^[2] Ibid. 117-118.  I would plead with Warp and Woof readers to read the book, which explains the interpersonal changes that occurred within the culture of the camp, not well expressed by the film of the same title.

[3] George Steiner. 1984. George Steiner: A Reader. (Oxford): 36.

[4] Jeremiah 23:29.

[5] One of my great concerns for The Church is that we have succumbed to the fallacy that business principles are easily transferred to Christian ministry contexts.  While there are pieces of truth everywhere in creation, imposition of naturalistic business principles to govern Christian thinking is a leadership lie. 

[6] Jeremiah 23:36. “My word” is compared to false teaching, 23:16, 17, 18, 22, 28, 29, 30, 36, 38.

[7] Isaiah 9:8.

[8] John Stevens. “Great Ideas Do Not Oppress, They Enlighten.” Clarion Call 10 February 2009. http://www.popecenter.org/clarion_call/article.html?id=2131 

[9] Matthew 8:5-13; Luke 7:1-10.

When I am dead, those who open my books will find other books inside.  It is there I rejoice, exclaim, argue, oppose, join with, categorically deny, question, comment, and generally respond to the author.  Recently, I was wading through the shoreline waves of one, who has in recent days, captured my attention.  Add yet another reaction to reading comprehension-conviction: 

Behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, and trouble will come to him-illness, poverty, losses, and then no one will see or hear him, just as now he neither sees nor hears others.  But there is no man with a hammer.  The happy man lives at his ease, faintly fluttered by small daily cares, like an aspen in the wind-and all is well.[1]  

Anton Chekhov’s short story “Gooseberries” captures conviction, his little man hammering away.  It seems appropriate to begin a series on reading with the ethical purpose statement that books should change us.  A manuscript ought to awaken my conscience, prick my spirit, send me to confession, work both as cure and suave.  

Louis L’Amour, an underappreciated “adventure novelist,” states clearly in his Education of a Wandering Man, “A book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.”[2]  A wide variety of authors concur with L’Amour.  John Gardner says, “A brilliantly imagined novel about a rapist or murderer can be more enlightening than a thousand psycho-sociological studies.”[3]  George Bernard Shaw employs the metaphor, “You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.”[4]  T. S. Eliot grasps a book’s unconscious impact, “It is the literature which we read with the least effort that can have the easiest and most insidious influence upon us.”[5]  Eliot’s concern was well understood by Flannery O’Connor who believes the book to be knocking on the door from the inside: 

The novelist doesn’t write to express himself, he doesn’t write simply to render a vision he believes true, rather he renders his vision so that it can be transferred, as nearly whole as possible, to his reader. . . . Your problem is going to be difficult in direct proportion as your beliefs depart from his. . . . I have to make the reader feel, in his bones if nowhere else, that something is going on here that counts.[6]  

“Comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable,” my favorite definition of preaching, seems appropriate for the conviction produced by reading.  Consequences from the little man’s hammer blows may sometimes be background noise, but the impact is never inconsequential.  

Children’s stories continue to convict me, impacting my thinking.  The Little Red Hen warns me against being a so-called “friend” who wants to take, not give.  “The Sword of Damocles” compels me to be wary of desire for power.  Rat and mole wander into the august presence in chapter seven of The Wind in the Willows, teaching me both to fear and rejoice in The Almighty.  Yertle the Turtle, the Dr. Seuss classic, warns me away from pride, leading to a (literal!) fall. 

My life has no transformation without hammering on my soul.  In our day of 24/7 entertainment, none other than Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren remind me, 

Television, radio, and all the sources of amusement and information that surround us in our daily lives are also artificial props.  They can give us the impression that our minds are active, because we are required to react to stimuli from outside.  But the power of those external stimuli to keep us going is limited.  They are like drugs.  We grow used to them, and we continuously need more and more of them.  Eventually, they have little or no effect.  Then, if we lack resources within ourselves, we cease to grow intellectually, morally, and spiritually.  And when we cease to grow, we begin to die.[7] 

Read or die.  Augustine in his Confessions explains that it was a child’s voice that extolled him to “take up and read” that compelling him toward the verse in Romans 13 that changed his life.  

Perhaps the greatest example of hammering conviction can be found in Nehemiah 8.  In the First Testament, Hebrew people would often have God’s Word read to them.  After a long sojourn in exile, Judah is back in her homeland again.  Language skills atrophied, Nehemiah had to translate and interpret Scriptural injunction,[8] contextualizing true Truth for his listeners.  “All the people wept as they heard the words of The Lord declared to them” (v 9); understanding the reading sent Israel away “with great rejoicing” (v 12). 

Samuel gives us a first hand account of truth knocking on the door.  The prophet used the Hebrew word shmah powerfully connecting with Chekhov’s metaphor.  Shmah occurs nine times in 1 Samuel 15.  In the context, Saul is about to rebel against God for a second time.  The English reader can pick up the narrative repetition by watching for the words “hear,” “listen,” and “obey.”[9]  Shmah records a three-fold impact on the hearer.  We recognize and understand the words being delivered through our ears to our brain.  Listening communicates comprehension; we know what we should do with what we have heard.  But the first two do not count if we do not enact the correct response of active compliance in the third place.  

Robert Coles in his must read The Call of Stories summarizes reading’s import: “The gnawing irony persists that powerful poems and poignant prose can affect us, excite us, cause us to see more clearly, yet not deliver that daily hammer-blow Chekhov prescribed.”[10]  I hope that people do not have to wait until I’m dead to read my words; I hope I do not die before I act on them. 

[2] Louis L’Amour. 1989. Education of a Wandering Man. (Bantam): 100.

[3] John Gardner. 1978. On Moral Fiction. (Basic): 106.

[4] George Bernard Shaw, a quote from his plays Back to Methuselah.

[5] T. S. Eliot. 1935. Religion and Literature.  In Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. (Faber and Faber): 100.

[6] Flannery O’Connor. 1957, 1969. Novelist and Believer. In Mystery & Manners. (Reprint: Farrar, Straus, Giroux): 162.

[7] Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. 1940, 1972. How To Read a Book. (Revised, Simon and Schuster): 346.

[8] William W. Klein, Craig L. Blomberg, and Robert L. Hubbard, Jr. Introduction to Biblical Interpretation. (Revised: Nelson): 24.

[9] Hermann J. Austel. 1980 shmah. Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament. (Moody): 2:938-39.

[10] Robert Coles. 1989. The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination. (Houghton Mifflin): 197.

REFLECTION: Out of Your Horn (Part 5)

Mark Eckel, Director, Mahseh Center, Lake Bruce, IN 

Eric Clapton’s From the Cradle blues album reverberated around the pool table as my son Tyler and I played one night.  Clapton listened to the blues from a young age.[1]  The couplets of loving and leaving, laughing and loathing, longing and languishing are both true at the same time in The Blues.  The Blues is the perfect musical complement to reflection.  As Charlie Parker pointed out “Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom.  If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”[2]  

Steve Turner makes it clear that Negro Spirituals are the soil from which the roots of blues, jazz, and even rock ‘n’ roll get their nourishment.[3]  It was the deep lament of slaves coupled with their high hope of Jesus’ return which provided fertilizer for The Blues.  James H. Horn’s The Spirituals and The Blues is an invaluable resource for understanding the history and theology of slave music in America. 

The black experience in America is a history of servitude and resistance, of survival in the land of death.  It is the story of black life in chains and of what that meant for the souls and bodies of black people.  This is the experience that created the spirituals, and it must be recognized if we are to render a valid theological interpretation of these black songs . . .[4] 

There is humanness in the blues where pain and praise are partners.  Life is messy.  How we reflect about life,[5] necessitates rough ground, a friction so we can walk, not slip.   Slogging through the swamp gets us to the other side. [6] It seems that the most difficult lessons, those that “take,” lessons that matter, that move us on in life, are born of hardship and travail.[7] 

The spiritual, then, is the spirit of the people struggling to be free; it is their religion, their source of strength in a time of trouble.   And if one does not know what trouble is, then the spiritual cannot be understood . . . [8] 

“Nobody knows the trouble I seen” is a verse born of travail, words from the birth canal of pain.[9]  Reflection takes on new meaning when we give delivery to suffering.  “Fly away and be at rest” is the song of those who hope for escape and relief.[10] 

Bono of U2 fame has castigated Evangelical Christians for their sick-sweet songs sung on Sundays.  Worship music is too happy.  It does not reflect the realities of life.  Instead, Bono maintains, our vocal worship should sound more like The Psalms which the rocker terms “The Blues of the Old Testament.”[11] 

But the spiritual is more than dealing with trouble.  It is a joyful experience, a vibrant affirmation of life and its possibilities in an appropriate esthetic form . . . The slave’s view of God embraced the whole of life-his joys and hopes, his sorrows and disappointments, and his basic belief was that God had not left him alone, and that his God would set him free from human bondage.  That is the central theological idea in black slave religion as reflected in the spirituals.[12] 

C. S. Lewis thought a great deal about joy, what he called sehnsucht or “longing.”  Clyde S. Kilby reports, 

One day as young Lewis stood beside a currant bush in flower there suddenly and mysteriously arose in him “as if from a depth not of years but of centuries” the memory of an earlier happy morning.  Though it happened in an instant of time, he felt that “in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.”  It was the beginning of his search for Joy.[13] 

The longing for God Lewis believed to inhabit every man’s soul, “a signpost pointing toward Him.”  Dissatisfaction so consumes a person, the heart cries out as it searches to relieve “the gnawing” which remains when “no adequate substitute is possible.”[14]  “Sehnsucht or the longing which haunts every man . . . entices him toward God.”[15]  

Since my earliest years of teaching high school, I reminded my students of Lewis’ famed quote: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”[16]  Lewis attacks what thoughtful Christian educators know to be true: our education system seeks to rob students of the “shy, persistent inner voice.”[17]  All opportunities to teach, write, and communicate in any way must nurture the fragile seed of transcendence which is planted in us all.[18] 

“I reflected on all of this” is both a recurring and summary statement from Solomon in Ecclesiastes 9:1.  “I thought to myself” and “I thought in my heart” are constantly repeated phrases in my favorite book of The Bible.[19]  Leaving no stone unturned, life was “tested by wisdom.”[20]  Solomon declares, “Look, this is what I have discovered…this is what I have found.”[21]  And what did he conclude?  Ecclesiastes 8:15 tells us: 

So I commend the enjoyment of life, because nothing is better for a man under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad.  Then joy will accompany him in his work all the days of the life God has given him under the sun. 

Here is Eric Clapton.  Here are the slaves singing in the fields.  Here is sehnsucht.  Here is Bono.  Here is the internal mark of longing on us all.  Charlie Parker’s reflection was right: “if you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” 

[2] As quoted by James H. Cone. 1972. The Spiritual & The Blues: An Interpretation. (Seabury): 6.

[3] Steve Turner. 1988, 1995. Hungry for Heaven: Rock ‘n’ Roll & the Search for Redemption. (IVP): 40-42.

[4] Ibid, Cone, pp. 20, 32.

[5] Brookfield, Stephen D. 1995.  Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. (Jossey-Bass).  Mezirow, Jack.2000. “Learning to Think Like an Adult: Core Concepts of Transformation Theory.  Learning as Transformation: Critical Perspectives on a Theory in Progress.  Ed. Jack Mezirow and Associates. (Jossey-Bass): 3-33. 

[6] Metaphors are used by Donald Schön and Joseph Dunne quoted in Doug Blomberg, 2007, Wisdom and Curriculum, (Dordt Press): 7-8.

[7] Romans 5:1-5.

[8] Ibid., Cone, p. 32.

[9] Compare the spiritual with Psalm 31:9-13.

[10] The song comes from Psalm 55, specifically verse six.

[11] http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/8091949/the_rolling_stone_interview_bono

[12] Ibid., Cone, pp. 32-33, 46.

[13] Clyde S. Kilby. 1964, 1978. The Christian World of C. S. Lewis. (Reprint, Eerdmans): 14.  I would most recommend Kilby who sees innate human longing as a major theme in Lewis’ writing.  For an in-depth analysis of the concept of sehnsucht see Douglas T. Hyatt. 1997. “Joy, The Call of God in Man: A Critical Appraisal of Lewis’s Argument from Desire.” In C. S. Lewis: Lightbearer in the Shadowlands, ed. by Angus J. L. Menuge. (Crossway): 305-28.

[14] Ibid.,Kilby, p. 29.

[15] Ibid., Kilby, p. 36.

[16] C. S. Lewis. 1943, 1960. Mere Christianity. (Reprint, Collier) :120.

[17] C. S. Lewis. 1949, 1980. “The Weight of Glory.” The Weight of Glory and Other Essays. (Revised, Harper): 31.  “In the final analysis, a reflective culture is about bringing a Christian school back to its fundamental principles, which in turn, are ultimately rooted in the faith commitments of the supporting community.  As Times, cultural contexts, and insights change, new pressures inescapably emerge.  New questions arise.  New challenges spring up.  As a result, a renewed need to reflect continually confronts us not only at Maplewood, but in every Christian school that wants to be true to its calling” (246).  Van Dyk (247-285) gives the research basis for his homey writing style throughout the rest of the book.  John took a sabbatical year to live out his teaching on reflection.  John van Dyk. 2007. The Maplewood Story: Fostering a Reflective Culture in the Christian School. (Dordt Press). 

[18] Ecclesiastes 3:11; Romans 1:18-32.  By this I do not mean “the god within” of eastern religions but the hole in the soul which can only be filled by The One who made us.

[19] Ecclesiastes 1:16; 2:1, 15, etc.

[20] Ecclesiastes 7:23.

[21] Ecclesiastes 7:27, 29; 12:9; 6:11-12.  See Mark Eckel. 2008. A Story of Transformation: Ecclesiastes as an Example of Adult Learning Processes. Intégrité 7:2 (Fall): 42-52.