There Will Be Blood aka Upton Sinclair's Oil!

Although it did not win the Best Picture Oscar this week, There Will Be Blood, a screen adaptation of Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!, stands as one of 2007's finest offerings on the big screen. Paul Edwards sees a spiritual silver lining around the dark clouds of violence and greed in this film. It's worth a read.

Zora Neale Hurston--Sweat

To my mind, Zora Neale Hurston is the best of African-American fiction writers. I appreciate the work, such as it is, of Ralph Ellison, and some of Toni Morrison's offerings, but Zora continues to delight me each time I return to her work. Why? Perhaps it is because she writes of an African-American experience that includes discrimination and oppression, but doesn't become utterly possessed by those forces. She writes of humans.
In "Sweat," we have a marriage gone bad. After sixteen years of life together, Sykes and Delia can say, without fear of contradiction, that the good is gone. The problem is obvious: Delia works like a slave to put food on the table and a roof over their heads, while Sykes flits about and womanizes. Joe Clarke, who comes off looking a lot better here than in Hurston's masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, compares the relationship to people sucking on sugar cane:

There's plenty men dat takes a wife lak dey do a joint uh sugar-cane. It's round, juicy, an' sweet when dey gits it. But dey squeeze an' grind, squeeze an'
grind an' wring tell dey wring every drop uh pleasure dat's in 'em out. When dey's satisfied dat dey is wrung dry, dey treats 'em jes' lak dey do a cane-chew. Dey thows 'em away. Dey knows whut dey is doin' while dey is at it, an' hates theirselves fuh it but they keeps on hangin' after huh tell she's empty. Den dey hates huh fuh bein' a cane-chew an' in de way.

The Christian reader of this story has a good inventory of approaches to take. We might consider the imagery of the snake, the "harlot" Bertha, or the theme of forgiveness. Those all have potential, but I'd like to dwell for a moment on the Biblical metaphor of Christ and the Church being husband and wife. Compare the husband in Hurston's story with the husband in that Biblical metaphor. Where Sykes does not provide, Jesus provides. Where Sykes is unfaithful, Jesus is completely faithful. Where Sykes is full of hate, Jesus abounds in love. Sykes seeks to bring death to Delia; Jesus promises life--abundant life--to his bride.
Delia on the other hand, mirrors the church reasonably well. She is faithful but not perfect. She seeks to turn the other cheek, moving her church membership rather than take communion impurely with Sykes. She even attempts to accomodate the snake. How many women would allow a caged rattlesnake to remain in their house for weeks on end? As a woman of God, Delia knew what her husband ought to be, she knew the model held up for her. She could see plainly that Sykes did not come close to measuring up, yet she did not use his unfaithfulness as an excuse to turn away herself. Her only sin against Sykes, if we can call it that, is walking away in his dying moments. All things considered, this seems a justified response.

Leo Tolstoy—What Men Live By

If you have any doubt about the theme of this little fable presented by the great Russian writer, the six separate scriptural epigraphs should help to clarify matters. “Love,” it seems clear, must be at the center of this story. I cannot read this story without thinking of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’ story, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” More on that in a moment.
In Tolstoy’s story, Simon, a poor shoemaker, heads to town in order to collect some debts and buy sheepskins in order to make himself a decent winter coat. After his debtors let him down, leaving him with only a few cents, Simon heads home. En route, he encounters a naked man, Michael, shivering near a shrine. He brings the man home, makes an apprentice of him, and eventually experiences a measure of prosperity as the youth emerges as a skilled craftsman.
As the story concludes, we learn that Michael is indeed an angel being punished by God for a moment of disobedience. After a series of personal revelations, which serve to restore him into God’s good graces, Michael’s angelic glory is revealed and he heads back into heavenly service, leaving Simon without an assistant.
The Garcia-Marquez story serves as a worthy counterpoint to this one. In that story, a winged man, presumably an angel, appears after a storm. The family in that story, assuming the man to be angelic, treats him abysmally, housing him in a chicken coop and exploiting him for their own monetary gain. In Tolstoy’s story, the family does not recognize Michael’s true nature yet treats him very well. In both cases, we revisit the Homeric theme of hospitality, seen in The Odyssey.
For my taste, Tolstoy’s story is a bit too didactic to be completely pleasing. Rather than following Poe’s idea of “Singleness of Effect” and beginning with a desired effect, Tolstoy begins with a message, rarely the route to achieving great literature. In fact, as we proceed through the stories of Eyes to See, the genius on view is that of authors capable of revealing a worldview without preaching, of expressing Christianity without appearing as apologists.

Helen Norris—The Christmas Wife

This story, the next entry in Eyes to See, is about as far from a warm-fuzzy, holiday TV movie as I can imagine. Think O. Henry’s “Gift of the Magi” with its huggy ending. Norris’ story is nothing like that. Instead, the coldness of the Christmas season is embraced as both main characters wind up isolated and only vaguely edified by the last page.
The first sentence of this story should not be missed in the headlong pursuit of persons and plot. “His name was Tanner, a reasonable man in his early sixties, desiring peace, a measure of joy, and reassurance.” Tanner, a widower, desires three things, all of them things offered in a pure form by Christ, but Tanner desires not these actual things but their appearance. In reality, what Tanner seeks is control. He wants to craft the same sort of controlled Christmas that he enjoyed with his wife, which is why he goes through the “social arrangements” service in order to find his “Christmas wife.”
Essentially, what Tanner seeks to create is his own version of a Hallmark advertisement, a holiday weekend, crafted in every detail, eliciting from his companion, “Cherry,” exactly the right responses. His project, naturally, fails.
At the same time, we find that the project of Cherry’s husband, the social arranger, is largely failing as well. He, desperate for money, puts his wife into this awkward situation hoping for a good result. While several of the couple’s bills undoubtedly get paid, the reader intuits that the couple emerges from this episode no happier than they had been before.
In much the same way, Cherry, who comes into the arrangement most grudgingly, does not get what she had hoped, although her hopes are minimal. In one of the simplest and most pathetic sentences I’ve read, she says, “’He’s my husband,’ she wept.”
Another telling sentence arrives on the heels of that simple exclamation. “He was forced to see with what grace she suffered them both [Tanner and her husband].” Grace is indeed what is needed for both of the male characters in Norris’ story. Both Tanner and the husband seek control, Tanner in the form of a carefully crafted yet artificial social setting and the husband in the form of the temporary relief dollars can bring. Neither of them, however, has any hope of a sustainable control. Tanner’s Christmas tableau will end, for better or worse, with the close of the weekend. The husband, with no prospects beyond this desperate rental of his wife, only postpones financial ruin.
What is not spoken, in this rather bleak but not utterly hopeless tale, is the true source of peace, joy, and reassurance. What is not spoken is the source of unending provision. What is not spoken is the miracle of the incarnation, the center of Christmas that each of these characters misses entirely. Yes, “Jesus is the reason for the season” may be a cliché, a sort of bumper-sticker discourse, but it is true and profound. Norris, in this story, expands this cliché beyond the bumper-sticker, presenting it in a nuanced enough way to cause the thoughtful mind to pause and ponder.

Shusaku Endo—The Final Martyrs

Another new author from Eyes to See, is Shusaku Endo, whose story “The Final Martyrs” takes the reader into an unfamiliar world, that of crypto-Christians during the politically turbulent times of nineteenth-century Japan. In reading this story, which explores, not surprisingly, the experience of persecution and martyrdom, my mind returned to “Sea and Sunset,” a story of thirteenth-century Japan by Yukio Mishima. Mishima, not an author particularly inclined toward Christianity, relates the utter otherness of a young European man brought as a slave to Japan in the aftermath of the abortive Children’s Crusade.
While Endo’s story stands as a fairly unremarkable study of the psychology of persecution, I find it intriguing for its location in an incredibly hostile, incredibly foreign locale. Both Endo’s and Mishima’s stories locate Christianity in a profoundly isolated place. The cavalry will not be riding in to save the day in either story. Comfort and hope will not be arriving from any external source. This leaves the would-be martyr in a vulnerable position, while affording him a purity of action. No one can ascribe political or social motivations to the steadfastness of these persecuted Christians. Perhaps most importantly, their potential for self-delusion, while not eliminated, is diminished.

Andre Dubus—A Father’s Story

Before picking up Eyes to See, I had never heard of Andre Dubus, a Louisiana product and yet another in the outflow of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. “A Father’s Story” did not suffice to make me rush out to buy all of Dubus’ books, but it is a story worth reading. The narrator of the story is Luke Ripley, a divorced Catholic father, struggling to balance the demands of his faith with the calls of his flesh.
After a very long lead-in—roughly half the story’s length—Dubus finally arrives at the central concern of this narrative. Luke’s daughter, now a young woman, during the course of a visit, comes home late one night having struck a pedestrian with her car after a bit of drinking with friends. The conflicting calls of justice, truth, fatherly protection, and fear play out over the remaining pages of the story. It’s not brilliant stuff, but the last page or so, in which Luke relates a conversation with God regarding this event, is worth the price of admission, worth the time invested in the story’s thirty pages.
Rather than analyzing this discourse myself, I’d rather leave it to you with a couple of questions. Does Dubus, through Ripley, rationalize his choices in the wake of the accident? In other words, is the voice that he ascribes to God really a God-worthy voice or is it more a self-justifying version of his own voice? I’ve always taken the Socratic dialogues of Plato with a bit of skepticism. After all, it is rather easy to win an argument when you’re responsible for both sides of it.
How often do we, as thoughtful believers, generate a pseudo-God voice in order to justify the actions that we intended to take all along? Is that what Luke Ripley is doing here? I don’t think that is the intention with which Dubus presents him, which may explain that apparently overlong exposition in the story’s first half.

Edgar Allan Poe--Cask of Amontillado and Tell-tale Heart

These two stories are among Poe's most widely anthologized and read. If you've had the misfortune of sitting in one of my literature classes in which we studied one or both of these, then you probably know my fascination with applying Poe's idea of "Singleness of Effect" to the tales. That's all fine, and I do believe that my theory of Poe's evocation of a sense of dread in acquaintances who seem perfectly polite (Cask) and household servants (Heart) gets to the core of these stories. However, a new thought--one that bridges both stories--has come to me today.
In both stories, the narrator is a killer, calculating and supposedly unaffected by his deeds. In both stories, the victim is killed for an apparently trivial reason.
The narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" indicates "I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! . . . Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold." Thus, the old man offended the narrator unknowingly. The same can be said of Fortunato in "The Cask of Amontillado." Granted, the narrator complains of a "thousand injuries" and "insult," but the wrongs committed by Fortunato must have been fairly inconsequential since he does not seem to consider that they might have undermined his relationship with Montresor. In a sense, both victims can be seen as unwitting and undeserving. Certainly the thousand injuries of Fortunato are returned in a disproportionate manner, while the old man is wholly innocent.
In both cases, the killer plots carefully to commit the action and escape punishment. This suggests the primeval killing, that of Cain against Abel in Genesis 4. In that case, Cain rose up against his brother after talking with him and while in a field. One might infer that conversation put Abel off his guard while the location in the field placed the deed out of sight of his parents.
Poe's killers, not only curry the favor of their victim and plot carefully to avoid detection in the commission of their deed, but they take pains to hide the body, in both cases incorporating the corpse into the structure of their house. In "Cask," the murder is committed by walling Fortunato into a niche in the crypt, while the "Tell-Tale Heart" narrator apparently smothers the old man, secreting his dismembered corpse beneath the floorboards of the bedroom.
The play of guilt over these characters differs, yet it is present in both of them, just as it is present with Cain in his "Am I my brother's keeper?" response. Montresor attempts to portray himself as a completed unmoved killer, yet he discloses a moment's hesitation as he finishes the masonry: "My heart grew sick--on account of the dampness of the catacombs."
The old man's killer is full of misgivings and guilt. Most readers understand the sound of the heart to be either some physical manifestation of guilt or the sound of the blood coursing within the killer's ears (or both).
Both killers, Cain-like, have attempted to excise something from themselves that has caused pain and discomfort, yet in both cases, they have only succeeded in further internalizing the hatred consuming them. By secreting the evidence of their guilt within the structure of their residence, these killers effectively ensure that they will live with the guilt, discovered or not, for the rest of their days. In the "Tell-Tale Heart," the guilt overflows in confession quite rapidly. In the "Cask of Amontillado," it seems to have lay undisturbed for half a century. Montresor would, perhaps, suggest that he has not been troubled by his deed over the intervening decades, but a few glimmers within the story suggest otherwise. First, why is he now confiding this story to a third party? Whether the "you" of the story's first paragraph is a confessor or confidante, one wonders why, after all these years, Montresor feels the need to share his action. He also concludes the story with the Latin phrase In pace requiescat. While this might simply be a chilling postscript, one might wonder if Montresor wishes for something, peace, that has eluded him over the years.

Fyodor Dostoevsky—“An Honest Thief”

The second story in Eyes to See is this story by Dostoevsky, an author with the same level of religious intensity as that possessed by Chesterton, but a profoundly greater narrative facility. “An Honest Thief” is a simple story but at the same time a vexing one.
The basic plot is simple. Astafy, a lodger in the home of a reluctant landlord tells a second-hand tale about an honest thief. This thief, Emelyan, also a lodger of sorts, had stolen riding breaches from Astafy, his benefactor. Emelyan denies the crime vehemently, yet his actions proclaim his guilt more clearly than would a confession. Eventually, apparently sick with his sense of guilt—or perhaps just sick—Emelyan lies on his deathbed and confesses the theft of the breeches to a sympathetic Astafy.
Complicating this story, however, is the narratological structure. Why must Dostoevsky employ the framing story with Astafy speaking to the narrator? Granted, the narrator has just been deprived of an overcoat by a wandering thief, but might the story not be told without this device?
In order to read Dostoevsky in this case, we should consider the character of the narrator for a moment. This is a significantly isolated man, holed up in his home office, rarely speaking with anyone. He confesses to having no meaningful conversation with his housekeeper for six years. He describes himself, upon first meeting Astafy as follows: “I lead as a rule a very lonely hermit’s existence. I have scarcely any friends; I hardly ever go anywhere. As I had spent ten years never coming out of my shell, I had, of course, grown used to solitude.”
The rationale for Astafy telling his story in response to the theft of the overcoat is obvious, but why did Dostoevsky need this narrative frame? I would suggest that this story is not about an honest thief. Emelyan is not the true focus of the story. Instead, the narrator is the character most changed in the course of these pages. Let me explain.
At the outset, as noted, our narrator is a hermit. Upon admitting Astafy to his life, he breaks with his old habits and makes a connection, however tentative, with another human being. This represents a first step to full humanity, yet it’s not enough. How remarkable is it for a man to love his friends? That’s nothing remarkable at all. But loving an enemy is significant. (I seem to have read this sort of thing before.)
The narrator’s initial response to the theft of his overcoat is surprisingly restrained. In fact, it is Astafy who seems the more concerned about the crime. It is he, despite his advanced age, who runs after the thief. It is he who continues to bring up the topic and express anger. Yet then it is Astafy who tells the story of his experience with Emelyan. In the course of those pages, Astafy fully humanizes the weaker man, Emelyan, so that in the end, while the reader and the narrator do not condone the thief’s conduct, we see that conduct as the action of a frail vessel, fatally marked by sin.
A moment ago, I suggested that the narrator is a changed figure by the end of the story, but is there evidence for such a claim? The fact of his narration is, I would argue, such evidence. I would compare this to the biblical book of Philemon. Paul sends a runaway slave, Onesimus, back to his owner, Philemon, along with a letter. In the letter, Paul implores Philemon to treat Onesimus as brother in Christ. What evidence do we have that Philemon heeded Paul’s advice? I believe that the survival of the letter suggests that course. Similarly, we should not expect the narrator to tell such a tale if he found it to be nonsense.

G.K. Chesterton—The Blue Cross

Chesterton’s Father Brown, while no Sherlock Holmes, stands as one of the significant figures in detective fiction. Frankly, I’d argue that no detective fiction is “great literature,” whatever that means, but it is enjoyed by millions of people. I suppose enjoyment constitutes greatness in one sense.
Without doing a bit more research, I can’t say whether “The Blue Cross” is the first of Chesterton’s invocations of the detective-priest. Regardless, this story does not have the typical structure of a detective tale.
In the midst of this ungreat literature, I find several points of interest for the Christian reader:
First, Brown stands in a noble crossroads for the educated believer, straddling the way of faith and of reason. Is intellect is powerful, yet it does not preclude his belief. His belief is profound, yet it does not compromise his intellect. I believe that the Christian is called to stand at just such a place.
Second, the great secular detective, Valentin, on whom ninety percent of this story dwells, exists solely in the realm of intellect and reason. While Valentin’s powers are significant and lead him toward the consummation of the case, he finds himself beaten to the case’s solution by the more rounded Brown.
Finally, the revelation of Brown toward the end of the story performs a powerful reversal. All through the story, the smaller priest has been portrayed as a hapless lamb, about to be sheared by the wily Flambeau, yet in the end, it is he who does the shearing. Father Brown here stands as a sort of Christ figure, a man who in the limited vision of the world seems mildly annoying and largely worthless, yet, when seen fully, in the largest context, is found to be incredibly more powerful and competent than initially suspected.
So, great literature or not, Chesterton’s story offers something of worth to the willing reader.

Eyes to See

I recently purchased a new collection of short stories, Eyes to See, edited by Bret Lott (Thomas Nelson: Nashville, 2008). My first reaction upon scanning over the table of contents was to be disappointed. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but once I noticed a couple of familiar titles—“A Good Man is Hard to Find” prominent among them—I felt as if I had just bought the same thing in a different package. However, having dropped a good chunk of money on the volume, I needed to at least pretend to read it. Once I got inside the front cover, I continued through story after story, only skipping over Flannery O’Connor. Therefore, it seems reasonable to give some of these stories a bit of attention in these postings. By this point, I can recommend the investment in the book.

The Minister’s Black Veil—Nathaniel Hawthorne

Few stories in American literature have been given the scrutiny of this one by Hawthorne. Researchers will find very little trouble in gathering dozens upon dozens of interpretations upon this story. What is perhaps most intriguing is the lengths that various critics will go to in order to strip this story of its most obvious interpretation.
First, let’s briefly summarize the story. The tale opens on a Sunday with morning services about to begin. All seems normal until Rev. Hooper exits the rectory to preach the service, inexplicably wearing a double fold of black crepe over the upper half of his face. The appearance of the minister greatly disturbs his parishioners. After a funeral and a wedding that day, Rev. Hooper meets with his fiancée, Elizabeth. When he refuses to set the veil aside for her, she breaks off the engagement although remaining quite devoted to him.
Years pass by as Hooper maintains the black veil. He becomes a more effective preacher during these years although remaining an enigma to his flock. Finally, as he lies on his deathbed, another minister, Rev. Clark, urges him to finally remove the veil. Hooper refuses, aided by Elizabeth, and dies covered by the black cloth.
In order to understand this story, one must begin and end the interpretation—or at least its heart—with the veil. Why does Hooper wear the veil? Is he hiding something or hiding from something? Alternately, is the veil a tool for concealment or for signification. The most obvious interpretation, and the one that most of the congregation apparently assume to be true, is that Hooper has committed some horrible sin and wears the veil in order to hide his face in shame. Edgar Allan Poe theorized that Hooper had committed a sexual sin with the young woman whose funeral he performs that first day. While such is a possibility, it, I believe, takes the story to a too-literal level. On the other hand, the veil might be a tool to shield Hooper’s eyes from other people.
Looking at the alternate scheme of understanding the veil, we might wonder if Hooper wears to veil to cover something up or to reveal something. Perhaps the veil indicates his awareness of sin. If so, then we might profitably ask whether the sin signified is his own or someone else’s?
Some readers have picked up on a Biblical usage of veils. In II Corinthians 3:13, Paul contrasts the boldness of the believer with Moses, who veiled himself in Exodus 34 after meeting with God on Sinai. As Moses descended from his meetings with God, the glory would gradually fade away from his face. Moses delivered God’s message to the people with an uncovered, radiant face, and then covered his face until the next meeting. As tantalizing as this reference is, one might find it difficult to connect Hooper’s view of the veil with this Mosaic veiling. It seems clear in Hawthorne’s story that the key to the veil is sin. The key to the veil in the Moses story is the glory and radiance of God. These seem to be two wholly different things.
In fact, though, these two things are not nearly as separate as they might appear at first blush. Moses veiled his face in order to hide the contrast between his radiant, God-drenched face and a merely human face. The key to understanding sin in its Biblical form is to see it as separation from God, a deviation from holiness.
Hooper’s veil, whatever its origin, has the effect of emphasizing man’s lack of holiness and separation from God. This is the sort of emphasis that runs through all of Paul’s writings. In fact, this is the realization that emerges in Paul’s Damascus Road experience. Paul, convinced of his righteousness, travels toward Damascus in order to expose the failings of others. Upon encountering Christ on the road, Paul’s eyes are blinded—a sort of veiling—yet his self-perception is opened. He sees himself as a sinful man, hopeless but for the salvation offered through Christ Jesus. We only know these things, of course, because Paul has related them, either directly or by way of Luke. Recall that his fellow travelers could not hear distinct words during the event.
Does Hooper experience his own Damascus Road event? Hawthorne, by his ambiguity, ensures that readers will not know without assistance from Hooper, and the minister is not willing to testify of whatever experience has placed the veil on his face.
What places the veil on Hooper’s face? That is a cause that we will never know. Perhaps Hawthorne intends this ambiguity to allow the reader to interpret it through his own lens. I am reminded here of the many reactions I have witnessed to Paul’s II Corinthians 12 account of his thorn in the flesh. Since Paul leaves the thorn extremely ambiguous, many readers have interpreted it according to their own weaknesses.
In the end, Hawthorne’s story stands as a latter-day account of the Puritan view of man’s sinfulness and need for God. Any interpretation that leaves this aspect out of “The Minister’s Black Veil” is hiding something—or perhaps hiding from something.

Self-Reliance—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Few thinkers have been as significant in forming the American way of thought as has Emerson. Look beneath the surface of the can-do American spirit, and you’ll find a subterranean river of Emerson flowing along, carrying both commerce and social thought. For the Christian reader, a quick look at just one of Emerson’s essays, “Self-Reliance,” will provide ample evidence that this man’s influence has not been one that has taken our people in the direction of holiness. In fact, one mid-sized quotation should make the case quite convincingly.
“On my saying, ‘What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?’ my friend suggested,--‘But these impulses may be from below, not from above.’ I replied, ‘They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.’ No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it.”
What nonsense! And it brings us to my biggest complaint against Emerson aside from his wholly secular outlook. Many critics will note and laud Emerson’s “aphoristic” style. In other words, his writing tends to sound like a collection of witty and wise sayings. Read through some of his essays and you will stumble upon various phrases that you’ve heard before. Essentially, Emerson worked in sound bites in an era long before electronic communication made sound bites important. This aphoristic style helps to explain the popularity of the writer; however, it also stands as one of his greatest weaknesses. Rather than taking statement and thoroughly working through it, exploring it, testing it, and weighing it in the balance, Emerson simple lays a claim on the table and moves on to the next, often resorting solely to his own force of personality as evidence for his assertion.
In short, Emerson quite demonstrably commits the very transgression that the secularists accuse believers of committing: believing things on faith and without any corroboration.
Why, in Emerson’s thought, is “No law sacred to me but that of my nature”? He offers no evidence, no argument. It is so, apparently, simply because he states it. It seems correct to Emerson; thus, since his inborn law is the only relevant law for him, it must be true. Such is, of course, an example of circular reasoning that would be dismissed as unrealistically contrived were we to place it in logic textbook, but for Emerson, such thinking has ensured nearly two centuries of importance.
Would Emerson then not applaud the actions of a serial killer who simple follows his own nature? If not, why? Perhaps he would argue that the serial killer is not indeed following his own nature, but if that is the case, then how can he know? How can he know that his own nature is not in some way perverted.
Later in the essay, Emerson trumpets his view of God, a pantheistic being that is in and among all. While he uses some of the terminology of orthodoxy, he changes those things meanings to make them conform to his inward-dwelling God. Let us consider his thoughts on prayer:
“Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good.”
That all sounds quite lovely, but what, precisely, does it mean? We learn as we continue the same passage.
“But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness.”
Therefore, if I pray for my children’s health, I am being mean and thieving. If I pray, as instructed by Jesus himself, for “our daily bread,” I am supposing dualism. But of course I do suppose dualism. I suppose that God is God and that man is man. These two are not the same. To suppose otherwise is would require a good bit of evidence that Emerson simply does not offer. The universe, in Emerson’s view, is a unified and interconnected thing, with the mind of God and the mind of humans linked in and among all things, simply because Emerson says so. A page or so later, he declares “men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.” Emerson’s own creed, however, he sets up as healthy and sound. Why? Again, it’s simply because he declares this to be the case.
Emerson’s writings stand as a sort of secular scripture, espousing views that Christians will find largely objectionable. His greatest strength is in the powerful voice with which he shares his ideas; his greatest weakness lies in his assumption that this powerful voice is a sufficient force to prove his positions.

A World Lost—Wendell Berry

In this 1996 novel, Berry once again explores the relatively mundane life of a rural community in Kentucky, a community very much like the one in which he and his family have lived for generations. These novels demonstrate the profundity of the commonplace when people live lives connected to place and community.
In A World Lost, Berry presents a sort of faux memoir as the narrator, Andrew Catlett, considers the murder of an uncle of the same name. Even though a good deal more drama would seem to attach to a tale of murder, there is nothing of the suspense novel in this volume. We learn early on that Uncle Andrew has been killed and who the killer is. While the motive of the assailant, Carp Harmon, remains ambiguous to the end, even young Andy’s search for that knowledge does not provide any actual sense of conflict.
Instead of drawing his novel’s energy from the forward momentum of plot and revelation, Berry allows interest to grow by accretion as the varied and long-developing effects of the life and death of Uncle Andrew play out through the various branches of the Catlett family.
While Berry draws this story out over 151 pages, he, I believe, overplays the matter by a good twenty pages. Significant stretches of the story drag rather painfully. However, the fact that he can maintain interest for as long as he does testifies to his powerful ear and eye.
This novel, focused on the rather disparate life and unsurprisingly violent end of a black sheep of a family, brings to mind the account of Paul Maclean in “A River Runs through It.” In both cases, an inexplicable but not unexpected violent death places a permanent mark on a family. While the death of Paul Maclean does not take place until the close of Norman Maclean’s novella and that of Andrew Catlett happens at the outset of Berry’s, it remains largely separate from but inextricably linked to all of the other events of the book.
In both tales, two brothers take quite different routes, evoking Cain and Abel (or Seth); Abraham and Lot; Jacob and Esau; and Joseph and his ten elder brothers. Despite not being brothers, the similarity with Abraham and Lot is perhaps the most illuminating here. When it becomes clear that their wealth and servants have become too great for them to remain together, Abraham and Lot agree to separate. Given the choice of directions, Lot looks toward the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, while Abraham remains a rural man. Decided rural in outlook, Wheeler Catlett, the narrator’s father, is a lawyer and a very solid, upright citizen. Most significant in Berry’s worldview, Wheeler, despite his profession, remains at heart a farmer. Andrew, on the other hand, even when he moves back to his home town and tends a pair of farms owned by the family, maintains a good measure of the urban sensitivity he has developed in his years away.
Like Norman Maclean’s narrator agonizing over the troubles of Paul, Wheeler Catlett can never release the memory of his brother nor absolve himself of all responsibility in his brother’s death.
For the Christian reader, themes of election, free will, and the pervasiveness of sin drench the reading of A World Lost. Uncle Andrew Catlett demonstrates time and again his inability to govern his actions, his apparent predisposition to a dissolute and self-destructive life. Yet his death comes from what may very well be an act of random violence. Carp Harmon’s motive for shooting Andrew remains cloaked in mystery. Such, in Berry’s world and as in the world of Job, is life. Things happen, not always for clear reasons. Sometimes human folly leads to a downfall, but other difficulties arise apparently from nowhere. The question, for Berry and for the Christian reader, is not why things occur but how these events, once they have occurred will play out across time.