How a Bad Pun Birthed a New Song - Carolyn Arends

Knowing how many writers frequent this blog, I thought you might relate to this recent post from my own blog about the serious business of playing with words:

I've always loved puns. I was never particularly adept at schoolyard games, but I could make words play. (You can imagine how popular this made me in grade school.)

For a little stretch his past month, I enjoyed posting a daily pun on my Facebook page and watching my friends cyber-groan.

I know a guy who's addicted to brake fluid. He says he can stop anytime.

I'm reading a book on anti-gravity. I can't put it down.

Don't trust atoms. They make everything up.

and:

I stayed up all night to see where the sun went. Then it dawned on me.

An unexpected thing happened with that last pun. I'm spending these warm days summer working on a Christmas record. It began to, well, dawn on me that at the heart of the  "dawn on me" joke there beat a rather promising song idea.

I started to think about what the first dawn after the birth of Jesus must have been like. I wondered if an exhausted Joseph, holding his adopted newborn in the aftermath of one very strange night, suddenly remembered the words of the prophet Isaiah:

The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned. - Isaiah 9:2

I found myself writing the following lyrics from Joseph’s perspective:

What was he thinking in the starlight?

Did he have time to think at all?

A carpenter his whole life

Now he was a midwife

And then the shepherds came to call.

When Joseph held the newborn baby

Was the whole meaning still unclear?

A man can get so tired

Even angel choirs

Just leave a ringing in his ears.

Was it all a blur, all too much?

Until at last, the sun came up …

Did it dawn on him

At the moment when

Morning chased the night away?

Did it dawn on him

This was God with him

In the light of Christmas day

At about this stage in the songwriting process, I began to wonder if one can legitimately write a song inspired by a bad pun. I worried for a bit. But then I thought about the fact that what makes a pun work is the delight (or dismay, depending on how you feel about puns) of discovering that one word can mean two (or more) things.

A baby comes. He means disrupted sleep and diaper changes and all the usual baby things. He also, if the angels are to be believed, means Salvation. He is a word - the word - made flesh, come to play among us.

"Is it possible," Frederick Buechner wonders, "to say that it is only when you hear the Gospel as a wild and marvellous joke that you really hear it at all? Heard as anything else, the Gospel is the church’s thing, the preacher’s thing, the lecturer’s thing. Heard as a joke – high and unbidden and ringing with laughter – it can only be God’s thing."

I decided it was OK to write a song based on a pun. And so I wrote verse 2.

Now we put Joseph in the stable

We put the stable on display

A sweet nativity scene

Fragments of an old dream

What kind of difference does it make?

But if that baby in the manger

Came to be Light for everyone

Maybe all the darkness

Deep inside our hearts is

A sign that only he can come

And end at last the tyranny

Of endless night and set us free …

Let it dawn on us

Like the morning sun

Let him chase our night away

Let it dawn on us

This is God with us

In the light of Christmas day

Shortly after I finished writing the song, my friends over at Andrew Peterson's Rabbit Room blog reposted a CT column I had written a while back about the possible link between pleasure and worship. I'd talked about how eating the delicious chile con queso at my favourite TexMex restaurant was a worship experience for me. I'd defended my line of argument by noting that CS Lewis claimed every sensual enjoyment (properly received) could be a "tiny theophany" -  a small but important revelation of God.

The column, perhaps predictably, ended with a pun: "I rest my queso." In the comments section, someone named  J. T. Adamson posted encouragingly, and I had to grin at his final sentence:

Well said, well said…and ended with a pun, and a pun (properly received) is a “tiny theophany” (at least for me).

Ha! So come, let us adore the tiny theophany in the manger, the word who's meaning can never be exhausted. Whether it's June or December, I pray he dawns on each one of us today.

Merry Christmas!

Carolyn

www.carolynarends.com

Worship Con Queso - Carolyn Arends

How sensual delights prepare us for the eternal feast
(In the September issue of Christianity Today)

There is a Tex-Mex restaurant in Houston I have visited on three occasions. Each meal has begun with chile con queso. The cheese at this particular restaurant is the most delicious food I have ever tasted.

With every bite, I have been overcome with gratitude to God for creating taste buds, cows, and human ingenuity. And that gratitude has led to praise.

Some folks understand this. Some think I'm kidding. And others are skeptical that such a carnal thing as a Tex-Mex appetizer could provoke genuine worship.

We Christians have a long history of mixed and sometimes openly hostile attitudes toward sensual pleasure. Saint Augustine is the fourth-century poster boy for our dilemma, struggling in Book X of hisConfessions to rein in each of his five senses. He attempts, for example, to "take food at mealtimes as though it were medicine" and to "fight against the pleasure in order not to be captivated by it."

Augustine is ever-vigilant that pleasure in created things never replace our desire for the Creator. His caution is well taken. But lately I've been discovering an emphatically propleasure voice in the writings of another Christian guide.

C. S. Lewis is known, of course, as a literary scholar, novelist, and apologist. He is also, consistently, a curator of pleasure. Where there is beauty to be received, music to be heard, laughter to be welcomed, and (especially) food to be eaten, Lewis attends, celebrates, scrutinizes, describes, and partakes.

In Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, Lewis argues that the pleasures derived from forest moss and sunlight, bird song, morning air, and the comfort of soft slippers are "shafts of [God's] glory as it strikes our sensibility." Our task is not to guard against sensual enjoyment, but to allow our minds to run "back up the sunbeam to the sun"—to see every pleasure as a "channel of adoration."

Lewis even argues that there is no such thing as a "bad" pleasure—only pleasures "snatched by unlawful acts." But he is not blind to the "concupiscence" (lustfulness) that so haunts Augustine. When our response to pleasure is greed instead of adoration—when we seek to grasp and possess rather than receive—our healthy cry of "This also is Thou" distorts into "the fatal word: Encore."

In his introduction to The Four Loves, Lewis distinguishes between "Need-pleasures" and "Pleasures of Appreciation." The enjoyment we feel upon receiving a Need-pleasure—water to quench thirst, for example, or the scratching of an itch—is intense but short-lived. But with Appreciation-pleasures—nonessential things that awaken us to delight, like delicious smells and tastes and scenes of beauty—the sensation intensifies over time. Greed—the repeated cry of "Encore!" to, say, rich black coffee or extra-creamy queso—may transform a Pleasure of Appreciation into a Pleasure of Need, draining out of it all the lasting enjoyment.

The answer, Lewis contends, is not to avoid pleasure but to "have" and "read" it properly: to receive it, openhanded, as both a gift and a message. "We know we are being touched by a finger of that right hand at which there are pleasures for evermore. There need be no question of thanks or praise as a separate event, something done afterwards. To experience the tiny theophany"—the small sign of God's presence—"is itself to adore."

In many respects, Augustine and Lewis are arguing two sides of the same coin. But there is a major point of divergence at the heart of their opposite orientations to pleasure. Where Augustine sees our sensuality as a liability to be managed until God "consign[s] both food and belly to destruction," Lewis views every earthly pleasure as an apprenticeship in adoration for the sort of thing that will go on forever in heaven.

Biblical writers seem irresistibly drawn to an image—part metaphor, part promise—of "the sacred meal with God." From the table prepared for the psalmist (Ps. 23:5), to Jesus' story of a great banquet (Luke 14:15–24), to the Revelation 19 vision of a wedding supper, the Scriptures are filled with the anticipation of feasting together—in the presence of God—forever. The prophet Isaiah (25:6–8) takes particular pleasure in this vision:

On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare
a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine—
the best of meats and the finest of wines.
On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations; he will swallow up death forever.

For Lewis, earthly meals are chances to practice the gratitude and adoration that will accompany our everlasting feast with God. Just as trials train us in patience, pleasure trains us in worship. Every sensual enjoyment (properly received) is a "tiny theophany"—a chance to "taste and see" that God is good, and a reminder that there is a whole lot more where that came from.

I rest my queso.

Morning Prayers - Arends

A friend confessed the other day:  "I'm not a Christian before 10am."  As a fellow night owl (read: anti-morning person), I had to laugh.  But her teasing confirmed in me something I have been suspecting for some time now:  If there is a "secret" to being an intentional disciple of Jesus, it's talking to him in the morning--even before the first dose of caffeine.  A day that is begun in conversation with God (before feet hit the floor) unfolds entirely differently than a day that is not.  Maybe that's obvious to most people, but it's taken me a very long time to learn, and it seems to be taking me even longer to consistently put it in practice.

There is this from C.S. Lewis:

"The real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind." (Mere Christianity)

And this from the Psalmist:

 ¹ Give ear to my words, O LORD,

       consider my sighing.

 ² Listen to my cry for help,

       my King and my God,

       for to you I pray.

 ³ In the morning, O LORD, you hear my voice;

       in the morning I lay my requests before you

       and wait in expectation.

(Psalm 5:1-3)

Grumpy and groggy, I am learning to pray in the morning.  It's amazing how, when I do, a day I am merely trying to survive transforms into a day that the Lord has made.  Now and then, I've even found myself rejoicing and being glad.  Prayer (and then, caffeine) ... breakfast of champions!

www.carolynarends.com

• November 4 -- North Vancouver, BC -- Lynn Valley Full Gospel
• November 5 -- Victoria, BC -- Gateway Baptist Church
• November 6 -- Coquitlam, BC -- Blue Mountain Baptist
• November 7 -- Langley, BC -- North Langley Community Church
• November 11 -- Swift Current, SK - Trailview Alliance Church
• November 12 -- Saskatoon, SK -- Elim Tabernacle
• November 13 -- Winnipeg , MB -- Eastview Community
• November 14 -- Thunderbay, ON -- St. Andrews
• November 19 -- Rockland, ON -- St. Patricks School
• November 20 -- Arnprior, ON -- First Baptist
• November 21 -- Ottawa, ON -- Metropolitan Bible Church

A Literary Pilgrimage to Oxford — Martin

When my wife and I were planning our trip to England this summer, I wanted to make sure we visited Oxford. Oxford University has produced so many exceptional and diverse writers such as: W.H. Auden, Lewis Carroll, Evelyn Waugh, Oscar Wilde, A.A. Milne, Dorothy L. Sayers, Jonathan Swift and John Donne — not to mention musicians, preachers and political leaders.

During our brief time, I managed to slip away from our tour to step into the quadrangle at Balliol College where one of my favourite poets — Gerard Manley Hopkins — and one of my favourite novelists — Graham Greene — had been students.

Above all, I wanted to visit a little pub in Oxford informally known as “The Bird and Baby”, but officially named “The Eagle and Child”. This was the place where C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, J.R.R. Tolkien and others met for years to discuss their writing and to share friendship. Lewis and various members of the “Inklings”, as they were known, met in “The Rabbit Room” of the pub between 1939 and 1962. Today the little room has become something of a shrine.

To enjoy our lunch in “The Eagle and Child” made C.S. Lewis and his friends seem that much closer — especially when it turned out that our waitress was from Calgary. Whenever I have a chance to return to Oxford, with more time to wander, I’ll certainly investigate Magdalen College where Lewis taught, and visit the home he shared with his brother Warnie, “The Kilns” — and I will stop for lunch at “The Bird and Baby”.

As a writer these are all good reasons to travel to a city as inspiring as Oxford.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

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The Blue Umbrella — Martin

“Not many people are killed by lightning.
Zac’s mother was.”

So begins the story of Zac Sparks, a ten-year-old who has had the carpet pulled out from under his life. He lands unevenly in the town of Five Corners, at the mansion of two cruel elderly aunts, where his existence becomes like that of a prisoner.

The eccentric populous of Five Corners seems surrounded by mystery — a girl who by choice doesn’t speak, a blind balloon seller, a midget butler, a shaggy barber (even smaller than the butler), a mother who rarely leaves her room, a town drunk whose beautiful singing voice is inexplicably heard when she is nowhere to be seen, and the proprietor of a general store who carries a blue umbrella wherever he goes. There are rumours of the upper level of the store being haunted, and Zac has seen strange lights coming from its skylights at night. The more he learns the stranger things become.

There is an effective allusion to Narnia, early in The Blue Umbrella. Zac is reminded of the story his mother had read to him, when he looks at some fur coats; he wishes he could escape, as the children who travelled through the wardrobe had had wondrous possibilities open for them.

Mike Mason’s writing is refreshing — just a hair’s breadth this side of absurdity — in a style reminiscent of Lemony Snicket. The Blue Umbrella draws us into delight — particularly when we see with childlike wonder the beauty and grandeur of weather. It also stirs dread — being rather dark for younger children: Zac’s aunts beat him continuously, and they take him to visit a character whose evil is so palpable that it overshadows their cruelty. Conversely goodness comes through in other characters, although Zac isn’t always sure who to trust.

The Blue Umbrella is about trust — and is also naturally seasoned with truths about important issues including anger, free will, the nature of reality, and heaven. Eventually Zac comes to trust one who “was willing to die for him” — and who, despite Zac’s short-comings, was quick to tell him, “Well done”.

We have a wonderful heritage of fantasy writers for children who desire to capture the truths of the Christian faith in their books — George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle and now Mike Mason. Mason is a popular non-fiction writer (attendees at Write! Canada several years ago received a free copy of his book Champagne for the Soul) but The Blue Umbrella fulfills his childhood dream to be a novelist; it stands well on its own but, I’m please to say, is also the first book in a trilogy.

Mike Mason is a Canadian, living in Langley, B.C. The Blue Umbrella is published by David C. Cook — First edition, September 2009

D.S. Martin is Music Critic for Christian Week. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

C.S. Lewis: a prototype for writers today - Martin

Even with so much being written, year after year, I find myself often drawn back to the writing of C.S. Lewis. What does he offer, that hasn’t been done better since? Why does his writing hardly seem dated? Why is he so well known today? It’s fascinating to note that he gained fame in quite unrelated forms of writing, and that that fame has not diminished since.

He is well-known, within scholarly circles, for his academic writing. With his book,The Allegory of Love, Lewis is said to have re-established Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen as an important work of sixteenth century literature, and to have proven himself to be a major literary critic. This in itself is an important contribution, but is Lewis’ least known.

He is best known, by the general public, as a novelist. C.S. Lewis’ space trilogy, including Perelandra which is being performed as an opera this year in Oxford, and his children’s fantasy series, The Chronicles of Narnia, carry significant weight within their light frames. Lewis saw how story could delightfully illustrate truths in a way more palatable than more direct methods. Since he was a voracious reader, with a passion for good books, his stories work independently as stories, even without thought given to what they speak of beyond themselves. Lewis managed to teach through his stories without really being didactic, because the truths he demonstrated arose within the framework of the story, not as something imposed from outside.

Lewis also became famous for his Christian apologetics. He took on the toughest issues of faith in such books as The Problem of Pain, Miracles, and Mere Christianity. What makes these books valuable is not only his ability to reason, and debate, but his amazing skill for metaphor. In Miracles he said, “...if we are going to talk about things which are not perceived by the senses, we are forced to use language metaphorically.” He knew that we would better see what is meant, if he gave us a picture.

Ironically his first desire was to be a poet, but he was far too old-fashioned to be a successful 20th century poet, too stuck within the forms of the past. Surprisingly, I believe it is this same disregard for his times that has helped to make all of his other writing timeless. By writing of the universal, he transcends changing fashion. His success in one genre, helped to renew attention in what he had written in another, which of course led to book sales. C.S. Lewis always wrote from the depth of who he was, and what he loved. This is how great artists always work.

D.S. Martin is Music Critic for Christian Week; his new poetry book, Poiema (Wipf & Stock), and his chapbook So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed are available at www.dsmartin.ca

The Three Platonic Ideals: Truth — Martin

In my recent blogs I have been talking about the three Platonic ideals: First Goodness (Nov. 14), then Beauty (Dec. 31); and now we’ll look at the third — Truth. These concepts have all been under attack in recent days. The politically correct are troubled by absolutes — particularly by Goodness and Truth.

Although Christians are comfortable with the word Truth, post-modernists have undermined it so that it’s viewed subjectively. In the same way that the ideal of Beauty has been watered down by the misconception that it is "in the eye of the beholder", many now contrast what is "true" to one person with what is "true" to another. Personally, I don’t like the word Truth to be used to mean "what I think is real"; we already have the word "believe" to indicate that. I prefer to save the word Truth to mean what really is, regardless of whether it is perceived or not.

If we don’t reserve this word for this purpose, we no longer have a simple way of expressing the idea of something that really is regardless of our perception. If I say, it is true that God sent Jesus to die for us, I don’t merely claim to believe it, but that it is fact regardless of what people may say. In his essay "The Death of Words" C.S. Lewis says that when "you have killed a word you have also...blotted from the human mind the thing that word originally stood for. Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say."

It is true, that sometimes believers falsely claim to have a corner on Truth. I think of the Catholic church persecuting Galileo because they believed in a geocentric universe. I think of when we use the Bible as a science textbook, dogmatically claiming to have a full understanding of everything that happened when God created the world, interpreting scripture in ways that may never have been intended. We need to proceed with humility as we speak of God’s Truth.

But we can and should speak of Truth — of what really is — because we have some unique insights to offer. As a poet I consider words to be precious, and concepts such as Truth to be worth protecting. The word Truth carries with it the idea of accuracy — that’s why it’s an ideal; if we remove this from our concept what is left of the value Plato praised?

D.S. Martin is Music Critic for Christian Week; his new poetry book, Poiema (Wipf & Stock), and his chapbook So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed are available at http://www.dsmartin.ca/

The Three Platonic Ideals: Goodness — Martin

I’m no scholar of the ancients; yet I’m often so drawn to ideas that ring true, that I have to give them further thought. The Greek philosopher Plato, centuries before Christ, spoke of three virtues,— Goodness, Beauty and Truth. The twentieth century snubbed its nose at these ideals as subjective wishful thinking, but such pseudo-sophistication wore out it’s welcome, when it’s ideas proved unable to stand up where real lives are really lived. Plato’s insight is worth our renewed consideration.

Of these three values, often the Christian community has embraced just two: Goodness and Truth. Similarly, even though the art community has rediscovered Beauty, it doesn’t have much to say about Goodness. Our "tolerant" Canadian society, while ready to accept Beauty and Goodness in and of themselves, is wishy-washy on the subject of Truth. I believe we need all three.

C.S. Lewis read George MacDonald’s novels when he was a young atheist. He later wrote, "The quality which had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live. I should have been shocked in my ‘teens if anyone had told me that what I learned to love in Phantastes was goodness."

When we portray or bring forth Beauty, Truth and Goodness in the novels and poetry we write, in the worship we offer, in the lives we lead, we are reflecting "the real universe" and reflecting its Creator. Hollywood has trouble portraying Goodness. It produces exciting (although sometimes two-dimensional) villains, but its "good guys" are often either boring or seriously tainted. It is a rare film that captures anything substantial of Goodness, Beauty or Truth.

I believe Christian writers often have trouble finding their way, too. Do we try so hard to show Goodness and spiritual Truth that our manuscripts are no longer true to life? Are we, on the other hand, so determined to show the truth of evil in our world that we have lost our taste for Goodness? I wouldn’t want to prescribe a code for Christian storytellers, but I wonder if even some of our best contemporary writers are having trouble here. Perhaps we would all benefit by reflecting — in a biblically balanced way — on Plato’s three ideals. Yes, stories in the Bible freely tell of sin, but there are certain ideals on which Philippians chapter four tells us to focus.

D.S. Martin is Music Critic for Christian Week; his new poetry book, Poiema (Wipf & Stock), and his chapbook So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed are available at http://www.dsmartin.ca/

Prince Caspian and Indiana Jones 4 - Boge

For those of you enamored (like me) in the worlds of The Chronicles of Narnia and Indiana Jones, the movie world has provided you with the excitement of two installments in these memorable series. Albeit, they are very different movies.

Prince Caspian, part of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series, is another brilliant investigation in the life of a Christian. In particular, it investigates what it means to be a follower of Christ – what it means to follow Him when others won’t. Is our faithfulness to God’s call dependent on other people also being faithful?

The book to movie transition isn’t always what you would expect. For those who wonder about the road not taken – about what might have or could have or should have been…Aslan in the movie says that ‘we can never know’. But the book says, “No one is ever told.” So what’s the difference? In the book, Aslan is still omniscient; he simply chooses not to tell you what might have happened if you took the left at the fork instead of the right. In the movie, Aslan doesn’t seem to actually know. It makes you wonder why the filmmakers chose to change that.

I was speaking with a friend of mine who is not, yet, a follower of Jesus Christ. I was curious about her take on Aslan. Especially in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I wondered if she would pick up on what Lewis had intended. She gave her thoughts. None of which mentioned the symbolic connection between the lion in the movie and the Lion of Judah.

That’s the thing with symbolism. It’s a language. Sometimes we miss out on the symbolism and lose the meaning behind the film, having it reduced to a ‘cool movie with cool battles and great settings’. She had missed the point of Lewis’ Aslan.

Or did she?

I wonder if symbolism can speak to people and plant seeds in their hearts – if it can communicate to people’s hearts and leave an imprint, even if it is not consciously understood. Like a parable. I mentioned the symbolic connection between Aslan and Christ to my friend. She thought that was interesting.

I also saw Indiana Jones 4 (and American Graffiti/Close Encounters of the Third Kind/Star Wars - what a blast they must have had making this movie) and wondered about why the relic in this movie was not Christian (or Judeo-Christian) like it was in Raiders or Last Crusade. My friend, (a different friend, guy friend this time) said that he preferred a non-religious relic because at least there’s no risk of distorting the Christian faith through the myth of a relic. Interesting point. Everlasting physical life from drinking from the Last Supper cup of Christ versus everlasting life from drinking from the life of Christ.

Spielberg and Lucas had a new type of vision for Indy 4 than they had for 1 and 3. It makes me wonder what could have been if the movie centered on an investigation into the Christian faith through an archeologically significant piece.

But, of course, Aslan says that’s not possible to know.

At least not for me.

Paul Boge