Self Identity #3 -Changing Books and Perspective

Changing Books and Perspective:

Written by Dan McDonald

 

          I look one last time at the paperback book written by the famous French actress.  Is the little novel a classic?  It is a well written book, with crisp sentences, wonderful imagery, and a sense of the sweep of life about it.  I think that is what the author truly intended, and if so, it was a success from my point of view.  Was it a classic; a Tale of Two Cities, Les Miserable, or Anna Karenina?  I am sure the author accepted that she was not writing, nor when finished, had written a classic.  But she wanted to write a book that told of life from her own individual perspective casting herself into a character she created to tell a story or was it her story?  I think she wrote to be serious, and to have fun  I will not call it a classic, but I will smile as I put her novel, her first novel to be honest into the little white envelope with “royal mail” stamped upon it.  I put it on a shelf with my book collection.  Her book didn’t make many points as it meandered from one scene to another speaking of her life, or the life of the fictional character she imagined created from her mind, experiences, dreams, fears, and imaginations, all meant to be realistic even mundane as the exploration of life always is.  Should it surprise us if we look at the life of an explorer and discover that mostly their lives were mundane, plodding along until they took enough steps to get somewhere no one else had ever been?  That is really when you get down to it, what makes an explorer unique.  It is what makes an individual life unique.  Sometimes we feel jaded because when we make our great discovery to a place where no one has ever been, it is already crowded with people living there.  So Columbus discovered a new world filled with people that had been there for thousands of years.  Livingstone discovered Lake Victoria with African tribesman living off the fish swimming in the lake’s waters.  Our individual lives are surely like this as well.  We grow up playing games we think are new until we become adults and want only to watch the children playing the games they think are new, the same games we used to do.  Thus sang a shy and stage-frightened Mary Ann Faithful, with wonder and beauty even as she was on the beginning of an often downward journey carrying her to what has often been a difficult and painful life.  Sophie Marceau in Telling Lies seldom made a point, but isn't that the point of an Existentialist view of life?  For the existentialist, there either is no point to life, or life itself is the very point of life.  Take your choice, be a cynic feeling no point to life, or an opportunist seeing life as the very exclamation point to all of reality!!!  I put her little book upon my shelf, and think I’ll forget it probably, but also I will never forget it and sometimes that all makes sense as we forge our ways into the future leaving the past behind while it forever guides our way into the future.  Life is made by the friends we keep and truth by the paradoxes we learn to accept whether logical, illogical, foundational or otherwise unexplainable.  Her little book is now in the white envelope and stored away on a shelf.

          I turn to another book, a book upon which cultures have credited their existence, and mad men have excused their crimes.  It is a book which has taught men and women to love, fanatics to hate, kings to kill, and saints to die with no or little resistance.  No wonder this book has been of all books most beloved and most reviled.  How can it be true that the same book that has taught love and kindness has incited evil and treachery?  How can it be one might ask that one book might be treated as holy while seemingly so guilty of inciting so much evil all the same?  The book’s followers claim it to present through its pages the voice of God speaking to man.  Many a crackpot and bizarre soul claims the same.  What if that it were really so that God spoke through the pages of one certain holy book?  Could that actually explain how the book could create in one man a peaceful saint whom birds in the wild recognized, whom peasants understood for his goodness, and whom tyrants would fear for his spoken word though he brandished no sword and commanded no army?  Would a word spoken by God possibly irritate an unbalanced soul to the point of violently coming undone so as to speak and do the unspeakable evil?  Is it a paradox that one book could cause good and evil to the extreme, or is that what one might expect for the voice of God to do coming into the audience of men, some with good hearts, some with ill, some unstable, some simmering in bitterness waiting only for an excuse to explode?  The bulk of mankind, I suppose would be like most of us who tend to live our lives away from both violence and good, in sort of a sleepy nether world stationed between the light and the darkness.  We would likely barely respond to the voice of God crying out in the wilderness.  We would smile at the saints and imagine ourselves sort of like them when we did an occasional good thing in an otherwise mundane life.  We would be shocked at those who were incited to evil as if that somehow excused our being made to drift into numbness by the same word of God.  I suppose if God did speak through a book, or in the wilderness, or from a cross, or even if he were to live, die and rise from the dead, we would see a thousand different responses to God's voice in our midst and would conclude that nothing important or eternal or dramatic or real had ever taken place.  But if God were to speak through a book, we might find that good men responded with goodness and evil men responded with evil, lazy men continued to be lazy, and occasionally someone hearing the word of God would dramatically change their course and we would say he got religion.  I would not be surprised if all that happened if God were to speak his word through a book, through prophets, priests, ministers, preachers, poets, and in the lives of saints or in the desperate errors of the damned made to be the wretched warning symbols for the centuries.  To many, I suppose it would just be another book, while to others it would be the book, and others would cite chapter and verse as they ordered cities destroyed, nations invaded, and children bombed.  The king would order it taught for its support of the right of kings, while the peasant would read it as a reminder that the peasant is equal to the king.  It would teach truth to every man, but every man could use it to chart his own course by twisting the books' words into every form a man might need to justify his own blatant course of life.

          I suspect that a cynic or a skeptic might be reading the words I write.  At least I hope so, I would hate to think that no one but people in a modern day “holiness club” are reading my scribbling.  I have put Sophie Marceau’s book up on my shelf.  I enjoyed it.  She is not Christian, makes no such claim.  She distances herself from the Pope, from the church, from the book.  She writes from such a different perspective as me, but I discovered that she wrote from the very same vantage point in life as I.  We both write as human beings born into the world with only our senses, impressions, experiences, reflections, thoughts, contemplations, and reasoning to shape the conclusions we make about life.  That is, when all is said and done the whole of my vantage point.  That was the vantage point that Sophie Marceau wrote from as well, and I think that at many points she understood her vantage point far better than I.  The same is true for Marina de Van, who created the movie that got me to thinking about the things that appear in these essays on self-identity.  We each and all have only our human understanding of our surroundings based on the reasoning we have done based on what we had taken in through our senses during our life experiences.  That is all we have as human beings.  That is ultimately our vantage point for everything we say whatever our tradition, belief, and persuasion.  That is, it would seem, the human vantage point.

          But we could ask the question asked by Marina de Van’s character Jeanne in “Don’t Look Back” if that solely human vantage point might itself be an inadequate vantage point with which to see the horizon upon which the truth of life is to be seen clearly on the horizon?  Is there by necessity, in our present human condition, "something missing" in the stories of our lives unless we are granted a differing vantage point from that one normally or naturally occurring to us?  Perhaps we are like souls who come alive for six weeks a year during a polar winter and then sleep through the remainder of the year.  We come to believe that all the human words about the brightness of the sun are mere mythologies.  We live in the ice and snow of the arctic or the Antarctic.  We awaken in the six weeks when the sun does not shine in such a polar region.  Then one day we are taken by a plane that flies through the night until landing at JFK at sunrise.  We look to the eastern sky and see sunlight filling the horizon.  Throughout our waking experiences we had never seen sunlight.  We had only seen the darkness of a six week long night in the Polar sky.  But we watch the sun rise and then watch the sun grow brighter until the noonday sunlight is blinding with brightness.  We had read what was written about the sun but had never been to a vantage point where we could see if for ourselves.  This would be a whole new world for us, where ice melts, grasses grow green, fruit trees produce fruit, and birds chirp in the trees.  How would or could the polar child that awoke only for the six weeks of night ever explain the sunlight he had never been able to see?  He would need a differing vantage point.  That is what The Bible claims to be, what its followers believe it is; a book written from a different vantage point.  It is not Marina de Van’s vantage point, it is not Sophie Marceau’s, and it isn’t even the Christian’s vantage point.  It is the vantage point only of the one who gave and inspired the Scriptures, for which reason the Scriptures are often described as “the word of God.”  That is what believers believe about this book, that this book is not the mere word of human senses, experiences, and reasoning.  We believe that God initiated, inspired, supervised, and guided the writing of this book so that it would be simultaneously God’s word written into the experiences of the humankind involved in this book’s writing.  It has been presented to mankind as a book written from a wholly different vantage point, that allows men and women to see from a vantage point from which they could not otherwise see.  It is not a vantage point to be seen by climbing a great mountain height or reaching a great ocean depth, but a vantage point afforded only by a gift of grace and mercy from someone whose vantage point was always above and beyond our own limited scope of life.

          I will steal for my description of the Bible and its message from a different vantage point the title of a book about the Biblical message, from a famous twentieth century Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and philosopher, Abraham Joshua Heschel.  This Jewish rabbi and philosopher, who wrote with wisdom, wit, and warmth; described the Bible and its message in a book he wrote that he entitled with a title that truly says it all, God in Search of Man.  The Bible was written because mankind, every man and woman, had become a wanderer that had gotten lost in the world and could not orient themselves to the point of once more finding their ways.  When we had wandered astray, had gone our own way, and could not or would not find our way back to God, God had not forgotten us.  God was making search for us; God in Search of Man.  Let us, for a moment, neither agree nor disagree with this viewpoint that the Bible is written from a different vantage point.  Let us just entertain for a moment the possibility that the Bible has been written from this unique vantage point that God is in search of man, and that this Bible is written to tell the story of his search for mankind.  If it has been so written, then that would mean it has been written from a very different vantage point than what Marina de Van, Sophie Marceau, or Dan McDonald could ever write.  De Van, Marceau, and McDonald all write based on the perceptions of their senses, experiences, and reason.  Each of us, I think would acknowledge that some of each of our perspectives are likely flawed, whether in the incompleteness of our senses, the limited nature of our experiences, or in the steps of logic or illogic of our reasoning.  Not one of us can offer more than an admittedly flawed perspective to our readers.  But God, writing in search of man, would necessarily be writing from an extremely different vantage point.  That is what the Scriptures claim for themselves, and what the believers of the Scriptures have long maintained.  We have confessed through the centuries and the ages, that even though men are involved in writing the Bible; that God in his search of man is uniquely connected to the message and composition of the Bible.  This is the book that has been called the word of God, and Heschel describes it as well as can be described when he describes the book of the Bible and its basic message as God in Search of Man.

If this were true of the Bible, then this would be a book for a wandering humanity that has lost its way.  What if the anguish of mankind might simply be described as an adult experiencing the child’s dilemma when separated from his or her parents’ at a mall, a zoo, or a museum.  The child loses their security and their happy world becomes a place of fear and anxiety.  They see themselves as separated from the ones who love and care for them, and suddenly surrounded by a sea of strangers.  Is that how we as adults also behave though hiding our childlike fears, not wanting to be seen as those who have lost self-control?  We begin to crumble, to fear, to cry, but maybe not openly like we did as little children, but in a covered up manner like adults protecting their self-respect and not wanting others to see that we feel lost, alone, and undone.  We have all the symptoms of little children lost in the mall, but we dare not tell the cashier or the store manager that we cannot find mommy or daddy, or that we fear that every one that ever loved us has now abandoned us and left us in a sea of strangers, all alone.  We dare not tell other adults that we feel lost and can find no meaning for our lives and feel only like we are deserted children.  But in our listlessness, without meaning, and in despair about life in a world full of strangers we feel feelings that seem to indicate that we believe that our heavenly Father, or at least some unknown God must have forgotten us.  But it is we who wandered astray and have lost our way.  It is he who is in search of us, seeking us, desiring to see us choose the pathway of the return to our home from which we long ago snuck out in the dark; when we imagined that freedom and excitement instead of loneliness  and folly stood waiting for us at the end of our adventures.  We have tried ever since then to find for ourselves meaning.  We have felt that there was a hole in the story of our lives not quite explainable from the vantage point in which we understood life.  Finally we have come to our wits’ end and have crumbled to the floor near the store’s help center weeping over our being lost.  Perhaps we have done everything in our power to not let others see what and how we feel, desperate men and women of modernity seeking meaning when everything we are told has convinced us that all we have is existence.  So we have almost given up when a store manager, or is it a prophet, a priest, a preacher, or a kind neighbor quietly says to us with a voice that we realize is meant for us, when the voice says to us as if we were little children lost at the mall, “your father and your mother are looking for you.”  Then the voice from heaven recognizable in the voice of the human voice upon earth repeats itself in our hearts saying “your father in heaven has been seeking you.”  The little child knows at once that his seeking is over for he has been found by the Father who was looking for him.

That is the story of the Bible.  It is the story of St. Augustine restless until he found his rest in God.  It is the story of a lost man discovered only by the God that sought him, "wretched wanderer far astray.”  It is the story of a book written by God searching us out, while we had become wandering men and women.  It is the story of man's futile search for meaning, being met by the searchings of our Father in heaven who was all along seeking us.  We human beings are ultimately men and women looking for what we don't know, but looking ultimately like little children hoping against hope that we might be found weeping lost at a store or at a neighbor's house on the next street that for us was far enough away not to be any street we had ever known.  For the truth is we do not find him, until we who are lost and separated from the fold are found by the God in search of man.