I’m grateful to Thomas Howard for Dove Descending, his commentary on T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” But why must Eliot be so pointedly obtuse as to need line-by-line decoding? (Though I suspect some of my students would think I find in Eliot a kindred spirit.) Having forced my way through “Prufrock” and “Hollow Men” and “Wasteland” last week, I’m ready for some words of redemption. I’m just getting started on “Four Quartets” — I love the notion of there being “a way up that is at one and the same time a way down,” but this poetry is tough going. (I hope I can get some help from Charlie Kidd when he returns from abroad.)

Last week while grading exams (almost done), I listened several times (and am doing so even now) to Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. The Alpine Symphony, a tribute to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, makes Nietzsche’s atheism (or at least his quest for a “nobler god”) feel so, I dunno, so what? Brave?

Then again, if your best hope is to have your ashes parked on the top of the Himalayas in a Chock Full o’Nuts can (per The Bucket List, which movie Shari sat me down to watch this weekend, and which movie felt to me like an extended commentary on how to make Nietzsche work for you — even if the main characters do make non-Nietzschean moves toward relationships), you move past bravery into, well, again, what?

OK, I guess it makes a pretty big difference whether there’s a Redeemer or not. If not, The Bucket List is about as close to redemption as you’re going to get, I suppose. That said, I’m not sure a bucket list isn’t a bad idea even if (or since) there is a Redeemer.

What could be on mine? I’ve already killed a gator, hit a home run, played Bach & B.B. King, swung a samurai sword, driven (even briefly owned) a muscled up Mustang, kissed the most beautiful girl in the world, raised with her the three most vibrantly alive sons ever, written more than I have the right to expect anybody to read, spoken truth into the lives of half a generation of seminarians, seen tons of the majestic …

Before we leave Strauss, his Also Sprach Zarathustra (the whole tone poem) has inspired me to try to get the “Prelude” into my fingers on my Lucille and out through my Fender tube amps.

My head still hurts (that good hurt when your head feels like it’s taken in more than it’s able) from how rich the Institute for Worship Studies experience was this session. I’m grateful especially for bold prayers and wise counsel I received, and for the self-giving love I witnessed among strong-willed and talented worship leaders. It’s curious that my teaching partner and I are going through such parallel dysfunctions in church life. I love the church so — may all of us who love the Groom and his Bride help each other help Her not dress so ugly. I hold much promise of Her better adornment through my IWS friends.

Like I said, random thoughts … but, hey, it’s my blog.

Note to both devoted readers: I won’t forget about the other seven reasons for samurai sword training in Japan.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality. • T. S. Eliot

First, believers like J.R.R. Tolkein, T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, Madeleine L’Engle, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and of course, C.S. Lewis have helped us imagine that what we see is not all there is, and that the Christian story makes all other stories make sense. Such verbal craftsmanship has helped us inhabit a reality in which, to elide Tolkein and Oliver Goldsmith, every fairy tale bears the trace of Grace stooping to conquer.

Walt Disney embodied a second approach to the imagination. Disney sought to fill a cultural mindscape with myth and story and legend, minus the specific content of any particular faith- or truth-claims. As Mark Pinsky (The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust) quips, Disney and his “Imagineers” have taught us to “wish upon a star, but not pray to a living God.”

A writer like Philip Pullman represents a third approach to the mind’s eye, one hostile to Christianity and aggressively promoting of an alternate vision of the divine.

When my kids were growing up, our family read through Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass). Precisely because Shari and I love the richness that writers like Lewis and Tolkein draw out of the Christian narrative, we wanted our sons to see — and have their faith hardened on the anvil of — a contrary vision. As I read the series, I kept thinking: “I’m reading anti-Narnia. Nietzsche’s quest for a ‘nobler god’ has found its end.”

I was not surprised later to find out that Pullman thought little of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. I was surprised only to find that he had the cheek to write them off as mere “religious propaganda.” If there’s ever been a case of “religious propaganda,” it’s Pullman’s trilogy. In volume one, we find that the fall of Genesis came through denial of one’s true self. In volume two, we encounter a reverse Garden of Eden scene, in which adolescents attain personal liberation through sexual exploration. And in volume three, Pullman updates Milton’s Paradise Lost (from which Pullman borrows the title of his trilogy). In Pullman’s inversion of Milton, cosmic liberation comes when angels justly rise against a senile and corrupt Ancient of Days.

Here’s the good news and the bad news about the movie The Golden Compass (Book One in the trilogy). The larger cosmic issues (which in the books are handled in a decidedly anti-Christian fashion) are treated — at least in this movie — as just so much Hollywood “good vs. evil.” Despite the fact that there is this overbearing Magisterium — a transparent foil for institutionalized religion — moviegoers are mercifully spared the mystifyingly bad theologizing and the stupefyingly ridiculous misquoting of the Bible that characterizes the book. This Magisterium is simply promoting itself and trying to control people so they won’t do “bad things” (as Nicole Kidman says, and that with a straight face, despite the fact that she is talking about surgery that separates a person from his or her soul). Sinister enough, but unlike the book, almost comically so. Further, it was a directorial kindness to condense the story to a manageable two hours, thus rescuing viewers from pages of Pullman’s pontifications.

The visual and conceptual universe the movie creates is stunning. The England of The Golden Compass exists in a universe that is parallel to ours. It has developed the way Jules Verne might have liked, with technology that looks more primitive, more innocent (especially when it comes to weaponry), more, well, Victorian. At the same time, the technology of The Golden Compass’s England surpasses ours. None of the motorized vehicles in Lyra’s England seems to pollute the environment. When did you last have a machine that reveals all truth? Or envision a mechanism that can separate a person from his or her soul (meaning this England’s technology is arguably even more morally ambiguous than ours)?

For all the remarkable digital enhancement, though, thanks to a line from Manohla Dargis’s New York Times review of the film, I couldn’t help but wait for the battle between the polar bears to end with an exchange of Coca-Colas.

Rather than concluding with the book’s rather grim story of the fate of the friend Lyra has been seeking to save, the movie ends with Lyra bravely setting out on the last leg of her journey to help her father, the mysterious Lord Asriel. We won’t know where Director Chris Weitz is taking us until the sequel — for which the ending of this movie is an even more unconcealed setup than the ending of the original Star Wars movie. In interviews, Weitz has stated he knows that in the movies about Books Two and Three he’ll have to deal more straightforwardly with the “angels and God” thing, so we’ll have to wait and see where this is all going.

But for now, the movie version of The Golden Compass is Pullman Lite.

•••••••

Al Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Seminary, has some trenchant thoughts on the books and the movie at his blog.

•••••••

Before the movie was released, I was asked to make some on air comments for Fox Network’s Local News 3, available here. Or simply go to http://www.myfoxorlando.com/myfox/ and search: New Movie Might Be Controversial

Following the deaths of the Spartan King Leonidas and “his brave three hundred” at Thermopylae in 480 B.C., the various Greek city-states decided they needed to pull together. Xerxes’ gargantuan army and navy were poised to overwhelm Greece, indeed the whole of Europe. At the eleventh hour the Greeks realized they needed each other.

Traditionally, Greece looked to Sparta for leadership on land and to Athens for leadership on the sea. But in this case there were misgivings about giving Athens command of the city-states’ combined fleets (despite Athens’ contributing the largest number of ships). Herodotus isn’t clear whether the reluctance was due to lack of confidence in or envy against Athens, or due simply to a recognition of Sparta’s moral capital.

The point is: Athens “got it,” to quip Herodotus: civil war in the face of an external threat is suicide.

Or, in Facebook-speak: mutual defenestration means self annihilation. When the enemy is at the gate, that’s not the time to be throwing each other out the window.

Rather than lobby for their traditional right to command, Athens accepted Spartan command of the navy as well as of the army. The result: two brilliant victories — one by Greece’s combined navies (at Salamis) and one by Greece’s combined armies (at Plataea) — and one huge and final retreat by Xerxes. The result: daughters of neither Athens nor Sparta were exported to harems in Persepolis.

There are times that call for a sense of measure and proportion — times when you need not to be doing a smack down on each other. Fifth century B.C. Greece it figured out. Will we?

On one front, we face militant Islamists who have declared a reverse Crusade on us, demanding we either grovel before a disincarnate cosmic monad, or die.

On another, Mormons, arguably the fastest growing religion on the planet, knock on our doors with their terminal niceness (with, as Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven chillingly recounts, notable exceptions) and their uber-Disney promise that not only can you wish upon a star but you can get your own star where you’ll be a god or goddess.

Then there are the angry atheists who grouch about the immorality and intellectual suicide of faith. And just wait until this Christmas season’s (how deliciously ironic) release of the movie based on Philip Pullman’s vision of anti-Narnia: The Golden Compass.

Meanwhile, mainline Western churches languor under the sway of pre-pagan eros and post-Christian heterodoxy, embodying in a way that couldn’t be more precise Jude’s prescient warning about “ungodly persons who pervert the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ” (Jude 4).

It’s an extraordinary time for evangelicals to rediscover the stability of the Bible’s meta-narrative of creation, fall and redemption —  the one true and enduring story that puts the lie to the false stories of jihad, of self-deification, of autonomy, of faux Christianity. A stability that allows us to read each other’s odd takes on the story with sufficient grace to account for the Grace that took on flesh to cover all our inadequacies.

In the end, much more is at stake than when the beneficiaries of the sacrifice of King Leonidas and “his brave three hundred” took stock of the price that had been paid for them. Nothing less than the opportunity to embody an answer to the prayer of the Second Person of the Trinity: “May they all be one as you, Father, are in me and I in you: may they be in us that the world may believe that you sent me” (John 17:21).