Weather Report, and "Can Christians Write?"

Also, a fun preorder update on The Locust Years

Hello friends, from what remains the absolutely mildest fall and winter here in my memory.

Our home, since purchasing our “little house in the Gorge” ten years ago, has been a microclimate just east of Portland, Oregon, where roughly ten thousand years ago, the melting Cordilleran Ice Sheets created a vast glacial lake behind an ice dam (the size of a medium-sized mountain) in Missoula, Montana. When eventually that dam exploded, I am told that the water made it the 600-ish miles from there to the Pacific Ocean in twenty-four hours. (Even my stunted arithmetic will tell you, after hours of counting on my fingers, that is about twenty-five miles an hour, which, when describing a vast wall of water that was filled with moose, elk, skunks, rocks, people, and chunks of several forests, is much faster than it sounds.)

The resulting “Lake Missoula Floods” carried much of the topsoil from Idaho, Eastern Washington and the top part of Oregon, and deposited it in the Willamette (rhymes with “damn it”) Valley of Oregon, where people immediately figured out that the multiple feet of absolutely perfect topsoil was the best thing for planting in the world, leading first to vast native agricultural projects of white oak savannah, camas, and other plantings, and later to the rich, rolling farms at the end of the Oregon Trail, and the best Pinot Noir wines in the world, no matter what California tries to say. Anyway, there were a lot of these floods, but the really big boy carved the vast canyon where we now live, which looks like this:

Picture by Travel Oregon.

Back to the microclimate. This was, for the Chinookian peoples, the “place where the East Wind lived.” The high Oregon desert, 2500+ feet high above sea level, and very harsh, pours wind, both hot and cold, down into the natural wind tunnel formed by those basalt canyon walls. Just upstream from us is Hood River, where the sport of windsurfing was invented. The wind and temperature do weird things, especially withall the canyons, and all the water, and all the everything, and the result is a windswept rain forest sprouting out of volcanic rock, and, in my opinion, creating the most magical and mysterious place on earth. Things happen here. It is a place that generates stories like it generates wind.

Anyway, this is what happens when I try to talk about the weather. You get a short dribble of geologic history. Normally the winds are howling and I’m digging us out of a foot of snow (while a short drive east, Portland roads are clear. Instead, the Lenten Roses are blooming and the plum trees are asking if it’s sfe to bud yet. (No, little guys, don’t.) I still think we’ll have a good storm before spring.

But we’re not complaining. The weather has been a bit of a relief, in the middle of such a busy season of life. It makes life easier to not have the do the many practical things that fallen trees, snow drifts, cranky pipes, power outages, and a constantly-hungry woodstove demand. Easier is not a bad word.

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An update on The Locust Years now that you’ve suffered through that very Paul weather report. You all showed up to the preorder in the most amazing way. I don’t have latest numbers, but since this opened last week, we are in the low hundreds of books preordered. This, for poetry, just isn’t something that normally happens in publishing. It’s a sign of kindness, and belief, and sheer generosity on all your parts. Thank you. That’s all I know how to say. I am humbled and honored. (And if you haven’t ordered yet, do so—noting the special preorder package set up by my publisher, Wiseblood Books!)

All this to say, it is so gratifying to see this project begin to go out. Not selfishly, I hope, but to welcome you into a “place” in this book that I have made, with friends, to host you. To be ably to be gently inhabited, and, I hope, to be a gift.

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I was invited by Current to write a response to a short essay by Paul Luikhart, titled, “To The Christian Writer.” Paul is a fiction writer, a teacher, and by all accounts a good guy. The piece though, was not particularly well-recieved by the more thoughtful segments of our little writing community. (His intention—to encourage fresh writing—is wonderful, but I am not sure that his intention made it to his intended readers with the effect, well, intended.)

I did not couch my response, “Can Christians Write?” as a direct response to Luikhart, but rather as a more general question trying to offer a far more robust vision of what Christian art is, and speculating on why the Christian worldview (and the Jewish worldview which is its soil) creates such depth of art and creativity in those cultures where it is believed. From the essay:

What is commonly called “Christian” art today has been mislabeled. This is because of the “Christian” music and publishing industries that arose beginning in the late 1960s (ironically, right as the last major Catholic and Christian literary renaissance in this country was fading). “Christian” became a consumer category; a glorified barcode. It arose to meet consumer desire. In a quickly changing culture and retail market, certain segments of people wanted products that were culturally non-threatening. My wife worked briefly in Christian radio promotions in the early 2000s, and the tagline of her radio station (“104.1 The . . . Fish!”) sums up the perspective: “Safe for the whole family!” In the short term, this sort of declawing of the arts to appeal to the underdeveloped comfort zones of (largely evangelical) churchgoers has hurt us. People are right to want something better. But we must be clear: This is to be rejected not because this sort of thing is Christian but because it is not Christian enough.

Christian art is art that has been definitively and directly shaped by the Christian worldview. The richness of the resulting artistic tradition is unequalled in history. This is directly attributable to a Christian understanding of the universe and the unique, divinely ordered place of the human being in that universe. Christian art includes vastly diverse disciplines, movements, periods, and specific traditions whose forms and subjects are intimately tied to the cultures that have arisen from the beliefs of Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant Christianity. They are not dependent on the personal faith or faithfulness of the artist or the audience. They do not need to be explicitly spiritual at all. But their foundation is essentially and irreplaceably Christian.

This foundation, expressed in an expansive diversity of voice and form, is a single core worldview which has been a uniquely fertile creative soil. Dana Gioia, former chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts and the pater familias of our contemporary American literary renaissance in Catholic and Christian circles, took steps to define this worldview in his 2013 essay “The Catholic Writer Today.” (This essay is essential reading to anyone interested in the topic of Christian literature in our time.) He lists (the precise phrasing is mine) human struggle in a fallen world, the sacramental sacredness of nature, the redemptive quality of suffering, and a sense of continuity between the living and the dead as key to this worldview. In these, I believe he is fundamentally correct—and with minor caveats, these are true of all Christian writing, far beyond the Roman Catholic. To them I would add one point of expansion: the tremendous Christian appreciation of the profound value of the individual person as the locus of the image of God.

This worldview, so intimately connected to the great story of the Christian faith, is unique in history. It does not hold the essential quality of personal fatalism that is the core of Classical narratives, nor of the impassivity that Eastern philosophies tend to inject into the art and story of their cultures. It has a great regard for overlooked things and people and considers no subject to be too high or too low for the attention of the artist. One can find God in a potato by Van Gogh. Do you think that this perspective is common in the history of human culture? We elevate the beauty of the “low,” the possibility of change and redemption, the goodness of common grace. These are belief statements, and they are, with few exceptions, unique to our tradition.

This worldview is uniquely adaptable to any artistic medium. It acts like fertilizer for the creative mind. Where it is believed, art flourishes. It can inhabit architecture or a novel with the same intimate expansiveness. Artists from Bach to Buechner, from El Greco to Graham Greene, have found themselves kneeling at its clear and overflowing well, though in very different manners, and with very different results. In this artistic tradition, as in our faith, nothing and no one sits below our sacred attention, for they are held (like even the smallest seed or sparrow) in the gaze and love of God. Nothing and no one are beyond redemption, for “all things” will, in the end, be caught up in Christ. There is no sin and no righteousness that does not hold the potential for a worthy subject. The bawdiest joke and the highest and most sincere expression of sentiment have their place. The unfortunate masturbation habits of Ignatius Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces are as fair game as Dante’s Empyrean vision in Paradiso. Rabelais’ Pantagruel belongs as much as Vodolazkin’s Laurus. The Christian artist, like any Christian, is absolutely free. And the Christian artist, like any Christian, is absolutely bound by that freedom.

Christian art has the effect of telling the truth about people—that we are a sacred, disastrous mix-up of the divine and the debauched; that we are, through overwhelming grace, beloved candidates for unreasonable redemptions; and that all things, everywhere, are fitting objects of deep and sustained attention. Christian art assumes the transcendentals of truth, beauty, and goodness, is able to describe why they are as well as what they are, and is able to partner with them to intentionally connect the soul to the “upward” draw of the divine eros, which seeks eternal satisfaction in the life of God. It humanizes both artist and audience, increases their ability to know and love the good, and becomes a way for us to participate in what St. Paul calls “the divine nature.”

Calling the resulting essay a “manifesto” is too strong, but it does state my thoughts on the point, which readers of The Rose Fire will, I think, appreciate. Please go read at Current, and let me know what you think.

My interest in this is not academic, nor to quibble with aesthetic definitions. I think that what we “touch” when we touch art is deeply spiritual, and capable of carrying us in all sorts of different directions. Many of these are wonderful, many are just circular, and some are downright terrifying. Knowing the architecture of Beauty, and feeling out the soul’s engagement with it, allows us BOTH to understand our tastes and responses to art and creativity, without being fully subject to them. This is the sort of objectivity that allows for both accurate perspective and the conscious and intentional breaking of those rules (as in Cubism!). What it does is move us away from an enslavement to the self, by placing us in relation to a living tradition that is generous, and (in a good way) asks much of us in response. I am “a bear of very little brain,” but I do think that this is am important conversation, and a practical one for artists and writers.

I am pleased to say there has been good response to the piece, including from Luikhart. I’ll excerpt one piece of an email¹ I wrote in continuance of the conversation, which will be of interest here, for my paid subscribers…

I am not sure if you ever read The Symposium, but it is the story of a dinner party, at which a question ("what is love?") is raised by Socrates, his ex-boyfriend Alcibiades, and a few other guests. As they get drunk and the conversation progresses, it turns to the relationship of love and beauty, and from there to the nature and the purpose of beauty. The last and definitive word is given by Socrates, who (stories in stories!) quotes Diotima, a priestess he met in his youth. Hers is the only woman's voice in the entirety of the discussion. I do not have time to fully summarize it, but here is how I'd sum up the gist of her teaching: