The Golden Compass review

I've been asked to renew my series (called "margin smudges" in our parish newsletter) in which I review and comment on books I'm reading, and specifically to start with Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass. At the time of the request, I had neither seen the recently-released movie nor, more importantly, read the book on which it's based. Having now done so (thanks to a loaner copy from Betsy Rupe to get me started), I can with a little more integrity add my two cents to the reviews that have already been published.

The Golden Compass is the first of a three-volume work entitled His Dark Materials, and as such is only the opening to a longer story. It is remarkably well written and makes an enjoyable read. The characters are believable and real, and Pullman has great storytelling skill. The movie is also well done, and actually does the first novel some justice. The acting is superb, the CGI and special effects are seamless, and other than what I thought were a few poor casting decisions (Sir Ian McKellen as Iorek? Really?), it's a thoroughly enjoyable film.

As you've probably heard already, though, it's not the first book of the trilogy that's the problem; it's books two and three. Philip Pullman is an avowed atheist, and, as he told The Sydney Morning Herald point-blank in an interview, "My books are about killing God.” At the end of book three, his protagonists do just that (sort of).

The god that gets killed in Pullman's novel, though, bears almost no resemblance to the Living God we worship and serve. It's more the medieval concept of an old man with a long beard living in the sky who is out of touch with the world. He's described with weak limbs and rheumy eyes, a rather pathetic and almost pitiable figure.

Pullman's real target isn't God, exactly, but rather "the church." The overarching point he makes is that the church wants to control behavior, and thus robs humanity of our freedom and robs life of all beauty. Pullman is particularly savage in his criticism of the church's desire to control human sexuality. The exercise of sexual expression, for Pullman and his characters, is something to be celebrated, a way to grow and mature, to expand human consciousness. Thus puberty is the beginning of self-knowledge and intellectual curiosity. To quote Hanna Rosen's review in Atlantic Monthly, "To [Pullman], the loss of sexual innocence is not a tragedy; it’s the springboard to a productive and virtuous adulthood."

While many Christian writers have condemned the books and the movie, it may be surprising to note that Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury (and a formidable theologian), is an admirer of Pullman’s and a supporter of his books. Williams even spoke in favor of using the books as a text for religious education in England, for he contends that Pullman's negative portrayal of the church amounts to an attack on dogmatism and the oppressive abuse of religion, not on Christianity itself. (It’s interesting to note that the person and teaching of Jesus are not a part of Pullman’s construct called “The Authority.”)

It’s unfortunately true that there’s been plenty of oppression in the history of the church, and plenty of attempts to control human behavior, even going so far as abuse and violence, so Pullman’s argument finds an easy mark.

Where the rubber meets the road on this kind of review is: will I take my son to see the movie, and will I read the book to him (or let him read it himself)? And a close corollary is: do I think the children of the parish should read it?

My answer is entirely dependent on the maturity of the child. I’m all for engaging children with deep and meaningful questions about life, spirituality, and morality. But the main point of the book requires a certain level of maturity to grasp. Any child able to read with comprehension will understand that the books are firmly against “God” and “The Church.” I’d want to wait until the reader has sufficient maturity to be able to question how Pullman’s world and ours differ before tackling these stories.

To pre-pubescent children, much of the subtext about sexual expression may also be missed, which may be an argument for letting them read the books early, depending on how you look at it. The whole "heroine loses her virginity and thereby saves the whole multi-world universe from impending doom" ending seemed... pointedly overdone, and fairly ridiculous. I saw it coming from at least three hundred pages away and kinda hoped that particular train wreck wasn't going to happen. Alas.

I will, eventually, encourage my boys to read these books. But I’ll wait until I think they’re ready, and until I judge that I can engage them in the important conversations that the book begins.

$6000 per pound

The baby bills are starting to come in. Some of them are enormous. I'm keeping a running tally, and the current cost of bringing Zachary home from the hospital: approximately six thousand dollars a pound. That's just the hospital cost... individual bills for the physicians will arrive separately, or so they told me.


Several thoughts come to mind.


First, it really doesn't matter what the bill is; a child is priceless.


Second, it's odd to incur such a huge bill for services that I didn't deliberately choose to pay. Sure, you sign a waiver and agreement for treatment and all that legalese when you check in to the hospital. Then your wife is in labor and they want to give her IV drips of drugs you've never heard of, and then she eventually requires an emergency c-section (read: major abdominal surgery), and then they whisk the baby off to the NICU because he's not breathing properly and keep him there for four days, and meanwhile, your beloved's life is saved, not once, but twice, by an attentive nurse, OB, and anesthesiologist. Nowhere in this process do you say, or even think, "hey, wait a second, what's this going to cost?"


Third, I'm thankful we are insured. It's actually rather good insurance. There are a few ways that the church takes care of our clergy, and the insurance coverage is one of them. So my out of pocket cost will be a fraction of that. A surprisingly small fraction.


But what if I wasn't insured? I guess we might have tried to deliver the baby somewhere cheaper. (But if we hadn't been at a first-class medical facility, my wife and son would have died. No kidding.) Or we would have sucked it up and paid it ourselves, which would have exhausted all our savings, and we're people who are living privileged lives. There are plenty of people in America who don't have health insurance, can't afford it, or don't qualify. Gordon wrote about this recently, with more eloquence than I have at my disposal at the moment.


No matter how you look at it, the health care system in this country needs fixing. And what irks me is that this is an election year coming up. Which means we're going to hear a lot of hot air about health care and prescription drugs for seniors (because seniors vote in large numbers), and not a whole heck of lot about addressing the difficult issues of who's going to pay for it and overhauling the system. And then the new administration will take a while to settle in, and...

New Daddy Brain = no blog posts

There are some things in life that affect you whether or not you see them coming. The syndrome I cheerfully call "New Daddy Brain" falls into that category.

You know the symptoms: heavy-lidded eyes, rumpled clothing, coffee mug permanently attached to left hand (regardless of how hot or how empty the mug is), a tendency to wander into rooms and then look around in bemusement, wondering why you're there...

I pitched up to Bible study a couple of days ago without my Bible, which is usually considered an essential piece of equipment if you're the one leading the study. Hey, at least I've managed to remember to wear pants every day this week.

And it's not like there hasn't been material worthy of reflection in my life. Declining numbers in the church, comic strips, hospital experiences (mine and those of others), reflections on new babies, letters from loved ones... all of them flit past, then go get trapped somewhere in the cobwebs of my mind, possibly never to return. I'm aware that I've promised you, dear readers, a wrap-up to the Sabbath set of posts, and also some reflections on the trip to Tanzania. Stay tuned. I'm giving myself another half a week to climb far enough out of the fog to function without a coffee IV drip, and then I'll get to some of this backlog.

Here he is....

Home from the hospital!

It's a boy!

Rejoice with us! The Lord has given us a son.

We're going to call him Zachary Alexander.

Mom and baby are still in the hospital. Pictures to follow when I get a chance. And a cool story or two.

Death of a preacher man

One of my seminary classmates died yesterday. That's one of those things you know is going happen eventually, but it's never welcome news when it gets to you.

His name was Bill Wiseman.

Hard to know where to start describing him, really. Bill kinda defied categorization. I knew him best, not as a classmate, but as a prayer partner. We were part of a small group that met together on a weekly-ish basis, prayed together, shared lives and stories, read scripture and discussed it, that sort of thing. The rules of the group made our discussions confidential, and there are some stories about him, or stories that he told, that I'd love to share--but I never got his permission to do so.

Those of you in small groups know what kind of special relationship forms between people who regularly pray for each other. We didn't always hang out together, but I always knew he was there. Some corner of my mind paid attention to where he was in chapel (along with the rest of the members of the small group), and at the prayers of the people it was a kind of anchor in reality to know that I was praying for Bill, that wise-cracking dude right over there, rather than some random name off the list of alumni and donors. He'd occasionally come down to my study desk in the basement of the library and keep me company.

Bill got to seminary by a roundabout route. Somewhere around age 30 he got himself elected to the Oklahoma state legislature, served a couple of terms, and then switched parties and lost his next election. Never really left politics altogether, in the sense of politics being the realm of people trying to make a difference in the world and make the world a better place. After he left office, he did a number of things. Worked in advertising for a while, if I remember right, and then was a consultant of some kind. Learned to fly somewhere along the way. He earned at least four academic degrees, including a doctorate (jurisprudence, I think), read Hebrew fluently and enthusiastically, and had a depth of connection to literature that astounded me.

He was in his late 50s at seminary, and you always knew that he was working from a slightly different paradigm than everybody else. Thought he was smarter than the professors (and was in some cases), concentrated on things differently than the rest of us, and was driven by different motivations. I remember him as a passionate reader and scholar of Hebrew and the old testament.

The thing many of my classmates are going to remember was one of his signature moments... his senior sermon. Now, you gotta have a little background on this to understand it. At the seminary in Austin, you get one chance, exactly one, to preach to the community in chapel. Usually it was Thursday, which was the weekly Eucharist, and was your garden-variety Episcopalian sermon: 10 to 12 minutes (maybe 15 at the outside), a few Biblical references, a carefully politically correct joke or two...

Well, old Bill preached on a Wednesday, if I remember right. Wednesday's service (Choral morning prayer, at least a couple of years ago) was usually about 25-30 minutes long, followed by lunch, followed by committee meetings. There's not usually a sermon. Well, that day we had a sermon. Boy did we. Bill preached for, I kid you not, I timed it, forty-seven minutes.

Bless his heart, it was the worst sermon I ever heard in the chapel. It had about four false endings, where people started to pull out their prayer books and shift in their seats, ready to move on... and then he kept talking. At one point, he pulled out a prayer shawl and a zucchetto (skullcap), put them on, and began to chant from the Torah. He rambled, he gushed, he told stories from the prophets, he told stories about his own life. And I'm sitting there the whole time, rear end long ago fallen asleep from the uncomfortable chairs, loving him because he's my prayer partner and wanting to wave the white surrender flag and tell him to shut up at the same time.

My feedback to him was this: in the end, it was basically an eight-word sermon with 46 minutes of commentary. Somewhere in the middle of that rambling and gushing over the beauty and richness of Hebrew scripture and tradition, he said:

I beg of you, drink from this well.


I actually agreed with him on that, and I envied his depth in the scriptures and his knowledge of Hebrew. At one point, he had me convinced that I should wear a zucchetto as part of my normal Sunday clerical attire. (okay, most of you, quit laughing.) I talked myself out of that, mostly because I didn't want to have to explain it a thousand times. (Also because I landed in San Antonio, and the combination of cowboy boots, a clerical collar, and a zucchetto is bizarre.) But hey, I just might go get one and wear it in Bill's honor one of these days.

He died, along with four other people, when the plane he was flying crashed. he was heading from Tulsa to my old home town of Sugar Land, but never got out of town. The funeral is next week, but I'll be at clergy conference. I'll have to let my friends Ron and Stephanie and Reid be my tears for me.

Give rest, O Christ, to your servant with your saints,
where sorrow and pain are no more,
neither sighing, but life everlasting

the other side of the world

So, here I am in Zanzibar. And here's a quick blog post, just because it's cool to post from the other side of God's world.

We saw the sites today of some caves where slaves were kept before being sold at the markets, and the cathedral built on the site of the slave market. I was invited to preside at worship and preach there--talk about intimidating! I'll get through somehow. God is good.

This afternoon, I'm engaging in a little sabbath time with my host and friend Masalakulangwa.

Can't download pictures, unfortunately, but I'll post a couple when I get home.