Ancient Truth | Modern Sound

This is my last week as a Brit.  On Wednesday I go through the swearing in ceremony and become a citizen of the United States.  Growing up in the seventies my view of America and what it was all about was defined by TV shows like “Starsky & Hutch” and “Dallas”.  It is a sobering thought to think that these are the prisms through which the world looks into America.  My dad, big Tam, liked America too.  But it was the land of Western stories of Louis L’Amour that he liked.  My dad was born too late – he would have been Rooster Cogburn in another life – he was born to be an upright man who would bring order from chaos, sixgun in hand.  Because of him, to this day, I can’t resist (who can) a good Western.  Despite being brought up in a Scottish mining village, me becoming an American seems more like predestination than a cosmic fluke.

 Even so, this has been a good last week to be a Brit.  The Brits had their best Olympics for 100 years.  Actually, exactly 100 years, because it was in 1908 in London the last time Great Britain was this great at the Olympics.  Even that is a bit of a cheat however.  In London in 1908 the British team fielded over a third of all competitors and there were a few Olympic events that year where the entire field was British.  So, I think it is fair to say that 2008 Beijing is the greatest ever Olympics as far as Great Britain is concerned.  On reading the stories of the athletes in the newspapers I am struck with a change in the athletes which I think represents a change in the culture.  We in Britain, especially Scotland, have been famous for the plucky effort which comes up famously short of success.  As a nation, we flatter to deceive.  It seems that these are not the Brits of 2008 however.  These current Olympians have a decidedly different outlook.  One cyclist was described as an athlete who “doesn’t do silver”.  Another went all out on the last corner and fell going for gold rather than settling for silver.  Getting nothing was better than just settling for second best.  I like them.  They are winners and they have a lot to teach us.  Just this week I was in a meeting at work where one of my colleagues suggested that the bid for work we had submitted was “competitive”.  Trying to emulate the British Olympians I told him being competitive wasn’t good enough I wanted to win.   On Wednesday all this will change in a way I am not sure of.  I will in some way stop being British and start being an American.   Since 1991 it has been like being a stranger in a strange land as I wander around trying to figure out the customs of another place and another culture.  I have lived in Houston and I still have not worked it out – maybe that is the point of course.  Maybe you only figure it all out at the end like the crime novels I like so much.  When I think about it becoming an American is a bit like becoming a Christian was for me.  I was close enough to the church as a kid to kind of know what it was about in a peripheral way but there was still a lot that I wasn’t familiar with.  I had to learn (am learning of course) to be a Christian.  I couldn’t count on those vaguely remembered stories from Sunday school; I had to make them my own.  I had watched the church in action and admired it but I only understood it when I became involved in it.  I didn’t know what forgiveness was until my wife forgave me.  I didn’t know what righteousness was until I saw it in the life of my mother in law.  And so, in living and working amongst other Christian people I gradually came to know what it means to be a Christian.  No Damascus moment for me.  Instead more like Pilgrims Progress, a journey yet to be finished. So, over my years living in here my view of Americathrough the lenses of “Dallas” and “Starsky & Hutch” has obviously changed.  I have learned to deeply appreciate Jefferson and Washington and the constitution.  The constitution, for example, applies to all who set foot in these lands, not just citizens.  That seems to me to point to how the framers of the constitution knew that this would be a special place that would offer unique solace to those who arrived here.  It did then and still does.  Do you know of another document like this – I don’t.   

A long time ago - in fact before there was a Great Britain - Jon Donne the English Elizabethan poet and Bishop wrote a poem to commemorate his marriage to Ann, the love of his life.  He called her a “new found land” which was the phrase of course that was used to describe the new continent across the sea.  He, a Brit, found in Ann what I found in Karen, a place of beauty, mystery, and danger, untamed by any man.  Like America.  So, this week I move from alien to citizen, Brit to American.  Thanks for the open arms. 

People who know me have heard me say stupid things - in fact people who don’t know me have heard me say stupid things too.  One stupid thing I have said is “I don’t read fiction”.  I spent about 10 years after seminary reading books on sociology, politics, and philosophy, telling anyone that would listen that fiction was over-rated.  As they say in London - what a complete pratt!   Thankfully I have moved on. 

The last few years my reading preferences have drifted towards detective or crime novels.  I have read dozens of them in planes whose primary value is not that they take you to another place, but that they are practically the last remaining refuge where no email can penetrate.  So, at five hundred miles an hour, in my aluminum cocoon, separated from the rest of humanity by my Bose Quiet Comfort headphones, I read books of crime and murder and the cops who track down the killers. 

I have read dozens of these books and (as far as I am concerned) two things separate the good from the sea of pap this is the world of the paperback book.  The first is a clear sense of place, of geography.  In the best novels you have the sense that the characters in the story could exist no other place and seem to grow out of the landscape like a local tree.  The second characteristic is a moral world where right and wrong, good and evil, are real choices to be wrestled with every day and the consequences of which create the world in which the characters live.  My friend Alan said to me the other day that he could not see how I could extract some Christian theme from the world of detective novels but, obviously, I think he is wrong.  These books deal in their best moments with the ultimate choices and ultimate mysteries of our life as human beings.  I appreciate this isn’t “Crime & Punishment” we are talking about here, but we are also talking about a busy guy reading on planes, not a student of Russian literature.   As my dad, big Tam, would say, “Horses for Courses”.

For example, Joseph Wambaugh’s books about the Hollywood station don’t really get to the moral high ground.  But they make it to my list because the dialogue is so good and so utterly So-Cal.  I haven’t read his early books which are supposed to be his best but “Hollywood Station” and “Hollywood Crows” just zing with the local language.  For example, the conversations between the surfer cops - ”Flotsam and Jetsam” as they are known to colleagues - seem to say nothing and everything at the same time.  It is writing at its best and reading these books is not a bad way to spend $8.  http://www.amazon.com/Hollywood-Station-Joseph-Wambaugh/dp/0446401242/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218988821&sr=1-3

Ian Rankine’s Inspector Rebus is out of place anywhere other than Edinburgh.  In his travels to London or just 40 miles to Glasgow he is not at home, the proverbial fish out of water.  But amongst the labyrinth of old Edinburgh, whose shadows hid Burke & Hare, Rebus is in his element.  Scotland’s beautiful capital has a darkness within it that Rebus fights against but at the same time embraces.  Rebus is dark, melancholy, with an inkling of the religious that is more than superstition, and as such is a good archetype for Scotland as a whole I think.  But, like the Scots in general, Rebus search for a moral center often ends with too many whiskies at the Oxford bar.  As the character has developed over close to 20 books the religious conversations with his friend the priest have been left behind and Rebus’ sarcasm has descended through cynicism to fatalism; a journey that, again, seems very Scottish to me.   At the end of the journey Rebus still feels to me like a man waiting for redemption, waiting for the key that will unlock the door to the secret of good and evil, waiting but no longer hopeful.   Again, hard to say these books aren’t worth the money http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url?%5Fencoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=Ian%20Rankin  And, of course, you can pick up many of them at Katy budget books.

The characters in Wambaugh’s books are brilliantly drawn, real people.  Yet they are shallow.  Rebus, on the other hand, is burdened with the knowledge of good and evil, a burden we were warned in the garden we could not carry, which is why I enjoy the Rebus books more.  There is a real human struggle at the heart of them that reflects our struggle to do right in the face of evil. 

The third and last of my favorites is James Lee Burke and his stories of detective Dave Robicheaux.  Set in New Orleans and New Iberia to call these detective novels does not do justice to their power as literature.  Louisiana lives in these pages like another - essential - character in the story.  Moreover, while the stories are of crimes committed and solved the overarching scope of the novels is almost biblical in its dimensions.  These are stories of living and dying, heaven and hell, crime and punishment, all set on the banks of the Bayou Teche.   I recently read “The Tin Roof Blowdown” which is set in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.  http://www.amazon.com/Roof-Blowdown-Dave-Robicheaux-Mysteries/dp/1416548505/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218994885&sr=1-1   Nothing I read at the time made me want to weep and pray for our own forgiveness more than the descriptions here of a biblical like judgement crashing down on the communities that Robicheaux polices.  The book does not spare us from our own sinfulness, everyone in the book is broken in some way or another, including a political system that failed the vulnerable amongst us.  And yet there is a rhythm of redemption that Robicheaux seems to have found in his wife, the former nun, and in the mass he takes regularly and accepts as a mystery he will never understand. 

I enjoyed all of these books immensely but, in closing, a word of caution.  All of these books are for adults and they are not Christian books.  They do not even deal directly with Christian themes.  Yet, to answer my friend, the reason a Christian can profit from these books is that the books talk about issues that are real to Christians and are set in a real, if fictional, context.  For example, the reality of good and evil; the mystery of redemption (is it possible?); the morality of vengeance; etc. etc. are all powerful themes in these books.  For the Christian however there is a depper train of thought possible and a different conclusion perhaps to the dilemmas these characters face.  So, for us, it is obvious that Wambaugh’s characters need the moral structure of the Christian faith to help them make the decisions they are faced with in their work.  It is also obvious that Rebus will not be at peace until he unburdens himself at the feet of Jesus.  And finally, it is reassuring to the Christian that in the face of a biblical deluge of judgement and destruction the mystery of Christ’s presence with us can help us understand, forgive, and work towards redemption. 

I am an old guy, getting older by the day, and feeling it.  Never more so than when I am travelling like the last few days.  “Travelling Man” was the “B side” of a 7 inch vinyl extended version of Free’s “All Right Now” that I owned when I was a teenager.  It was important then to know these details and own the picture version of the sleeve which, of course, I did.  For some reason known only to my deepest psyche I hum that tune when I walk through every airport, railway station, or car rental place.

Today I travelled from Atyrau, Kazakhstan, to Moscow, Russia.  I have much to be thankful for.  I said a prayer this morning, knowing I would be travelling on Trans Aero Airlines, that I would not spend the 2.5 hours silently praying that the Russian airplane would hold it together for one last trip.  When the bus took me out of the check in area and drove me to the plane my prayers were answered better than I could have expected.  There was a Boeing 737 waiting to take me to Moscow.  Believe me, a Boeing 737 is a winged chariot fit for a god compared to some of the planes I get to fly in.  I rested easy.  (more…)