Findings

This will be the best 3 minutes and 23 seconds of your day. It’s the story of an adoption. I heard it on the radio last Friday on my way to the chiropractor, and it made me into a serious driving hazard — DWC (Driving While Crying). (It reminded me of this segment a few years ago: different stretch of road, but similar subject, and similar power.)

This is how God loves.

I’ve seen Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card mentioned on a few blogs, and I got the impression that it’s part of the canon, required reading that I missed somewhere along the way. I don’t read sci-fi very often; I really enjoyed Lewis’s space fantasy, but that’s about the only example of the genre I can think of that inspires an enthusiastic response. (Movies are a different story.) Now I have a second example. Plot spoilers follow as I try to come to terms with this book, so if you don’t want plot details, read no further.

“Ender,” this book’s protagonist, is 6 years old at its start. He lives in a future version of earth, where the population is tightly controlled, and where preparation for decisive battle against the “buggers” — an insectoid species that has attacked earth twice and been defeated — is of paramount importance. Ender Wiggin is a “third,” an extra child okayed for the Wiggin family because their genetic promise warrants the risk in hope of producing the next great military commander. Turns out that Ender is gifted enough to be chosen for training, and this tale recounts the chilling process of transforming him into a victorious commander.

It’s a book that constantly turns paradigms on their ear. Its multifacetedness and compression of meaning are nothing short of poetic. For starters, there are the terms used. The “buggers” are depicted as the enemy of humanity, but when we meet Ender, he is himself “bugged” by military officials who monitor his every thought and reaction through a small device sewn in at the base of his skull. It’s a common practice for promising “thirds” in this future earth. So who’s the real bugger? Ender’s military training exemplifies a process of isolating and manipulating and watching him in ways that destroy any possibility of true freedom. “Human beings are free except when humanity needs them,” his supervising colonel tells him. When we meet the buggers at the end of the story, and learn that they are ant-like, controlled by a single mind that sends its impulses through all of them at once, we can’t miss the irony. They are only defeated because humanity has used a similar tactical approach to Ender’s education. The culminating battle, in fact, is fought without his even knowing it’s real; he thinks he’s just playing another video game, not commanding a real battle.

Then there’s Ender. His name is really Andrew, but his sister’s nickname for him has stuck, and fittingly so — he is the ultimate “ender” in the story, for he destroys a world. His name has meaning on more than one level. Same with the “game.” Most of Ender’s training takes place through games: mock battles, simulators, video games. What better way to teach tactics? (Similar to Wargames, now that I think of it, though this book was written several years before that movie came out.) But the true game is being played with Ender’s own mind, a process he’s aware of to varying degrees at varying times. Who is playing with him? His military trainers, his brother Peter (a “moral sinkhole,” we’re told), even his sister Valentine, who loves him but argues that the only freedom comes from learning how to play the game yourself and manipulate others to your own advantage. (There’s a prescient foreshadowing of the internet, and the power of the blogosphere, embedded in this 1977 tale too.) The end of the story reveals yet another player who has been influencing Ender’s mind, and the surprise turns the decisive trick on the reader. The story plays with our own assumptions in so many ways that the real game is the novel itself.

Not being a sci-fi connoisseur, my liking for the book boils down to its success in shedding light on my non-sci-fi life. It takes place in a world where some of our assumptions have run their course and borne fruit, and tackles themes relevant to the world outside the bounds of the story. For instance, what are the limits of your perception, and how are they blocking your understanding? One of the skills Ender needs to learn is how to fight in a gravity-free battle room, and the major share of this is mental — how you think about gravitational orientation. But of course the various forces vying for control of his mind — along with his own emotional experience and self-concept — inspired me to reflect on what currents, inside and outside, may be shaping me, and how. How free are we? And underlying the whole story is the additional question: Is it worth it? Is the preservation of the species, seemingly a noble aim, worth what has been done to Ender? Are the authorities here reliable, either morally or in terms of having correct information? 

Another question: what is the nature of children? None of the heroes of this novel are over 12 years old. Card’s dedication page refers to “how young and how old children can be.” If children are humanity at its purest, what’s the essence of humanity? Are we more good, or more evil? Ender doesn’t want to be a killer, but he keeps finding himself in situations where he has to do serious harm to others to survive. The reactions of others are telling too; he’s a savior of sorts, but this inspires hatred rather than love. One of his most fascinating insights comes after four years of training, when he tells his sister that he hates himself because

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them – 

You beat them, his sister finishes for him. No, destroy them, Ender corrects: “I make it impossible for them ever to hurt me again. I grind them and grind them until they don’t exist.” It’s a penetrating commentary on the power love confers, and the different variables that influence how that power is wielded.   

One reader said of this book that it changed her way of understanding reality. I think I would agree. It plants seeds and questions, not just through its exploration of certain themes, and not just through its creation of a convincing fantasy-world that sheds light on this one, but through the experience of reading it and finding ourselves in Ender’s shoes, having our vision shaped by another’s controlling intelligence. I’m not sure whether I’ll plunge into any of the sequels right away, but this book leaves its reader with plenty to mull. Embers from it will continue glowing in my mind for some time to come.

I seem to be a person whose life makes more sense when it flows through the fingers into a keyboard. This week, my preferred keyboard hasn’t been the computer, but this one:

The piano was tuned the other day, and though I think of myself as not having much of an ear, tuning always functions as a summons to my musical persona. Maybe it’s the piano tuner’s two predictable songs, “Till There Was You” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” They fill the house, and as soon as he leaves I dash downstairs and start playing myself, searching for luscious overtones.

I’ve been playing a variety of tunes: jaunts down Memory Lane with Scott Joplin and the Sonatina Album, worship songs and hymn arrangements, a few old jazz tunes. My favorite piece for now is Liz Story’s “Things With Wings” from the album Solid Colors. I find it very mysterious the way my musical self can lie undisturbed until I sit down at the piano, then it inflates instantly, knocking everything else out of the way in all of its insistence and abandon. I’ll play a piece again and again until I hear what I’m wanting to create, and the time passes without registering at all.

It has a beneficial effect on my family too. When I sit at the computer, my older daughter refers to it as “playing around on the computer,” and both girls eventually start misbehaving behind my back. “When you’re on the computer, we feel like we’re in charge,” she told me once.

But when I’m at the piano, they dance. They make requests, their top three being ”The Maple Leaf Rag,” the theme from Man from Snowy River, and my own jazzed-up version of “Rubber Ducky.” If it happens to be after they’re tucked into bed, they drift off quickly to sleep instead of lying awake chattering quietly to their stuffed animals. I’ve heard that the way to someone’s heart is through their stomach, or their sense of smell. But experience seems to point to the ear as the pathway to the soul.

Here’s the view this week, after some serious rain and another weeding:

And here are a few closer looks. The peppers are coming along nicely:

And the carrots, depending on your vantage point, may be doing well too:

Apparently Mr. Chipmunk thought so, because he’s made a splendid meal out of precisely half of them (so far he’s eluded the surveillance video, but I have eyewitnesses):

But the cucumbers are flourishing:

As is the lettuce:

The peas remind me (for some reason) of Martians, but they’re beginning to flower:

And we have our first few cherry tomatoes:

Blurry, huh? I’m still figuring out my camera, as you can see from this photo of Mr. Munch, who let me get much closer this week:

I have no idea why the flash didn’t go off, but I thought the effect was kind of interesting anyway.

This week I wrote about living on the Marcellus Shale for Poetry Friday, and the local discussions about extracting natural gas. Our oil dependency in general is troubling, but it’s truly a helpless feeling to be conservation-minded and have no control over how the resources are extracted right in your own back yard. The property lines drawn on the surface have little meaning when we’re considering the effects of methods used to reach resources underground. I’m not anti-natural gas, but there are intelligent ways to extract it that leave the land productive and respect its inhabitants. I wish I felt more confident that a forbearing intelligence would be guiding the process.

I can’t control the mining industry, but I can grow a garden. I can produce some of my own food, and work with my own hands to take care of a small patch of dirt in a way that enriches it rather than depletes it. It combats the powerless feeling I have reading the paper sometimes. 

If you want to take a look at some other gardens, or share a post about your own, pop on over to Cloudscome’s Sunday Garden Stroll.

It’s Poetry Friday, hosted at Semicolon today.

I have a love-hate relationship with Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. I love the generosity of its conception of love, but I also agree with the criticism that it entangles love with something darker and more abusive.

This poem, “The Wishing Tree” by Kathleen Jamie, offers a slightly more optimistic picture:

I stand neither in the wilderness
nor fairyland,

but in the fold
of a green hill,

the tilt from one parish
into another.

To look at me
through a smirr of rain

is to taste the iron
in your own blood;

because I bear
the common currency

of longing: each wish
each secret visitation…

The rest of the poem is here. I’m thinking of this poem today as part of my ongoing anxiety over living on the Marcellus Shale, supposedly an incredibly rich vein of natural gas the extraction of which is now being feverishly discussed in newspapers and village meetings. How will the huge amounts of waste water from drilling be disposed of? What chemicals do drillers pump into the ground to soften the rock? Why are they exempt from disclosure of the additives they use? How is it that they went so far as to divert streams and spill diesel fuel at several sites in the state next to us before anyone noticed? 

As lawmakers determine whether to streamline the regulatory process without having answers to many basic questions, I’m reflecting on how we treat the land like the wishing tree at best, the giving tree at worst. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say “they” – the gas industry, the municipal government, the landowners eager to drill and make a quick fortune. But it’s “we” that will experience the long-term effects. There’s already a large plume of TCE from an old spill spreading through the ground a few miles away from us, requiring ventilation systems to be installed in many homes. I was hoping the wisdom of experience just might take root before my children live through (and breathe through) more such consequences.

My goal when I started homeschooling was to cultivate the love of learning in my daughter. By streamlining instruction so that it’s one-to-one, and cutting wasted or dead time, I thought that I could make school something she would look forward to.

That hasn’t happened. She doesn’t wake up eager to hit the schoolbooks. Sometimes other mothers seem to have children who are really enjoying the school part of homeschooling, and I feel like a massive failure. As my husband said the other night, “She loves learning, but doesn’t like school.” In other words, the same dichotomy exists in homeschooling as existed in her public school experience. I haven’t succeeded in meeting my goals.

As I’ve thought and prayed through this, I’m starting to see it differently. “I’m a failure” is an easy conclusion to come to. It’s my default mode. But there are other ways of seeing this issue, too.

Personality type. For one thing, is the love for school I see in some other kids always the product of their mothers? Or is it also a product of their personalities? When I look at my daughter (7), I see someone who’s not at all a passive or compliant person. I don’t mean that she’s in rebellion, or cops an attitude. I mean that she’s filled to bursting with ideas all the time. It’s been this way since the beginning, when she was quite happy in the playpen and could amuse herself handily there. She never wakes up in the morning wondering, “What will I be taught today?” Instead she wakes up with a multi-point agenda, a list of things she wants to make, do, experience. School — an agenda imposed from without — interrupts this. It doesn’t matter if the materials are dull or ingenius.

I’m not an unschooler. And I accept the Charlotte Mason life-as-learning idea. But I’m not about to give up all structure in our schooling. That strikes me as a way of turning a potentially major strength (being an idea person) into a potentially major weakness (being a person who either doesn’t respect others, or doesn’t recognize that there’s a body of knowledge outside herself. She doesn’t know it all, and has to learn to learn.)

Looking around me, in my own world and the larger world accessible to me through reading and other media, I see plenty of people who didn’t like school and grew up to be major influencers and leaders, people of genius that end up blazing the trail that many lovers of school ultimately follow. Maybe I need to reformulate my understanding of “love of learning” so that it doesn’t insist on “love of school.” Can I be okay with my daughter being who she is? Can I accept that her room is always tilting toward a state of entropy, and teaching her to maintain order is a constant effort? Can I accept that every night as I tuck her in she’s making plans for what we’re going to do tomorrow with the Model Magic, not the math workbook? Can I celebrate the fact that as she’s learning to draw, she’s always eager to get through the lesson so she can draw horses? If so, then maybe I can begin to see that she has an absolute passion for learning — even if it isn’t there for the curriculum insisted upon by the State of New York, or for skills and knowledge in areas she’s not naturally attracted to.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t work to find the best materials possible to fit with our children’s learning styles. I’m just saying that it’s conceivable that even the best materials won’t transform certain kinds of people into lovers of school, and maybe, just maybe, that’s okay.

Making peace. I’ve been talking about making peace with her personality type. In reality, it’s also making peace with my own. I’ve spent a vast majority of my life in an academic setting, and went into homeschooling with the idea that I am a lover of school. I thought, “I will absolutely love teaching my daughter!”

Well, yes… and no. Truth be told, I love certain kinds of learning, much like my daughter. For instance, I have a doctorate in English, because I love to read stories, not because of generic love for school. I could never read a textbook to save my life, all the way through college. The number of pages my eyes have dutifully but disinterestedly plodded across over the years, reading the words while my mind wanders, retaining nothing — it numbers in the thousands. I’m beginning to love and devour nonfiction, but only of certain kinds. I was put into accelerated math early on, but wasn’t interested enough to ever really stay on top of it. And I still remember my 7th grade teacher slapping my exam on The Hobbit down on my desk and saying, “It’s a good thing you can write!” Unspoken: “Because you obviously didn’t read it.” Nope. Didn’t. Not till much later in life, when I wanted to myself — and then I loved it.

Do I “love” teaching my daughter? Yes, on the “my daughter” part. I went into this in order to build our relationship, and I thought offering her my academic side (my “best side,” I believed) was a good way to do that. Our relationship is getting built, but not so much because of anything to do with the academics. It’s because when you homeschool there’s really not much left to hide behind; I have to face and engage with my children even in areas where I’m unsure of myself. It’s been great to begin reaping the rewards of that in our friendship.

But the “teaching” part? Not a thrill to teach first grade. No. (Such a relief, typing it out loud.) First grade math, spelling, handwriting, language skills? Pretty slow going. I do like history, as I knew I would going into it. And of course I love all the reading we do together, and feel absolutely delighted to see her develop the skills to take off on her own. I’ve also enjoyed feeding her interest in horses. I love some parts of it but not others — much like her. We study all of it, but we love parts. And once we love it, somehow in my mind that part sheds the category of “school.”

Revise the goal. Maybe I need to revise “cultivate a love of learning” as a goal, since when I say that I’ve seemed to mean “cultivate love of school.” Maybe it would be better to make the goal “encourage her creative energy while equipping her with skills and knowledge she needs.” Or… something.

I’ll find as many ways as possible to set that energy free in the context of academics, but in the end, the creative energy is the most valuable thing on the table. It’s the essence of who she is, the core from which most of her deepest satisfactions and accomplishments will flow. And yes, math and spelling are important in their way, but they’re not the heart of educational success. Far from it. 

Becky has a meme for this month’s Author Challenge:

What has been your favorite book that you’ve read for the Celebrate the Author challenge?

This is a hard one, because after only 6 months it’s hard to choose between The Black Cauldron and Frog and Toad Together. I’ve enjoyed Frog and Toad for the longest, so I guess I’ll go with that.

What has been your least favorite book?

No One Noticed the Cat, Anne McCaffrey. (I should have gone back to Pern.)

What one author or one book would you suggest to other participants?

The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, Chris Van Allsburg, because it’s such a novel idea.

Have you discovered any new authors along the way?

Not yet, but in the next 6 months I will. And I’ve learned new things about previously known authors.

Would you be interested in participating in this challenge again next year? Why or Why not?

I might be. If I did it again, I would change my focus so it would seem all new. This year I’m doing mostly children’s or YA books. If I did it again, I’d choose adult books, just to make it different. For some months I could choose the same authors; I learned this year, for instance, that Russell Hoban has written adult novels. I never knew that before reading about him for this challenge. Another idea would be to turn it into a mini lit crit course, and see what the authors have written about their artistic philosophy (since Becky’s gotten me thinking about Coleridge again!).

I bought this book on the strength of the excerpts in Bill McKibben’s Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job and the Scale of Creation. The translation was such a rich, vivid rendering of the poetry that I wanted an extended experience of it.

Turns out that Mitchell’s interpretive introduction was equally rewarding. Mitchell considers the work on literary terms, in the context of similar writings in other faiths and cultures. It seems to me that this gives his approach to the book the daring to confront some things I’d noticed, but that I haven’t seen addressed in commentaries on the book as a theodicy. (Not that I’ve seen many commentaries, so my experience doesn’t say much about the norm.)

For instance, what about the viscerally indignant response I have to God in the opening chapters, where he accepts the challenge from the accuser? Mitchell quotes Carl Jung, suggesting that the God of the opening pages is morally inferior to Job, and seemingly plagued by insecurity. He warns us not to take it too seriously though, since these pages are just a prologue to a tale that never revisits either the accuser or the court of heaven — a court that resembles that of “some ancient King of Kings, complete with annual meetings of the royal council and a Satan.”

And what about the difference between that opening picture of God, and the far more resplendent and terrifying one of the whirlwind later in the book? Mitchell suggests that there are two different realities at work, and the shift from one to the other is signalled by the shift from narrative to poetry. The prologue sketches out the Job of ancient legend, a legend that was probably in existence (says Mitchell) for centuries before this version was written. This is the Job James speaks of in the New Testament when he says, “You have heard of the patience of Job.” It bears little resemblance to the ranting, risking, “ferociously impatient” Job of the poetry. It’s as though the writer lays out the framework of the ancient legend, but then explores it in the entirely different and more searching mode of the poem, returning in the last chapter to the narrative to bring us back to earth.

I’ve said Mitchell’s approach is literary. Under that heading, he seems to approach the text through a mixture of psychoanalytical and archetypal criticism. For instance, he speaks at times in terms of ego and superego, suggesting that at the beginning of the book Job is full of anxiety, and his righteousness is motivated by fear. His “superego is riding high,” in Mitchell’s words. Similarly, different components of the story are viewed as externalized subjective states. The accuser, for instance, is seen as an embodiment of God’s doubts about Job. The whirlwind is seen not as an objective tornado, but a “cloud of unknowing,” a symbol of Job’s release of all he thinks he knows about God. (Elsewhere I’ve read an interpretation of the whirlwind as the bluster of the preceding arguments between Job and company.) Under the category of myth criticism is Mitchell’s reading of the book’s themes and imagery in terms of other myths. For instance, the descriptions given out of the whirlwind of the beast and the serpent Mitchell reads as “central figures in ancient near-eastern eschatology, the embodiments of evil that the sky-god battles and conquers at the end of time, just as he conquered the sea and the forces of chaos in creating the world at the beginning of time.” Another example would be his view of Job as a version of an ancient legend, such as one that existed in Sumer as early as 2000 BC. Beneath these ideas is a notion of a set of common archetypes underlying all myths.

I don’t have a problem with seeing this book in those terms… Its writer may very well have used artistic materials already in existence for a long time, but as scholars with far more authority than I have determined, he uses them in an inspired way to give inspired insight.

I could go on and on about the introduction. (Maybe I have already!) I love the discussion of Job’s friends, of their fear of contact with Job’s suffering, of their awareness that the dogmas they wield like an exoskeleton protect an inner lack of any real depth of understanding or experience. I love the discussion of the ending, and of the way the feminine figures so prominently in the form of Job’s daughters. But the most penetrating discussion has to do with the voice from the whirlwind, and Job’s response. Mitchell suggests that the vision of nature offers a worldview that

stands, of course, in direct opposition to the Genesis myth in which man is given dominion over all creatures. It is a God’s-eye view of creation before man, beyond good and evil, marked by the innocence of a mind that has stepped outside the circle of human values… What the Voice means is that paradise isn’t situated in the past or future, and doesn’t require a world tamed or edited by the moral sense. It is our world, when we perceive it clearly, without eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

This vision, Mitchell argues, has a transformational impact on Job. Rejecting the translation of Job’s response as groveling in the dust, he argues that when Job sees this vision, he doesn’t merely capitulate to God’s anger, or submit; he surrenders, and Mitchell’s translation of Job’s response reflects the difference. His discussion of the moral issues involved in his view of God’s response is challenging.

I come to the book with a different worldview and spiritual framework, but I felt that Mitchell gave me fresh insight. He is able to honestly wrestle with the text on its own terms because he has perhaps less of a stake in it; it seems he isn’t out to defend a pre-existing view of God — or at least, his set of pre-existing assumptions is different than mine. This book provides provocative analysis that serves as a good counterpoint to other commentaries, and a translation that seems to scrape all the varnish of the ages off this amazing, explosive poetry. (I should give some examples, but this post is too long already! You can see some excerpts of the poetry, and the intro in entirety, here at Mr. Mitchell’s site, along with reviews by more qualified writers.) Though I’m not ready to agree with the commentary on every point, it’s challenging and confrontational, and it explores aspects of the text that I haven’t seen addressed elsewhere. It’s well worth a read.

I’ve wanted to participate in Cloudscome’s Sunday Garden Stroll for awhile now, but I wasn’t sure my garden was going to amount to anything. We’ve planted tomatoes, cucumbers, red and green peppers, lettuce, peas, and carrots. This week my daughters and I waited anxiously for the heat wave to break, because weeds were getting the upper hand:

Then a string of thunderstorms brought the temperature down about 17 degrees in an hour, and we knew the next morning would be our chance to transform our small patch into this:

It doesn’t look that impressive, does it? I planted things in phases, and some of it hasn’t sprouted yet. My two daughters (4 and 7) worked with me, and the most enjoyable part was visiting as we crouched and groaned our way along. I played the part of the serious garden geek, talking enthusiastically about how much fun weeding is, and how good it felt to have cooler weather, and how easily the weeds came up, and how great it felt to be reserving all the water in the soil for the vegetables… and I discovered that I AM a serious garden geek. I meant every word of it.

The girls enjoyed getting dirty. It struck me how little opportunity they have to get legitimately, satisfyingly, deeply dirty.

Then we moved to the flower garden beside the garage for dessert. It’s shady and cool, and it didn’t have as many weeds thanks to the leaf mulch. The flower patch represents my mother-in-law’s touch. She’s constantly giving us art projects:

and driftwood:

And some of the original plants, including this enormous hosta:

I realize that in most sci-fi movies, it’s insects who take over the earth… but I’m keeping a wary eye on this hosta.

It felt good to get the ground back in shape and see that the first phase of planting is producing. Now we’ll be able to eat our salads without regard to the global food industry and its various bacterial ills.

That is, provided we can stay a step ahead of this guy:

Becky made an interesting comment on this post that has prompted some thinking. What’s the difference between the imaginative faith we practice in our reading of stories, and other kinds of faith?

Becky spoke of the “willing suspension of disbelief” we extend when we enter the imaginative world of a story. It’s a phrase from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, and it’s been used in other contexts than his original application to literature — even this year’s political campaigns (more’s the pity!). Originally it was part of Coleridge’s discussion of the origin of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge was to be responsible for the “imaginative” subjects (his view of the imagination being somewhat complex and exalted) and Wordsworth for the everyday subjects, giving them “the charm of novelty” by filtering them through the imagination. About his part, Coleridge writes: 

It was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

Poetic faith, procured for shadows of imagination. Coleridge in general gives imagination a religious role of penetrating to the heart of things. But my sense is that he’s referring to a very specific subcategory of faith in this passage, not applicable to every situation. Key to his conception of poetic faith are two qualities:

1. It’s a temporary dispensation, “for the moment”
2. It’s entered into willingly with the knowledge that the poem or story isn’t purporting to be “true” in the realistic sense. It may reflect aspects of truth in experience, but it’s not making any claim to have actually happened.

The faith of the Bible, on the other hand, is pithily summed up in Hebrews 11 as “being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” It’s a requirement for spiritual regeneration and the means of salvation. I despair of listing all its many aspects and references here. Suffice it to say that it’s not poetic faith… For one thing, as Hebrews 11 makes plain, it’s not mere suspension of disbelief, but active belief — belief that often requires great endurance and determination. “Suspension of disbelief” is the initial gateway in. For another, it refers to belief in something that makes real-world truth claims.

C.S. Lewis says that in the case of Christ, “the myth became real” — and this is a total reversal of Coleridge’s idea of taking actual “reality” and transforming it into an imaginative, mythic “reality” through an artistic process. It follows that the faith of the reader is an opposite kind of faith, too. Poetic faith is temporary; biblical faith is tough and lasting. Poetic faith is granted with the prior knowledge that the poetic vision isn’t claiming to have taken place in the daylight world of matter; biblical faith believes Christ marks the supernatural intervening in human history. It’s a different animal, not just because it has a different object of faith, but in its character.

I think imagination still plays a role in religious faith, though. It can be a function of memory that keeps the object of faith before you when times are dark. There are lots of admonitions to remember in the Bible. There’s also a great respect for artistic imagination. Why else do we have the symbolic, prophetic works, so dense in their imagery they make the most sophisticated symbolist poet look like small potatoes? Why else does the Bible have so many different literary genres? Why so much poetry? Why so many of the pleasing aspects of literature reflected in its formal features? We need to summon all the imagination we have to appreciate this expression of the ultimate creator and poet.