Saturday, September 20, 2014
Scotland: Success, Sorrow and the Sin that Separates.
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
A Fair Hearing
Yes, I'm aware I'm lampooning this even as I write - I get the irony, but I'm doing this because the desire to be heard is a strong one and it's one of many which has fired up this referendum in the first place.
I don't want to write a series of arguments or clever points to get you to swing around to my point of view, however. I'm sure you've already made up your mind, or, if you haven't this late in the game, then you're probably not going to be swayed at the last minute by meagre ramblings.
I'm also not here to congratulate everyone on their political engagement, to point out all the wonderful things the referendum debate has brought into the public consciousness, to pat everyone on the back in advance of the final whistle and remind us all to be sportsmanlike in victory, or defeat.
I'm not condemning either of those actions, either. We all have a right to speak up about the things we believe in and are passionate about and there is much truth to the positive, 'we're all friends here, right?' posts as well.
No.
All I want to do is express myself and, primarily, I mean how I feel.
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
Lent: One Month Later
Sunday, May 18, 2014
Truth and Fiction (A Short Story)
Truth and Fiction
Friday, April 25, 2014
After the Passion (A Psalm)
Last night, in the midst of all this I felt the desire to write a Psalm. I have never tried before, nor have I really wanted to, but I started it right then and worked on it again this morning. It is probably still a work in progress, but I wanted to share it, for, in writing when feeling low and in focussing on God as I did so - in crying out to Him and praising Him - I find my heart very much lightened. I hope it might be a blessing to others also.
One final thing. Psalms have a tendency to be melodramatic and, it has to be said, so do I. That tendency has got a lot worse this week - leaving me feeling guilty every time I express myself - but here, in the context of a Psalm, it seems only a magnification, not a distortion. I hope you read it as such.
Why so disquiet within me, oh my soul?
My enemies outnumber my friends.
They are locusts stripping my fields,
They are an army of ghosts sent to haunt me.
Their helmets shine like gold,
Their raiment like the sun at noon,
But they hide faces pocked with decay,
Their flesh is the flesh of the grave:
To rally to their call is to die.
Why have you let them come to me, oh Lord?
Why, when victory seemed so close at hand,
When I basked in the glow of your triumph,
Was it snatched away, so cruelly?
For I have seen your Holy city, Lord,
I have tasted the wine of Zion,
Like honey on my lips,
Like nectar on the tongue.
Your people welcomed me
With olive branches and laurels,
With fruit and fragrant wine.
We sang and danced and rejoiced together.
My cup was overflowing with joy.
But it did not last, Lord.
Like a dream, it vanished in the morning,
Like a fox it ran with the dawn
And I was left alone.
Alone, I face this army in the desert.
Was it merely a mirage?
Did my mind deceive me?
Or are these ghosts the deception,
Sent to waylay me on my pilgrimage?
For I am not alone.
When the one who holds the banquet
Walks beside me?
The Lord will be my shield.
He will be my armour and my sword.
His word will be the light to guide me,
The path which I must follow.
We march for home,
For the city on the hill,
Where the banquet yet awaits
And the doors are thrown wide
For the return of her Princes.
I will sing to the Lord,
And put aside the vanity that haunts me.
For the triumph was yours, oh my God,
The tears,
The sweat,
The blood,
But I rejoiced in the gift
And not in the giver.
[Selah]
It was not a dream,
For I have not yet awoken.
The city was not a mirage,
For the desert is the lie.
You have prepared a place for me,
Oh Lord, my God,
And though phantoms assail me,
Though I am faithless and weak,
You will not give it to another.
Why so disquiet within me, oh my soul?
For the Lord is my rock and my salvation
And I will sing,
Though worlds collapse around me
And tears wear gullies in my cheeks.
I will sing.
Sunday, April 20, 2014
Resurrection Day!
Easter has come and that means Lent is over. I can return to Fiction. I no longer have to deny myself the way I have for the last month and a bit. This is fantastic news in many ways, and yet, apart from reading a chapter of a story a friend is writing (and cruelly posted just after I had started my Lent - kidding!) I haven't really availed myself of the opportunity. I doubt this has anything to do with piety. It's mostly because the day has been busy enough with things of its own, and it's also because I'm in a really weird place emotionally
I'll tell you the story.
So, a little over six months ago I committed to joining the Aberdeen Passion 2014. I've mentioned this before. In that six month period, as well as having ups and downs in 'the real world' with the arrival of a beautiful baby girl, the departure of a much loved cat, and a fair degree of uncertainty over what I should be doing with my life, I bonded with my fellow cast-members (some again, some for the first time), grew into a part I wasn't, in many ways suited for, and fell in love, once again, with acting out the events of that first Holy week.
And then came Lent. I started this blog and set aside something that meant a lot to me in order to take up things I knew needed to mean more. I learned a lot, I changed a little and all the while there was this new family who were (some of them at least) following that journey alongside me. They weren't the only ones, nor were they the most important family in my life by any means - but they were welcoming and accepting in a way those you weren't actually raised by, or with (or married to) rarely are and I saw them more and more often as the weeks went by.
And then there was last week. A sudden, final, furious burst of activity to get the Passion play finessed and ready for the stage: the final rehearsal in our old rehearsal space on Palm Sunday, the technical rehearsal in the venue on Thursday night, the full dress rehearsal on Friday afternoon and then, one after the other, with only one night's sleep in the middle, the three performances. What a ride! What a rush! What an incredible experience to share with these wonderful people I had come to love - without even really knowing many of them. And it was all to the glory of God... and yeah, we had a bit of the glory too. How could we not with people telling us after each performance how great they thought the whole thing was, how moved they were, how one actress had set them off crying, how another actor had really made them think about that character in a new way. It was a profoundly intense... and in a sense, profoundly intimate experience to share.
And then it was all over.
It had to end, of course. Today's Easter Sunday and we wouldn't want to perform it again on such an important day. We have our own families to spend time with and share the joy of Jesus' resurrection all over again. And we carry on in the blessed afterglow of all that we've experienced too - such an amazing high, such wonderful new insights into God's love for us, such potential in the friendships we have made!
But there's a hole there now. For a while life was sparkling and strange and just so unbelievably fresh, that to return to life afterwards, especially knowing that work - that world of dreary normality, where I don't really even know who I am any more - is just around the corner.
I've had my ups and downs all day: celebrating Easter, and yet mourning the Aberdeen Passion - because that's what this is... it's grief. Grief at the loss of a one-off experience. Grief at the separation of relationships. Grief at the ending of a dream.
But this isn't the end. If there's one thing I've been reminded of time and time again this weekend it is that that Easter Sunday nearly two thousand years ago was not the end! It wasn't the end then and just because we've finished one way of telling about it, it's not the end now. The same saviour we crucified on stage, the one our characters hugged with joy at the end - He was actually present with us the whole time we were performing. We could tell. We could feel Him strengthening us. We were encouraged by Him when things got difficult. It was He who brought us all together and it is in His nail-scarred hands that all those relationships and experiences rest.
This isn't just the day when we celebrate Jesus' resurrection. This is our resurrection day too. If we believe in Him then we died with Him and were raised with Him. My life is constantly being renewed in Jesus Christ!
So, I may be struggling a bit just now, but I know that my life was not that one play, and nor was my experience of its glorious subject, my Lord and saviour, Jesus Christ, the man who was God, who bore the sins of the world, who is the one and only way to the Father and the gateway to eternal life - He is with me now and He knows the plans he has for me, for all of us. I can't wait to see where He takes me next.
God bless you all and may you all have a Happy Easter!
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Passion
As I said before, I am not bold and courageous in most things and I certainly lack Peter's walk-on-water faith, even at my best. What I can relate to, however, (and many others would be with me) is insecurity. I've been over this before - I wrote a whole post on it - but being able to see and understand the problem, and even seeing the solution in the form of God's good grace, does not make it simply vanish. I am still an inherently insecure person the vast majority of the time, and so I can relate to this in Peter. I can relate to his uncertainty about who he really is, why he is being used by God the way he is and how he should follow through when things get rough.
So, this is my hook for playing him: Peter the bold who crumbles when his Master is taken from him, because his identity was hanging on who he thought Jesus was, rather than who Jesus was revealing himself to be all the time. My Peter is somewhat stripped down, thought that's not to say simplified, necessarily, but I've focussed on this aspect of his character over some of the more traditional elements. There is still some bravado, some rushed, thoughtless action - I can't change the story, even if I wanted to - but my performance hangs on Peter's internal life, the emotional landscape he, perhaps, doesn't really understand, the thoughts he holds onto and those he cannot yet grasp.
I don't know how much of that will show on stage, but I hope it will inform all that does. In the end it is the best that I can do. I'm simply not a good enough actor to portray Peter any other way. I can only do my best with the talents God has given me and hope that, by his Spirit it is enough. I know, also, that I'm not at the centre of this play. The Passion is not about Peter, but he is one of our roads in to understanding it and so I take the role very seriously, praying that God will use it to reveal something of Himself to the audience this weekend.
And that brings be to the other thing I want to examine, just very briefly. I mentioned praying for faith, and have pointed out on numerous occasions that I am not bold - I lack confidence in myself and can be very shy. So why, you might ask, are you acting on stage at all?
It's a very good question. I was plagued by stage fright when I was younger - I remember once imagining myself having heart attack on stage at a school prize giving event and seeing my (somewhat rotund, and rather posh) headmaster looming over me to say "Get off the stage, George, you're blocking the procedure" - and even this weekend past standing up in front of my church to give an announcement was utterly terrifying, but here's a funny thing. The last time I was involved in the Aberdeen Passion I was not really nervous at all. There are still a few more days until the first performance and I do have a very strong sense of just how much bigger my part is this time around than last, but even so I'm still not really nervous.
Some of it is probably just because of how well and often we've rehearsed. I cannot doubt that I know my lines and what I need to do with them. Some of it is likely because of the great team of people I have the privilege of working with - the Passion family as we call it, because, in so many ways, that is what we have become and I treasure the time we get to spend together working on these productions. But, there is more to it - of that I'm sure.
If there is a miracle hidden within my testimony, it is this: God has transformed me from a timid, socially awkward youth into a timid, socially awkward man - who can do whatever He asks of me, even in front of an audience, when He wills it to be so. Praise the Lord, because without him I'd be hiding in cupboard somewhere right now!
Tuesday, April 08, 2014
Imagine
Imagination. The one thing all three books above have in common, aside from the fact that I chose to read them (and simply because they were there, on my bookshelf, rather than because of any other particular agenda), is that they each make appeals to the human imagination in the way they look at our Faith and the world around us. McGrath calls for the use of the Christian imagination in how we look at and respond to the natural world and the sciences which explore it, as well as in how we look at our theological orthodoxy and relate it to the world. Lewis demonstrates the power the imagination has to deceive us in our understanding of both God and those we love, but equally that it can be transformed by our faith to help us know God and others more clearly.
I have touched on this topic before, of course, in my defence of fiction and it's ability to be used as an explanatory, analogical, allegorical and inspiring tool for exploring the ideas of life and faith, but that's not all the imagination is used for and so this is a look at the Christian imagination as whole and why we should spend more time developing it within our fellowships.
Imagination is frowned upon by a number of Christians and this is seen to be something mirrored outside of the Church as well. Imagination is something children have, an element of play. It is not something which a mature adult should spend much time worrying about. I commented on this attitude before, citing C. S. Lewis' response to such thinking. This time I shall quote him more fully:
But as I said, there is more the the human imagination that its power to create and be absorbed in complete fictions. The imagination is also a very necessary part of our rationality. We do not simply use our imaginations to think of things that are not, we also need to use it to explore ideas that are, but which we cannot perceive with our usual range of physical senses. The best example of this can be seen in the modern sciences, which are often exploring elements of the natural world which can be observed and recorded using various pieces of technology - things which most assuredly do exist - and yet things which the human eye cannot see, the ear cannot hear, the fingers cannot touch and manipulate, and so on. Scientists, however some might baulk at such a suggestion (though I'm sure most would not) must use their imaginations if they are to understand such phenomena better, determining how they work and how they relate to other such phenomena.Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
Equally, Philosophy and Theology have engaged with the human imagination for thousands of years, exploring concepts which are real, but not tangible, which can be conceived of, but not seen. The idea that the imagination is a fanciful, even shameful thing, seems to be a more recent one, tied together with the increase in fantasy fiction since the nineteenth century and, before that, to the puritan reaction against fiction full stop.
So what does it mean for Christians to use their imaginations? I cannot claim to have a comprehensive doctrine to hand, nor can I cite much in the way of Scripture to help develop one. All I can say is that Christians need to use their imaginations to see the connections between what they believe and the reality they see, as well as to expand those notions to see how they relate to what others believe and how best to share that testimony with them. This can, of course, involve our creative gifts, given to us by God to exercise for his glory, but it can just as easily be used in how we explain our faith at a purely theological, spiritual or experiential level.
Romans 12 verse 2 says this:
Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will his - his good, perfect and pleasing will.Paul is talking about a spiritual transformation which enables us to see the world in a profoundly Christian way, but just because it is a spiritual process does not mean it does not have physical applications. Seeing the world itself is one such application, how we think about the world and how we process our understanding of it are similarly physio-chemical processes in the brain. The spiritual and the physical are not - as the Greek metaphysical worldview taught - completely separate realms, but interacting realities. Our spiritual transformation affects us physically. What Paul is speaking about, then, involves a transformation of our thinking minds - our rationality and our imaginations. McGrath mentions this several times when proposing his new approach to Natural theology, suggesting that the Christian vision of reality is a transformed one and one which allows us to see the world in a certain way. That doesn't just extend to the natural sciences, but to all areas of life and ultimately even to how we view our faith itself.
So, I'm not suggesting we need to invent theologies or visions of God to pass on to others, but we must use all of our minds as much as all of our hearts, strength and souls when we love God and the transformed Christian imagination is very much a part of that process. We should not stifle it, but within the guidance of scripture and the Spirit, let it help us explore and express our beliefs and the wonderful deeds and personality of our gracious God.
Until next time, then, go well!
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Insecurity [Grace] Identity
Another week of Lent, another blog. I thought, in fact, that I had run out of things to say and, since I have not yet finished the book I'm currently reading, I didn't even have a review I could muster to fill this (admittedly irregular) posting schedule. As always seems to be the case at the moment, however, something occured to me - I would suggest 'was given to me', but I don't want to claim any authority I do not have - and I realised I have another post in me after all.
But first, the usual update: no fiction consumed, several more sermons listened to, prayerfulness increasing (ish), a greater knowledge of God's presence gained , an increasing eagerness to talk about faith and issues surrounding it growing within me... This isn't to say, however, that it has been easy, or that I haven't struggled with the temptation to break my Lent, or skip a bible reading opportunity; nor is it to say that all those positive fruit seen above abound every moment, or even every day. Sometimes this feels very stale. Sometimes God still feels distant. Sometimes I just don't care as I should. This is, sadly, normal for humans. It shouldn't be, but then that's why we need God's grace, which brings me neatly to my topic for today - or it will be seen to have done, by the time I have reached my conclusion, because we'll start, as we almost always do, not with grace, but with a moment of human weakness.
I'm part of a group of young men in my church who are working together, under the oversight of our Minister, to learn and to improve our preaching skills, or rather, handling the Bible in a number of different, public ministries. Part of this has involved doing a three week stint of leading the morning services - welcoming everyone, introducing hymns, praying and generally aiding in bringing the congregation worshipfully before God.
I have not yet done this, ostensibly because of the birth of my daughter and the time commitment having a small baby entails. One morning this week, however, when the minister mentioned it to me and noted that it might be difficult to find a block for me with my Sunday School commitments, I let slip the real reason: "Also, it's terrifying!" I said.
Now, standing up on front of people is always going to pretty scary, I understand, but as I contemplated this afterwards, I realised it wasn't primarily stage fright I was suffering from, but a much deeper insecurity about church leadership. I don't feel like I'm qualified to lead a congregation of Christians in anything. Now, putting aside for a moment the relevance of a concept like qualification with regard to Christian ministry, why do I feel this way?
I think there are a number of factors involved, and if you'll forgive me going on about myself like this (I'm the only person I know will enough to use so an example, after all), these are the ones I think are the biggest issues:
1) I'm acutely aware that I don't come from a Christian background and, despite the fact that I became a Christian when I was only eleven, I didn't really get heavily involved in a church community until I moved to Aberdeen to go to university. Even though that was over eleven years ago now, I still feel rather new at this.
2) I have a somewhat more liberal approach to faith and politics than many of my brothers and sisters in the congregation. I'm still very much an evangelical, and newspapers would happily label me as a conservative Christian, but I believe that the church should not legislate the lives of non-Christians and so take a back seat at times in some of the more controversial debates of the day.
3) I have a scientific background. Even before I became a Christian, I thought myself to be a kind of scientist and used that as an excuse not to listen to what my Christian friends were trying to tell me about God. Once I was on the other side, however, whole other issues came up, most notably the ongoing Creation vs. Evolution debate, which hit me hard, and left me feeling rather lonely, during the evolutionary biology parts of my Zoology degree. I have since reconciled science and the Bible to my satisfaction (mostly), but I still feel a sense of separation from many I worship with when I wonder how they'd feel about my position on these issues.
4) I am a geek. I love sci-fi and fantasy, video games, graphic novels, and so on. I've kinda touched on this before and it might not sound like much of a barrier, but in my mind, knowing that I don't share the secular interests of most of the rest of my fellowship further adds to my sense of myself as 'outsider'.
Ignore, at this stage, whether or not I might be right about any of this and just imagine how I might then feel to lead any group of Christians in worship, prayer, or studying the word of God and you begin to see what kind of terror it is that I've been experiencing.
But if you're one of the people who have been shouting at the screen by this stage you'll already see why I need a radical change in my perception of the situation. All of the above presupposes several things:
1) That all kinds of spiritual leadership require qualifications beyond a saving faith in the triune God. Yes, there are helpful theological qualifications and there are gifts and talents bestowed and developed in the believer by God, but if He sends you, then you go. Many biblical figures questioned their fitness to be leaders when God called them (Moses is the typical example) but God didn't call them because of their fitness, He called them because He knew what He would do with them and that it was good.
2) That personality traits, political views, scientific understanding, matters of conscience, hobby choices, intelligence quotient, imagination or lack thereof and any number of other supposed identity markers matter in the the grand schemes of the Kingdom of God. Yes, we're all individuals, and yes what makes us different is both part of God's gloriously diverse creation and a cause of no small amounts of frustration and strife between believers, but neither the believer, nor the church, acquires its identity from any of these things.
Our identity is found in our trinitarian God: God the Father, Jesus Christ His Son, our Saviour and the Holy Spirit, our comforter, counsellor and advocate. The Church is united to each other and to Christ and that means we can put aside our differences in his presence when they would threaten to separate us.
3) That it really matters what others think of me. Given the above two points, I need to keep reminding myself that though others opinion of me can affect my witness and leadership, it should certainly not hinder my attempts at it, especially within the church. I do not present myself, but point to God. If someone doesn't like the way I do that, or some other facet of my being, all I can do is keep pointing to God. "Don't look at me, " I must shout, "look at Him!"
And this brings me back to the start of all this, the thing that holds all those points together, and which should be foremost in our minds when we deal with other believers. God's good grace. It is by grace that we are saved to be united with Christ as part of His Church, by grace we are called to serve and by grace given the gifts to carry out that calling. There is nothing of us in that save what God gave us in the first place, for we are His creatures, His children.
And we must try to treat other believers with that same loving grace, knowing that it is at work in them as in us and whatever our pasts, personalities, politics or pastimes, we would not even be in the Church without the grace of God. There but for the grace of God go I, after all.
And so to my terror. It is wrong. It is a sign of a lack of trust in God, of an insecure worldly way of thinking that has no place in a life lived in Christ. I must put it behind me and step up to the calling that has been made, to the increase of God's glory and the diminution of the self. I know what I need to do, I just pray for the courage and commitment and, above all else, the grace - all from God - to carry it out.
Until next time, go well.
Friday, March 21, 2014
The FAILblog
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Meditations on the Abyss
Saturday, March 08, 2014
Fiction, Lies and Parables
So, there was a lot I wanted to say in my last post and I think I got the majority of it onto the page, but there are still some important things I wanted to talk about in more detail. Foremost of these in my mind the last few days has been the place fiction actually plays in my life and thinking, why I thought I should give it up for Lent and yet also why I believe it is a really important part of human experience and something Christians should be less dismissive of and more participatory in than they often are.
Firstly, an update on how my Lent had progressed so far.
For three days I have successfully avoided reading any fiction and have spent my mornings feeding my daughter to the dulcet tones of my minister preaching on Song of Songs and Luke's gospel. I have been reading and enjoying John Jefferson Davis' 'Meditation and Communion with God' and have spent a good bit more time aware of the presence of God in my life.
I have not, however, had much time to do any actual meditation on the word of God, or spent much time in prayer and my daughter's current feeding habits have often distracted me from the thrust of the morning message. (She has taken to wriggling, flailing, screaming, spitting and pouting rather than take her milk in an orderly fashion - I wonder if she misses the TV being on?) Any free time I have had has been taken up with other distractions like sleepiness and procrastination. The sinful nature exerts its presence once again.
But there have been encouragements. As I said I have been more aware of God's presence this week, which had affected my behaviour to some degree. I've been less afraid of telling people about my faith as well, going so far as to be accused (light heartedly) of being a Bible basher yesterday evening. I've also seen unexpected fruit from my previous blog post, with evidence of others being encouraged and a sense of having been part of something God has been doing this Lent. I hope that can continue, because that's the real point, isn't it? We participate in God's mission and, at the same time, we participate in the divine nature, being in communion with the Father and the Son through the Spirit dwelling within us. Though it's sometimes hard to believe (and harder still to remember after we've experienced it) it does not get better than that.
I pray that God will continue to reveal himself to me throughout this Lent as I try to focus more and more on him. But how about you? Are any of you doing something special for Lent this year? How's it going? I'd love to hear about it in the comments (assuming they are working...) and add them to my prayers also.
Now: fiction.
Fiction has always been a big part of my life. For a long as I can remember I have loved stories and have taken whatever opportunities I could find to stretch my imagination, acting my favourites out and starting to craft my own. This is something I've never really grown out of, and whilst some would, suggest this kind of imagination is childish and that we should put such things behind us as we mature, I'm reminded of C. S. Lewis' succinct commentary on 1 Corinthians 13:11. To paraphrase, whilst he agreed that we should cease to be childish, one of the ways we do this is in no longer trying to be so grown up! Besides, Paul was using physical maturity as an analogy for spiritual transformation and he did not go into specifics about such things as childlike imagination.
Paul himself was one of the most imaginative writers of the New Testament. Yes, he was writing about genuine spiritual realities, but they were still things unseen and which we may use our God-given imaginations to get our heads around. Paul was very skilled at this and his imagery and analogies can help us alot to understand the spiritual transformation we have undergone as Christians.
So, fiction and imagination have been a huge part of my life. From books, to comics, films to TV series, video games to the stories I write myself, I have continued to surround myself with stories, to the point where my mind is saturated with them. They help form how I think, how I relate ideas, one to another. Some of this is good, it gives me a set of tools to help me understand God, the world and other people, but it can also get in the way. It can be a huge distraction from God at times and it can affect my priorities.
I'd been thinking about this for a while, but found I was really not eager to give up any of this (such things are never easy, after all) and I was convinced that God wanted me to stay in touch with this side of my life for various reasons. Besides, it seems to me that it is a huge part of who I am.
But my identity is in Christ first and foremost, and whatever God's plans for my imaginitive gifts and sensibilities, it's clear that I need to seek him first. This is the crunch point we all must hit from time to time. The difficult part of being a Christian - recognising when we're wrong and God is right. So I saw Lent coming and realised this was an opportunity to break some habits, reassess them and attempt to focus on God as I ought.
But does that mean fiction is bad? Have I given it up forever because it was a serious problem? I don't think so. How I approach it has to change, but that's because how I approach God has to change. It's a paradigm shift of priorities, not a condemnation of fiction itself.
"But isn't fiction a frivolous thing?" you might ask. People do, especially of genre fiction, my personal preference. One Korean student I met once was particularly sceptical, wondering why I would want to experience any other reality than the one God had laid before me.
Whilst there is an element of escapism in fiction (not that that is necessarily a bad thing, in my opinion - all enjoyment we have is a kind of escapism from the corrupting effects of sin in the world, a glimpse of God's good gifts) I don't think that's its only, or even primary purpose. I believe fiction, in any form you might find it, to be one of the most powerful tools the human mind can use. With it we can manipulate reality for others in ways which are not otherwise possible, and so we can open up whole other avenues of experience, even worldviews.
"But isn't it just another way of lying?"
A Christian writer friend of mine once wrote "let me lie to you" in the introduction to one of his works, having qualified it with precisely why he thought you should. Good reasons all! I now believe he was wrong, however. He wasn't lying in his story at all. Fiction is not inherently a deception, benevolent or otherwise, unless it is presented as truth. Otherwise it is merely creation, an expression of that part of the image of God in ourselves.
How else to explain the Parables? Jesus was not telling true stories, complete with those oh-so irritating 'what happened to them all afterwards' bits which, of necessity, accompany every 'true' movie ever. No. The Parables were not direct retellings of actual events, nor did his audiences think they were. They were made up stories, told with intent, to make a point. Jesus was not lying by telling them, he was expressing truth through fiction, through imaginary images (based in reality though they were) that he had created for the purpose.
That, I believe, is fiction at its most perfect, most sublime, as is to be expected of the Son of God, but humans now are creating beautiful things all the time, with varying agendas and purposes. Some of it is dangerous and we do need to use our discernment, especially when recommending it to others, but there is much of it we can learn from even if we don't endorse the end ideas.
I find this especially true in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy. The Church has never really embraced genre fiction (to the extent it has embraced any fiction at all). Indeed, many Christians have been told to avoid it completely, often for the reasons outlined above, or because of misconceptions about what the stories are actually about. As a consequence more and more genre fiction is being written by those with a non-Christian, even anti-Christian agenda!
Despite this genre fiction is becoming increasingly mainstream and has embedded itself into popular culture. Its ideas are seeping into the public consciousness, but since it often discusses concepts like human destiny, religion, philosophy, meaning and purpose, then it actually offers us a starting point for talking to people about these things - much more so, in fact, than a lot of traditional fiction and even more so still than most people's every day experience in the West.
What I'm saying is this: we are missing an enormous opportunity by dismissing this stuff outright. We should be engaging with it, arguing it with the people who love it and creating it so that the secular messages aren't the only ones out there.
It is for this reason that I don't plan to give this up indefinitely, though I would hope to return to it with a different sense of priority and purpose. I am also still writing fiction at the moment, even though I've stopped reading and watching it, because I believe I'm exercising a gift God has given me. I need to practise and I have readers for whom giving up would not be a good witness, but rather a lack of consideration.
My writing is a long way from fulfilling the purposes I've listed above, but there are glimpses, I think, and God always shines through the cracks that are left open to Him. My prayer this Lent then, one of so many, is that I'll grow in Him and, with the Spirit within me, will get a bit closer to his intent for these gifts.
That's all for today, then. Go well, however you're approaching this season, and may God complete in you all His purposes for your good.