What Do You Want?

Tony Reinke Christian Hedonism

stalker

James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (2016), 27–29:

What do you want?

That, we’ve seen, is the question. It is the first and fundamental question of discipleship because you are what you love. But buried in this insight is an uncomfortable realization: you might not love what you think.

This discomforting epiphany is at the heart of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece, Stalker. The genre hovers between noir thriller and dystopian science fiction. Set in environs that at times evoke Cormac McCarthy’s The Road but at other moments feel like The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the “plot” (such as it is) follows three men on a journey: Professor, Writer, and Stalker, who serves as their guide.

As we begin, the destination is shrouded in mystery and intrigue, but eventually we learn that Stalker is leading these men to the Zone, and more specifically to the Room within the Zone. The Zone has the eerie feel of a postapocalyptic oasis, a scene where some prior devastation has left ruins that are now returning to nature, cultivating a terrible beauty, a kind of “bright sadness.”

The Room is what has drawn them here, what has led them to follow Stalker’s promises. For in the Room, he tells them, they will achieve their heart’s desire. In the Room their dreams will come true. In the Room you get exactly what you want.

Which is why, when they are at the threshold of the room, Professor and Writer begin to get cold feet. Geoff Dyer captures the scene in his remarkable book about the film, Zona.

They are in a big, abandoned, derelict, dark damp room with what look like the remains of an enormous chemistry set floating in the puddle in the middle, as if the Zone resulted from an ill-conceived experiment that went horribly wrong. Off to the right, through a large hole in the wall, is a source of light that they all look towards. For a long while no one speaks. The air is full of the chirpy chirpy cheep cheep of birdsong. It’s the opposite of those places where the sedge has withered from the lake and no birds sing. The birds are whistling and chirruping and singing like mad. Stalker tells Writer and Professor — tells us — that we are now at the very threshold of the Room. This is the most important moment in your life, he says. Your innermost wish will be made true here.

Here we are. This is the place where you can have what you want.

Who wants to go first?

Professor and Writer hesitate because it dawns on them: What if I don’t know what I want? “Well,” observes Dyer, “that’s for the Room to decide. The Room reveals all: what you get is not what you think you wish for but what you most deeply wish for.” A disturbing epiphany is creeping up on Professor and Writer: What if they don’t want what they think? What if the desires they are conscious of — the one’s they’ve “chosen,” as it were — are not their innermost longings, their deepest wish? What if, in some sense, their deepest longings are humming under their consciousness unawares? What if, in effect, they are not who they think they are? Dyer captures the angst here: “Not many people can confront the truth about themselves. If they did they’d run a mile, would take an immediate and profound dislike to the person in whose skin they’d learned to sit quite tolerably all these years.”

Many of us can identify. If I ask you, a Christian, to tell me what you really want, what you most deeply long for, what you ultimately love — well, of course you know the right answer. You know what you ought to say. And what you state could be entirely genuine and authentic, a true expression of your intellectual conviction.

But would you want to step into the Room?

Art To the Church; Art From the Church; Art Facing the Church

Tony Reinke Art, Music, Musical Worship

Harold Best

Harold M. Best is a musician, composer, and was for more than twenty-five years the dean of the Conservatory of Music at Wheaton College. He is the author of two important books: Music Through the Eyes of Faith (1993) and Unceasing Worship (2003).

Best explains the three postures of Christians and art in his lecture “Arts and Christianity,” using a triad I find helpful.

1: Art to the Church (artist as servant).

These are the Christian artists called to produce simple, accessible liturgical art. It is art humbled low, to wash the feet of Christ and congregants to the point that art becomes part of a synthesis, a servant of the Word aiming for robust corporate worship.

“Art for the church does not just mean art made expressly for use in corporate worship,” he clarified to me in a later email, “but for the church, individual by individual, at all times and all places, in its continuing worship.” This first category expands to include non-congregational music, like worship concerts and Christian radio.

2: Art from the Church (artist as prophet).

This is Christian art made for the unconverted. The Christian artist goes out into culture “as a rampant outspoken prophetic invader,” so loaded with creativity, she breaks out into the world, pushing herself to the edge of her imaginative originality, and with the expectation that such art will lead to getting knocked around a bit.

In this category, Best told me, Christians “should be more cutting-edge evangelistic in their public work instead of replicating or paralleling the stuff that is regularly experienced in corporate worship.”

3: Art facing the Church (artist as steward).

Just as the Church produces music for the unconverted, the world produces music facing Christians. This inescapable reality does not call for retreat but for Christian engagement, for believers to face culture squarely in order to learn and to appreciate art from non-Christians, “to learn, to copy, to adapt, to paraphrase, to reject, to debate with, and above all, to understand the difference between content and intent.” We debate the intent of the world’s art, while at the same time celebrating and learning from the artistic products themselves.*

“Christians should not keep soaking up Christian music all the time,” says Best, “they should be engaging in all kinds of music, for this is their responsibility in entering into that last part of the triad.” In fact, he divulged, “I tire a little of Christians being hooked on Christian radio, when they should be engaging with the world in what it is thinking, saying, singing, and promoting.”

Art to the church, art from the church, art facing the church — a helpful triad to distinguishing art forms, and what Christians are to do with them.

Sources and notes:

Harold Best, lecture, “Arts and Christianity” sojournchurch.com (MP3).

Harold Best, email to the author (May 25, 2016).

* Best’s neutrality of art form, here assumed, has been disputed by Ken Myers in “Music and Meaning: Some Forms Are Better than Others,” 9marks.org (April 23, 2014).

Hughes Oliphant Old (1933–2016)

Tony Reinke spurgeon

hooIt’s been reported that Hughes Oliphant Old passed away today at the age of 83.

A personal friend of his, Travis Fentiman, reported on Facebook: “Dr. Hughes Oliphant Old, affectionately known as Scotti, one of the word’s leading historians of Christian, reformed worship, and a friend, went to be with our Savior at about 10:30 this morning.”

Another friend on Facebook said, “his wife, Mary, and his children, Hannah and Isaac, were with him at home when he peacefully passed into glory.”

UPDATE: Old’s funeral will be held on Tuesday, May 31, 11am at Providence Presbyterian Church (West Lebanon, NH), followed by interment at Christian Street Cemetery in Wilder, VT.

Old brought to life the history of Christian worship in a way few (if any) will ever match, notably through his magnum opus, a seven-volume series straightforwardly titled: The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church. It is a massive series he launched in 1998 and completed in 2010 at a length of 4,500 pages.

His life and work was a precious gift to the Church and will be for future generations. Old will surely be missed. Here’s a list of individual volumes in his masterful history of preaching and preachers:

Writer’s Block and Research

Tony Reinke Writing

Sebastian Junger is a former war reporter, bestselling author, and award winning documentary filmmaker of Restrepo. He made a couple of key points about non-fiction writing recently on Tim Ferriss’s podcast, worth transcribing and sharing here:

Really there two kinds of writing: fiction and non-fiction. And the first step, if you’re a journalist — which I consider all non-fiction should be — the first thing you have to do is your research. You are writing about the real world and you need facts and quotes and interviews and all that. So my writing process really starts out in the world as I’m researching a story or in a library or on the Internet or wherever.

Fiction writers are trying to re-imagine the world in a way that’s never been done before, and reproduce it on the page and have people enter this fictional world and be riveted by it. And that’s where inspiration comes in, and that’s where you really have to be at your desk every morning because you never know when the ‘creative gods’ will speak to you.

But for a journalist, it’s much more like carpentry. You get the lumber, get the bricks, you build the basement and start putting it together. There’s a process, and a lot of inspiration in the actual language that you use. But it’s much more procedural than I think fiction writing probably is. . . .

I sit down with coffee and write for a couple hours. And if I feel that I’m blocked in my writing — I just can’t write the next section, I keep re-writing it, and it doesn’t work, and I get stuck — it’s not that I’m blocked, it’s that I don’t have enough research to write with power and knowledge about that topic. It’s not that I cannot find the right words, it’s that I don’t have the ammunition. I have not gone out into the world and brought back ‘the goods’ that I’m writing about.

You never want to solve a research problem with language. You never want to become such a fine writer that you can thread the needle and get through a thin patch in your research because you’re such a great prose artist.

Source: “Lessons from War, Tribal Societies, and a Non-Fiction Life” (May 22, 2016).

Personal Update

Tony Reinke .Reading Digest

hands

It’s been a busy month of content to process, so I figured I would post some updates on my recent writings, recordings, reads, and listens.

In the last month, written or recorded:

As my smartphone book wraps up in the next month, my summer reading plan is coming together, a little more heady than normal (but not by much):

Current reading/writing tunes:

New Goodreads book reviews (here) for:

The Story of Job and the Making of Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Tony Reinke Fyodor Dostoevsky, Job

fyodor

Joseph Frank makes this note in the inaugural volume of his widely celebrated literary biography, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849 (1979), 54:

Many years later, when Dostoevsky was reading the Book of Job once again — as he had done so many times before — he wrote his wife that it put him into such a state of “unhealthy rapture” that he almost cried. “It’s a strange thing, Anya, this book is one of the first in my life which made an impression on me; I was then still almost a child.”

There is an allusion to this revelatory experience of the young boy in The Brothers Karamazov, where Father Zosima recalls being struck by a reading of the Book of Job at the age of eight, and feeling that “for the first time in my life I consciously received the seed of God’s word in my heart.”

In other words, it is quite possible Zosima’s childhood experience is autobiographical for Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In light of that point, here’s the reference in The Brothers Karamazov, Pevear/Volokhonsky translation (2002), 291:

Mother took me to church by myself (I do not remember where my brother was then), during Holy Week, to the Monday liturgy. It was a clear day, and, remembering it now, I seem to see again the incense rising from the censer and quietly ascending upwards, and from above, through a narrow window in the cupola, God’s rays pouring down upon us in the church, and the incense rising up to them in waves, as if dissolving into them. I looked with deep tenderness, and for the first time in my life I consciously received the first seed of the word of God in my soul.

A young man walked out into the middle of the church with a big book, so big that it seemed to me he even had difficulty carrying it, and he placed it on the analogion, opened it, and began to read, and suddenly, then, for the first time I understood something, for the first time in my life I understood what was read in God’s church.

There was a man in the land of Uz, rightful and pious, and he had so much wealth, so many camels, so many sheep and asses, and his children made merry, and he loved them very much and beseeched God for them: for it may be that they have sinned in their merrymaking. Now Satan goes up before God together with the sons of God, and says to the Lord that he has walked all over the earth and under the earth.

“And have you seen my servant Job?” God asks him.

And God boasted before Satan, pointing to his great and holy servant.

And Satan smiled at God’s words: “Hand him over to me and you shall see that your servant will begin to murmur and will curse your name.”

And God handed over his righteous man, whom he loved so, to Satan, and Satan smote his children and his cattle, and scattered his wealth, all suddenly, as if with divine lightning, and Job rent his garments and threw himself to the ground and cried out: “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return into the earth: the Lord gave and the Lord has taken away: blessed be the name of the Lord henceforth and forevermore!”

Fathers and teachers, bear with these tears of mine — for it is as if my whole childhood were rising again before me, and I am breathing now as I breathed then with my eight-year-old little breast, and feel, as I did then, astonishment, confusion, and joy.