Book Club Questions for Birmingham

I was so pleased when I heard from an old friend, Joy Fargo, that she had read Birmingham and was introducing it to her book club. May her tribe increase! Having searched the internet for book club questions, she wrote her own and passed them on to me.

Here they are, in case you are interested:

1. Where were you in 1963 and how aware were you of what was happening in the Civil Rights movement?
2. How does the opening scene in the bus set the tone of the book?
3. The author uses alternating narrators to tell the story.  How does this affect your understanding of the events of the book?
4. How would you describe Chris, the main character?  Was he believable to you (taking into account the year this happened)?
5. What qualities do you see in Dorcas?  How did you respond to this character?
6. What is the significance of the names the author chooses for the main characters:  Chris Wright, Dorcas Jones, Rev. R.I. Wriggleshott, Charley (the guy from the bus)?
7. Dorcas keeps asking Chris why he is there.  Why was he there?  What role does her questioning play in the development of the story?
8. What was accomplished by Chris’ trip to Birmingham (both in regard to the Civil Rights movement and in his personal life)?
9. Chris’ wife Linda wanted him to stay in Berkeley and just fight injustices there.  Do you think that would have been a better choice?  What role does Chris’ wife play in this story?
10. Does the book describe a different “black sexuality” and “white sexuality”?
11. How do you feel about the portrayal of the leaders of the Civil Rights movement?  According to what you know, were they honorable?  Do you think the portrayal was fair?
12. How would you describe the intersection of the Civil Rights movement and the Christian faith?
13. Birmingham describes a black community that had varied responses to the Civil Rights movement. Which do you think was most idealistic? Realistic?
14. If you had been in Birmingham in 1963, how do you think you would have responded?
15. What injustice today might move you to action?

Eugene and Jan Peterson

It’s always a pleasure to hear from appreciative readers, but it’s a very special joy to get a letter from those I deeply admire. Eugene Peterson and his wife Jan gave me permission to quote this response to Birmingham:

We read this book together over the past two months and feel we have been immersed in a distant world that we had only known previously through the public media.

Jan was born in Birmingham and grew up with a few black playmates. Eugene grew up in an almost completely white world. He only knew one black person, who later became the best man in their wedding. Our only experience with Martin Luther King was listening to his “I Have a Dream” address at Morgan State University in Baltimore.

Which is to say that the world of racial discrimination and violence was almost entirely “black and white.” Tim’s novel introduced us to the enormous complexity introduced by the “movement”–moderate whites, moderate blacks, militant whites, militant blacks, the KKK, fearful blacks, naive idealistic whites. Narrated through the alternating first-person voices of a young black woman, Dorcas, and a young white man, Chris, the tension builds page by page.

We both feel that for two months we experienced the closest thing to being there without being there.

Birmingham is here!!!!

This is a big day for me! After years of waiting I can finally announce that my novel Birmingham is available!

It’s at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, in both ebook and paperback formats.

The novel is set in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963–fifty years ago, when Martin Luther King joined Fred Shuttlesworth in leading what is sometimes referred to as the children’s crusade. This was a turning point for the civil rights movement–children facing into the dogs and firehoses of the Birmingham police.

My story begins with a white seminary student who shows up to help the protests–penniless, naive, idealistic. He gets taken in by the movement and put to work, even though his presence is both illegal and dangerous. Chris Wright is his name, and as the protests advance over weeks of turmoil and frustration, he gets entangled with a faction of the Ku Klux Klan and with Dorcas Jones, a young, hard-nosed agitator.

I wrote the novel because I find these events so fascinating, and so easily forgotten. It was much more complicated than the view you will get from the 50th anniversary celebrations this May!

In many ways, our nation was on trial. We came through–but only because of the courage and vision of countless individuals, mostly poor, Bible-believing African-Americans. This was not a triumph of the elites. It was a triumph of the powerless and the despised.

Please buy Birmingham for yourself and all your friends and relations. If you like it, please write a brief review on Amazon (or any other website). If you have a blog, please feature the book. If you have a book group, please consider reading Birmingham together.

On Finishing

Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies ends this way:

“There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.”

Is there a better ending to a novel? I can’t remember one.

I am thinking about endings because I am finishing two long-term projects. I just sent off my manuscript for The Search for Adam, my book on creation and evolution. And, I am finishing up the publishing process for Birmingham, my novel of the civil rights movement.

Being a writer affords me the enviable experience of producing visible products. Like an architect or an engineer or an artist or a carpenter, I can point to something and say, “That is my work. It’s done, and I can move on to something else.” Such work offers satisfaction that is lacking in many other important occupations–doctoring, teaching, administering, repairing, manufacturing–that never really end.

I’ve now finished 28 books. and have become quite familiar with the emotions of the experience. You would expect exhilaration, but what actually comes is a mixture of satisfaction and letdown. It’s very like graduation. Celebration is appropriate, but a part of you feels empty and adrift.

Why the sadness?

–Because it’s done, work that you enjoyed doing and can never do again.
–Because it’s out of your hands, and its fate depends on others–publishers, booksellers, buyers, readers, critics. You delivered the baby and gave it up for adoption.
–Because the act of creation puts dreams into solid form, which never quite live up to what they could be. In the end, it’s just another book. Of which, one can’t help thinking, there are too many.

Most of all, sadness comes because you can’t carry joy forward. Contemplating your accomplishments is an extremely fleeting satisfaction. People who make an occupation of looking back are inevitably miserable company.

Human beings look forward. We need to feel that we are going somewhere. For only brief periods can we live in the present, as other animals apparently do without effort. Consciousness presses us to speculate about the future, to live toward whatever is coming to be.
Thus every ending is, for us, a beginning. Our minds and hearts are geared for what has yet to emerge. It’s just how we are.

That would be an extremely odd manifestation in a world that was stuck in sameness. It would be a terrible and crippling disability if our job was to fit into a universe that always ends in physical disability and death, a universe where the stars can only be extinguished one by one into eternal darkness. Is it possible we are suited for a different kind of world, one that offers an eternal prospect?

Wolf Hall

While I’m sitting waiting for the election results, I might as well plug a book that I have enjoyed more than any novel in the last decade. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker Prize (as did its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, which I haven’t yet read–I’m #22 on the library waiting list).

Wolf Hall is set in the time of Henry VIII, and closely follows the life of his counselor and henchman Thomas Cromwell. I love getting the history: the turbulence of the Reformation, the titillation of Henry’s multiple love affairs and marriages, the arrogant presumptions of the ruling class. But what makes the novel great are the language and the characterizations, particularly of Cromwell but equally of Anne Boleyn, Henry, and quite a number of other vivid personalities. I hardly knew historical fiction could be this great. I read the book once in late July and then–I had never done this before–sat back down and read it again in October. Truthfully, I could start again tomorrow. I found it mesmerizing.

Some Reading Suggestions

My son Silas is reading a book I had recommended to him, Blood Done Sign My Name, by Timothy Tyson. He was so enthusiastic I feel like telling the world all over again what a terrific read this is. It’s a memoir of the Civil Rights era in a small town in the South. What’s most unusual is that Tyson is a historian (he teaches at Duke) who went back and interviewed all the people he remembers from his boyhood. He brings vivid stories–memories of his father, a heroic Methodist pastor–and a very thoughtful and unsentimental historical awareness.

Also…. the cover story on the latest Sports Illustrated  (6/4/12) is terrific. Unfortunately you can’t get internet access unless you’re a subscriber, so you have to buy a copy. It’s worth it. [Breaking news: I found a link, which I've included above.]

To Cheat or Not to Cheat is about steroids use in baseball, and it follows four pitchers drafted by the Minnesota Twins and placed on the same Class A team in 1994. They all had similar size and abilities at the start, but one of them used steroids, and as a result grew bigger and stronger and made it to the majors. The rest washed out, though they made it to Triple A. The personal stories of all four bring the dilemma of cheating to life. I won’t tell you how it comes out, but it’s very much worth reading.

Something Fresh on Genesis

Last week in New York I met John Walton, a Wheaton College Old Testament professor who has a new way of reading Genesis 1-3. My initial response to his theses was mild skepticism. Too often when somebody claims that they see something in the Bible in a whole new way, the result is idiosyncratic or crotchety—interesting, but not particularly convincing or helpful.

As I listened to Walton, though, I grew increasingly appreciative. He’s a thoroughly conservative reader, taking the text with dead seriousness and not overruling anything from a modern sensibility—“We now know.” He reads Genesis in a very unfamiliar way, but in a way that fits into and fills out the rest of Scripture. It avoids “modern” controversies and fits an Ancient Near East context.

Briefly, he sees the first chapters of Genesis as speaking of the earth as God’s Temple. The “action” is the establishment of that Temple as a place for God to live, and human responsibility to serve God in that Temple. It’s not a material history of the earth, Walton says, but a “spiritual” history. (My word, not his.) It sets the stage for everything that comes out in the rest of the Bible.

He lays out the details on Genesis 1 in his book The Lost World of Genesis One. I haven’t read this yet. In the talk I heard and the subsequent discussion, he built on that material into Genesis 2. Very, very interesting stuff. I thought you might like to know.

Tough Questions and the Chronicles of Narnia: Part 2

The Difficulty of Change (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader)

This is the second set of notes from my friend Bob Prud’homme, who taught a class on Tough Questions using the Narnia Tales. This one comes from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and has to do with change. It’s an excellent stimulus for discussion.

 

Is real change possible? How can I change as a person? What is the role of God in change?

We all have things we would like to change. That might be something from my past that haunts me and interferes with my relationships. It may be a part my personality. However, change is difficult. The ubiquity of the “diet and weight loss” industry makes this clear.

Why am I the person I am? Is it heredity or environment? What is real change about? What is the role of God in change for a Christian? Can non-Christians not change in the way a Christian can? Why don’t I see much difference between change in Christians and non-Christians? These are tough questions.

As the jumping off point we are going to look at Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (VDT) and the change in Eustace Clarence Scrubb.

Plot summary: (from Wikipedia)

The two youngest Pevensie children, Lucy and Edmund, are staying with their odious cousin Eustace Scrubb. Edmund, Lucy, and Eustace are drawn into the Narnian world through a picture of a ship at sea. The three children land in the ocean near the pictured vessel, the Dawn Treader, and are taken aboard.

The Dawn Treader is the ship of Caspian X, King of Narnia, who was the key character in the previous book (Prince Caspian). Edmund and Lucy (along with Peter and Susan) helped him gain the throne from his evil uncle Miraz.

Three years have passed since then, peace has been established in Narnia, and Caspian has undertaken his oath to find the seven lost Lords of Narnia. Lucy and Edmund are delighted to be back in Narnia, but Eustace is less enthusiastic, as he has never been there before and had taunted his cousins with his belief that the country never existed.

At the second island they visit, Eustace leaves the group to avoid participating in the work needed to render the ship seaworthy after a storm has damaged it, and hides in a dead dragon’s cave to escape a sudden downpour. The dragon’s treasure arouses his greed: he fills his pockets with gold and jewels and puts on a large golden bracelet; but as he sleeps, he is transformed into a dragon. As a dragon, he becomes aware of how bad his previous behaviour was. Aslan turns Eustace back into a boy, now a much nicer person.

The book begins with a wonderful description of the main character in our discussion:

 THERE WAS A BOY CALLED EUSTACE Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. His parents called him Eustace Clarence and masters called him Scrubb. I can’t tell you how his friends spoke to him, for he had none. He didn’t call his Father and Mother “Father” and “Mother,” but Harold and Alberta. They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotalers and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on beds and the windows were always open.

Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on a card. He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools. ((p.1)

Eustace is turned into a dragon:

He had turned into a dragon while he was asleep. Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself. (p.75)

How does our society say that people change?

  The book VDT has been made into a movie. The movie does a very good job of following the book in most respects. But it makes a major alteration in presenting how Eustace became “undragoned.” In the movie the dragon scratches his chest, in a pointless gesture, and then Aslan roars, the dragon is catapulted into the air, fire sort of surrounds him and he falls to the ground a boy again. What is communicated by that sequence is that God does something dramatic and presto-chango we are changed. Our society likes the presto-chango process of change. Think of the before and after weight loss photos. Think about liposuction. Think about the infomercial that promises “abs of steel in only 5 minutes a day”.

Here is how the book describes his being “undragoned.” Eustace appears to Edmund and they have this talk:

  “I won’t tell you how I became a—a dragon till I can tell the others and get it all over,” said Eustace. “By the way, I didn’t even know it was a dragon till I heard you all using the word when I turned up here the other morning. I want to tell you how I stopped being one.”

“Fire ahead,” said Edmund.

“Well, last night I was more miserable than ever. And that beastly arm-ring was hurting like anything—”

“Is that all right now?”

Eustace laughed—a different laugh from any Edmund had heard him give before—and slipped the bracelet easily off his arm.

“There it is,” he said, “and anyone who likes can have it as far as I’m concerned. Well, as I say, I was lying awake and wondering what on earth would become of me. And then—but, mind you, it may have been all a dream. I don’t know.”

“Go on,” said Edmund, with considerable patience.

“Well, anyway, I looked up and saw the very last thing I expected: a huge lion coming slowly toward me. And one queer thing was that there was no moon last night, but there was moonlight where the lion was. So it came nearer and nearer. I was terribly afraid of it. You may think that, being a dragon, I could have knocked any lion out easily enough. But it wasn’t that kind of fear. I wasn’t afraid of it eating me, I was just afraid of it—if you can understand. Well, it came close up to me and looked straight into my eyes. And I shut my eyes tight. But that wasn’t any good because it told me to follow it.”

“You mean it spoke?”

“I don’t know. Now that you mention it, I don’t think it did. But it told me all the same. And I knew I’d have to do what it told me, so I got up and followed it. And it led me a long way into the mountains. And there was always this moonlight over and round the lion wherever we went. So at last we came to the top of a mountain I’d never seen before and on the top of this mountain there was a garden—trees and fruit and everything. In the middle of it there was a well.

“I knew it was a well because you could see the water bubbling up from the bottom of it: but it was a lot bigger than most wells—like a very big, round bath with marble steps going down into it. The water was as clear as anything and I thought if I could get in there and bathe it would ease the pain in my leg. But the lion told me I must undress first. Mind you, I don’t know if he said any words out loud or not.

“I was just going to say that I couldn’t undress because I hadn’t any clothes on when I suddenly thought that dragons are snaky sort of things and snakes can cast their skins. Oh, of course, thought I, that’s what the lion means. So I started scratching myself and my scales began coming off all over the place. And wondering what on earth would become of me. And then—but, mind you, it may have been all a dream. I don’t know.”

“Go on,” said Edmund, with considerable patience.

“But just as I was going to put my feet into the water I looked down and saw that they were all hard and rough and wrinkled and scaly just as they had been before. Oh, that’s all right, said I, it only means I had another smaller suit on underneath the first one, and I’ll have to get out of it too. So I scratched and tore again and this under-skin peeled off beautifully and out I stepped and left it lying beside the other one and went down to the well for my bathe.

“Well, exactly the same thing happened again. And I thought to myself, oh dear, however many skins have I got to take off? For I was longing to bathe my leg. So I scratched away for the third  time and got off a third skin, just like the two others, and stepped out of it. But as soon as I looked at myself in the water I knew it had been no good.

“Then the lion said—but I don’t know if it spoke—’You will have to let me undress you.’ I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it.

“The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know—if you’ve ever picked the scab of a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” said Edmund.

“Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off—just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt—and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me—I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on—and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I’d turned into a boy again. You’d think me simply phony if I told you how I felt about my own arms. I know they’ve no muscle and are pretty mouldy compared with Caspian’s, but I was so glad to see them.

“After a bit the lion took me out and dressed me—”

“Dressed you. With his paws?”

“Well, I don’t exactly remember that bit. But he did somehow or other: in new clothes—the same I’ve got on now, as a matter of fact. And then suddenly I was back here. Which is what makes me think it must have been a dream.”

“No. It wasn’t a dream,” said Edmund.

“Why not?”

“Well, there are the clothes, for one thing. And you have been—well, un-dragoned, for another.”

“What do you think it was, then?” asked Eustace.

“I think you’ve seen Aslan,” said Edmund.

One of the key elements of change for Eustace is the image of taking clothing off and putting clothing on. This is a theme through Scripture (Is 61:10, Gal 3:23, Eph 4:24)

“Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. …As God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.” Col 3:9-12

What is God’s role in the clothing process? What is our role?

What are the “new clothes” that are put on?

Why was the change process painful for Eustace? What does that mean for us?

Alcoholics Anonymous

I would argue that the most successful “change organization” of our generation is Alcoholics Anonymous.

Twelve Steps

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made a direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

The AA process of change is exactly the process that Lewis lays out. There is recognition of our inability to do it on our own, a submission to God, God removes our defects, and we are re-dressed in changed behavior.

Can someone change who isn’t willing to take this “God centric” view of the process? That is, can only Christians truly change?

The Bible talks about our life in Christ being a new creation.

Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come. 2 Cor 5:17

What does it mean that “old things have passed away; behold new things have come?” Are all my old temptations and failings “passed away?” Is this verse, then, not true? What changes, my nature or my “nurture?”

(See Col 1:26-27; Jeremiah 31:31-34; Philippians 2:12-15).

Annals of Government Regulation

Or, Have I heard this before?

Surely there never was such fragile china-ware as that of which the [manufacturers] of Coketown were made. Handle them never so lightly, and they fell to pieces with such ease that you might suspect them of having been flawed before. They were ruined, when they were required to send laboring children to school; they were ruined, when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined, when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery; they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke. … Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill-used—that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences of any of his acts—he was sure to come out with the awful menace, that he would “sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic.” This had terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions.

However, the Coketowners were so patriotic after all, that they never had pitched their property into the Atlantic yet, but, on the contrary, had been kind enough to take mighty good care of it. So there it was, in the haze yonder; and it increased and multiplied.

–from Hard Times, by Charles Dickens, 1854

Good Reads

A friend has written asking what contemporary fiction I enjoy. A very valuable subject! I’m always interested to hear people’s recommendations.

This is a good moment to mention a website I use and appreciate: goodreads.com. I use it to keep track of the books I’ve read and the books I’d like to read. That is, I keep my lists on it. But it’s also good for exchanging reading lists with others, or for exploring what books to read next. If you sign up I’d be glad to “friend” you so you can see my lists and vice versa.

Here are a few of the novels on my A list from recent reading:

Straight Man

The White Tiger

Bel Canto

The Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian

Cloud Atlas

Interpreter of Maladies

Winter’s Tale

On Chesil Beach

Child of My Heart

Black Dogs

Life of Pi

Fieldwork

Operation Shylock

State of Wonder

If I had to pick one? Probably Bel Canto.