Review: The Blade Itself

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By Joe Abercrombie
Narrated by Steven Pacey on Audible

This book was recommended to me by someone whose opinions I have profound respect for, so I leapt into the novel with much anticipation.

The Blade Itself is the first in the “First Law Series.” There is much to love in this book and I’ll be starting the next one in the series in the next day or so.

I’m told that, when providing constructive criticism, it’s actually best to give the positive first so that it doesn’t sound insincere following the criticism. Let’s try that.

There are a few things I loved about this book. First, Logan Nine-Fingers, known as the “Bloody-Nine,” rough and tumble barbarian from the north. The character could have fallen easily into that of the trite trope—he’s a man who has lived by the sword his whole life but who now wants to lay that sword down and never pick it up again. A man whose most profitable skill is his ability to kill others who doesn’t want to kill anymore, and yet he still keeps finding himself in situations where he must kill or be killed. That’s the plot of many terrible action movies (and a few that have done very well in the box office); it’s been done to death.

Logan pulls himself out of his stereotype and becomes a character with whom one can connect and empathize. Instead of the “badass with a heart of gold” action hero (though perhaps he is that), his dilemma makes us question what a person raised to be ready to violence can do to escape that life. That’s a story we can believe in and become immersed in—that’s a story that isn’t simply a power fantasy for adolescents or men with a Fight Club-esque existential crisis.

But I shouldn’t wax too philosophical about Logan as simply an analogy for the person who knows only violence. He’s a character who is fun. And this leads me to the second thing I love about this novel—the author’s voice, or perhaps voices. Though narrated from the third-person, the very voice of the narrator of the story (here I mean the fictional person telling the story, not the reader for the audiobook) shifts from character to character. This is most notable with Logan, where the voice is matter-of-fact, reserving or eschewing entirely moral judgment in favor of practicality. Many times, we hear the narrator say, “You have to be realistic about these things,” when describing Logan’s portions of the story. This further divorces Logan from stereotype: he’s not trying to get away from killing out of some pretense at found morality or piety; he’s just tired of killing people and seeing so much death.

The last thing I really loved about this novel was the author’s style. He writes beautiful sentences, entertaining sentences, sentences that utilize grammar and syntax to amuse and delight. A writer skilled in the style and rhetoric of writing can conceal many other narrative faults.

This book is not without its faults. Here are my complaints:

The setting is not terribly interesting, partially because it just doesn’t do anything for the story. The cultures of the setting are shorthand references to historical earthly cultures or blends thereof without significant differences. Therefore, I don’t care about the world or what happens to it. I can forgive much of this because of the fascinating descriptions of the small events that happen to the characters across the story, and I don’t expect every fantasy story to be set in a world with Martin- or Tolkien-levels of detail, but the blandness of this world (so far, at least) still leaves an itch unscratched.

I have a similar complaint about many of the characters other than Logan; they’re just not that interesting. Sand dan Glokta, the young hero of the union turned crippled inquisitor, held my interest as Logan did, and the cast of motley characters with whom Logan ran before the start of the book are quite amusing. They remind me of Shakespeare’s mechanicals—if they’d been written by G.R.R. Martin. The rest of the cast, Bayaz the magus, Collem West and his sister, and particularly Jezal dan Luthar, come across as two-dimensional cardboard cut-outs of particular “types” in fiction. If there were some other element of Commedia to this story, I could perhaps forgive that. There is not.

My last complaint is a trifling one. The narrator for Audible is actually quite good, but he pronounces a few words in ways that distract me from the flow of the narrative. Nitpicky, I know, but important when listening to a story. On the other hand, the author is British and the narrator might be too, so this may be a dialect issue and not worth starting another contest over proper pronunciation. We all have schedules to keep, after all.

Criticisms aside, did I enjoy this book? Yes, very much so. Will I read the next one? I’ve already said so. Will I get to the third in the trilogy. Let’s not rush to any conclusions. But, if Logan Nine-fingers is in it, I probably will.

Approved

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Today, K and I received word that we have been approved for the foster-to-adopt and adoption processes (we’re not sure which path we’ll end up being led down, but either is open to us). We have another week or so to wait while our file is finally audited and the licensing procedure is complete.

It was five years ago that we started seriously thinking about becoming parents in this way. Almost three years ago when we started an application but stopped because we were told that we could not be approved while I was home-officing and meeting with clients at home. Eight months since we turned in our application for real. And now we’re potentially just a week or two away from becoming parents. The reality of it hasn’t fully sunk in yet, but we’re excited.

Fittingly, it’s also our tenth wedding anniversary this week. Lots to celebrate. And this section of the blog is about to become far more robust!

Roleplaying Games as a Microcosm of Free Will, Part 2

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In Part I, I described an extended analogy using (good) roleplaying games as an example of the compatibilist school of thought on free will. But why does it matter?

Our understanding of free will informs almost every other aspect of our theology. For a human being to be culpable for wrongdoing, he must have free will. This is a basic aspect of our criminal justice system and the same principle holds true for the cosmic importance of sin. Our understanding of the purpose and direction of Creation rests in part on our belief about how and how often God directly intervenes in our lives. Differing views about the cause of events—randomness, directly controlled by God or something in between—influence our understanding of theodicy. More important, perhaps, than all of these, our understanding of free will tells us something about our own place in Creation and about our personal relationships with God.

So why do I feel so strongly about the analogy presented in the previous post on this subject? Like all good analogies, I think roleplaying games show us something about a doctrine of free will that we might otherwise miss. It is not simply that the roleplaying game correlates with a compatibilist doctrine of free will and that makes so much sense to me, it’s what the game shows us about that doctrine.

Here it is: a compatibilist view of free will has a strong component of relationship when there is a being, a personality, behind the deterministic force. The Player and the GM may at times be opposed, but they are always together, negotiating a narrative through mutual agency and response. A good GM, much of the time, need not determine the course of the story—all she has to do is respond to the actions of the Player Characters by determining the logical consequences of those actions—in the physical location (or even the physics of) the game world or in the relationships between Player Characters and Non-Player Characters controlled by the GM.

It’s important to keep and mind that, when responsive determination of cause and effect is the GM’s role, that’s not determinism, at least not directly. We might attribute some determinism to the nature of the rules themselves as they provide the boundaries of possibility, but that’s something we can discuss in a later post. That is an impersonal determinism.

What’s fascinating here are those times when the GM decides that the Players will experience a certain event or encounter a certain character—here, the GM is making a conscious choice (stemming largely from personality) that allows the GM to directly determine his interaction with the Players. It’s a set-up to be sure, but a fundamental one when there are both free agents (the Players and their characters) and an consciousness in control of the game world.

Within a scene, both the Players and the GM (and the mechanics) work to determine what happens. The best GMs sometimes “fudge” the results, occasionally ignoring the dice (or whatever other action-resolution system is in place) and determines himself what happens. The very best GMs are able to keep the players completely oblivious about when this does or does not occur. This is determinism to be sure, but when used sparingly it is a powerful determinism that nevertheless preserves the power of Player’s choices. There must be trust between Player and GM that the other is “playing fair” and preserving free will (and not cheating the rules). Here both free will and determinism play important roles.

With all of this, the roleplaying lays out for us the why of compatibilism being the best school of thought for the Christian. It preserves God’s ultimate sovereignty, maintains the dignity and freewill of man and, most important, builds relationship between the two as they co-create narrative. Ours is a God of relationship—even the trinity points to this. Why would God not, then, write the rules of the universe in such a way that relationship remains the focus?

Roleplaying Games as a Microcosm of Free Will, Part I

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In this post, I’m going to use an analogy (or set of analogies) to describe the various philosophical schools of thought on free will. Being a nerd and avid gamer, I’m of course going to find that analogy in the world of gaming. Specifically, in that corner of the gaming world that is possibly the nerdiest (and also my favorite): roleplaying games (RPGs). Here, I mean RPGs that are played with pen, paper and dice (or some other mechanic) in a face-to-face situation—not video games that would be classified as falling in the “RPG” genre.

If you’re not sure how a roleplaying game works, I’ve written a basic explanation here.

Here begins the analogy:

Let us say, for the sake of argument, that written literature represents pure determinism (at least when you are the reader). The story is already set, the characters are going to take the actions that they have been written to take, and you’re just along for the ride.[1]

On the other end of the spectrum is when you tell a story to others and have no set requirements about the content or nature of the story. This is pure free will. No outside force determines the course of the story and no logic need constrain your characters; you are the sole captain of your ship.

Somewhere between pure determinism and pure free will, things get interesting. Here we find a debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists. The latter believe that any element of determinism destroys the existence of free will, while the former believe that some determinism and some freedom of will can peacefully and logically co-exist.

In a RPG, the GM is a little microcosm of a god, though GMs who take this seriously usually fail to keep in mind that they’re playing a game that the Players are there to have fun, and that being forced to act out a story over which they have no control is neither fun nor interesting. Players generally call GM behavior that forces them down an inevitable story arc “railroading.”

When a GM railroads his players, they may be choosing their actions, but the consequences of their actions will always lead to the same result. The meaningfulness of choosing is lost; only the illusion of meaningful choice remains. Don’t look at the man behind the curtain or that illusion will itself disappear.

Railroading in a RPG, then, represents something more akin to the deterministic nature of Fate in Greek theatre—the characters seem free to do what they want, but they will always reach the same result no matter what they do—just ask Oedipus. Like Greek tragedy, this is depressing; it’s only real meaning is the paradigm’s tautology that Fate is unavoidable, so no matter what you do, you cannot avoid Fate.

Both Greek tragedy and poorly-run RPGs represent incompatibilist theory—it’s plain to see here how the determinism of the situation makes the existence of the remaining modicum of free will ultimately meaningless.

Roleplaying games, when run by a skilled GM, fall firmly into the compatibilist free-will philosophy. There are some—indeed, many—things outside of a Player Character’s control. From the very conception of a game, the determination of the setting to be used for the game naturally precludes certain options for characters, both ontological and practical. Once the game begins, at least some of the events that occur are predetermined by the GM.[2] What has happened before the game begins, for instance, is usually dictated solely by the GM.

Once the story begins, however, the Players and their characters have true agency. When a PC acts, he has the capacity to enact change in the (fictional) world around him. The things he does influence the story in a tangible way as the GM incorporates the results of the character’s actions into the plot and narrative as they progress.

What we end up with is a back-and-forth, a give-and-take between Players and GM where both influence the course of the story. Determinism—the actions of the GM in setting the stage for the characters’ actions—and free will—the actions of the characters in pushing the story along—live side by side and feed off of one another. This scenario is clearly the most meaningful. We’ll explore why in the next post.

For part 2, click here.

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[1] I understand that many writers, myself included, would argue that a story takes on a life of its own during its creation and wanders in directions we never initially considered. Nevertheless, once put down, the story is immutable.

[2] It has become popular in the last decade to focus on building narrative in an RPG and, thus, to foster “collaborative storytelling,” in which the players have greater control over the story in a more cooperative relationship with the GM. Even games without such a focus have become less “adversarial” in their depiction of the relationship between GM and players. Nevertheless, the analogy for our purposes focuses on the situation where the GM has ultimate narrative authority but allows the actions of the characters to alter the story as it moves forward.

What is a Roleplaying Game?

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Roleplaying games, at their heart, differ from most other types of games because they are about telling an interesting and enjoyable story in a medium that combines traditional storytelling techniques with improvisational theatre, speculative problem-solving and statistics (found in whatever “resolution mechanic” that decides actions that could succeed or fail—and, according to modern RPG theory, both success and failure are interesting and appropriate to the story).

There’s no need to detail the venerable forty-some-odd-year history of “modern” roleplaying, but a few notes might prove useful for those drawn here by subjects other than gaming. The mother-of-all-roleplaying-games (as we think of them today) is of course Dungeons & Dragons.[1] In that game, as in most other RPGs, one of the participants takes on the role of the Gamemaster (GM), while the others take on the roles of the Player Characters (PCs). We’ll call the latter the Players.

As in a theatrical performance, a Player seeks to play his Player Character as well as can be done. What “as well as can be done” depends heavily upon the group and the RPG, but for our sake we’ll stay highbrow and assume that this means immersing oneself in being someone else for a while, learning how someone other than yourself might feel and speak and act and exploring an alternate reality through that lens.

Under normal circumstances[2], each Player has only one character to portray. With a typical group, that means the Players are supplying three to five PCs to the game. While they may have intricate backstories, complex psychologies and all of the other traits that well-thought-out characters in fiction have, there’s not much for them to do without a situation for them to be in.

This is where the Gamemaster (GM) comes in. In an RPG, the GM represents all forces external to the characters—the weather, the setting, things that happen, all the other characters in the story that are not the PCs, etc. This gives the GM broad authority over the nature and course of the story that will be told over the course of the game.

So, the PCs find themselves in a situation over the creation of which they had no control. Once the “scene,” the playing out of the situation, begins, however, it is the agency of the PCs (and other characters involved in the scene—known as NPCs or non-player characters and controlled by the GM) who move the story forward.

This brings us to a feature of roleplaying games that separates the genre from other storytelling games—rules and mechanics. A Player Character has “statistics”, values that determine the character’s strengths and weaknesses. When the PC takes an action that could potentially fail, that character’s statistics are used along with the rules and mechanics to determine the result of the action. The mechanics of most RPGs use dice to add the element of chance to the action—representing all of the little factors that could come together to ensure success or conspire to assure defeat. This prevents the game from being determined by GM fiat, leaving some things to chance.

The rules may allow for possibilities that do not occur in our reality (such as wizardry and magic), but they may also prohibit certain actions (like hacking a computer to which one does not have access, or succeeding at sprinting down a tightrope in gusting winds and pouring rain).

Once the dice have fallen, the results of the action (its success, failure and side-effects) become part of the story, which now moves forward having incorporated that event. The “structured unpredictability” of the game both separates it from other types of storytelling and adds drama to the story. If, as occurs in Dungeons & Dragons, a brave hero confronts a dragon, he cannot be assured of success. When played as intended, neither does the GM have the ability to absolutely determine the outcome of the battle (although, as the controller of the dragon, he may try his best—using the rules—to defeat the hero).

Who wins? Some RPGs focus on an adversarial relationship between the GM and the Players, with each attempting to outwit the other for control of the story. Fortunately, the mainstream approach is quickly becoming that of “structured collaborative storytelling.” Here, everyone wins or loses together—either the story is a good one or it falls flat. Well-developed and -played characters can improve a poor plot; conversely, a rich setting with an interesting plot can cover for two-dimensional characters. But the game only takes on the transcendence sought by its Players—it only becomes meaningful as something more than mere game, something closer to art—when Players and GM all do their jobs to the best of their ability and everyone’s benefit.

Stories can be long or short, they can be played in a single session of a few hours or stretched into many sessions over the course of months or years that create truly deed and epic narratives.

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[1]Thoughts about Dungeons & Dragons, RPGs and Sci-Fi/Fantasy as they relate to Christianity are (or will be) addressed in other posts.

[2] Much to my delight, creators of roleplaying games have brought us a wide variety of approaches to gaming, some quite avant-garde in pushing the envelope of what the genre of game can do. There’s far too much variety (and I have far too much to say about that variety) to address such things here. So, when I say “normal circumstances,” just know that I intend the most common approach used by current RPGs. There will always be variation.

Patiently Waiting…Sort Of

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I’ve had a few friends or family members comment to me, “Hey, I saw you have a ‘Fatherhood’ section on your blog, and I was excited to see what you have to say about fatherhood, but there’s nothing there.”

So maybe a little explanation is in order. K and I are a few weeks away from finally being licensed to foster and/or adopt children through the Texas foster care program. No little ones in the house yet, but there could be two or three by this time next month. Am I ready? Is anyone?

Obviously, that makes this section of the blog a little premature. I have no special insights into fatherhood. Sure I’ve read books and been to training on being a parent, and K and I even had a sixteen-year-old exchange student live with us last year. But parenting strikes me as learn-on-the-job sort of thing, so I’m trying not to be overly confident in my expected skills at being a father. I’m not finding it difficult.

I used to joke with friends in law school that, when going into a final exam, it was the students who weren’t afraid who were in the most trouble—they didn’t even know how much they didn’t know. This feels the same. I’m excited and nervous at the same time, and that’s probably a good thing.

K and I have been married for ten years this month; we’ve been thinking about adoption for five years. We started the process in 2013, then stopped, the re-started in November of last year. It’s been a long journey.

If you’re wondering, I have plenty ideas about how to parent the children, how to deal with their particular situations and difficulties, how to love them and be firm about the rules, and all the other things that are part and parcel of parenthood. But I’m smart enough to know that they only thing that will happen if I share all of these ideas with you now is that you’ll all be quite amused when you start to hear about how different my reality is from what I’d imagined and how quickly my perfect-case scenarios fall by the wayside.

So, as I am doing, you’ll just have to wait.

What Tom Clancy’s The Division Teaches Us About Humanity

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I’m a big fan of Tom Clancy games in general, but The Division really hit a chord with me. I don’t usually devote much time to MMO games, but I’ve remained steadily involved with the game since its release back in March. This is partially because I have good friends to play it with; friends make everything better.

But this is not a review. Instead, I want to talk about some of my observations in the game.

If you’re not familiar, the game has a place called the “Dark Zone”, a smallpox-contaminated part of Manhattan quarantined from the rest of New York City. The Dark Zone is the game’s PvP (Player versus Player) area. Some of the toughest computer-controlled bad guys are in the Dark Zone, as are some of the best rewards. To eliminate these bad guys and reap the rewards, one typically needs to form a group with other players. Once you’ve grabbed the loot, you have to go to a special area and call in a helicopter to extract the items before you “own” them. They are contaminated, after all.

Before you’ve extracted items, any other player can kill you and steal those items. Lone wanderer players make easy targets to teams of other players and—especially when you get the drop on them—are often easier to kill than the non-player character bad guys.

This is supposed to be part of the draw of the game—the cat and mouse of stalking and evading other players, the team-on-team direct combat against player opponents and, most of all, the tension the system creates. There are few people you can actually trust, and I’ve had more than a few encounters where, randomly encountering another player, we both have to scope each other out, not wanting to fight, but unsure of the other’s intentions. That nervousness is in some way satisfying because it is so immersive; it brings you into post-disaster New York in a personal and experiential way. I like that.

On the other hand, particularly because I’m introverted and often avoid linking up with random players (only joining teams of people I actually know in real life), I often find myself navigating the Dark Zone by myself. Consequently, I often find myself getting killed and my stuff ganked because I’m outnumbered, outgunned, or simply stabbed in the back by an opportunist while I’m trying to defeat the Zone’s tough computer-controlled hostiles.

My time playing has taught me that there are three groups of people when it comes to the Dark Zone. The first is where I find myself, reluctant to “go rogue” to kill and steal from other players even when I’m in a group and confident I can get away with it. I’ve encountered only a few other players with this view. The second group is probably largest. They understand that this is a game—there are winners and losers, and those who play have agreed to the rules that govern the game. This group probably enjoys the game the most because they fully play out the game’s possibilities—sometimes going rogue and killing other players in ambushes or pitched battles. But they don’t strike me as the type who would probably act that way were the game real life. They know the difference in the stakes and consequences of a game versus the real thing.

The last group is the one that I find so simultaneously fascinating and infuriating. These are the bullies, those whose primary joy in the game is picking on players less powerful than themselves. These are the ones who, having killed you in an unfair fight (usually extremely so—four to one odds and they strike when you’re otherwise occupied) come up and stand next to your body to laugh and mock you until you’re able to respawn. These are players with malice aforethought.

At the end of the day, it’s still a game, and it wouldn’t be fair for me to make a presumption about a stranger’s moral capacity in the real world based on behavior in a digitally-manufactured world. On the other hand, I’m a believer that the anonymity of the internet (including multiplayer games) allows people a release from the social conventions that normally restrain their baser selves.

When playing the game (admittedly, perhaps more to relieve my own frustration than any objective reality) I am constantly reminded that maybe there really is a fine line between social order and the chaos of those with more power and less restraint.

Review: Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer’s Craft

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A Great Course Taught by Professor Brooks Landon

In this thirteen-hour lecture series, Professor Brooks Landon guides us through the crafting of long sentences, long sentences that please the ear and capture the rhythms of speech and nature, that use free modifiers to add information to a sentence in ways that remain coherent to the reader, carefully contemplated and structured to maximum effect, whether suspensive sentences that delay their impact until the last moment or those that start with a bang from which they build; these are sentences that—when done well—shape the consciousness of the reader as she readers by carefully ordering a succession of thoughts and images while marrying substance and style.

See what I did there? It’s not a great example of the kinds of sentence that Professor Landon teaches in this course, but it does on a rudimentary level combine many of the techniques he discusses. The secret, of course, is doing it well.

I’m a huge fan of the Great Courses series. If you’re not familiar, Great Courses is a company that records—as you might imagine—great courses from highly-accomplished university professors. You can purchase courses as audio CDs, as DVDs (in some cases) or, and this is my personal favorite, as audiobooks through Audible. I don’t believe that Audible carries the full catalog of Great Courses, but their selection is broad and the price is lower than the alternative formats. Great Courses scratch the perpetual student itch I find myself constantly plagued by.

Free advertising aside, let’s talk about this course in particular. Upon explaining to K what I was listening to, her response was an emphatic, “Nerd!” The exclamation continued when I explained that the course contained thirteen hours of lectures on sentence-writing. But I own my nerdom and, besides, K knew what this was when she married me.

The foundational lectures of this course drew me in and, I think, were alone worth the price of admission. Prof. Landon argues that sentence structure is a matter of influencing consciousness. We know that words have power, and being able to hack people’s brains by writing seemed like a cool ability, so I was on board from the get-go.

After discussing the implied premises that sentences contain[1], briefly mentioning Noam Chomsky’s “deep structure theory”, and busting some myths about the primacy of the short sentence (take that Strunk & White!) Landon goes on to provide many practical techniques for lengthening sentences while maintaining or increasing readability. For Landon, well-written sentences provide more information, flow better and better structure the progression of ideas that move forward in steps than short sentences do.

The major technique Landon explains is the use of “free modifiers”, phrases that can be placed in (almost) any part of a sentence and remain grammatically correct. Once establishing the concept, he goes on to demonstrate advanced techniques using free modifiers, from suspensive sentences (and the various effects of different locations of a free modifier) to duple and triple rhythms as rhetorical and poetic tools.

Throughout the way, Landon provides numerous examples of the concepts he discusses—many from famous and well-respected wordsmiths but also some of his own or his students’ creations. Even more, he makes many references to other writers on the nature of writing, providing many additional resources for continuing to explore Landon’s ideas and good writing in general.

Like most writing techniques, the stylistic mechanisms preached by Landon are easy to learn but quite difficult to master. You’ll likely see me experimenting on this blog with certain of the techniques to develop my own proficiency with them.

Landon is well accomplished in his field and clearly passionate about good writing. And he sounds a bit like Jimmy Stewart, which made absorbing his lectures all the more amusing.

If, like me, you’re on the lookout to improve your writing game, this course represents a relatively small investment of time that could pay dividends in the long run. I highly recommend it.

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[1] For instance, in the first part of this sentence: (1) there are things called sentences, (2) there are things called premises, (3) sentences imply premises.

The Girl with the Former Tattoo

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I encounter her waiting in the checkout line at the grocery store, where our humanity is laid bare by the frustration of waiting and other people and uncomfortable awareness of self.

Like our very humanity, her shoulders are bare. Above her left shoulder-blade, there is a mottled patch of skin, scar tissue telling the tale of her life. The pattern it makes is undeniable: a large cross. The ink is long gone, but the shape of it remains impressed upon her.

Immediately, I am filled with curiosity, which I imagine (and hope) is mixed with compassion. The very idea of it tells the story in my mind’s eye, unfolding in short vignettes and clips formed of my own reverie.

This woman once held such profound faith that she elected to suffer for it, even with a cross. She displayed her faithfulness proudly, perhaps defiantly, a badge of honor, the tattoo an external reflection of the inner truth that her faith could not be separated from her. But the analogy is incomplete, for the tattoo can be, and has been, removed.

Not having a tattoo myself, I understand the pain it costs only by resemblance and conjecture. I know enough to know that it is not a small thing. Thousands of pin pricks to pierce the skin and deposit pigment, blood welling up from below. But the pain of removing a tattoo—I later learn—is worse.

She spent hours under a laser over many weeks, the spear of light heating the ink until it began to break down. Most report the pain as far greater than that of getting the tattoo in the first place. Despite this, the motley skin on her shoulder can only mean one thing: something happened so that keeping the tattoo of a cross became more painful to her than searing it off.

In my mind I play through many scenarios—the death of a loved one, rejection or harsh treatment by fellow believers, interpretation of scripture that clashed head-on with what she had been told was acceptable, the hypocrisy of the faithful or some other unfortunate event that left her broken. It seems to me that the hurt must be deeply personal to have moved her to bear the physical pain of tattoo removal.

As I imagine her life and her pain—too afraid (or, as I’d prefer to think, too polite) to ask her about it—I begin to wonder how much we Christians, acting in our capacity as professing Christians, do to hurt others and turn them away from the church. Or worse, from Christ.

We, collectively as Christians, regardless of denomination, do a poor job of admitting our faults, holding back our judgments and, as John Wesley warned us, refraining from doing harm. It is true that some of the pain and offense results from willing misconception that the church is God, but we could always be clearer that we have our own failings and are no better than anyone else. As important, how do we order our lives and our witness to do no harm, to avoid misrepresenting Christ to the world?

The Honest Seeker

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We sit together at breakfast this honest seeker and I, a young man who I have the great good fortune of meeting this morning, who reveals more to me than I to him. By happenstance, if such a thing is to be believed in, we have been brought together, him seeking faith, me welling up with unexpected passion to explain my own.

Our subject is honest about his position. He sees great value in the social structure the church provides, great wisdom in the moral and philosophical precepts the scriptures teach, great promise in the philanthropic work the body of Christ undertakes. And yet, he will state matter-of-factly that he remains unsure about the spiritual reality of Christianity.

On this foundation he stands, his mind open, seeking for ideas and doctrines, carefully and skeptically weighing them, patiently considering the advice and thoughts and experiences of others, ever pursuing a reality he is not sure of, unsure he possesses a spiritual inclination, intellectually fascinated by the possibility of encountering the reality he hears so much about from others, ready to be convinced but pessimistic that he can be.

As we talk he questions me with deep and thoughtful interrogatories: Why is there evil and suffering? Why do Christians see all sin as equal? What is the resurrection supposed to mean? I struggle along to provide what answers I can; he follows with more difficult queries, testing not only me but the very limits of rational thought. When I tell him that some questions are beyond human understanding, he pauses, pondering the thought, piercing it with the sharp edges of his mind, perhaps perturbed by the prospect but satisfied by my honesty (if not the truth of my assertion).

He holds my attempts at answers in his hand, turning them slowly to view them from every angle, taking the measure of them, ascertaining their boundaries and their flaws. When I tell him that faith is a truth that must be experienced, not proved, he looks back at me with understanding, his young eyes seeming older by far.

I appreciate his skepticism. He is cautious before ever finding faith. Even before he believes, he is building a tower, testing its foundations, proving it to himself before he makes it his home. His, when he finds it, will be a strong faith, well considered, conscious of the ambiguities with which one must become comfortable to maintain faith, both reasonable and beyond reason. He is honest, surely the God who sees his heart will reward such honest seeking.

We part ways after a few hours but agree to meet regularly to continue our fellowship. But I am no guide, merely a fellow traveler on a road we all must walk to its destination.