Mastering with Grace, Sacrifice, and Generosity

When I first read Amor Towles marvelous novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, I was immediately struck by this:

“A man must master his circumstances or otherwise be mastered by them.”

I don’t think Towles means men and women should exert power over our environment and relationships, forcing them to conform to our will. After all, the hero of his novel, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, is forcibly under house arrest in the hotel he is staying at. He cannot leave without threat of death.

Rather I think Towles is focused on the attitude, the mindset we have when we face challenges, disappointments, tragedy, or injustice. But it’s an attitude that shapes our actions and ultimately our character. We can become victims of our circumstances, letting them force us into their mold, or we can rise above them.

That is exactly what Alexander does. Instead of falling into despair, he makes the most of his new situation. Rather than seeking revenge, he looks for how he can contribute to the life and people of the hotel—both guests and staff. He takes a job in the hotel restaurant. He becomes guardian of an abandoned girl, and then the girl’s daughter. He falls in love. Over the course of decades, he makes a profound and lasting impact on the lives of many people—even though he is imprisoned!

Anthony Ray Hinton is a true-life example of this. Wrongfully imprisoned and placed on death row for decades, he transformed from a cauldron of anger to a beacon of light for those around him. As chronicled in his astounding book, The Sun Does Shine, he mastered his circumstances long before he was finally exonerated and released.

The examples Towles and Hinton give are ones of shaping our circumstances not with force but with goodness, sacrifice, and generosity. Thus Towles memorable line about circumstances may need a slight alteration. The point is not to control our situation or ourselves in any way we wish. Rather it is a choice between two masters:

“We must allow grace to master us or we will be mastered by our circumstances.”

A Cautionary Tale

In many ways, Fierce Attachments, a memoir of a daughter’s relationship with her mother, is a sad tale. After the sudden and early death of the Vivian’s father, her mother is consumed by her grief, using it to shield herself from others. Though Vivian wants to connect with her mother, she has difficulty. Her mother—a strong, intelligent, capable, and opinionated (!) woman—cannot see her daughter or the world through any other lens than herself.

But we should not judge her mother too harshly. Even many of us who have not experienced a sudden, traumatic loss, still live like this. We are simply focused on ourselves and have difficulty getting out of that frame to see people from their own viewpoint.

Vivian and her mother can’t connect and can’t separate. What makes this raw book even more tragic is that while Vivian criticizes the narrow path her mother has taken, almost inevitably it seems, Vivian ends up doing the same. She has relationships with men, but she can never really attach in a deep and lasting way. She even wonders if she intentionally picks men who are incapable of that kind of connection.

In How to Know a Person, David Brooks mentions Gornick’s memoir as a cautionary tale. While there are practical ways to know a person better, he says, we also need to be alert to the many paths which can prevent that from happening.

This memoir, however, is a cautionary tale in another sense. It highlights that while grief can be healthy, it can aslo bind us if it becomes the consuming fact of our life. Grief is a dreadful and necessary journey through the valley of the shadow of death, but the valley is not the destination.

The Crux of Faith

For Christians, the cross may be so familiar that we cease to see it and be shocked by it.

To help us, Bran Zahnd offers an untypical theology of the cross. As the author suggests, The Wood Between the Worlds is an exercise in theopoetics—akin to meditations on nineteen aspects or implications of the death of Christ. Since other excellent volumes cover the standard topics of atonement, substitution, forgiveness, and salvation, Zahnd turns his attention elsewhere.

We read, for example, that while humanity was exiled from Eden and the Tree of Life, now all are welcome at the cross, the true Tree of Life. We also find a profound chapter on Pontius Pilate, and how we are all at some level stained by skepticism and dirty hands. In addition, Zahnd offers a wonderfully clear explanation of Rene Girard’s important work on the social dynamics of scapegoating today and throughout history.

Insights and icons from Eastern Orthodox Christianity weave in and out of these and his other uncommon subjects such as Ellie Wiesel’s doubts, the harrowing of hell, and Mary’s ponderings.

Much of the book considers power and weakness. In this light Zahnd takes up uncomfortable topics such as capital punishment, pacifism, and James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree.

While today’s church often focuses on power, the gospel writers emphasize suffering, loss, and weakness. When Paul says, “God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Cor 1:25), he “doesn’t mean that when God is weak, God is still stronger than human might. That wouldn’t be scandalous. It would be just a typical boast about power as conventionally understood. Rather Paul is taking us into the deep mystery of the cross, saying that God’s power is precisely located in the weakness” of the cross. [p. 29].

Power corrupts as the Ring of Power in Tolkien’s trilogy twists those who seek it. All our attempts to use power are likewise subject to corruption. Christianity is tainted when it aligns itself with government-sponsored violence as all sides did in World War I and as we still see today. We cannot justify such actions by misunderstanding the imagery of armies and destruction in the book of Revelation. For it is the slain lamb who is the central victor of the book.

Through mystery and metaphor, in this mind-provoking and soul-provoking book, Zahnd explores the literal crux of the Christian story.

Nietzsche Is Still Laughing

Deep in the recesses of Charles Taylor’s massive tome A Secular Age on the huge shifts that have transformed the Western world in the last five hundred years, he tells a story–a story of a friend visiting a political gathering:

A Buddhist acquaintance of mine from Thailand briefly visited the German Greens. He confessed to utter bewilderment. He thought he understood the goals of the party: peace between human beings, and a stance of respect and friendship by humans towards nature. But what astonished him was all the anger, the tone of denunciation, of hatred towards the established parties. These people didn’t seem to see that the first step towards their goal would have to involve stilling the anger and aggression in themselves. He couldn’t understand what they were up to.*

Taylor says that the person who would have been most delighted with the irony of this story was Friedrich Nietzsche. The late nineteenth-century German philosopher was famous for his idea of “will to power.” He thought, essentially, that there was no morality, no ethics. These were just thin, convenient covers for seeking to gain what we wanted—to impose our control on others!

Such a story would prove to Nietzsche that he was right, that people don’t operate by ideals, even the most high minded. It’s all a sham, a fake, a charade. Even a political party supposedly built on the foundation of peace with the natural world quickly degenerates into vitriol and violence.

We may think this view is cynical. Nietzsche just thought it was reality.

Like those pursuing progressive ways to make the world better, conservative Christians may also disagree with Nietzsche. But in a day in which some think that Jesus’ admonition to love our enemies is wrong or that it just doesn’t apply when it comes to asserting our political will, Nietzsche is still laughing.


*Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 698.

Image credit: openart.ai photograph of Friedrich Nietzsche laughing.

Lessons in Stereotypes

Lessons in Chemistry (now an Apple TV series) is a fun and funny book that takes on serious issues. (The lead character’s dog is a special delight.) Set in the Eisenhower era before women were as prominent in the workplace, the story points out many of the foibles, fallacies, and injustices of a male-dominated culture.

The book highlights the unnecessary limits, the ill treatment, and the stereotypes so many once had and sadly still have of women. But an irony is that the book also seems to perpetuate certain stereotypes.

With one or two exception, men seem to be consistently portrayed as greedy, inept, sexually violent, selfish, domineering, and clueless. Those who adhere to religious faith are similarly derided. They are depicted as either charlatans or benighted souls who haven’t managed to make it out of the dark ages, carelessly damaging lives along the way.

People are complex. Heroes have flaws and villains have virtues. May the world abound with books that affirm the complicated value and dignity of all people and groups (even with sometimes deep imperfections) without having to drag any down to lift others up.

How to Know a Person

I was sitting around a table with some friends. How did the topic come up? I don’t quite recall.

We were talking about World War II, and Ralph said, “You can’t trust the Germans. Look what they’ve done in two world wars. And don’t say they’ve changed because skinheads and nationalism are on the rise there. We just should never have let them become an independent nation again. We should have carved up the country for good.”

I was a bit surprised to hear such ideas about a group of people who have little malice thrown at them these days. He didn’t sound angry. He wasn’t loud. He was outwardly calm, but I sensed there was emotion underneath.

I responded evenly by saying it seemed helpful to have them as allies, as a force for economic and political stability in central Europe. Clearly he still disagreed.

Then I remembered what I had just read in David Brooks’s new book, How to Know a Person. He told a story of being on a panel discussion with someone who had a very different view of the culture wars. Brooks responded not with anger or diatribe but by stating his side with a bit of cool dispassion.

Later Brooks realized this was the wrong approach. Instead he should have at least asked more questions about what the other person thought and why.

Taking Brooks’s lead, I decided I too was wrong and that the important thing in this moment was not to try to change Ralph’s mind, not to correct him, however wrong his attitudes might be. My job first was to listen to him, get to know him, and maybe love him a little better.

So I started asking some questions, genuinely wanting to know more: “What’s behind your thoughts here? When and how did you first start to think this way?” And quietly he began to tell us more of his story.

His father and uncles had been in the war. What they saw and went through was terrible. And his wife had been born in central Europe. Her family had suffered at the hands of the Germans for multiple generations.

Ralph was not speculating on geopolitics. For him, this was personal.

Brooks is a consummate journalist who is excellent at summarizing the best research of experts while telling stories of others and himself that move us and create understanding. While offering excellent material on how to get to know people as individuals, he reminds us that everyone is situated in a group, in a history, in a place. We also have to explore and appreciate those to truly hear others.

In a day of hyper reactions and extreme tribalism, we seem to have lost the vital art of conversation, of making friends, of connecting with others more than superficially. Brooks tells us how with practical, sensible wisdom.

I don’t remember the last time I had put the ideas of a book into practice so quickly as I did with Ralph. Before I would have just sat in stunned silence. But now I knew how to respond positively. How to Know a Person is that kind of book, a book worth rereading.

A Book That Reorganized My Mind

Why was it almost impossible not to believe in God five hundred years ago, and now it’s almost impossible to believe in God? That is the driving question behind Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age.

Having read a half dozen books which tout the significance of and make substantial use of Taylor’s magnum opus, I was convinced I finally needed to take the plunge myself. And indeed Taylor’s work reorganized much of the furniture in my mind—and even forced me to rethink the purpose of the rooms themselves!

One example: In the medieval age, not everyone was expected to live up to a spiritual or civic ideal. But society as a whole did so, encapsulated in the famous formula: “the clergy pray for all, the Lords defend all, the peasants labor for all.” Each group served the other two. As a result, the nobles and the peasants, for example, are not expected to live the same specialized spiritual life as the clergy, who in a sense made up in that department what the rest lacked.

All that changed with the Reformation after which all were expected to grow into the ideal, whether Catholic or Protestant. The aim is for all to flourish as God intended. Having read Taylor, I now see that expectation in every sermon, every book, every political speech, every commercial. We are all children of the Reformation. Whether from a democratic, totalitarian, conservative, liberal, religious, atheist, or consumerist persuasion—all aspire to have all people flourish (each with their own formula for what is “perfect”).

Which leads to an irony of our day: If this is the age of relativism and supposed tolerance, why are so many absolutely committed to their brand of Reform even to the point of anger and violence (witness the French Revolution, the tens of millions killed by idealist Communist and fascist regimes, and similar justifications for force and violence today)? And what can be done to disrupt the tendency to compel others to follow our agendas? How might we undo our bent to create our version of the “New Humanity” or “New Society” by paradoxically treating people as less than human?

And that’s what this masterful book does over and over—generates huge questions.

Another example: Taylor makes the case that we live in a world of so many possible belief options that everyone is haunted by doubt. (As Taylor puts it, we are all cross-pressured.)

The believer is haunted by, “What if God, heaven, the resurrection—what if it’s just not true? I’m pretty sure it’s true, but what if it’s not? Am I wasting my life?”

At the same time, unbelievers are haunted by, “What if God, heaven, the resurrection—what if it is all true? I’m pretty sure it isn’t true, but what if it is? What may I be missing?”

I could go on for pages about the provocative, game-changing ideas in the book. I haven’t even mentioned his concepts of our disenchanted world and the buffered self which many other books make first-rate use of (such as Alan Noble’s Disruptive Witness and Mike Cosper’s Recapturing Wonder).

Taylor’s book is not without weaknesses. It seems churlish to mention things that aren’t in a book that already has 775 pages of dense text. Nonetheless, though he describes step by step how the changes over the last five hundred years happened among elite thinkers, he doesn’t do much to unpack the causes or motivations behind those steps.

Besides generating a devotional focus on death, for example, how else did the deaths of one-third of Europe in the Bubonic Plague affect religious thinking? And how else might have the excesses of the papacy and Luther’s reactions led to the various developments Taylor identifies? Also, how might the discovery of the New World have affected the view of our cosmos and ourselves? And in what ways did the continuous religious wars of the sixteenth century spur the development of Natural Law (and the Enlightenment) in attempts to find ways to settle disputes that didn’t rely on religion? (Okay, maybe all that can be A Secular Age: The Prequel.)

Second, Taylor writes in an unnecessarily arcane academic style. For decades I have been an editor of academic books on philosophy, history, and religion. Even so I could only read about ten pages a day because I had to read most of his very dense pages twice to have any chance of decoding his prose. Luckily we have James Smith’s summary of Taylor, How (Not) to Be Secular, which provides some help with comprehension in a briefer package.

A Secular Age is not for everyone. But I was glad I labored through this stunning book, giving me so much to chew on and appreciate.

Grateful for the Government?

I Must Betray You offers a dramatic window into the repressive nightmare that was the Romanian dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu. Set in late 1989, the novel follows the story of Christian, a seventeen-year-old student in Bucharest.

The plot seamlessly introduces us to how the web of government informers and surveillance warped every aspect of life—school, family, friendships, romance, groceries, jobs, health, prisons, punishment, and protests.

A neighbor of mine who was in eighth grade in Romania when the revolution occurred, told me that this book was eerily like the life he led–food shortages, government-sponsored violence, fear of informers everywhere, restrictions on travel, jobs, and education. Like Christian in the novel, my neighbor even marched with the protestors while army soldiers with loaded weapons watched.

Some people in this country say our government is so bad it would be better to throw it away and start over. After all, things couldn’t get any worse. If we are tempted this Independence Day to think that we live in bad times, this story reminds us to be grateful for what we have—for things could be worse, much worse.

Image by Larry White from Pixabay

The Words of a 20th-Century Prophet

Today, May 15, 2024, is the fortieth anniversary of the death of Francis A. Schaeffer (1912-1984). To mark the occasion The Gospel Coalition released a retrospective piece on this influential twentieth-century Christian apologist by long-time Schaeffer associate Dick Keyes .

I also wrote on how Schaeffer spoke prophetically about one of the most pressing needs that the church has today—showing love to each other. If you’d like to see it, just click here.

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Why is showing love so important? As I noted earlier, one reason among many is that if we don’t show love to other Christians, we can’t expect non-Christians to believe in Jesus (John 17:20-21). In  Schaeffer’s book addressing this, The Mark of the Christian, he assumes something that I fear many Christians have lost. He assumes that evangelism is a priority. Instead, many certainly act like politics or the culture wars are more important. Yet when we disagree with anger and vitriol, we handicap our ability to draw people to Jesus.

My wife and I can’t be the only one who had a neighbor say, “I don’t want to be a Christian because I don’t want to be like them.”

“What do you mean? Be like them how?”

“Christians are just so hateful,” came the reply. Jesus would consider this response justified.

Sadly, the internet can bring out the worst in all of us–both in what we post and in how we react to those we disagree with. These days we seem to assume the worst possible motivations for the actions and words of others.

Instead it is time to give each other the benefit of the doubt and find room for grace.

A Simple Key to Great Conversations

“Yes, I’d like to be better at talking to people. But I always blank out. What do I say?”

The beauty is we don’t have to say much at all. Why? Because most people want the opportunity to talk about themselves. All we have to do is ask them.

In my last post I mentioned Holleman’s four mindsets that prepare us for talking to others. In The Six Conversations, she also offers (not surprisingly) six types of questions we can ask that largely cover the scope of our lives. While she gives dozens of examples with excellent advice on how to use them, here a few of the sorts of questions she suggests.

Social
◊ How are things going with your [roommate, parents, siblings]?
◊ If you could have dinner with anyone, past or present, who would it be?
◊ What upcoming plans do you have with friends?

Emotional
◊ What’s made you grateful recently?
◊ What are you looking forward to?
◊ Wow. That’s a big deal. How did you feel about that?

Physical
◊ What have you been doing to relax lately?
◊ What restaurants/new meals have you tried lately?
◊ Was that [recent experience] refreshing or draining for you?

Cognitive
◊ What have you been learning about or thinking about lately?
◊ Who else have you talked to about these ideas? [social]
◊ How do those ideas make you feel? [emotional]
◊ Have those ideas made you think about doing anything different? [volitional]

Volitional
◊ In light of your [news, concern, complaint, problem, opportunity], what choices do you have?
◊ What’s your next step?
◊ Do you have any goals you are working on? Or as a friend recently asked me, “What big goals would you like to accomplish before your kids take away your car keys?” (!)

Spiritual
◊ What’s your spiritual journey been like?
◊ What spiritual traditions do you resonate with?
◊ What kind of spiritual environment did you grow up in?

To keep great conversations and relationships growing, it’s key to be nonjudgmental, to ask follow-up questions, and not be too quick to give our perspective.

My Three-Question Starter Kit
I keep reviewing this list so the questions become more second nature, but if you want just three to remember, here’s the ones I’ve used:

◊ What’s the story behind [your pet, the college you picked, your interest in ____, etc.]?
What surprised (excited, disappointed) you about [your weekend, the test, the trip, etc.]?
◊ Before we go, what else would you like me ask that you haven’t had a chance to talk about yet?

Holleman has so much more to offer in her wise, practical book which can lead us out of the isolation and polarization we’ve felt. If we can stay curious and believe the best about others, we may not only help others be less lonely, we may also help ourselves.


Giraffe image by Christine Sponchia from Pixabay
Friends image by Eva Michálková from Pixabay