Page 2187 – Christianity Today (2024)

Style: Indie folk; compare to David Bazan, Denison Witmer, and The Avett Brothers

Top tracks: “Arkansas,” “Throwing Your Voice,” “Cloudy Shoes”

On “Cloudy Shoes,” Damien Jurado admits “I’m still trying to fix my mind, still trying to work it out.” Once caught up with the faux-Christian artists of the early Tooth & Nail 90s’, Jurado has been distancing himself from that label for over a decade. Produced by former Starflyer 59 player Richard Swift, Saint Bartlett recalls a diverse history of Jurado’s styles like it were a musical biography. Some lo-fi tracks could pass for b-sides from 1995, but the album’s better moments reveal a new, upbeat direction for the seasoned singer-songwriter.

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Style: ’90s gospel sound a la Amy Grant and the days of CeCe & BeBe Winans.

Top Tracks: “The Healing Part,” “His Strength Is Perfect,” “He’s Always There”

Dedicating this new project to those who are hurting and lonely, Winans focuses on uplifting songs that center on God’ strength when we are weak. An honorable idea, but each song has the same mid-tempo feel, and the album loses some of that positive energy as it goes along. But the biggest distraction from Winans’ amazing voice is the 1990s-like production. The drum samples and synth parts, especially on “The Healing Part,” are thin and very reminiscent of old Amy Grant. The songwriting is solid, but this album needs a little modernizing and a splash of variety.

Copyright © 2010 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Lynda Randle knows what it’s like to be pulled in a million different directions. She’s a relatively successful solo artist, but is most well-known as a regular performer—and the only African-American—in the Gaither Homecoming tours and products. She is the founder of Lynda Randle Ministries in Kansas City, through which she encourages women and aims to build bridges between races. She and her husband, Mike, aim to plant a new church in KC that will bring together a multicultural congregation. She is the older sister of Michael Tait, former member of dc Talk and now the lead singer for the Newsboys. Finally, Randle is A Woman After God’s Own Heart, the title of her new CD (releasing today) and of the women’s conferences she stages 2-3 times per year (most recent was held last weekend in Minnesota). We recently caught up with Randle to discuss her new album, and more.

A Woman after God’s Own Heart is the title of your conferences and your new CD. Tell me what that phrase means to you.

Lynda Randle: It’s from David’s story in the Bible. After all of his sins, all of the mistakes David made, God said, “He is still a man after my own heart.” God’s desires for the heart of his children is to be toward him. In my own life, I’ve blown it many times, but I want to be a woman after God’s own heart. And there’s security in knowing that God loves us unconditionally.

Is that the theme on the album and at your conferences?

Randle: Absolutely. Cee Cee Michaela is speaking again this year [the conference was held in May in Minnesota]. She has an incredible story of secondary virginity and purity, and on what it means to be a woman of God. I think at the end of the day, the women go back feeling that they are loved and appreciated. I just want women just to know that although we wear all these different hats and we blow it, and sometimes we’re not sure who we are, we are deeply and intimately loved by the Father.

Is that any different than, say, 25 years ago? Do you think women need to hear that message more today than ever?

Randle: I think so. The difference between women today and yesterday is the sewing machine—seriously. I’m old school. A lot of young sisters don’t even know how to sew on a button. Some can’t boil water, can’t cook, can’t do anything because there are so many things pulling on young women today—careers, the Internet, Skyping, texting. Yesteryear wasn’t like that. There was a central focus on family and relationships; it wasn’t just all about me. A lot of young sisters today, it’s all about them. They are far from relationships and caring for people.

Right now, I’m taking care of my mom in our home. She had a stroke in December. We are busier than ever, but relationships are so important. My parents took 18 or 19 years of their life to invest in mine; I should give something back. Young kids today don’t know anything about that. But I’m living this thing out.

I understand you also take care of troubled young women?

Randle: Yeah. I have “little sisters” all around the world. We’ve got a young girl who wants to come live with us from Norway in 2012. There’s a young girl from Kentucky that just lived with us for about a year, and I’ve mentored her, like a big sister. Gloria Gaither recently said to me, “If you could mother the world, you would.” I said, “I would. I would bring everybody home and do that.”

After a recent concert in Pittsburgh, I noticed a girl, about 18, who looked despondent. Her mother introduced me, and I went to give her a hug, but she sort of shrunk back. I was like that; I was a rebellious teenager with issues. But I told her that every night when I get up and sing on stage, I’m terrified. I said, “This is nothing I ever dreamed of doing, especially after failing the ninth grade.” I wanted her to see that I was human, but she was still just looked removed and a little bit angry. So that was that.

Lo and behold, the next day I open up my e-mail, and this young lady had written me. We started corresponding, and she recently said, “Just wanted to know if we could talk sometime. My family is all out of sorts.” I asked her for her number, and asked if I could maybe be a big sister. When I typed that, it was almost an oath on my part, because you do not play with these young kids. You do not get in and out of their lives like you do your bed, or going in and out of a door. You must mean it.

But that’s what I do. I know I can’t bring everybody home, but maybe this summer or whenever she gets a break, maybe she can visit. I don’t think I’m the great hope, but I know kids need this kind of attention. If I didn’t tour, I’d love to have a youth center full of girls.

Is that in your vision for the future though?

Randle: It is so in my vision. Singing of course would be there, but mostly, I would just be encouraging the body of women. I would have “little sisters” from here to kingdom come. This is what I would give my life for—and this is outside of my husband [Mike] and my own two girls [Patience, 19, and Joy, 13]. We are so very close, my husband and me and my girls. We talk about everything, and we keep it real.

What do you want listeners to take away from your new album?

Randle: Something real. I know all the clichés that believers say, so I try to write creatively, to say things in a different way. The song “I Love You Like This” stemmed from the fact that in relationships, people give you maybe two or three strikes and then you’re out. But God’s like, “No, I’m in it for the long haul. And this is the way I love you.” That’s the message I’m trying to share.

“Hold On” has been getting oodles of response when I do it live. It’s about a man leaving a woman, in a divorce or a breakup. The second verse says you can pray and things may not be okay when you wake up the next day—that’s what I mean by keeping it real. All I can say is, hold on because God’s holding onto you. I can’t even tell you to be strong, because I have not walked a mile in your shoes. But I know someone who’s carried me over rough and rocky roads, whose arms are strong when ours are weak.

How does a black sister like you end up in the Gaither family of all places?

Randle: (laughs) God has a sense of humor! That’s all I can say.

He sure does. But how did it come about?

Randle: In 1989, I sang at a conference in Arizona where Gloria Gaither was one of the speakers. After I sang, Gloria said from the stage, “I love her. I want to take her home.” Well, she wasn’t lying. She went home and told Bill she met this girl and went on and on. I met Bill later that year, but it was several years later before anything came to fruition, when I recorded my first album with them, A Way Through (1995). I was never shopping a record deal—and now we’re at seven or eight albums later with the Gaithers.

Do you feel like it’s a good fit?

Randle: It is. If you go to their concerts, it’s not just southern gospel and twanging guitars; maybe only 25-30 percent are straight southern gospel or hymns. There’s some traditional, some black gospel, some hymns, some praise and worship. I’ll sing “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” and there ain’t nothing southern gospel about that. I’ll do “Walk with Me, Lord,” by Mahalia Jackson. Nothing southern gospel about that either.

What’s next for you?

Randle: We do a lot of European tours next year [with the Gaithers]. We’re doing a Woman After God’s Own Heart conference in Norway; we do 2-3 of those conferences each year. We’re doing more solo dates too, just Lynda Randle stuff.

My husband, Mike, is an architect by trade and a youth pastor by call. And we’re starting a church here in Kansas City in the next year or so; Mike will be senior pastor.

A brand new church, or a plant off of another existing church?

Randle: I think this might be a sister church kind of thing, we’re not quite sure. We’re connected with Christian Fellowship Baptist Church here in Kansas City.

And they have your blessings?

Randle: Absolutely. They are 500 percent onboard. There’s really no multicultural church really thriving on this side of town [north KC], a very multicultural area. But I’m a bridge builder [between races], just like I am with the Gaithers. I’m the only [African-American] on the Gaither tour, but I feel like I’m connecting with white folks all over. I think God has me there for that reason.

Copyright © 2010 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Dear Alan,

Yesterday I read your latest London letter (and last one, alas), and I enjoyed it a great deal. I also knew you would have some wonderfully detailed examples of London’s historical layering, which we’ve been discussing for the past few letters.

I’m still thinking about your opening example—what a succession of sites in a single place. The Great Northern & City Railway, its power station, Gainsborough Studios with Hitchco*ck haunting the sets of B-Movies (!), a single season of Almeida Shakespeare in that same, now terminal space (ephemerality as the heart of theater), and now, in a great climax of history and gentrification … luxury flats. Time comes round. And likewise in your other example: how that “village London” exhibit in Trafalgar Square, turning much of the square into turf again, inadvertently actualized (is this the right word?) the name of the church overlooking it, St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields. To think of that name being bestowed, and it meant literally! Time comes round. By the way, those Evensong hymns by Cowper and Newman managed to stir in me what our beloved Stuart author Thomas Browne calls an “elevation,” even in my low-energy state at that point.

Well, that Measure for Measure production I caught with Mark may have been ephemeral too, but by bringing it up, you give me the pleasure of briefly remembering that night. First of all, what a great theater. I’ve heard you sing Islington’s praises generally, and so I was excited when Mark and I took a nice stroll to the Almeida there. It was also fun before the show to hear him commend the theater itself for this and that, all said with a director’s eye and the accompanying sense of possibilities the space afforded. Measure for Measure is a comedy, at least technically speaking, although it’s better to use that handy phrase “problem comedy,” which has been applied to this and a few other plays for awhile now. They were all written around the time that Shakespeare was writing Hamlet. He had recently lost his father, and was just entering those haunted, magnificent few years in which he would write his greatest tragedies—besides Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. Thus this play is no romantic comedy of lads and lasses, or anything tonally like the high comedies completed just previously—As You Like It, Twelfth Night. Each of those plays features a poignant undersong, like minor notes placed amid the shiny, happy comic strains. “Youth’s a stuff will not endure,” and so forth. Yet in terms of outlook, and weariness, they are worlds away from Measure for Measure, which arguably marks Shakespeare’s Blue Period. We should also take note of a change in literary taste since the days of the comedies of the 1590s and even these final few high comedies. Satire was now all the rage, to the point that a Bishop’s Ban was decreed against such hostile, scabrous works in 1599, as if the very sharpness of their language might cut through England’s social fabric.

No, instead of cakes and ale, Measure for Measure offers nothing less than an examination of the human moral predicament, if “predicament” were strong enough a word. The play makes us confront this brutal fact: we poison ourselves despite ourselves. All of us. It is the human way. And those who seem most upright are very likely the most egregiously dissembling. Seen this way, the lieutenant Angelo appears as the play’s central figure, and in due time we see him transform from a Puritan to a satyr, tormented by his lust for Isabella and willing to use the powers entrusted to him to be “satisfied.” None of the characters is particularly likeable. Isabella is chaste, certainly, but possesses none of the enlivening spirit of, say, Rosalind from As You Like It. And the Duke—what is the Duke’s deal? He seems mystifying, and not entirely trustworthy, from beginning to end. I really hadn’t lived with this remarkable, troubling play for a couple of years, and this production at the Almeida Theatre gave me fresh eyes and ears for it.

Mark and I began our Islington adventure at the Angel Tube stop, and it seems fitting to end this tiny recollection back there, as my friend and I descended on the station’s steep escalator, still discussing the show we’d just seen. Or better yet, I shall end with some grander send-up of that urban wonder that is the London Underground, and the design wonder that is its iconic rail map. So check out this “Transit Map of the World’s Transit Systems” from Frank Jacobs’ Strange Maps (you’ve featured an image from this curious book on your blog, I think) or, even more apropos, given that a Measure for Measure performance was our occasion to travel to the Almeida in the first place, a Shakespeare-themed Tube map: two great UK exports that look great together.

Having riffed on Shakespeare a little, allow me next to mention one last Renaissance writer, Thomas Nashe, a favorite of mine. He’ll help me to begin to think for a moment about what we experience in city life, and what we don’t have to. In his romp of an early-modern novel, The Unfortunate Traveller, Nashe follows his picaresque adventurer Jack Wilton to the Low Countries, the Imperial Court, and Renaissance Rome. We see Tudor London only briefly, with sketches of intrigues at Henry VIII’s palace and an outbreak of the sweating sickness, which Nashe describes with all of the visual horrors of filmmakers such as David Lynch or David Cronenberg. (The Internet Movie Database website describes the latter David as “King of Venereal Horror”—that’s quite a title.)

I also think one last time about my research subject, that Tudor traveler William Thomas. He succeeded somehow in returning to favor after his Italian exile, improbably going from disgraced, embezzling courtier to a one-man humanist think tank for the young king, Edward VI. (For the record, I was finally able to consult a number of his works in the British Library manuscript reading room, despite the ongoing strike. A happy ending!) These texts, some of them autographs, are lasting signs of Thomas’ busy period in the center of the Edwardian royal court.

Unfortunately Thomas was also a one-man fortune’s wheel. After achieving, in his words, this great “prosperitie” with King Edward, he swiftly found himself on the outs again when Mary I assumed the throne in 1553. He resisted the queen’s match with Philip of Spain, was caught up in Wyatt’s Rebellion, and was eventually imprisoned and executed. A letter exists, written from outside London once Wyatt’s rebels had entered the city. Thomas has fled to somewhere in Devonshire I think, and nervously asks about his London property, which he soon learns is sacked. (Although you’re right in your last letter—if anyone could find traces of that long-lost Tudor home, it would be Peter Ackroyd!) These aspects of London’s long history—the uprisings and plague and, in our day, the bus bombings—are all happily foreign, of course. Sometimes we must be grateful for narrow urban experiences, for our little dull pinpoint on the timeline.

Well, maybe it’s time that we too shut down our historical consciousness, as you mentioned average Londoners have to do. Like them, we must navigate through our days, today and ahead of us, and not brood too much on ruins or layers or loss. I’d like to spend the rest of this letter, then, making one more attempt at verbalizing what I previously called that vast tonal range so prevalent in city life. My first impression is not promising: our experience of London looks inevitably narrow in this way, too—our times there have been brief, and our sense of the place is limited mainly to the over-exposed central areas, especially Bloomsbury (love it as I do). Take the upshot of your own comment: neither one of us is an “average Londoner,” despite our deep enthusiasm for the city and our fair-to-decent ability to get around it.

There’s an elite London we will surely never see, and geographically I think of the reposing, grey-facaded respectability of Mayfair. (When Henry James spoke of London as “in certain ways the spoiled child of the world,” he had just previously been meditating on “the mind of Mayfair.”) One representative of that world, Conservative leader David Cameron, has just fashioned a coalition making him England’s new Prime Minister. Certainly Cameron has helped to craft a different image of his party in recent years (his jeans, tieless shirt, and habit of bicycling to work come to mind), but class differences nevertheless remain far more formidable in the UK than they are in the States. And Alan, when the Tory MP Sir Nicholas Winterton describes those “totally different kind of people” whom he would rather not have to travel with or near, well, he’s talking about us—if, that is, we somehow rose above the level of tourists anyhow. (And you and I, we’re the worst sort—overly amiable, thus slightly suspicious or off-putting, southern and midwestern American tourists!)

We also never see the countless out-of-the-way neighborhoods, with urban realities far different from Mayfair’s. A rougher, quotidian existence prevails. Me, I think of the East End at this point, but I realize I do so in the most general, know-nothing terms, based on warnings I’ve received, articles read, etc. The centuries-old reputation of East London remains influential, as an area where poverty, crime, and overcrowding wreak urban havoc amid the docks and rookeries. Although it is still an impoverished area, I learned a lot from Sophie Howarth’s recent article on her favorite spots in her East End neighborhood, such as Broadway Market or the The Royal Oak café on Columbia Road. Her survey appeared in the premier issue of a new travel magazine, Afar (see its blog here). Howarth (founder of an interesting “social enterprise” on Marchmont Street, quite near where we were staying) quickly gives us outsiders a different impression, or rather one with more depth and complexity—two things required for any genuine encounter with a neighborhood.

And yet, despite these constrained circ*mstances—limitations of experience or imagination, our lazy reliance on generalities—it’s easy to sense and savor that tonal range that interests me, the bizarre assembly of high and low things overheard, the funny and absurd side by side with the horrific, and all finessed further by the kind of serendipity that intense urban density makes possible. Furthermore, it all takes place simultaneously, so that the historical layering we’re speaking of collapses and flattens out. To create, what? Not chronological layers in this case but, hmmm, would accordion folds be a useful metaphor here?

At some level, this tonal variety springs forth from human personality itself, with all of its delights and repulsions, its capacities for actions good and bad, its attention to the trifling or world-changing. This shouldn’t be surprising—what is a city, after all, but a concrete hive bustling with human personalities? I might as well acknowledge the ugly and difficult side first. Alan, do you remember that lovely Sunday evening with our friends in St. John’s Wood, visiting their neighborhood free house? Well, I have just heard that this enviable neighborhood, home to the American embassy community and popular because of the Beatles’ Abbey Road Studios nearby, has been hit by a string of muggings. (“And tired like me with follies and with crimes,” writes Samuel Johnson in “London,” a poem based on a satire by Juvenal, an earlier mocker of urban ills.) More darkly, on a perfect and perfectly sunny early spring morning when we enjoyed coffee and the papers, I read in The Observer about a ghastly crime. A Yorkshire man had stabbed his ex-partner’s mother and then written a message to his ex on the wall, in blood: “________ you, Claire.” The assailant eventually jumped to his death from a car park. These are horror stories, and cities endure them, and their citizens live through them, or do not.

It’s better to have the quiet life, a demanding one even or one of drudgery, trudging step by step through a quiet career. One day we awaited friends in front of the Royal Exchange, still an impressive sight. It was all the mercantile rage under Elizabeth I. Our best equivalent may be the Dallas Cowboys’ grandiose new stadium. As I glanced across the square at the tall doors of the Bank of England, a guy walked up from his motorbike and knocked on that imposing entrance. A young businessman soon appeared, and accepted take-out in exchange for a few pound notes. The doors dwarfed this common transaction, making it somehow comical. Within, employees were working hard on a Sunday afternoon, eating from Styrofoam for the sake of finance. And better this life, moving along, than sheer indifference, where those without means or facing adversities are met with pitilessness. I’m thinking of Peter Ackroyd again, this time his novel The Lambs of London. There we meet that eclectic essayist and opium-eater Thomas de Quincy. He first comes to the city and knows not a soul. Finally a distant kinsman allows him to stay in a “deserted, broken-down house in Berners Street.” On his first night there, he discovers a housemate, Anna. “I don’t mind the rats,” she says. “But I mind the ghosts.” Hers, we learn, “was a familiar London history of want, neglect, and hardship that made her seem older than she truly was.” They soon become friends, and together walk the city’s streets. Anna nurses Thomas through a fever. He has to travel to Winchester, and returning five days later, finds Anna gone. “She disappeared from the face of London as suddenly and as completely as if she had sunk beneath an ocean.”

These examples refuse to step aside, yet what a meager visualization this is, gaunt in its attention and urban rendering. To focus only on what Henry James calls the “miles and miles of the dreariest, stodgiest commonness” is to become equally stodgy, to be parsimonious in tone. “The heart tends to grow hard in her company,” he remarks elsewhere about London. There may be some truth to this, as with that anonymity cultivated so easily in cities, or habits of passing easily by. “London is so clumsy and so brutal,” he also says. I suspect James and I would disagree as to the precise merits of clumsiness. (Listen to me— arguing now with the author of The American!) For me, this is one of the treasured parts of city life. All of the clumsy, silly things. I cannot help but smile when remembering that pub placard we saw near the British Museum – “EAT! Come in and celebrate 150 years of fish and chips.” Or how about GoodEnough College? A recruitment advert for MI-5, seen on the Piccadilly line, also risks absurdity:

“Notice the last person to get off the train? Could you describe that person? You may be able to help protect the UK if you have observant skills. / / Don’t tell others about your application.”

You and I encountered plenty of heartiness in London, too. The London-raised Irish playwright Martin McDonagh claims that he recently moved to New York after growing tired of Londoners’ rudeness, but I typically haven’t experienced this. They can, though, be a surprisingly colorful lot. Walk around London (or any city) with the barest willingness to play the eavesdropper. It will always yield color of a linguistic sort. As I strolled by a cluster of students near University College, I heard one exclaim, “Well that’s such a Hugh Grant and Colin Farrell moment, isn’t it?” That last clause does better as isn’t it?, to convey the properly arch intonation. The fellow had just placed his friend within an intergenerational lineage of British rakes. Another version of extreme intonation is the polite lilt. “Are you done then?” asked the British Library employee in the rare-book room. “Lovely then.” To use an exclamation point there would exaggerate the delivery. Helium moment at first, with faint smile, but then downshifting quickly. The British use of “isn’t it?”, though, is more like an expressive work of art: two short, bland words in a rhetorical question, yet capable of stiletto uses. The golfer Padraig Harrington recently used it thus, to comment on Tiger Woods’ behavior. The phrase “particularly fetching” is also tonally resourceful—but to different effect.

Here are a few British-English words or portmanteaus tickling my brain lately: hot-desking (wi-fi work at cafÉ tables), barmy (“we are barmy in the depths of recession”), candy floss (our cotton candy). I noticed ads for “Vitabiotic,” which sounds like the healthiest something or other ever sold. If you’re not a black-coffee person, you may prefer a Flat White, as in “velvety smooth Flat White.” British English is more inventive in its euphemisms. Consider, for example, the phrase “the Anglo-Saxon tetragram.” Its sentences often mix words that we would find tonally exclusive, so that a tabloid headline might read, “Essex girl appalled by distended tummy. Icky.” Similarly, do you recall those two gobs on our train to Heathrow? Restless, glancing about, they seemed like a pair straight out of a Pinter play. Yet I remember one asking the other, “What’s wrong? Just a sore belly?” I half expected one guy to scratch and coo at the other’s stomach. Then there are verbs: to nip, to nick. A while ago, a Wimbledon billboard announced the benefits of a remote shut-down command if one’s cell phone were stolen. It’s one of my all-time favorite examples of English: “If it’s nicked, it’s knackered.”

We need these nimble, eclectic displays of language because our lives are just so. Shortly after we reached our hotel room, I flipped through a front-desk copy of Time Out London and was struck by the human activities on a given Saturday. There was the Starting Over Show at the Hilton Metropol on Edgeware Road: “A show for people going through life-changing challenges such as divorce, separation, illness or bereavement. Exhibitors include hypnotherapists, lawyers, financial advisors and life counselors.” A concurrent event called Desire sold jewelry and silverware. There was a screen-printing class, a Violin Makers’ Day. And there was the Flirting and Walking Tour of London, beginning at the National Portrait Gallery and “uncovering flirting hotspots including art galleries, bookstores and supermarkets.” It continued, “The evening includes practical exercises based on theories around body language and stepping outside your comfort zone.”

I marvel at this range, these tones, this myriad living— or the haphazardly mingling energies of Camden Town, or Wordsworth’s lines, brought up in your last letter: “This City now doth, like a garment, wear / The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, … / And all that mighty heart is lying still!”

That sense of coming to, of potential that may burst into life and strife and noble motion at any minute, also reminds me of Keats’ phrase, “‘Tis might half slumb’ring on its own right arm” (and in turn, with a nod above, Isabella’s words to Angelo, by which she urges mercy for her condemned brother Claudio: “O, it is excellent / To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous / To use it like a giant”).

It seems fitting to wrap up my last, less than little flight of urban fancy with a regretful list, a compilation of a few books I wish I hadn’t passed on—born of a mix of necessary frugality, a lack of appreciation for our overseas setting, foolhardy overpacking related to research, and, redeeming it all, a remembrance of spousal wishes. They include an inexpensive paperback of Tyndale’s New Testament (would have been perfect for a friend); Peter Hall’s Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players; Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, a play that is all the rage in London at present, thanks to Mark Rylance’s universally praised turn as Johnny “Rooster” Byron, a Blakean ex-daredevil biker, strangely moving drug dealer, and squatter who lives in a metal trailer in Wiltshire (by the way, Alan, thanks for lending me your copy after we returned home; it took the edge off of my wistfulness); various editions of Simon Armitage’s poems; Shakespeare’s Individualism, a brand new academic title by Peter Holbrook, and Anne Barton’s Essays, Mainly Shakespearean; a little volume on Ariosto, spotted in a shop on Charing Cross and, again, perfect for a friend; a new (to me) collected edition of Michael Donaghy’s fine poetry, an edition that I still imagine on the shelf at Foyles, as if impassively waiting for me to choose more wisely next time; Elizabeth Jennings’ New Collected Poems; Joseph O’Neill’s 2008 novel Netherland at one of the Oxfam bookshops; and a beautiful modern edition of the Wyclifite Bible in the British Library bookstore.

So when can we return and obtain some of these foolishly underappreciated (though hardly overlooked) volumes?

Cheers, and cheerio—only for now, I hope, with more adventures ahead …

Brett

London Letters, 1London Letters, 2London Letters, 3London Letters, 4London Letters, 5

Copyright © 2010 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

My husband and I consciously choose to watch only one television show at a time, which we watch, well, religiously. For the past few years, our show has been Lost. Its dramatic plot and love stories and perpetual mysteries all piqued my interest, but the show, written by a Catholic and a Jew, also played with philosophical and theological themes that kept me coming back for more. Sunday night’s series finale was no exception.

Judeo-Christian language and imagery show up repeatedly. There’s Jacob, who, to pass the mantel of leadership of the island to Jack Shepherd, dips a cup into water and says, “Drink this.” The scene is laden with references to the Last Supper. There’s Jack’s father, Christian Shepherd, who dies and comes to life again, as one of a handful of resurrected characters. Light is the source of all goodness. Miraculous healings abound.

But, as much as the show draws on Christian symbols, it doesn’t offer a Christ figure. There is no personal deity. Although “the island,” through Jacob, summons wayward individuals to itself, those individuals are then on their own, left to call forth their individual light and let it shine as they see fit. Lost could easily be dismissed as yet another syncretistic attempt to speak in vaguely positive spiritual terms, failing to say anything specific about God.

One aspect of Sunday’s show stands out, however, for its theological truth. Over the course of the past season, two story lines have been playing out in tandem. In one, the characters never crashed on the island. Their flight from Australia lands in Los Angeles without a hitch,and they go on with their normal lives, with varying degrees of happiness. In the other, life on the island continues, as the same characters battle against nature, against each other, and against the evil smoke monster. The final episode brings the two stories together.

In order for the two stories to merge, the people in LA need to remember their lives on the island. But simply seeing one another isn’t enough. The memory of their time together on the island comes through physical touch, and it comes only through love. When Jin and Sun see their baby in an ultrasound exam, when Kate helps Claire give birth to Aaron, when Charlie brings Claire a blanket, when Juliet hands Sawyer a candy bar—profound or mundane, the physical touch from the hand of the beloved prompts memory and reunion.

In every case, the memory of love becomes a present reality. The pain of the past is overcome. The dead are alive. The wounded are healed. Those separated are reunited. As Tolkien might say, “Everything bad has come untrue.”

It is here that the creators of Lost got it right, in recognizing the power of love and the power of physical touch to enable memory, healing, and joy. In the Bible, Jesus explains that we need “eyes to see” the deeper, spiritual reality, the kingdom of God at work around us. Lost‘s characters did not have eyes to see one another, and they did not have eyes to see themselves, until they encountered love. For Christians, it is Jesus who gives us eyes to see: eyes to see the world as it is and to know ourselves loved within it. Jesus did not demonstrate God’s healing power from a far-off place. Rather, he healed and cared for people by touching them. He put his hands on the eyes of the blind man. He touched the lepers. And his touch was the touch of one who loves. His loving touch enables us to see.

Each of Lost‘s characters was alone when the series began. Even the married couple, Jin and Sun, felt alienated from one another. Over the course of the series, these rugged individuals soon realized that they needed one another, that they needed community in order to survive. Moreover, they needed one another in order to understand themselves, and in order to become whole.

Christian theology is relational at its core. The Father loves the Son loves the Spirit, and from that Trinitarian love emerges creation. That love for human beings extends so far that God came as one of us. In his book Love Walked Among Us, Paul Miller points out a pattern that emerges in the Gospels. Jesus sees a person in need, feels compassion towards that person, and moves toward that person to offer help (cf. Luke 7:11-17). The same pattern holds true of God in the Old Testament (Ex. 3:7).

Lost certainly is not suggesting that the Trinitarian God is the answer to the world’s problems. The final scene—with a stained-glass window incorporating a pantheon of religious symbols, including everything from a cross to a yin-yang circle—is as vague and vacuous as modern spirituality gets. This is a show that, for the most part, gets its theology wrong. But it is also a show that, for the most part, gets its relationships right. As a result, the series depicts theological truth even as it shies away from proclaiming it.

CT’s Entertainment Blog has covered Lost several times, including regular installments from Chris Seay, author of The Gospel According to Lost. Seay said he was disappointed with the series finale. Online editor Sarah Pulliam Bailey spoke with Entertainment Weekly’s Lost aficionado, Jeff ‘Doc’ Jensen, last week. Her.meneutics blogger Laura Leonard has written about Lost’s female characters.

It is amazing to me! There are people within the ranks of Christianity who have been taught and who believe that Christ will shield His followers from wounds of every kind.

If the truth were known, the saints of God in every age were only effective after they had been wounded. They experienced the humbling wounds that brought contrition, compassion and a yearning for the knowledge of God. I could only wish that more among the followers of Christ knew what some of the early saints meant when they spoke of being wounded by the Holy Spirit.

Think for a moment about the apostle Paul. I suppose there is no theologian living or dead who quite knows what Paul meant when he said, “From henceforth let no man make trouble for me: for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus” (Galatians 6:17). Every commentary has a different idea. I think Paul referred to the wounds he suffered because of his faith and godly life.

–A.W. Tozer (Men Who Met God, p. 59)

I cringe when people suggest that becoming a follower of Jesus will provide a shield from hurt, pain, and loss. After all, Jesus was nailed to a tree, betrayed by a best friend, and stared death in the eyes. Yes, he triumphed, but he also never went numb. He felt. He sensed. He ached. He cried out.

We will, too.

Sometimes when I invite people to know Jesus I’ll tell them flat out: Becoming a follower of Jesus will not make you skinnier, richer, or more powerful. The words are usually met with nervous laughter, because everyone knows that it’s uncomfortably true. I’m grateful for Tozer’s timeless words.

What do you think are some of the biggest misconceptions people have about becoming a follower of Jesus?

The Democrats were all about faith in the 2008 election, sponsoring official faith-based panels at the Democratic National Convention and nominating a candidate who spoke openly about his faith. In contrast, the Republicans held one unadvertised prayer breakfast with muffins and plastic cups of orange juice in a renovated bar-turned-church, and their nominee rarely spoke about his faith.

Leading up to the 2010 elections, however, the Democratic National Committee’s faith staff of more than a half-dozen has shifted to one part-time employee, Michelle Boorstein of the Washington Postreports.

[Former Virginia Governor Tim] Kaine, who chairs the DNC, and other party leaders say the decrease in paid faith staff reflects a change in how the party does outreach – not a shift away from religious voters. The party, at the behest of the White House, has reshaped how it reaches out to all constituency groups and has opted to expand its network of grass-roots volunteers and shrink its national staff of organizers who were in the past broken down by race and religion.

Although a party spokesman said its faith outreach staff had been dismantled when Obama took office, Kaine said that a staff member who also does African American outreach has been assigned to oversee faith as well but had been on a medical leave. The party will be hiring more faith staff and crafting a faith outreach plan as the fall election season gets closer, said Kaine, who rejected the idea that the effort was diminishing on his watch.

Boorstein reports that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent more than $82,000 on faith outreach in 2008, but a spokesperson couldn’t name expenses for 2009 or 2010. The Eleison Group, which does faith consulting, worked on more than 40 campaigns in 2008, but it has no 2010 national campaign contracts right now.

Chris Seay, author of The Gospel According to Lost, offers his thoughts on Sunday night’s finale, “The End.” (SPOILERS AHEAD). Seay says he felt the success of the finale depended on the ability of the storytellers “to weave these two narratives together, and I felt like the finale fell short in that. There are still a lot of questions [including] about whether the island is purgatory. It leaves us with a lot of pieces to put together. It just wasn’t what the storytelling geek in me wanted.” Seay does note that he enjoyed the spiritual focus, and adds that though he wouldn’t want the show to be “Christian propaganda,” he was somewhat disappointed in the mishmash of religions – “all these spiritual paths” – that showed up at the end. “To have all these religions literally laid on top of each other felt disingenuous, even a bit offensive.” Check out the rest of Seay’s comments here:

On Sunday night, LOST, the series that has consumed so many, and baffled so many others, finished with a flurry of activity befitting the show that consistently blazed its own trail.

Fair or not (and perhaps it is), a TV show’s legacy is often judged by the final impression. But whether fans liked the ending or not (whether they understood it or not), it certainly was a all-you-can-watch buffet for the millions of insatiable LOST diehards. Starting with the two-hour recap and ending with Jimmy Kimmel’s hour-long “Aloha to LOST” special—oh yeah, and with the extended two-and-a-half hour episode sandwiched in between—the series finale was not just the final episode; it was an event.

Aptly titled “The End,” the finale was action-packed, philosophical, emotionally intense, rewarding, baffling, redemptive, and just ambiguous enough to prompt speculation. In other words, it was everything fans have come to expect from their beloved show.

Worth the Devotion

The series began six years ago when Oceanic Flight 815 crashed on a mysterious island. Every episode since “The Pilot,” it seems, has raised more questions, or implemented a new mind-boggling storytelling device. First viewers witnessed flashbacks, then flash-forwards, then an island that jumped haphazardly through time and space, and, starting earlier this season, an alternate (or “sideways”) reality—created when a group of the survivors detonated a hydrogen bomb in the season 5 finale—where the plane never crashed.

Throughout LOST‘s six seasons, fans tuned in for the characters, the drama, the adventure, and, perhaps most of all, the mysteries that spawned thousands of theories on online forums, message boards, and blogs. Since its premiere, LOST has been unlike any other show. Similarly, its finale may have carried more expectations than any single episode in the history of television. With so many questions unanswered and so many mysteries unresolved, it would be an understatement to say fans expected a sensational (and satisfying) end to what has been an epic journey.

The finale, for many fans, wasn’t just about the end of the story; it was about solving the mystery, and determining, in this final culmination, whether the show was worth the devotion it evoked. Leading up to the finale, LOST websites were abuzz with chatter about the questions that needed to be answered. Those who expected the finale to finally answer all those questions, however, may have been disappointed. Some of the mysteries were addressed in the finale. Most weren’t.

In fact, the final hours of LOST showed little concern for satisfying viewers’ curiosity. Instead, the writers were committed to finishing the story they have been weaving for the last six seasons. But the finale did offer something for everyone. For the sci-fi fans: the pool of electromagnetism in the “heart of the island” (and the cork-like contraption keeping the glowing water in the electromagnetic pool). For the romantics: all the “I love you” exchanges in the Sideways reality (and the final kiss for Jack and Kate on the island). For the adventure-lovers: well, the entire episode. And for everyone: numerous meaningful scenes between all the characters to whom viewers have developed such an attachment.

LOST has often been described as an epic journey, and for the last year, it seemed to be building to a definitive confrontation between good and evil. But LOST was always more Lord of the Flies than Lord of the Rings. These characters were not marching toward Mordor together. For the entire first season, they struggled to inhabit the same beach without killing each other. Even when they did work together, the characters all seemed to be harboring their own hidden agendas.

So for the LOST characters, the “good versus evil” struggle started inside each of them. As Jacob, the island’s former protector, revealed in a recent episode, he chose these people as candidates to replace him because they were flawed. Because they were searching for something. What these characters found on the island was an opportunity for redemption. Some embraced this opportunity; others did not.

Embracing the Outlandish

LOST‘s plot has gotten so complex, so outlandish, that when one attempts to sum up the on-island events it sounds, to borrow a word used by Miles in the penultimate episode, wonky. A man instantly healed from paralysis. Cancer cured. A polar bear on a tropical island. A smoke monster—that also seems, somehow, to be at least part-human. A frozen donkey wheel that, when turned, can send the island skipping through time. A man who doesn’t age. Men who come back to life. Men who communicate with ghosts. A sideways reality. A mystical pool of light at the heart of the island.

Pulled out of context, it does sound incredibly wonky.

But in those moments on that island, it worked. The writers stayed true to the world they created, and the characters played their roles convincingly enough to make every scene—even the most far-fetched—believable. And entertaining. And that was enough keep viewers engaged.

The finale is sure to evoke some criticism (or at least a plethora of questions) about the resolution of the Sideways storyline—the alternate reality that made up a major portion of the final season. The show’s producers assured fans long ago that the characters on the island weren’t part of a dream, dead, or in purgatory. But the pivotal scene in the alternate world revealed that, in this world, the characters had all died—at various times and in various places in the original timeline. And now they were being united again in what appeared to be a place very much like purgatory (they even gathered together at a church and sat together in pews as they prepared to “move on,” and eventually Christian Shephard walked out of the church into a very bright light).

Scrutinized separately from the context of the show, that scene could be labeled too outlandish. Some viewers might consider it a cop-out, or at least a letdown. But in the moment, when almost all the characters were reunited, it was powerful. Charlie and Claire (with newborn baby Aaron). Sayid and Shannon. Juliet and Sawyer, Kate and Jack—all reunited. And every one of them, smiling. (Who could have predicted such a happy ending for these characters—in any reality?)

The resolution on the island, however, was less serene. With rain pouring down, the island was continually shaken by tremors—precursors of the volcanic eruption that was sure to sink the island. The monster, once described as “evil incarnate” (and who, for the final two seasons, has been disguised in the body of the deceased character John Locke), has finally figured out how to leave the island—and in doing so, he plans to destroy not only the island, but the world.

Jack, the island’s newly inaugurated protector, is the only obstacle that remains for the monster. In a classic battle scene that seemed to belong in the Mountains of Mordor, Jack and the monster charged at one another. Just before the monster could end Jack’s life, Kate showed up and shot the monster in the back. So it was Jack who limped away—at least temporarily—heading back to the electromagnetic pool at the heart of the island. (How typical of LOST that, immediately after Jack finishes killing the monster disguised in Locke’s body, the next scene reveals the other reality where Jack, the spinal surgeon, is successfully completing Locke’s spinal surgery.)

The End of “The End”

If LOST had one primary character (it often seemed to have a dozen), it was Jack, the talented surgeon who was constantly searching for a purpose—the wayward doctor for whom faith was just too far-fetched. It took six seasons, but Jack finally got his redemption. In that final scene, with Walt’s dog lying beside him in the bamboo field, as Jack saw the plane carrying his friends flying overhead, the pseudo-protagonist seemed to find not only his purpose, but also peace.

Fans can complain that the finale didn’t answer every question, but when LOST is viewed as a whole, from “The Pilot” all the way through to “The End,” the adventure is unmatched. And confusing as that adventure was at times, one can’t help thinking that those who weren’t a part of it, those who didn’t join the millions of fans for this epic experience, missed something magical.

Perhaps Terry O’Quinn (who played the character John Locke and the island’s ultimate antagonist) said it best during the two-hour recap: “You don’t want the book to come to an end, but you close the book and say, ‘That was great!’ “

LOST was truly great. Throughout its six-year run, the show’s ambitious storyline was not only groundbreaking, but transcendent. The scope of the show, the production budget, the extensive and diverse cast, the commitment to character development, and cult-like obsession it evoked from its fans—these are elements that are unlikely to be reproduced by another network television show.

So what if we never learned all the answers? We don’t fully understand the significance of “the numbers.” We don’t know why Claire’s child was not supposed to be “raised by another.” Many details about the island’s history, from the hieroglyphics to the Dharma Initiative’s origins to the infertility issues, will remain shrouded. But the story presented to us was, if not perfect, certainly sensational. From the moment when Jack’s eye opened to the moment when it closed, LOST has been one of the most entertaining and compelling stories ever told.

As for all the mysteries that remain, consider them incentive to go back to the beginning and start watching again. Because we’re not going to find anything on television as worthy of our time. Not anymore.

Tyler Charles is a freelance writer living in Delaware, Ohio.

Copyright © 2010 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

Bluetree, a Christian rock band from Ireland, claims that a general wanted to kill them in a recent standoff in Myanmar, where the band was visiting. The band, known for its radio hit “God of This City” (also covered by Chris Tomlin), had snuck into the country, knowing the possible danger.

According to a recent post on CNN’s Belief blog, “high-ranking members of two different military units were pointing at [the band] and yelling in a language they didn’t understand, according to lead singer Aaron Boyd. Their interpreter clammed up and the president of the NGO that had brought the band into the country said, ‘This is bad. This is really, really bad.’ Later, after leaving the country, the band was informed that their fates were being debated: ‘We were told later their general said we’re not even going to waste our bullets with them, we’re just going to slice their throats,’ Boyd said. ‘Bottom line was our guy, whatever he did, whatever he said, managed to calm the whole thing down.'”