Page 5733 – Christianity Today (2024)

Is pastoral visitation obsolete? Is it a relic of a day when people were at home more and our grandmothers were pleased to serve the minister a cup of tea in the parlor? Today’s pastors may be unsure of the purpose of the pastoral call, and those they call upon may be even more unsure.

Yet there is still a widespread feeling that calling is important. The Bible is a reaching-out book, and calling is consistent with this emphasis. Jesus sent out the twelve disciples, he sent out the seventy-two, and he called upon his followers to go and to make disciples. He himself visited in the homes of Martha, Zacchaeus, Peter, and others. Paul traveled for the Gospel, characteristically writing the Romans, “I have been longing for many years to visit you.”

The main difficulty with calling today is not with the theoretical side (should it be done?) but with the practical side (how should it be done?).

The physician once spent most of his time making house calls; now he rarely makes house calls but sees patients in his office. The pastor’s work has similarly changed. Often he counsels people in his study. Many conversations that might previously have taken place during a pastoral call now occur in the study. And no longer is the pastor the only counselor available; the troubled person can now choose from a wide array of counseling services. Also, visits to the sick and dying are now much more likely to take place in hospitals than in homes.

There has also been a change in visiting the needy. A new professional is at work here: the social worker. The neighbors who once called the pastor to report someone in need may now call the welfare office. The burden of the poor has shifted from the church to the state.

Once the pastor was a kind of supervising teacher or educational inspector, seeing that religion was taught in the home. This role too has been abandoned. The hope of direct teaching of religion in the home has disappeared; now this teaching is left to the Sunday school.

The pastoral call has, then, been narrowed in scope by the removal of many of its concerns to other places or other persons. This narrowing diminishes the support structure that helped the minister and those he visited know what he was doing and why.

Further difficulty is caused by changes in home life. The urge for privacy is strong these days, and this makes entry into the home more difficult. The inviting front porch of yesteryear has been replaced by the walled-in backyard patio. The apartment house often looks like a fortress, complete with guards. The parlor, which for all of its stiffness did suggest that callers were expected and that this was the place to receive them, is now gone. The “family room” might seem to be a room reserved for the family, not a place for outsiders. The movement to the suburbs, then to the outer suburbs, and then into the country is for many people a move toward a way of life that is private and isolated.

All of this makes a telephone call in advance almost a necessity, and this means that the pastoral call loses some of its spontaneity—or perhaps doesn’t occur at all. The house is often empty. Women have jobs outside the home. Jobs for both men and women may be a considerable distance away and require more time away from home. Much entertainment takes place outside the home, and more and more meals are eaten outside the home. When family members are at home, TV sets and stereos are likely to occupy their attention in different parts of the house and may also be left on when a visitor arrives, providing a noisy background not conducive to conversation.

The house itself may seem rather impersonal. It may have been selected more for its resale potential than as an expression of the taste of its owners. The furniture may have been chosen because it can easily be moved to the next home.

While there is an aloof and impersonal air in many homes, there is also a poignant cry that many people are really lonely. They will join sensitivity groups and seek to communicate with others in a selected group outside the home, but sometimes they do not transfer these newfound skills of communication to their home setting. Just when the home seems to be at its most inhospitable, it is most in need of the call from the church.

I’d like to suggest that a model for the call might be based upon the statement of Jesus that he regarded his disciples not as servants but as friends (John 15:14–17). Here is a relationship not of master-servant but of equals.

This model of friendship from the teaching of Jesus can be matched with his teaching of love. Something of this is caught in the action of Jesus when Peter came to him impulsively and then began to sink in the water, crying out for help. “Jesus at once reached out and caught hold of him” (Matt. 13:30). Friends reach out, and calling is reaching out.

This model relates to the needs of today in at least two ways. Many people will admit to being lonely; there is a need for friendship. And friendship stimulates conversation. So much is communicated into the home through newspapers and magazines, radio, and TV, but in many homes little communication goes on between wife and husband, between parent and child, and between children.

The call is really an exercise in conversation. This is the framework for the pastor here, just as the epistle was the framework for Paul in the New Testament. The conversation of a pastoral call is, in this conception, the conversation of friends. It can be light and casual, or absorbing and serious. If we say that the stuff of a call is conversation and that the purpose of the call is simply friendship, then we need not worry about the level of the conversation. It may be short and full of laughter and light, or long and full of soul-searching complexities.

This model relieves us of much of the now irrelevant baggage we have carried into our thinking about the call. It still fulfills the biblical demands. The pressure upon us to call is given an outlet, and frustration can be turned into energy that helps and inspires this work.

The image of friendship and consequent conversation may even carry over into the area of prayer as part of the call. Prayer is appropriate when God is included in the conversation. Just as conversation should flow easily and naturally, so prayer can quite naturally be a part of this model.

This model can serve for the lay caller as well as for the pastor. Friendship is not something that is for professionals only. Both as caller and as callee, the lay person can feel comfortable with the model of friendship.

When a minister can go up the walk and press the door bell without the baggage of the ages pressing down upon him, he can look forward to his visit. Friends are always welcome.—RODGER SILLARS, pastor, First Presbyterian Church, Clarence, New York.

Michael Novakis a Roman Catholic theologian whose books include “Choosing Our King.”

The day I heard Michael Harrington say that most liberals are “closet socialists,” I knew by my revulsion that I had to face an ugly truth about myself. For years, I had tried to hide, even from myself, my unconscious convictions. In the intellectual circles I frequent, persons with inclinations like my own are mocked, considered to be compromised, held at arm’s length as security risks. We are easily intimidated.

The truth is there are probably millions of us. Who knows? Your brother or sister may be one of us. The fellow teaching in the class next to yours; the columnist for the rival paper; even the famous liberated poetess—our kind, hiding their convictions out of fear of retribution, lurk everywhere. Even now we may be corrupting your children.

We are the closet capitalists. Now, at last, our time has come. The whole world is going socialist. Nearly 118 out of 142 nations of the world are tyrannies. A bare 24 are free-economy democracies. We are the world’s newest, least understood, and little loved minority. It is time for us to begin, everywhere, organizing cells of the Capitalist Liberation Front.

I first realized I was a capitalist when all my friends began publicly declaring that they were socialists, Harrington and John Kenneth Galbraith having called the signal. How I wished I could be as left as they. Night after night I tried to persuade myself of the coherence of their logic; I did my best to go straight. I held up in the privacy of my room pictures of every socialist land known to me: North Korea, Albania, Czechoslovakia (land of my grandparents), and even Sweden. Nothing worked.

When I quizzed my socialist intellectual friends, I found they didn’t like socialist countries, either. They all said to me: “We want socialism, but not like Eastern Europe.” I said: “Cuba?” No suggestion won their assent. They didn’t want to be identified with China (except that the streets seemed clean). Nor with Tanzania. They loved the idea of socialism.

“But what is it about this particular idea you like?” I asked. “Government control? Will we have a Pentagon of heavy industry?” Not exactly. Nor did they think my suggestion witty, that under socialism everything would function like the Post Office. When they began to speak of “planning,” I asked, who would police the planners? They had enormous faith in politicians, bureaucrats, and experts. Especially in experts.

“Will Mayor Daley have ‘clout’ over the planners?” I asked, seeking a little comfort. “Or congressmen from Mississippi?” My friends thought liberal-minded persons would make the key decisions. Knowing the nation, I can’t feel so sure. Knowing the liberal-minded, I’m not so comforted.

Since they have argued that oil companies are now too large, I couldn’t see how an HEW that included Oil would be smaller. My modest proposal was that they encourage monopoly in every industry and then make each surviving corporation head a cabinet officer.

Practical discussions seemed beside the point. Finally, I realized that socialism is not a political proposal, not an economic plan. Socialism is the residue of Judaeo-Christian faith, without religion. It is a belief in community, the goodness of the human race, and paradise on earth.

That’s when I discovered I was an incurable and inveterate, as well as secret, sinner. I believe in sin. I’m for capitalism, modified and made intelligent and public-spirited, because it makes the world free for sinners. It allows human beings to do pretty much what they will. Socialism is a system built on belief in human goodness; so it never works. Capitalism is a system built on belief in human selfishness; given checks and balances, it is nearly always a smashing, scandalous success. Check Taiwan, Japan, West Germany, Hong Kong, and (one of the newest nations in one of the recently most underdeveloped sectors of the world) these United States. Two hundred years ago, there was a China, and also a Russia. The United States was only a gleam in Patrick Henry’s eye.

Wherever you go in the world, sin thrives better under capitalism. It’s presumptuous to believe that God is on any human’s side. (Actually, if capitalism were godless and socialism were deeply religious, the roles of many spokesmen in America would be reversed in fascinating ways.) But God did make human beings free. Free to sin. God’s heart may have been socialist; his design was capitalist as hell. There is an innate tendency in socialism toward authoritarianism. Left to themselves, all human beings won’t be good; most must be converted. Capitalism, accepting human sinfulness, rubs sinner against sinner, making even dry wood yield a spark of grace.

Capitalism has given the planet its present impetus for liberation. Everywhere else they are hawking capitalist ideas: growth, liberation, democracy, investments, banking, industry, technology. Millions are alive, and living longer, because of medicine developed under capitalism. Without our enormous psychic energy, productivity, and inventions, oil would still be lying under Saudi Arabia, undiscovered, unpumped, and useless. Coffee, bananas, tin, sugar, and other items of trade would have no markets. Capitalism has made the world rich, inventing riches other populations didn’t know they had. And yielding sinful pleasures for the millions.

Six per cent of the world’s population consumes, they say, 40 per cent of the world’s goods. The same 6 per cent produces more than 50 per cent; far more than it can consume. No other system can make such a statement, even in lands more populous, older, and richer than our own. As everybody knows, hedonism requires excess.

Look out, world! The closet capitalists are coming out. You don’t have to love us. We don’t need your love. If we can help you out, we’ll be glad to. A system built on sin is built on very solid ground indeed. The saintliness of socialism will not feed the poor. The United States may be, as many of you say, the worthless and despicable prodigal son among the nations. Just wait and see who gets the fatted calf.

—Copyright 1976 The Washington Post; reprinted with permission.

Lying has been brought to public attention in various and compelling ways in recent years, in the United States and around the world. Events have caused both Christians and unbelievers to take another look at the priority of truth.

The Communists have a kind of schizophrenia about lying. They subordinate ethics and morality to the interests of the class struggle. They repudiate all morality that is taken outside of human, class concepts. Therefore they consider it right to lie whenever a lie will serve to advance the Communist cause. However, the Communists find it necessary to insist that the teachings of Marx and Lenin are normative. All ideas must be judged in the light of their teaching. Thus total falsehood would bring even a Communist society to its knees.

Some Christians suppose that the commandment “Thou shalt not bear false witness” is something special that belongs to revelation and not to nature. This is erroneous. The Ten Commandments are based upon what is naturally in man’s best interest. Even if there were no commandment from God to tell the truth, lying would be seen to run counter to human well-being. In the long run lying is always destructive.

The Apostle Paul deals with lying in Colossians three. He does so within the larger context of the transformed walk of believers. They are to put away anger, wrath, malice, slander, and foul talk. Then he says categorically, “Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old nature with its practices” (Col. 3:9). The meaning is plain: lying belongs to the old order of life, truth-telling to the new. Christians are not to lie to one another.

But is a lie ever justifiable? Must we insist that lying is always wrong and should never, under any circ*mstances, be engaged in? What about times when telling the truth would cause a Christian to break some other commandment of God? Corrie ten Boom faced this years ago. If she revealed the fact that Jews were hidden in her father’s house, she would then be a contributor to their later death in gas chambers. If she lied, she would sin but perhaps save them from death. What should she have done?

This question as we have framed it is far removed from the approach of the situational ethicist. We are speaking of evils, and asking whether the Christian is right in choosing the lesser of them. The situationist would reject this idea of greater and lesser evil. For him, a deed is either right or wrong depending on whether or not it fulfills the law of love. For the situationist, to tell the Nazi soldiers there were no Jews in the house would not be to choose the lesser evil; it would be to do what is good under the law of love.

There are few times in life when anyone is faced with two evils, one of which he must choose. Often telling the truth may result in embarrassment, financial loss, or a score of other undesirable personal consequences. But these do not involve breaking another law of God. In such cases the truth must be told however expensive it is to us. In Acts 4:19 Peter and John gave their response to the Sanhedrin, which had commanded them never to speak or teach in the name of Jesus. They could have promised the Sanhedrin to do what was demanded of them, tongue in cheek, and then gone out to speak and teach in Jesus’ name anyway. And perhaps they could have argued that this lie was the lesser of two evils—for to obey the Sanhedrin would be to disobey Jesus’ command and to disobey the Sanhedrin might mean death. Surely to lie would be better than to die. But however embarrassing or costly the consequences, they told the truth: “we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20).

If and when a Christian does have to choose one evil over another, he is not free from the guilt of the evil he chooses. If he lies, he is guility of having told a lie, no matter what his motives. In calling for truth the Bible mentions no exceptions. The commandment of Sabbath-keeping had exceptions; works of mercy and necessity were permitted. The law against killing allowed for exceptions; at certain points in the Old Testament, war and capital punishment were commanded by God. But the commandment of truth-telling had no exceptions.

If the Christian is convinced that he must choose to do a particular evil because the only alternative would be to do a greater evil, then he must do so with the knowledge that he has broken the law of God and must seek forgiveness through repentance and confession. Fortunately for us sinners, God’s grace is greater than all our sins—the many we commit selfishly, and the few we commit unselfishly.

Marxism, Religion: Impossible Bedfellows

One of the strangest alliances of our times is that which certain professing Christians claim to seek between religion and Marxism. Undeniably there are specific evils that Communists and all sorts of other observers can denounce and try to correct. (There are, to be sure, other specific evils that Communism and other totalitarian systems foster.) But Marxism is much more than just a catalogue of complaints against the way things are. It is a total world and life view that is utterly opposed to anything resembling historic Christian teaching—indeed, to the teachings of religions generally.

Cuba, the Western hemisphere’s only Communist country, provides the best recent illustration of this. Cubans voted this year for the first time since Fidel Castro came to power seventeen years ago. The 5.5 million voters who went to the polls gave almost unanimous approval to the new constitution. That basic document had been drafted by the nation’s Communist party congress a few weeks earlier, but the congress also wrote a working platform. A comparison of the two is revealing.

Article 54 of the new constitution “recognizes and guarantees … the right of each person to profess whatever religion he pleases and to practice, within the legal limits, the worship of his choice.” The phrase “within the legal limits” could of course mean only that polygamy or the use of narcotics or loud noises would be prohibited. That it has meant and will mean much more is evidenced by the working platform’s explicit naming of one of the tasks of the ideological struggle as “the gradual conquest of religious beliefs.” This conquest is not to be by taking “coercive … measures against religion,” but “by adjusting scientific materialistic propaganda to the cultural level of workers.”

The Marxist view is clearly enunciated in the working platform: “… religion is a twisted and fantastic reflection of outer reality.” People who truly believe in a personal God to whom we are all accountable for time and eternity are not Marxists even if they are properly outraged by some of the same things that Communists attack. And by the same token, people who are Marxists have absolutely no business pretending to be Christians. They should have the courage of their convictions and profess openly their disdain of a supernatural view of the world in favor of what is proudly called “scientific materialism.”

To complement the tremendous latitude that the phrase “legal limits” allows for Cuban government opposition to religion there will doubtless be a very narrow interpretation of “the worship of [one’s] choice.”

Worship is indeed a very important part of the Christian’s responsibility, but so is evangelism, so is the teaching of converts, so is the performance of works of mercy in the name of Christ, so is the criticism of government or any other institution that sets itself up as the ultimate authority, claiming in effect to displace God. These Christian activities are not protected, even nominally, by the Cuban constitution.

Some Communist protests and programs may seem right and attractive when lifted out of their ideological context. For differing reasons, both Christians and Communists might protest abortion, for example. But we have to go beyond rhetoric to an analysis of working Marxist systems, of which Cuba is the best example in this hemisphere. The testimony of its constitution should be clear to all: Marxism is one thing, Christianity is quite another. Let there be no confusion whatsoever between them.

Four Billion And Climbing

According to reasonably good estimates, the population of the world reached four billion persons earlier this month. Population is apparently growing at a rate of 1.8 per cent a year. If that rate continues, the population will pass the five billion mark before 1990.

As far as experts can tell, the population of the planet did not reach one billion until about 1850. Eighty years were required to achieve the second billion. Despite the ravages of World War II only thirty years were needed to reach three billion, which happened by 1961. Now it has taken only half as long to add the fourth billion.

The rate of growth is not so great as it once was; reaching the fifth billion is expected to take as long as reaching the fourth did. But that is little comfort to those nations that will see their already low living standards slip even more as human procreation continues to outpace economic production.

For Christians, the evangelistic challenge is clear. There are now one-third more people than there were fifteen years ago. But have evangelistic personnel (both missionaries and national workers) and fruitful efforts increased by that much also? Even if they had, which is doubtful, Christians would just be keeping up; they would not be advancing. Are there one-third more people attending Bible-teaching congregations now than there were in 1961?

As inhabitants of a planet whose population is increasing so rapidly Christians must face many other dimensions of responsibility. The complexity of the new problems is not cause for the Church to panic, however. God was well aware of this population explosion long before it happened. His commission to go into all the world carries with it the promise that he will be with us always. He has also promised the power necessary to follow his command.

It is certainly no time for the Church to be complacent, completely reliant upon methods that worked in bygone days. Today’s Christians have a commission to evangelize today’s people—all four billion of them—with the energy and methods that God provides today.

A Setback For ‘Gay Liberation’

In a recent refusal to hear a case, the Supreme Court has rendered what might in time be considered a landmark decision on hom*osexuality.

At issue was a Virginia law that makes hom*osexual acts (sodomy) between consenting adults in public or in private a crime punishable by imprisonment. When this statute was tested by two hom*osexuals, a lower federal court ruled that the Virginia law was constitutional. It said (among other things) that forbidding sodomy is not an upstart notion, and mentioned its prohibition in the Book of Leviticus.

The case was appealed to the Supreme Court, but only three of the nine justices voted for a full court hearing, one fewer than the required number. The three did not necessarily think the Virginia law was unconstitutional; their vote meant that they thought the court should hear the evidence. Their colleagues did not agree, and so the decision of the lower court stands. Any state may therefore legislate that sodomy is a crime and is punishable by imprisonment.

The decision is in accord with the Judeo-Christian tradition based on the Old and New Testament Scriptures. Some hom*osexuals who claim to be Christians have rejected, on cultural or hermeneutical grounds, the scriptural prohibition against hom*osexual acts. But in neither of these ways have they been able to make a case that does not invalidate Scripture on this issue and does not open the door wide to the denial of more central biblical teachings—those having to do with salvation—as well.

Even if Christian hom*osexuals remain convinced that Scripture does not condemn hom*osexual activity, they can no longer say that laws against this are unconstitutional. The constitutionality of these laws has now been affirmed by the highest court in the land. hom*osexuals should obey the law.

In welcoming the Supreme Court’s confirmation of what many Christians think is a scriptural teaching, let us not forget that hom*osexuals are persons for whom Christ died. Christian hom*osexuals need our prayers and support as they seek God’s help to overcome their handicap.

When The Covers Close

When Howard Hughes died several weeks ago, his life and death were featured on the front pages of the New York Times and other major newspapers and in the national news weeklies. Little or nothing was said about his religious convictions. Whether he had any religious faith only God knows. But his death does underline a couple of timeless religious truths.

Hughes reportedly amassed more than two billion dollars’ worth of assets, including a large gambling empire in Las Vegas. But death is the great leveler. Howard Hughes went out of this life just as he came into it: empty-handed.

And when death overtook him, the books both of men and of God were closed. Nothing can now be added to or subtracted from the record of his life.

For us, the books are still open, for a while. We still have time to be better—better parents, spouses, children, employees, neighbors, Christians; to be more generous or loving or thoughtful, less self-centered, less short-tempered, less materialistic. But our books, too, can close at any time.

Have you ever watched a child stand gazing at a box of chocolates, a frown of concentration wrinkling that space between the eyebrows? “Only one, Jessica. Take any one you want, but you may have only one. Choose.” Shall it be the biggest one, or might that small round one be the favorite peppermint cream? Then again the long one could contain nougat, and with tiny bites that would last longer. The agony of choice.

Have you pored over pictures and maps, imagined weather conditions, and thought about the alternatives for your precious “only one” vacation? Shall it be mountains or seaside? Will you choose fresh air and exercise or travel and sightseeing? The agony of choice.

Then there are the crisis decisions—choosing between two job offers, saying yes or no to a marriage proposal, choosing to live in the country or in the city. Hours, days, weeks, months, years, or a lifetime can be affected by a single choice. This is one of the earliest lessons a child needs to learn: if you choose to go swimming, then you can’t go to the circus; if you choose to go to the playground, then you won’t be here when daddy gets home; if you choose to take that puppy home, then you’ll have to take care of it.

What the Word of God conveys about the far-reaching results of choice should have been ingrained in people from the teaching of Adam and Eve to their children on down through the grandchildren and subsequent generations. That it was not is clear from history. Isaiah speaks God’s warning to people in chapter 31:

Woe unto them that go down to Egypt for help; and stay on horses, and trust in chariots, because they are many: and in horsem*n because they are very strong: but they look not unto the Holy One of Israel, neither seek the LORD!… Now the Egyptians are men, and not God: and their horses flesh, and not spirit. When the LORD shall stretch out his hand, both he that helpeth shall fall, and he that is helpen shall fall down, and they shall all fall down together [vv. 1, 3].

Here is a promise of God: those who choose to seek help by turning away from him will fall down in a heap along with the people they have turned to. A twisted heap of arms and legs, fallen horses and men, is the picture we are given. Turn the page back to chapter 30, verses 1–3:

Woe to the rebellious children, saith the LORD, that take counsel, but not of me; and that cover with a covering, but not of my spirit, that they may add sin to sin: that walk to go down into Egypt, and have not asked at my mouth; to strengthen themselves in the strength of Pharaoh, and to trust in the shadow of Egypt! Therefore shall the strength of Pharaoh be your shame, and the trust in the shadow of Egypt your confusion.

If a jumble of human beings and horses all in a heap is too far removed from our experiences, “confusion” is not—confusion of ideas, emotions, solutions, identity, purpose, ambitions, motives. The very solutions themselves that are being given by the twentieth-century “counsel”—the solutions, for example, of abortion, of denying the framework given for the home, of putting self-fulfillment first, of seeking happiness in divorce for unbiblical reasons and a new marriage—will end in shame and confusion.

Joshua makes it very clear in chapter 24, verses 14–20, that it is not possible to serve God and false gods at the same time: “Choose you this day whom ye will serve … but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (v. 15). The Creator of the orderly universe is the Author of a plan for each of our lives that “fits” psychologically, emotionally, materially, physically, spiritually. To seek true solutions from the author of chaos—that is, Satan and all his false prophets and philosophies—is to bring on a set of results that will be chaos.

“And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between two opinions? if the LORD be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word” (1 Kings 18:21).

Oh, you say, I do choose the living God; I did long ago. My cry comes with David’s in Psalm 18:31, “For who is God save the Lord? or who is a rock save our God?” I made a big choice, and now I am a child of this Creator God, the God of perfect wisdom and order.

But it is still true for each of us that there is moment-by-moment choice affecting our lives, bringing results in us and because of us in other people. We bring on a chaos of confused ideas and misunderstandings if our choices are not moment by moment to serve this Lord whom we have chosen as Saviour. Review Isaiah 50:7, 10, 11 once again:

For the Lord GOD will help me; therefore shall I not be confounded: therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be ashamed.… Who is among you that feareth the LORD, that obeyeth the voice of his servant, that walketh in darkness, and hath no light? let him trust in the name of the LORD, and stay upon his God. Behold, all ye that kindle a fire, that compass yourselves about with sparks: walk in the light of your fire, and in the sparks that ye have kindled. This shall ye have of my hand; ye shall lie down in sorrow.

When we do not know where to turn and someone offers us a solution that is contrary to the written Word of God, do we wait and cling to the Word, asking God to direct us? Setting the face “like a flint” is not done in a moment when everything is clear and easy in the path ahead. When one declares, “I will not be confounded,” it is at a time when one faces danger. To “walk in the light of your [own] fire, and in the sparks that ye have kindled” is similar to going to Egypt for help, and the promised result is also similar: “ye shall lie down in sorrow.”

There are a lot of voices today promising happier, richer, more fulfilled, quieter, more peaceful, stressless lives. There are lots of voices promising equality, identity, freedom, liberation. These voices tempt Christians to edit the Word of God to make it fit something else, rather than to set their faces like a flint and judge and edit from the base of God’s Word. “Choose,” we are told. “Choose ye this day,” day after day, over and over again. Choose to sit in the dark and wait for His guidance.

Choose, as Mary did in Luke 10, to sit at Jesus’ feet and concentrate on what he is teaching. In that incident Jesus was not saying that Martha’s work was unnecessary; he himself cooked fish for the disciples. But there was at that time a choice to be made. The rushing around the kitchen could be done later; right then the conversation came first. Mary recognized this priority. “But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:42).

Mary hadn’t long to sit in her home at Jesus’ feet: he would soon be dying, and then rising and ascending to his Father. She sat and listened during the time that was so quickly passing. We too have a limited time in which to listen and to do what he has for us to do before we go to be with him. Day by day, moment by moment, choose carefully whom you will listen to, whom you will serve.

EDITH SCHAEFFER

Did We Love Her Out Of Hell, Guys?

“Atheist Leader Quits in Dallas,” the heading on this news item said:

DALLAS (UPI)—Madalyn Murray O’Hair has quit as the unofficial leader of American atheists. She said attacks by the Christian community and the lack of support of other atheists proved too much.

“I quit,” she said. “Anyone who desires to take over leadership of the American atheist community can have it.

“For thirteen years the Christian community in the U.S. has abused and brutalized me.”

Congratulations, guys. We did it. We took on that compact little Irishperson and beat her. We forced her into a corner and made her quit. We grabbed that woman who took our prayers out of the public schools … that woman who almost made the astronauts stop reading Genesis … that woman who tried to take our religious programs off the air … and we thrashed her good. Nice going, men.

And we did it our way. Verbal abuse. Hate mail. Vitriolic prayers. Pressure. Pressure. Pressure.

We did it.

We divided the atheistic community and wiped their noses in the dirt. Once more, because of us, the forces of good triumphed over evil. The Father must be proud of us today. Jesus rejoices. The Holy Spirit’s happy. We did her in.

And I’m sure she’s convinced now that Christ is really the answer. That love does make the world go round. That Christians do have it together and are faithful to their leader. After all, didn’t Jesus abuse and brutalize the people he overcame?

Nice going, guys. The world’s a better place because of us.

EUTYCHUS VII

• Soon after that press conference Ms. O’Hair repudiated her statement. Eutychus says that proves all atheists are indecisive—ED.

High Marks

The illustrations by Joe DeVelasco are super plus (Jan. 30 and Feb. 27 issues). Chicago Tribune

WAYNE STAYSKAL

Chicago, Ill.

Roof Relief

It was with real interest that I read your news story in the February 27 issue, “Tragedy in Guatemala,” and the March 12 story on relief activities after the tragic earthquake there. I know that in an operation of this kind it is very easy to overlook the work of some organizations. Seventh-day Adventist World Service was there. In addition to the nearly $500,000 worth of relief which we have already expended in Guatemala, we have now ordered another $250,000 worth of aluminum roofing which will be sent on eleven tractor trailers to San Francisco, where it will be loaded on ship. This is important, as the 1.5 million homeless people need to be placed under roofs; the rainy season is about to begin. Seventh-day Adventist World Service has set as a goal 5,000 houses which we will rebuild in this devastated country.

We are happy to report that of 14,000 members we have in the country, only six were killed, and only 300 families were made homeless. We do, however, feel that our obligation is to everyone, which of course is the type of relief we give throughout the world.

H.D. BURBANK

Executive Secretary

Seventh-day Adventist World Service Inc.

Washington, D. C.

• In fast-breaking articles of this type it is often not possible to list every group that is involved. Our stories were intended to portray the types of relief being provided.—ED.

Help That Refreshes

The more I read your magazine, the more refreshing help I derive from its articles. I am especially grateful for the article “Christianity Faces the Eighties” (Feb. 27). As much as we’d like to stick our haloed heads in the sands and wait till all the bad weather passes, it just isn’t practical.… The article on euthanasia in the same issue is one of which I hope to see many more.

(Mrs.) CHARLOTTE RIEGEL

Lumphanan, Aberdeenshire

Scotland

Thank you for publishing Gary Hardaway’s [article]. We Christian futurists rejoice at the appearance of such articles in your journal. Perhaps instead of developing a “last days” mentality, we should develop a “first days” mentality. From this perspective we can define a more forceful and creative ethic for the 1980s. Hardaway’s article would have been much stronger had he expanded the thoughts in the last eight lines of his second point. This is the heart of the matter.

R. HOWARD MCCUEN, JR.

Stone United Presbyterian Church

Wheeling, W. Va.

The Rent Free Myth

In your editorial “Where Do Retired Pastors Live?” (March 12) you made an excellent point, but at the expense of disseminating some false information. You referred to the “pastor’s rent-free housing,” and this just isn’t so. Instead of a minister earning X number of dollars he earns X minus $3,000 (give or take $500) and he lives in the parsonage. He is, in effect, renting from the church. His situation differs from other renters because most churches do not adequately maintain their parsonages. The minister keeps it up; he improves their property while its value appreciates with the rising cost of real estate. Having renovated three parsonages with my own time and money, and having spent the first nineteen years of my ministry without a nickel of equity built up, I appreciate the sentiment of your article, but wish to demythologize the ancient superstition that the minister lives rent-free.

W. NORMAN MACFARLANE

Philippus United Church of Christ

Cincinnati, Ohio

Marred Interview

Your welcome and timely interview with Charles Colson (March 12) was sadly marred by the egregious picture on the cover.… I know he became famous for saying that he’d walk over his grandmother if it would help Nixon get reelected, but that unfortunate statement belongs to his pre-conversion past which he has repudiated. Why rake it up again when he is trying hard to make a new life for himself?

EDWARD A. JOHNSON

Ohiowa, Neb.

Unique Thumbnail

Sincere, hearty thanks are due to you once again for providing a splendid thumbnail review of the latest Christian books (March 12). No one else does this sort of thing.

ALAN J. RIDER

Holy Cross Lutheran Church

Livermore, Calif.

Where ‘Obey’?

My friend Harold Lindsell seems to have read something into the New Testament when he refers to the biblical injunction for wives to “obey” their husbands (Current Religious Thought, “Egalitarianism and Scriptural Infallibility,” March 26). Nowhere in the New Testament are wives commanded to “obey” their husbands or husbands encouraged to exercise authority over their wives. However, the New Testament requires all Christians to be subject to each other. This includes wives submitting to their husbands as well as husbands to their wives.

GILBERT BILEZIKIAN

Associate Professor of Biblical Studies

Wheaton College

Wheaton, Ill

Harold Lindsell’s article has prompted this support of egalitarian marriage and biblical infallibility. The two are not incompatible as he has implied. The crux of his argument seems to be that egalitarian marriage and wifely submission are mutually exclusive concepts, and since wifely submission has biblical support that therefore egalitarian marriage cannot. They need not be mutually exclusive concepts as long as wifely submission is not considered the whole picture. A marriage of mutual submission of wife to husband and husband to wife certainly qualifies as an egalitarian marriage. Moreover, it does not contradict Scripture. Since mutual submission is the pattern set up for all Christians, then surely this pattern must exist in the Christian marriage as well. Nowhere in the Bible is the husband commanded to “lord it over” his wife. That kind of language is reserved for the curse of sin as a result of the Fall. Egalitarian marriage is the pattern present in Genesis before the Fall, and there is no indication that the “new heaven and the new earth” will have anything to do with the order established by that curse. In the meantime, husbands are told by Paul to love their wives. Our understanding of what it means to love as we have learned through the whole messsage of the New Testament is intimately bound up in the idea of service and submission. If Paul’s language on the subject (submission for wives and love from husbands) in the Ephesians 5 passage seems to indicate different requirements for the different sexes it is only because we … are blinded by the order that sin has created—and have even gone so far as to absolutize that order and claim that God’s infallible Word promotes it.

BETTY M. VANDERSCHAAF

Iowa City, Iowa

I would like to ask Dr. Lindsell how he interprets the following passages in terms of twentieth-century church practice: First Corinthians 11:2–16 (veiling of women, length of hair); First Corinthians 14:33–35 (women speaking in church); First Timothy 2:8–15 (women’s apparel, women not allowed to teach or have authority over men).… If he is going to call Drs. Jewett and Mollenkott, Ms. Hardesty and Ms. Scanzoni heretics, then let him come right out and say so. These are very serious accusations [he] is raising.

JOHN D. KEPLER

Associate Pastor

Newport Covenant Church

Bellevue, Wash.

To Think And Act

Let me thank you for the outstanding issue of January 16. As I turned through the pages before reading, I found it hard to know where to begin.… “The Passivity of American Christians” is one of the finest pieces I have seen in a very long time. Indeed it does give us much to think upon and some things to act upon, which is always helpful. Just one little question about what I feel sure was an error: surely in the twelfth line down on the last column the word protest should have been protect! This would make a difference in the meaning, and it might not be as readily recognizable as wisdom in the final paragraph, which any reader would know should be wisdom.

CLARA H. STUART

New Orleans, La.

• Thanks for the corrections—ED.

ERRATUM

In the February 27 news story “The Rise and Fall of Billy James,” it was stated that the board of American Christian College agreed to give Mr. Hargis an annual stipend of $24,000. Instead, the funds were to come from the David Livingstone Missionary Foundation

The Gospel And Architecture

The purpose and duty of a church is to preach the full Gospel, purely and powerfully, and to minister to the needs of its people. But a congregation should also realize that the architecture of its building or buildings is a matter of Gospel.

I don’t wish to imply that the responsibility of a church is to proclaim the virtues of fine building, or that salvation is dependent upon good architecture. Salvation is a free gift of God through faith in Christ. It seems to me, though, that when salvation comes, when our lives are transformed by a renewing of our minds after we have offered our bodies as a living sacrifice to God, as we work out the implications of our salvation, as we grow in the fear and knowledge of the Lord, then all aspects of our lives are subject to renewal: our work, our play, our social lives, even our architecture. This renewal is not a condition for our salvation; it is rather an expression of our thankfulness for it.

Having said all this I want to repeat that the architecture of the Church is neither irrelevant nor unimportant; it is a matter of Gospel. The building that a church occupies and the furnishings within it either reinforce or contradict what the church preaches. I am sure that this is why God himself was the architect of the Tabernacle of the Israelites (Exodus 35 through 39). Architecture is not to be ignored or left only to the elite and artistically sensitive. All Christians should strive to live aesthetically as well as theologically obedient lives as part of their service to God.

There are some signs that churches are increasing in awareness of the relation of church architecture to their message. New church buildings as often as not seat the congregation in circular, semi-circular, and opposing patterns rather than in the traditional parallel rows facing one end of the church. The latter is not unlike a theater where people gather to watch a performance on the stage. No interaction is encouraged between spectators.

The circular, semi-circular, or opposing arrangements are conducive to interaction. They therefore express the truth that a church is a family of believers gathered out of the world to worship, have fellowship, and break the Bread of Life together. One congregation I recently visited had moved the pulpit to a side wall of the church and reorganized the seating in sections around it. When new church buildings are being designed, these new patterns of seating lead naturally to non-traditional building forms—circular, semi-circular, hexagonal—that suggest on the outside the nature of the Body of Christ on the inside.

Evangelical churches recognize, theologically, the centrality of the Word and the sacraments. But far too often the pulpit, table, and font, the furniture associated with the Word and Sacraments, are found amidst the visual clutter of religious symbols, collection baskets, flags, flowers, piano, and organ, all competing for the attention of the congregation.

Some churches, however, have expressed architecturally their belief in the centrality of the Word and sacraments, usually by placing the pulpit, table, and font in a visually balanced arrangement against an undistracting background. Flags and flowers and other accouterments of church life are located elsewhere. There are other possibilities, of course. One is to place the baptismal font near the entrance, a reminder that entrance to the Church is through the washing away of sin.

The design of the furniture itself is important to the truth it expresses. A well-designed sounding board over the pulpit is a powerful visual statement of the importance of preaching the Word. One of the best communion tables I’ve seen was simply a table with place settings, surrounded with chairs. It reinforced architecturally the truth that communion is a celebration by the family of God of the Lord’s death and his victory over sin. There is a baptismal font that is fixed in my memory because it so appropriately symbolized the meaning of baptism. It was a granite basin four feet or more in diameter filled to the brim with clean, gently circulating water, shimmering in the light and always in full view of the worshiping congregation. The water-filled basin was a reminder that through Christ we are cleansed from our sins and that through the Holy Spirit our lives are daily washed and renewed. How much more fitting is this font than the more usual covered one pushed off to the side until the occasion arises for a baptism.

Although in almost all evangelical churches music is an important part of worship, few have been able to integrate the instruments and choir into the building in a way that expresses their proper role in the service. Too often they are located with the pulpit, table, and font at the focal point of the sanctuary. This location gives the impression that music functions as entertainment or an intermission in the service, or worse, that it, along with the Word and Sacraments, is a means of grace. Actually music is part of the response of God’s people to his grace. Rightfully, then, the instruments and the choir, in order to augment the worship and to lead and reinforce the singing of the congregation, should be physically part of the congregation.

It is the total building design, however, where the greatest contradictions occur. I am delighted to see the joy of Christianity expressed in the colorful banners that are displayed in some churches these days, but the banners cannot outshout what the building itself silently proclaims. We can’t believably contend that Christianity is for contemporary man from behind the false fronts of imitated historical styles. We can’t preach the genuineness of the Christian life from within buildings that display imitation stone, imitation stained glass, imitation wood, and imitation plants. Nor can we profess our concern for the plight of the world from interiors whose emphasis is on comfort or luxury. Our building must stand as a critique of the values of our age or the impact of what we preach will be diminished.

I hesitate to be critical in an area where we as Christians are largely unacquainted. God does call us to be obedient, however, in all areas of life, so we have a responsibility to increase our knowledge and sensitivity. For help in doing this I suggest two books, Christ and Architecture by D.J. Bruggink and When Faith Takes Form by C. H. Droppers.

RICHARD A. SMITS

Richard A. Smits is a senior studio architect with Skidmore Owings and Merril, Chicago, Illinois.

Seuss For Goslings—Seuss For Geese

Children’s stories have provided me, as an adult, with hours of pleasure. They’ve helped me escape my daily responsibilities and pressures. Everyone needs vacations: I prefer the inexpensive ones that I can take each time I open a familiar book, or try out a new one. Especially when I finish a captivating children’s story I am better able to pick up my adult life.

Books about children’s books can be just as refreshing and entertaining. Down the Rabbit Hole, by Selma G. Lanes, is a first-rate example. Atheneum has just issued it as a “college edition” paper-back; it was originally published in 1971.

Selma Lanes does more than give us a history of children’s literature. (“The chapters that follow are frankly idiosyncratic,” she writes at the outset—rather like this column). She treats the genre seriously and argues for excellence. Children’s books are not easy to write—or necessarily easier to write than a tale for adults, contrary to what many people think. Lanes quotes Walter de la Mare: “I know well that only the rarest kind of best in anything can be good enough for the young.” Those wanting to write for children should always have that sentence before them.

Lanes ranges through the realm of children’s stories with a sure hand and a smooth style. She understands the relationship children have with their books, and for those adults who lack this insight she lays the paths plain. Her chapter titles alone make the book worth its $4.95 price. “Seuss for the Goose Is Seuss for the Gander” is my favorite.

In “Who Killed St. Nicholas?” Lanes explains the theory of writing for children by citing that first juvenile magazine, St. Nicholas. And whether she is considering books for blacks, or picture books, or illustrators her apt examples give body to her theories.

Although Down the Rabbit Hole does not deal with religion specifically, it approaches children’s literature from a spiritual perspective. “In the best of children’s books, … we find this quality of spiritual refreshment, of things seen simply and savored truly as they might have been on the first day of creation” (p. 211). That brings us back to my initial comment: adults need that kind of spiritual refreshment just as much as children—perhaps even more.

For me that usually comes from a fairy tale. Thomas Nelson’s new edition of Arthur Ransome’s Old Peter’s Russian Tales, first published in 1916, is a fine example. This handsome book features a new set of illustrations by Faith Jacques.

In the first “Note” to the collection Ransome writes that “In Russia hardly anybody is too old for fairy stories.… I think there must be more fairy stories told in Russia than anywhere else in the world.” Certainly the love of taletelling shows in every paragraph. There is just enough of a continuum with Old Peter and his grandchildren to give the book unity without destroying its “short-storyness.” The tales are crisp and clear, like the snow and sharp air surrounding Old Peter’s hut. The simple acceptance of God’s providence found in these stories helps us understand what Jesus meant when he spoke to his disciples of “becoming childlike.” Ransome’s Russian tales were new to me; I highly recommend them.

Fables and fairy tales are for the childlike of whatever age. Theologian and literary critic Mary McDermott Shideler has just published a slim volume of such fables, Mother and the Flying Saucer and Other Fables (Pegana Press, $2.95). The best tale is the first one, used in the title. I hope she’ll write more like it. The best feature of the book is the reprint of a story and essay from Theology Today, “Philosophies and Fairy-Tales.” Children won’t understand it, but adults will see why fairy tales are important to us all.

“The ‘feeling intellect,’” McDermott says, “is a state we achieve only rarely.” We need that kind of wholeness. Each of these books for and about children and the childlike will help us approach a balanced life, a feeling intellect.

CHERYL FORBES

When I was a little girl I filled hours narrating my life to myself in a ceaseless interior monologue. I was always a third-person character in these narratives—“Then she cast a withering glance at her teacher and, holding her head high, swept from the room.” I viewed my every action from the vantage point of an astonished, admiring, detached observer. But as I grew older, I began to develop a vague uneasiness about this sort of unremitting narration of my life inside my head.

I don’t really know what caused the narrating urge. Although my family was by no means a literary one, I suppose that whatever exposure I had to story-telling, whether gossip, reminiscences, Bible reading, or outright lying, might have fostered the narrative impulse. That does not explain it fully, however. I do not know how widespread this phenomenon is among children nor how late it is likely to persist into adulthood. Nor do I know whether other children are as adept at concealing it as I was.

I do have a somewhat clearer idea of why I ousted the narrator from my mind. It happened when I realized that this was not what was going on inside other people’s heads, and what is more, that if they knew it was going on inside mine they would find it queer to say the least, and very probably disagreeable as well. And, too, I began to find that I wanted room for more in there than simply this voice reading (or writing) my life away. I wanted to stuff in algebraic equations and logical syllogisms, Icelandic saga, recipes, songs, and the imprint of important pictures. To concentrate on this, I needed to shut down the voice and concentrate. It was, after all, a relief not to have it harping away, describing my every movement to myself. At various times, primarily highly dramatic moments, it has come back, though with narratives of broader scenes that do not so narrowly focus on one character.

Another phenomenon in my life connected with story-telling is probably a great deal more common than the first. It is the burning desire for a story not to end, for it to go on forever. “And what happened next?” was always my rejoinder to the closing of a story. The story-teller was often annoyed that I didn’t seem properly grateful for what I’d been given. It was not ingratitude at all, of course, but simply an insatiable desire for more, for a fictional world that stretched out as interminably before me as the “real” world.

After I learned to read for myself it was the same thing. When I began to near the end of an absorbing book, I always slowed down, going over every word carefully so as to come to the end more gradually. This phenomenon did not disappear as the other one did, however. First of all, there seemed to be no need to suppress it, since many of my acquaintances felt the same way, and second, it would have been impossible to feel any other way. I remember vividly, for example, my reactions as a graduate student to Tolkien’s Ring Trilogy. After hundreds and hundreds of pages of a world where everything was more—more beautiful, more dreadful, more cozy, more terrifying—than my own mundane experience, I suffered profound withdrawal pangs. Why wasn’t life more like literature?

What I was dissatisfied with in life was not its ambiguity. Often the people or situations I was most fascinated with in the Ring Trilogy, or any story, were the ambiguous, shadowy ones. Nor did I deceive myself into thinking that “adventure,” i.e., going cold and hungry over mountain passes or being tortured by Ores, was fun. It was just that there were so many possibilities for excitement in Middle-earth, whether over mushrooms or monsters. Life, on the other hand, seemed inescapably boring. I understood fully what a character in one of Goddard’s movies (which I saw during the same year) meant when he spoke of “the movie we would all like to live.”

Now I suddenly hear and read many voices calling for “stories”—stories in politics, stories in psychotherapy, stories in theology, talk of myth and metaphor and parable. I was at first quite expectant, not having heard many good stories lately; but I was to be once more disappointed. For what I had thought of as story was not at all what these voices meant by it. (I had long since given up trying to track down what they meant by myth.)

For example, story is defined by Michael Novak (certainly an honest enough voice in other areas) as “an imagined form linking actions in ordered sequences.” He supplies this as an example of story: “The communists invaded South Viet Nam and have been attempting to undermine an independent government whose sovereignty has been recognized by over sixty nations” (“Story” in Politics, Council on Religion and International Affairs, 1970, p. 18). Now if that is Michael Novak’s idea of a story, God help his children at bedtime. There has never yet been a story in which “government” of whatever political persuasion has been a character, though there are lots of stories about kings and queens, generals and soldiers, camp followers and revolutionaries, even a few about presidents. Novak’s example is no more than an impoverished discursive declarative sentence. A blik does not a story make.

On the other hand, if what one wants is a political story, heaven knows there is no dearth of them these days. For months we had the continuing saga of Watergate spun out for us daily in all imaginable mediums—print, sound tape, television. Sometimes it seemed like a tawdry soap opera and at other times like a Greek tragedy in slow motion. The plot was dictated by the multifold ramifications of evil, one lie building upon another, until the structure’s height could not be supported by its base and down it crashed, with agonizing slowness, like a fall in a dream. There was a strong undercurrent of Elizabethan correspondences—ill health mirroring internal decay, blocked blood passages as the body politic stagnates. The story of the century on a cosmic scale.

Harvey Cox, always one to get in on the ground floor, raises one’s expectations to a fever pitch in the first chapter of The Seduction of the Spirit. He actually has some idea of what a story is and tells one. He doesn’t reveal himself as a particularly great story-teller, but at least it is a story, however truncated. One eagerly turns to chapter two, ready for the next exciting installment, only to find that chapter one was only a come-on, a gimmick. For now we must wade through the same old warmed-over neo-bourgeois sociological anthropology. An upper-middle-class travelogue about (among other things) story-telling cultures.

Sam Keen, lately embraced in ecclesiastical circles as a quasi-theologian, is also partially responsible for the revival of interest in stories, but again for the sake of something other than the story itself. This time it is story-as-therapy. (Who will free us of these utilitarians!) One can applaud some of his reasons for this enterprise, for example, the desire to break free of psychological metaphors that have imprisoned us in a Freudian three-storied universe. However, Keen does not take storytelling seriously enough; he insists on seeing it as a mere tool. Although he presses all the “primitive” buttons for which his audience has learned a positive response (scenario of tribesmen hunkered around a fire, of Israelites relaying tradition), this is a facile, and ultimately patronizing, way of reading our twentieth-century consciousness back into that tribal circle.

Pre-technological cultures probably took their stories both a great deal more and a great deal less seriously. They were either a matter of life and death or a matter for laughter, but never a means by which to explore one’s subjectivity. They had a real and objective life independent of the whims of narcissism. Keen’s psychodrama technique seems as irresponsible as dabbling in diabolism and the interpretations as predictable and banal as black magic usually is. Such irresponsible play-acting sometimes has dire consequences. Anyone who is unimpressed with this argument should perhaps read Hamlet. If one would use a play to catch the conscience of a king, or even just your ordinary neurotic, he must be prepared to accept the consequences.

What accounts for this narrative impotence among contemporary theologians? When they are pulled towards the story as toward a magnet, why do they continually stop short?

The trouble is primarily theological. Novelists are having no trouble at all writing on religious themes; in fact, they are concerned with scarcely anything else, except sex. But theologians, who cry up the idea of story in every new issue of various journals, cannot get it together to tell one.

One need only go back to the great demythologizing dictums of the 1930s to locate the castration of the theological imagination. God knows it is not the story we are interested in, poor primitive thing; it is the great idea behind the story. One hears the echo of his high school English teacher—“Now what does this story mean? What is the theme, the message?” (And somewhere from a dark corner the irrascible, irrational, and largely unnoticed voice of Barth protesting: “It’s not my story. I didn’t make it up. I don’t have to apologize for it; I only have to tell it.”) And we have been ripping away the leaves, ripping away the petals in order to get to the unripened ovary of the kerygma ever since. Small wonder it has not borne fruit.

When we began to awaken to our folly, there was a great outcry for “myth.” (Put the myth back in Christmyth.) Learned men nodded knowingly at humankind’s “need” for myth. Myths are somewhat like vitamins, which Larousse’s Gastronomique calls “ineffable substances.” They are necessary for good mental health. Therefore the theologians, taking a cue from Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, have decided that it is all right to administer periodic doses of myth to the masses, at least until they can learn to live without it or until some synthetic substitute is developed. What is particularly ridiculous about this theological stance, however, is that the Grand Inquisitor has been left talking to himself. No one is any longer interested in his make-believe myths, to be applied like an old-fashioned poultice to the aches and pains of the human soul.

The novelist Walker Percy says the Christian storyteller is “like a man who finds a treasure buried in a field and sells all he has to buy the field, only to discover that everyone else has the same treasure in his field and that in any case real estate values have gone so high that all the fieldowners have forgotten the treasure and plan to subdivide” (Katallagete, Fall, 1970, p. 11). I propose then that we shut down the mining operation on this particular vein of supposed gold. After all, the operation is bankrupt. The backers have cashed in their chips and there wasn’t enough there to redeem them. Bultmann’s image of contemporary man has been challenged by the poet Robert Duncan as “too hygienic and highminded.” He reminds us—and we remember with a rush of relief—“that theologians … aren’t all religion, are they? Saints, for instance.… But what saints and most religious lives—the intense ones—show us are people who live what all the rest of us see meaning in, see through …” (A Meeting of Poets and Theologians to Discuss Parable, Myth and Language, The Church Society for College Work, 1968, p. 14).

What I would like to try, in place of the old sanitized demythologizing or the new synthetic remythologizing, is a much older notion, almost lost to us who are sunk up to our very noses in the quicksand of subjectivity. It is the old metaphor of the author and the play. What if it is not we who are writing the story at all, putting in cameo appearances at appropriate intervals for our cultural myths, like pulling out the turkey at Thanksgiving and the Advent candles at Christmas, but what if we are being written, narrated into existence by something much realer than ourselves? What if it is the “myth” that is real and we are the mere reflection of reality, being the metaphor that only points to meaning?

One could, of course, go back to Plato to locate this idea, but I would rather not. Plato is, for us, so safe and categorizable. We nod and say, “Oh yes, Platonism. I’d recognize it anywhere.” Besides, Plato’s Forms are much too deistic and do not push and shove the shadows sufficiently. Instead, let us consider an ill-assorted gaggle of relatively recent writers who have suggested this idea to us.

The first, Robert Duncan, anticipated the outbreak of utilitarian Christian story-tellers by a few years when he criticized such exploitation by saying: “In the tribute poets pay, after Dryden [the demythologizer of Shakespeare], to deliver over their art to the consensus of reasonable men, poetry, like the universe of rationalist science, ceases to be primal Creation and becomes a commodity, a material for human uses and self-development” (A Meeting …, p. 41). In other words, we have created the illusion that myth is primarily functional, that it is a tool we can use to integrate our personalities, to be O.K. And though some aspects of myth may still be hissing and bubbling down in the dark recesses of our unconscious, we will eventually dredge it all up into the landfill of sanity. The concept that we ourselves are being used by myth seems beyond our imaginations. To continue with Duncan:

The operations of allegory and metaphor case to be magical and become manners of speaking plays of wit, and the sense of historical events themselves cease to be thought of as informed by a creative intent, to be read as omens and portents, showings forth of meaning within meaning, intent within intent, of a momentous design in which men in their acts participate and to which they contribute, in terms of which men know or do not know their roles [A Meeting …, p. 41; italics mine].

But we are forever bumping up against the stage furniture, something that we cannot see but that nevertheless will not yield to our hypotheses. And instead of recognizing that the chair leg that has just confronted us in such a painful fashion is real, we simply rearrange the furniture of our mind to exclude that particular chair leg. Duncan again, zeroing in on Christian religion:

And many Christians have twisted the poetry of the Bible in vices of interpretation to see the divine as conforming to our highest ethical precepts, and, where their humanitarian ideals were strong, come to apostasy when faced with the immovable reality of Jehovah who declares Himself a God of Jealousy, Vengeance and Wrath. Reason falters, but our mythic, our deepest poetic sense, recognizes and greets as truth the proclamation that the Son brings that just this Wrathful Father is the First Person of Love [A Meeting …, p. 38].

Thus we have at least two generations of theological schizoid apostates: their reason demands the renunciation of an irrational God, yet they cannot bring themselves to renounce him, so strong is the enchantment of the story. In order to relieve this unbearable tension, they set about blocking out their roles so as to avoid crashing into the stage sets to which they refuse to grant credulity. Miracles are unaccountable; therefore we will take no account of them. We will rewrite the story (as many have done before us) to suit ourselves. But the rewriting of the story simply becomes (as it did before) part of the story. Bultmann is our new Chronicler. Or to let Duncan finally speak through a poem (in his volume Roots and Branches) in the guise of Bobbin, an elf-shadow, about the limitations of humans:

Yet whenever they see us

we must look like men,

for men see not what things are but what

they are in things. The world changes

dark to light as their eyes change.

Next in my cloud of witnesses is C. S. Lewis, with his use of fantasy as a means of making myth lucid, or rather of jolting our preconceived world view off its precarious pedestal so that we can at least be open to other possibilities. One of his strategies in The Great Divorce is to out-materialize the materialists, certainly a proper undertaking for a story-teller. In Lewis’s fantasized Heaven, it is the recently arrived mortals who are phantasmagoric and insubstantial. The very heavenly grass is like spikes to their feet. Drops of water spray are like bullets. One can see through them, but not through the creatures whose natural habitation is heaven.

One of these fully realized creatures attempts to explain the nature of “myth” he is now experiencing to a new arrival who is interested only in the “meaning” and not in the “thing itself’: “Hitherto you have experienced truth only with the abstract intellect. I will bring you where you can taste it like honey and be embraced by it as by a bridgegroom” (The Great Divorce, 1971, Macmillan, p. 43). The recalcitrant Episcopalian, a member of the Theological Society, resists, however, and for the old familiar reasons: “These great mysteries cannot be approached in that way. If there were such a thing … quite frankly, I should not be interested in it. It would be of no religious significance. God, for me, is something purely spiritual.”

It is against this disembodied ontologizing that Lewis protests again and again. If creation is to be redeemed, then it must be thoroughly redeemed, not just its meaning. Resurrection without a body is a hollow victory. Likewise myth has a reality that we, in our present state of incompleteness, catch only glimmers of. As Ransom in Perelandra confronts the guardian gods of Malcandra and Perelandra he recognizes them as Ares and Aphrodite:

In the mind of the fallen Archon under whom our planet groans, the memory of Deep Heaven and the gods with whom he once consorted is still alive. Nay, in the very matter of our world, the traces of the celestial commonwealth are not quite lost. Memory passes through the womb and hovers in the air. The Muse is a real thing.… Our mythology is based on a solider reality than we dream: but it is also at an infinite distance from that dream [Perelandra, Macmillan, 1968, p. 201].

In fact, so far removed are we from the basis of myth, so blind, that all we can pick up are random threads that lead from one story to another. Yet Lewis has a “suspicion that what was myth in one world might always be fact in some other” (Perelandra, p. 102). Ares and Aphrodite are real, much realer than you or I could ever hope to be. At any rate, Lewis sees us as poor, insubstantial stage-blusterers when we claim that the author of the play in which we are merely characters is less real than we are, that we are writing a play in which he is a character.

My third witness, Muriel Spark, is much harder to catch hold of since she does not explain or theorize as do the previous two. Yet her story, The Comforters, is unsettling and frightening and brings us back to where we started from. In this story the heroine, Caroline, through some quirk of clairaudience, hears a typewriter and voices recording her life. It is not a mystery story wherein the whole point lies in doing away with the mystery, in explaining “away” the psychic phenomenon, but it is a mystery story in that the voices and the typewriter are never explained. They simply cease when the story comes to an end, after having recorded that part of Caroline’s life. No one else hears the voices or the typewriter, so of course they think the whole thing is merely a mental aberration, even though the typewriting voices record not only events in which Caroline is involved but also events concerning people she does not even know about until the entire story is complete. She finally explains the phenomenon this way: “‘But the typewriter and the voices—it is as if a writer on another plane of existence was writing a story about us.’ As soon as she had said these words, Caroline knew she had hit on the truth” (The Comforters, Avon, 1965, p. 68). Her fiancé, of a much more mundane mentality, attempts to record the voices:

“If the sound has objective existence it will be recorded.”

“This sound might have another sort of existence and still be real.”

“Well, let’s first exhaust the possibilities of the natural order—”

“But we don’t know all the possibilities of the natural order” [p. 70].

Caroline, a recent Catholic convert, is at first inclined to think she has merely gotten involved in the novel of “a writer on another plane of existence.” She is thus determined to assert her free will, to act oppositely from the voices’ descriptions of her future activity. Yet her every attempt to do this is foiled. The story is inexorable:

Her sense of being written into the novel was painful. Of her constant influence on its course she remained unaware and now she was impatient for the story to come to an end, knowing that the narrative could never become coherent to her until she was at last outside it, and at the same time consummately inside it [p. 196],

I do not think that Caroline’s experience is really all that rare. Who knows what unarticulated currents of story run through the lives of children, only to be dammed up because they do not run in culturally sanctioned channels? Or in what perverse ways they are rerouted to the detriment of both the person and his society? Yet how often does the overwhelming sense that our lives have dramatic form sweep over us, especially when we feel one chapter ending and another beginning? Perhaps for those of us who have led disjunctive lives, the sense of discrete, episodic stories is stronger, more apparent. However, while we are still “inside” the story, we perceive its coherence dimly, which is why it is dangerous not to take it seriously, or to take it seriously in the wrong way.

I have proposed that the way of thinking about ourselves as characters in a story might be a necessary way of reorienting ourselves to reality. Certainly if we perceive of ourselves as both character and author, serious problems could result. I believe this is the way Charles Manson probably saw himself—the ultimate unrestrained existentialist (see the book on Manson, Helter-Skelter). If, on the other hand, we see ourselves to be characters within the story but not the Creator of it, then we can fully enjoy our creatureliness, and await with expectation (and sometimes dread) the next development of the plot. We can, in Duncan’s words, “open ourselves to myth [so that] it works to convert us and to enact itself anew in our lives.”

The Mind’s Eye, Or Words And Sounds

Fashions in children’s literature since 1776 have changed almost as often as fashions in adult literature. And the trends in the two have not always followed the same pattern. What were children reading when our nation was founded? During colonial times didacticism certainly motivated adults writing for children. Then imagination and fairy tales gained prominence but disappeared until the 1950s in favor of realism. Now, as seen by the publication of such books as Mr. Death by Anne Moody (Harper & Row; see “Books” for a review of that and two other children’s stories about death), realism seems to be regaining ground.

In colonial America the Puritan influence was reflected in the religious nature of children’s reading matter, for example, the Bible and The New England Primer. But young people have always liked adventure stories, and religious strictures could not keep them from enjoying works written for adults. The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift were just such books. Children undoubtedly read these great stories and simply skipped the parts that did not interest them.

Children’s books in the nineteenth century were often highly didactic; that is, they instructed the young in proper values. Books were produced by the hundreds in which good always triumphed over evil. Many a little girl identified with the heroine in the Elsie Dinsmore series by Martha Finley (1828–1909), who clearly was the chief moralist of the period. The pinnacle of didactic writing was unquestionably reached in William H. McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers (1836–7), which taught reading for the sake of patriotism, industry, and good citizenship.

Didacticism gradually gave way to a more imaginative form of writing that grew out of the popular fairy-tale collections of the Grimm brothers and the original creations of Hans Christian Andersen. A hundred years ago virtually every child was familiar with tales like “Hansel and Gretel” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Clement Moore wrote a Christmas poem in 1822 that children still love, “The Night Before Christmas.”

Other authors, such as Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain, brought a new dimension to children’s literature with more realistic, life-like stories. Who could forget the March family? And what little boy who has read Twain’s stories has not wished he were Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn?

In the later nineteenth century, novels especially suited for children began to appear, such as Robert L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. They met the needs of young readers for adventure and excitement.

By the early twentieth century the market was flooded with literature for children, most of it mediocre. To encourage better writing, the American Library Association in 1922 established the Newbery Award. One of the all-time favorite Newbery winners is Esther Forbes’s Johnny Tremain (1943), the realistic story of a crippled apprentice and his involvement in revolutionary activities in Boston during the 1770s.

Some twentieth-century works can justifiably be called “modem classics” because of their continuing appeal. Examples of these include A.A. Milne’s books about Winnie-the-Pooh, E.B. White’s touching story of friendship entitled Charlotte’s Web, Pamela Travers’s account of the magical nanny Mary Poppins, and The Little House on the Prairie, a series by Laura I. Wilder that drew upon her own childhood experiences. C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Hobbit are outstanding pieces of modem fantasy that appeal to both children and adults.

Whether a child loves adventure tales, fairy stories, or realistic novels, a book should expand his understanding of reality, exercise his imagination, and encourage him to love the sound and sight of words.

CHARLENE PIERARD¹Charlene Pierard is assistant branch librarian at the Vigo County Public Library, Terre Haute, Indiana.

Children’s books reflect quite accurately what’s going on in American life, what adults consider to be important; what values they see as desirable. Although books certainly aren’t the primary influence on many children, they help to shape children’s values and attitudes in subtle ways. And the books our children read are more likely to reinforce the largely secular influence of the general culture than to open up alternatives.

This is not to say that most children’s books are bad for children. North American publishers have produced many excellent ones, many that give children flashes of insight into human life in language that is a delight to experience.

But there is hardly any Christian presence in this field. Most books for children are not controversial but simply secular. Perhaps that is part of the reason why few Christians involve themselves in assessing children’s books and in producing books that reflect a Christian perspective for young readers.

The vision of life children find in their books is largely the same vision that inspires the thousands of adult titles that pour out each year. In 1966, for instance, Zena Sutherland suggested in her column in Saturday Review that American children needed more books about minority races. Within a year, the climate of opinion had moved in that direction and she had stacks of such books on her desk, waiting for her evaluation. Books about minority children became books for minority children as adults shifted their goals from full and immediate assimilation to preserving cultural differences. To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960, has a character that is very dated today, a strong white lawyer who tries to use his professional skills to rescue a defenseless black man. Today’s book about minorities is more likely to be in the vein of Virginia Hamilton’s M. C. Higgins, the Great, winner of numerous awards, including the 1975 Newbery Award. Ms. Hamilton’s excellent and very modern novel reflects the more progressive minority view that whatever strength minorities develop must be built by their own efforts and on the basis of their own roots and traditions rather than on mere acceptance into the white American mainstream.

Between 1973 and 1975, a large number of books considered the World War II experience of Jewish people; on the whole they reflected the new widespread conviction that anti-Semitism in any form is wrong, an attitude one couldn’t take for granted a few decades ago.

The depression is another inspiration for numerous recent children’s books. In Naomi Karp’s Nothing Rhymes With April, for instance, the young heroine reflects on the fate of the suffering poor, on the uncle who jumped from a window, on the disrupted families, and rages in her way at the faceless rich who, she believes, caused the whole depression. Such an approach reflects a considerable change in the view of economics and the history of the depression from what was current during the forties and fifties.

Changes in adult living patterns also influence children’s books in subtle ways. One of the most significant cultural developments in recent decades has been the shift in adult patterns of work and leisure. During the fifties and sixties, continuing education became increasingly important to many people. They felt the need to upgrade their job skills during their leisure hours and so leisure activities gradually became an extension of work for a good number of people.

According to publishers, librarians, and teachers, this work-leisure pattern has had a profound effect on children’s books and reading patterns. When a representative of a leading trade publisher for children remarked that the market for children’s fiction was rapidly dwindling, teachers and librarians present explained that their students considered themselves too sophisticated to waste their time on made-up stories that would do them little good on the job. In earlier decades when most people could get jobs with a minimum of specialized training, gaining competitive skills wasn’t quite as urgent as it is for some today; in that period fiction dominated children’s reading, particularly for those whose families considered the leisurely reading of novels to be a sign of high social status. Today, the old-style leisure pursuits have fallen to those who make them their profession, those who don’t care about vocational achievement, and those who are financially secure. This change strikes another blow at the aesthetic side of life in God’s creation. The imagination is gradually pressed into the services of pragmatic geniuses who can make it earn its keep, or it will find itself left to the “nonproductive” members of society—the very young and the very old, women of “leisure,” and dilettantes on university campuses. Little or no room remains for the expansive vision of the novelist, the dramatist, or the poet who pulls the specialists’ fragmented views of reality into a compressed and comprehensive whole, freighted with symbolic meaning that expresses elements of the truth in a way that grips the whole person rather than primarily the intellect. Where fiction is considered irrelevant and impractical, the novelist becomes at best a purveyor of diversions, more likely a spinner of society’s lies, as positivists and followers of Nietzsche have said all along.

In that kind of climate, it is small wonder that a Christian vision of life is conspicuously absent from children’s books. Of course, the inclination toward nonfiction is neither total nor irreversible, as the recent interest in fantasy and science fiction suggests. Nevertheless, the place for a Christian vision of life that rejects positivistic notions of truth and the meaning of life is considerably restricted.

Similarly, the role that religion itself plays in people’s lives is restricted in children’s books. In fact, very few books for children suggest that any kind of religion—exotic or traditional—plays a role in the lives of contemporary North Americans. Religious people appear primarily in three very specialized places in children’s literature: the ethnic ghetto, the past, and never-never land.

The book about the religious ethnic group may treat the Jewish people, for instance, or certain black communities where the store-front preacher is a central figure. A variation on that theme is the book about the Amish or some groups of Mennonites, who function as an ethnic group because of their distinctive ways. Thy Friend, Obadiah, a story of a charming Quaker child who lived in colonial times, is a well-known example. So are the very successful and deeply moving novels of Robert Newton Peck (A Day No Pigs Would Die and Soup). Peck looks back on the religious faith operating in his family as one of a whole series of elements that shaped his childhood. As far as the reader knows, it differs little from the other childish things that fell away as the narrator grew to the sophisticated, nostalgic person he is today.

People may also take faith seriously in books set in the past, particularly during the periods of obvious religious conflict. Faith seldom plays a significant role in people’s lives in realistic juvenile novels set in the twentieth century, certainly not those after the Second World War. Authors sometimes examine crises in the lives of “professional religious people” like ministers and priests, but ordinary people are unlikely to have any sense of the divine.

The other category in which faith can be taken seriously is fantasy, with its relative, science fiction. In this kind of literature the speculative character of the plot seems to make faith and religious practices as plausible as anything else.

One might expect to turn to religious publishers of children’s books for greater vision; unfortunately, it is hardly worth the effort. Evangelical authors of great insight and writing ability have seldom written for children, C. S. Lewis being the outstanding exception out of a rapidly receding past. Our reluctance to write for children about the matters that concern us implies that childhood is an adjunct to the more important periods of life. Although there are many fine religious books for university students, younger people have little more than a few novels and books related to saving individual souls in the narrow sense and to handling personal problems.

At one time I thought the painfully contrived “novels” about witnessing, controlling one’s sex drives, surviving in school, and so on were the result of a lack of writing talent among Christians. However, conversations with some of the better known authors of these convinced me that this kind of book was produced quite intentionally in the belief that fiction has no place in the creation unless it carries a moral. As one author put it, the story was intended only to make the moral more pleasant to take. The result has been a large number of books with predictable plots set in exotic lands, where every ten-year-old child is a potential evangelist or at least a hero who can deter a political coup, stop a hijacking, and witness with one hand tied to a stake. In small doses, these books are not harmful, but they are a far cry from the “Christ is Lord of all life” vision that we evangelicals have espoused for so long.

There are, however, very hopeful signs that Christian publishers are beginning to sense the great need for better books for children. A few years ago, for instance, Eerdmans published Gordon Oosterman’s People, a book about three Indian tribes of the southwest United States. It is by no means the most scintillating book on Indian culture, but it approaches the culture, the problems, and the needs of the Indian tribes with the kind of Christian anthropology that children need to encounter at least occasionally if they are to be convinced that adults believe God is concerned about human life.

A good children’s book meets the same standards that a good adult book meets. The text assumes that the readers love the sound of language, the variety of new words and new ideas, the logical relations implicit in our sentence patterns, and so on. If the book is fiction, the story ought to meet the usual standards for fiction, such as well-motivated tension, a plot in which meaning inheres rather than one on which a moralistic meaning has been imposed, characters who are distinguishable and credible, and so one. The illustrations should fit the text, interpreting it and symbolically expanding its meaning. They should be accurate, imaginative, properly placed, and skillfully done. The total effect ought to be coherence, rather than a memory of a plot outline through which a moral has marched. The entire book ought to “work” so that the child experiences the logical, the aesthetic, the linguistic, the psychological, and other elements as one. Nonfiction books ought also to be lucid, clearly organized, free of unsupported generalizations, and so on.

Finding good books for children is difficult in many areas. Two sources of help are Adventuring With Books by Shelton L. Root (Citation, 1973) and Children’s Literature: A Guide to Reference Sources edited by Virginia Haviland (Library of Congress, 1966, supplement 1972). Root’s book, the most valuable tool for the lay person, is a comprehensive and well-annotated handbook for selecting books. Titles are arranged by subject area and level of difficulty. The Haviland volume is a basic bibliography of books, articles, bibliographies, and other resources about children’s books. The annotations are unusually thorough.

It is helpful to watch for publishers with a reputation for quality, such as Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Seabury, Harper & Row, and Harlin Quist. The worst places to buy children’s books are supermarkets, department stores, many church-supply stores, and general-interest adult bookstores. The books available in these outlets are likely to be “merchandise books,” which sell by the hundreds of thousands, usually at a price under $1.95. The essential ingredient is the book’s ability to sell as an impulse item; that may mean a flashy cover to make it stand out, a gimmick, or a place in a long series with a perpetuating market. Any adult who tries to read such books to a child more than three or four times will be driven back to the store for replacements because the plots are boring and the language pedestrian.

The better-bred cousin of the merchandise book frequents some of the same outlets, but seldom the supermarket, the drugstore, or the airport. These are books whose mediocrity is strongly influenced by subtle forces because they must be distributed as widely as possible. There’s nothing particularly wrong with mediocre books; they provide children with considerable information, and they are certainly better constructed than the merchandise book. However, their very innocuousness is part of the difficulty, for the problems they pose are inevitably trivial or at least easily resolved. People seldom suffer in such books, sin (never given that name) is easily dealt with, and the evil-doers of the world can be quickly sorted out into a class of THEM—bullies, kids who cheat, girls who sleep around, mothers who alienate their children, or fathers who are too busy. These are the books that make up the mainstream, that convey in quiet ways a contemporary and secular vision of life.

Children’s books of high quality are usually sold through the better bookstores, sometimes at universities. Otherwise, they can be located through media reviews and annotated lists from various agencies concerned with children’s books. The high-quality book doesn’t need a special seal or a literary/philosophical analysis to prove its worth. Its character stands out almost immediately and generally survives numerous readings, even by adults.

In these books authors refuse to condescend to children, choosing instead to tell their stories simply as they see them. They share their insights into human behaviour and the meaning of life—however small and however limited. They tell children of the needs they see around them, about the kinds of people they admire, about the things that make a person’s life worthwhile. They also face them with a real world, one that is terribly distorted and for which there are no simple solutions to be found in techniques alone. A good author gives children insight into a world where sin has real consequences—marriages break down and children suffer and strike out; some live sumptuously in this world while others barely stay alive; self-centered, corrupt people distort their social structures to exploit others and eventually destroy themselves. The best authors also offer them hope that goes beyond conventional platitudes.

However delightful high-quality books may be, they always lead the reader more deeply into life until he or she instinctively responds, “Yes, that is really the way it is,” or “I wonder how the author knew that about me.” Not every book will have that effect. However, every child deserves at least the opportunity to encounter books that were written by authors who believe that children’s needs, interests, and tastes are as important as those of adults. They need to see books whose authors are honestly trying to share with them, not dominate them or propagandize them, no matter how noble a cause. They need to see books whose illustrators believe children can appreciate beauty as much as adults can. And they need to see books that lift the cover just enough to reveal both the mystery and the put-togetherness of life in the creation, where God himself has set his footprints.

Some Noteworthy Titles

Adams, Richard: Watership Down; Aiken, Joan: Midnight Is a Place; Benchley, Nathaniel: Bright Candles; Bodecker, N. M.: Let’s Marry, Said the Cherry; da Paola, Tomie: Watch Out For the Chicken Feet in Your Soup and Strega Nona; Flory, Jane: We’ll Have a Friend For Lunch; Hickman, Janet: The Valley of the Shadow; Hughes, Richard: Gertrude’s Child and The Kidnapping of the Coffepot; Kerr, M. E.: Is That You, Miss Blue?; Jarrell, Randall, and Burkett, Nancy Eckholm: Snow White and the Seven Dwarves; Meltzer, Milton, and Cole, Richard: The Eye of Conscience; Moskin, Marietta: Waiting for Mama; Murphey, Shirley Rousseau: Poor Jenny, Bright as a Penny; Murray, Michele: The Crystal Nights; Preussler, Otto: The Satanic Mill; Rheiss, Joanna: The Upstairs Room; Richler, Mordecai: Jacob Two-Two and the Hooded Fang; Shulevitz, Uri: The Magician; Singer, Isaac Bashevis: The Wicked City; Smith, Gene: The Hayburners; Starkey, Marion L.: The Visionary Girls; Tripp, Wallace: A Great Big Ugly Man Came Up and Tied His Horse to Me; Walsh, Jill Paton: The Emperor’s Winding Sheet; Wolberg, Barbara: Zooming In.

Some Noteworthy Authors

For younger children—

Edward Ardizonne

Kay Chaoro

Paul Galdone

Lorenz Graham

Tomie da Paola

Maurice Sendak

Uri Shulevitz

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Dorothy Van Woerkom

For the middle years—

Judy Blume

Robert Burch

Betsy Byars

Bill and Vera Cleaver

Meindert De Jong

Louise M. Fitzhugh

Nat Hentoff

Jean Merrill

Robert Newton Peck

Ivan Southall

Wallace Tripp

For Older years—

Richard Adams

Joan Aiken

Nathaniel Benchley

Julia Cunningham

Sylvia Louise Engdahl

James Foreman

Virginia Hamilton

M.E. Kerr

Marilyn Sachs

Elizabeth George Speare

Jill Paton Walsh

What is Narnia? For many children and a great many adults the question needs no answer. The popularity of the seven Narnia tales makes that land better known than the real country of Upper Volta.

“The happy land of Narnia—Narnia of the heathery mountains and the thymy downs, Narnia of the many rivers, the plashing glens, the mossy caverns and the deep forests ringing with the hammers of the Dwarfs. Oh the sweet air of Narnia!” That sensuous description of what I consider C. S. Lewis’s richest imaginative country occurs in the fifth book in the series, The Horse and His Boy (Macmillan, 1972; all subsequent quotations from the seven books will be from this edition). Bree, the horse of the title, captures the love all Narnians, inside and outside the tales, feel for the land. Both children and adults read and reread the Narnia stories, and a million copies are sold each year.

The stories collectively entitled “The Chronicles of Narnia” were published one a year from 1950 to 1956 in this order: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” The Silver Chair, The Horse and His Boy, The Magician’s Nephew, and The Last Battle. According to Lewis, though, the proper order in which to read them is Nephew, Lion, Horse, Caspian, Voyage, Chair, and Battle. The year after Lion was published, Lewis in a letter commented on its sale: “A number of mothers, and still more, school mistresses, have decided that it is likely to frighten children, so it is not selling very well. But the real children like it, and I am astonished how some very young ones seem to understand it. I think it frightens some adults, but very few children” (Letters of C.S. Lewis).

Lewis must have anticipated such a problem. Near the end of Lion in a passage describing some evil creatures he speaks of “ogres with monstrous teeth, and wolves, and bull-headed men; spirits of evil trees and poisonous plants; and other creatures whom I won’t describe because if I did the grown-ups would probably not let you read this book.” According to Lewis’s secretary, Walter Hooper, “these seven fairy stories were an instant success with children, for whom they were ostensibly written. Parents read them to find out what all the ‘fuss’ was about, became converted, and pressed them on their friends” (preface to The Lion of Judah in Never-Never Land).

As stories for children the seven chronicles have received much praise. The New Yorker reviewed Lion in 1950: “It is, in turn, beautiful, frightening, wise, and nonsensical.” The Last Battle won the Carnegie Medal for the best children’s book published in 1955. Kathleen Raine in “From a Poet” says she has “given away many sets of these to children, who accept Narnia with a passion that testifies to its truth to some world of imagination we all share. I delight in them myself, and never find that they pall in however many readings children may demand.”

Why are the tales so popular? Hooper gives the simplest explanation: “Lewis was a master story-teller with an uncanny visual imagination.” A brief overview of the main story ideas will give a glimpse of the sheer delightfulness of the narrative, though it will leave out much of the detail that gives the stories their extraordinary concreteness.

The seven chronicles tell the history of Narnia from its creation to its end. In The Magician’s Nephew two children, Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer, along with Digory’s Uncle Andrew, a witch, and a cab driver and his horse, stumble into Narnia at its creation. Aslan, a lion who is the son of the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea, sings Narnia into existence and gives the gift of speech to two members of each animal species. The witch, whose evil power over Narnia is held in check for hundreds of years by the “Tree of Protection,” finally overcomes Narnia and makes the land always winter, but never Christmas.

Narnia’s release from the witch’s spell is told in Lion, where the four Pevensie children, Peter, Edmund, Susan, and Lucy, enter Narnia through a wardrobe in Professor Kirke’s (Digory’s) house. The wardrobe is made of wood from a tree, the seed of which came from Narnia’s Tree of Protection. Aslan reappears in Narnia to crown Peter as High King and to give the children the four thrones in the castle of Cair Paravel. Edmund in the course of the story betrays his sisters and brother to the White Witch; his life is forfeit. In order to save him, Aslan offers himself as sacrifice. The witch kills Aslan, but, since he was a willing substitute for another’s life, death works backward, and Aslan is soon alive again.

The Horse and His Boy, a tale within a tale, occurs during the golden reign of the High King Peter and his brother and two sisters. The talking horse Bree and his boy Shasta escape from Narnia’s southern neighbor Calormen. Along the way the two join another talking horse, the mare Hwin and her girl Aravis. Aslan appears to the travelers in several guises to help the four save Narnia and her ally Archenland. Shasta learns near the end of the tale that he is a prince of Archenland, that his real name is Cor, and that he has a twin brother, Prince Corin. Cor eventually becomes king of Archenland.

While hunting the White Stag, the Pevensie children stumble back into England, ending their golden reign of Narnia (this concludes Lion). They discover that no time passed in England while they ruled Narnia. The four children return a year later, by English time, but hundreds of years later by Narnian time, to help Prince Caspian, the rightful king of Narnia, regain the throne from his Uncle Miraz, under whose reign the Old Narnians (the talking animals, dwarfs, fauns, satyrs, centaurs, and giants) have gone into hiding. In this story, too, Aslan returns to help the children to victory. At the end of Prince Caspian, Peter and Susan learn that their days of visiting Narnia are over; they are now too old.

Edmund and Lucy return with their cousin, Eustace Clarence Scrubb (“he almost deserved” his name, says Lewis), during King Caspian X’s reign. This time the children never actually visit the land itself but fall through a painting on Eustace’s wall to a ship’s deck traveling to the east and the end of the world. During the voyage Scrubb becomes a dragon, learns humility, and subsequently returns to human form (the boy, because of bad training at home and school, needed much changing). At the end of Voyage Lucy and Edmund find they have seen the last of Narnia.

Aslan calls Scrubb back into Narnia, along with Scrubb’s schoolmate, Jill Pole. Caspian’s son, Prince Rilian, must be found and released from the Green Witch’s captivity. To help the children with the task Aslan gives them certain signs to look for, all of which the children miss—except the last one. Scrubb’s and Pole’s quest-companion, a Marsh-wiggle named Puddleglum, provides the common sense the children lack. A Marsh-wiggle is tall and thin, with webbed feet, and takes a very serious view of life. Puddleglum is Lewis’s best Narnian creation. And The Silver Chair is the most amusing, entertaining, and perhaps philosophical of all the tales. The companions complete their task of freeing Rilian and return to Narnia just in time for the death of Rilian’s father, King Caspian.

Once more Aslan calls Scrubb and Pole to Narnia, this time not to save the country but to fight in its last battle. King Tirian and his companions die along with Narnia. But at death they find themselves in a land of bright sunshine, green grass, and blue sky. They also find Lucy, Edmund, Peter, the Professor, Polly, and Narnia’s first king and queen, Frank and Helen, in the land. As Aslan explains to them, “There was a real railway accident. Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands—dead.” All the characters of the Narnia tales except Susan, who stopped believing in Narnia when she became an adult, are reunited in the Narnia that never ends, which is in these stories a type of Heaven.

Lewis labeled Narnia “for children.” What did he say about the art of writing “juveniles”? How does he accomplish this in Narnia? And what does Narnia offer children? I must emphasize, as Lewis does, that his books were written for adults as well as children. Perhaps it would be better to say that Lewis wrote Narnia for the childlike. Not all children will like Narnia, since not all like fairy tales or fantasies. Some people, like Lewis himself or Tolkien or me, may gravitate to fantasy in adulthood. Lewis understood that there were as many different types of child readers as adult readers.

I think parents should read fairy tales to their children. That genre requires, at least initially, oral, rather than silent, reading. The excitement comes from hearing the story, as though it were happening at that instant. Also, the author must touch something within a child, so that the two separate personalities understand one another. Lewis described it this way in “On Three Ways of Writing For Children”: “Once in a hotel dining-room I said, rather too loudly, ‘I loathe prunes.’ ‘So do I,’ came an unexpected six-year-old voice from another table. Sympathy was instantaneous. Neither of us thought it was funny. We both knew that prunes are far too nasty to be funny. That is the proper meeting between man and child as independent personalities.… [An author] is a freeman and an equal, like the postman, the butcher, and the dog next door.”

Lewis wrote for children because he had a story to tell. It seemed to him that most of the adult reading population was more interested in psychological characterization than in a ripping good tale, while children still were able to enjoy a story. He outlined three ways to write for children: write a story giving children what you think they want or need, write a story from a story told extemporaneously to a particular child, or write a children’s story because that is the form best suited to what you have to say. He used the latter way, and in “On Juvenile Tastes” deplored the former: “The wrong sort [of writers for children] believe that children are ‘a distinct race.’ They carefully ‘make up’ the tastes of these odd creatures—like an anthropologist observing the habits of a savage tribe—or even the tastes of a clearly defined age-group within a particular social class within the ‘distinct race.’ They dish up not what they like themselves but what that race is supposed to like. Educational and moral, as well as commercial, motives may come in.”

It is interesting that Lewis was hard on those who write to teach children “morals.” The Narnia tales have been criticized for just that reason. Since Lewis was an outspoken Christian, and since his children’s stories contain a great deal of, at times, thinly veiled Christianity and what are now considered old-fashioned moral virtues, people assume that he wrote his stories to teach certain things. “This,” he says, “is all pure moonshine. I couldn’t write in that way at all. Everything began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord” (“Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said”). The author in him fell in love with the form of a child’s fairy tale.

Writing for children brings necessary restrictions on vocabulary, reflective passages, digressions, and descriptions of erotic love. And Lewis tried to write chapters of equal length for convenience in reading aloud. Those limitations paradoxically provided Lewis the right amount of freedom to create a world that the reader can see and smell and almost touch. There are no wasted words or chapters or ideas. Form and content meld into a compact, artistic unity.

After the author in him began to boil, he says the man in him “began to have his turn”:

I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm … But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could [“Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” in Of Other Worlds, Harcourt, 1966, p. 37].

Lewis did not think it wrong for a story to contain a moral; all his do. But he did think it wrong to put in morals as medicine. If a writer wants a moral in his story, he should include one he needs. That gives some immediacy. Even so, Lewis thought starting with didacticism was sure to produce a bad moral as well as a bad story.

In letters and essays Lewis wrote much about the requirements of good writing, no matter what the form. Write for the ear, not the eye. Use simple, straightforward language. Describe a situation or an emotion. Make the reader feel or see what you are presenting; don’t rely heavily on adjectives or adverbs. Read as many good books as possible, but avoid nearly all magazines (the one the reader now has in hand is, of course, an exception). And always write about what interests you. Following the last suggestion an author will never write down to anyone but will find those universal interests (or dislikes, as with prunes) that bridge the gap between the author, the printed page, and the reader. That is particularly important when the author is an adult and the reader a child.

Lewis certainly follows his own advice in the Narnia tales. Though the simple vocabulary under less talented hands would sound stilted, he manages to explain situations and describe scenes clearly and vividly. Even when the scene is utterly fantastic—such as entering another country through a wardrobe—touches of what Lewis calls “presentational realism” (a technique he learned from medieval romance) brings the scene immediately before the mind’s eye.

The four children are exploring the professor’s house on a rainy day when they discover the room with the wardrobe. “There was nothing else in the room at all except a dead blue-bottle on the window-sill,” says Lewis. That small detail is a contact point between the reader and the writer. Each of us remembers rainy days and dead bugs, and that simple sentence conveys well how empty the room is. Lewis uses the technique repeatedly. Lucy opens the wardrobe and two mothballs drop out. After a long march the children are tired and “Susan had a slight blister on one heel.” Similar touches are found in paragraph after paragraph.

The dialogue, too, flows naturally. The children get tired and cranky, and the older ones lord it over the younger ones. Here’s an example that occurs early in Lion:

“I think he’s an old dear,” said Susan [about the professor], “Oh, come off it!” said Edmund, who was tired and pretending not to be tired, which always made him bad-tempered. “Don’t go on talking like that.” “Like what?” said Susan; “and anyway, it’s time you were in bed.” “Trying to talk like Mother,” said Edmund. “And who are you to say when I’m to go to bed? Go to bed yourself’ [p. 2].

Lewis spends a lot of time talking about such basics as food and drink. Narnians celebrate victories with sumptuous feasts. But during wars, food and water are scarce. Eating and drinking are universals Lewis shares with his readers; they are also part of common grace. Aslan in creating Narnia provided plenty of good things to be enjoyed as gifts of the Creator and not for themselves alone. The simple description of the first tea Lucy has in Narnia makes the reader hungry: “And really it was a wonderful tea. There was a nice brown egg, lightly boiled … and then sardines on toast, and then buttered toast, and then toast with honey, and then a sugar-topped cake.” The reader who doesn’t like boiled eggs or sardines is likely to feel that there must be something about them that he has been missing.

Lewis in different ways throughout all seven books presents the potency of Christianity. A good example is found in The Magician’s Nephew:

Both children were looking up into the Lion’s face.… And all at once (they never knew exactly how it happened) the face seemed to be a sea of tossing gold in which they were floating, and such a sweetness and power rolled about them and over them and entered into them that they felt they had never really been happy or wise or good, or even alive and awake, before. And the memory of that moment stayed with them always, so that as long as they both lived, if ever they were sad or afraid or angry, the thought of all that golden goodness, and the feeling that it was still there, quite close, just around some corner or behind some door, would come back and make them sure, deep down inside, that all was well [p. 160].

Paul describes it as peace passing understanding, and theologians explain it as the work of the Holy Spirit. Lewis brings it to us in beautiful, evocative language that appeals to our senses as well as our minds.

Lewis offers children, then, a vivid story filled with familiar details and extraordinary events. He also presents to them logic, differing concepts of time, loyalty, how to tell whether someone is telling the truth or lying, common sense, love, sacrifice, evil and goodness, war and violence, death, and the importance of the imagination. Children learn what pride is, how difficult obedience can be, and how temptation works. In short, Lewis introduces them to reality, both physical and spiritual.

Another scene from The Magician’s Nephew explains love and temptation and obedience in a striking, real way. Aslan sends Digory to get an apple from a faraway garden to plant in Narnia as the tree of protection. One bite of the fruit brings health and youth, and Digory’s mother is dying. The witch tempts him to steal an apple for his mother. She says, “‘All will be well again. Your home will be happy again. You will be like other boys.’ ‘Oh!’ gasped Digory as if he had been hurt, and put his hand to his head. For he now knew that the most terrible choice lay before him” (p. 145). But promises—he had promised Aslan—and loyalty—the witch suggests he leave his friend Polly behind—help Digory see how “false and hollow” are the witch’s suggestions. He learns that real love for his mother means acting as she would expect him to, not saving her life at any price. He also finds out what it means to obey Aslan. Such a passage gives children a better understanding of Christ’s statement that loving and following him make our relationships with parents seem like hate. And for those children who read the book and have no knowledge of Christ, hearing about him in later life could trigger a memory of that passage: “Oh, yes. I remember reading something like that years ago. I see what the Bible means.” Of course what follows in the story—Aslan gives Digory an apple for his mother, who does recover—shows that for God’s children all events work for good.

In Voyage Eustace Scrubb learns the price of pride the hard way. After he turns into a dragon his superiority gives way to humility and helpfulness. Aslan rips off the dragonskin to make him a new boy—human for the first time. Eustace explains it to Edmund: “The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know—if you’ve picked the scab of a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away” (p. 89).

War and other forms of violence play a great part in the stories of Narnia. They are always a direct result of evil, the tyrannical inflicting of one person’s wishes on a whole country. Lewis describes battles with realism, as when Peter fights the wolf captain to save Susan in Lion:

Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do. He rushed straight up to the monster.… He had just time to duck down and plunge his sword, as hard as he could, between the brute’s forelegs into its heart. Then came a horrible, confused moment like something in a nightmare, He was tugging and pulling and the Wolf seemed neither alive nor dead, and its bared teeth knocked against his forehead, and everything was blood and heat and hair [p. 106].

People have objected to the realism with which Lewis depicts war. The possibility of the death of the children, too, is always present in the story. During a duel in Prince Caspian Peter tells Edmund, “Give my love to … to everyone at home, Ed, if he gets me.… So long, old chap.” Lewis doesn’t pull back from the logical possibility that war in Narnia may result in the death of one or all of the children. But he thought that to avoid violence was “to give children a false impression and feed them on escapism in the bad sense”:

Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.… Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end of the book [“On Three Ways of Writing For Children,” in Of Other Worlds, Harcourt, 1966, p. 31].

Narnia demands much of the children who enter there. No one can visit that land without undergoing some change. Edmund finds out he’s a traitor and must seek and receive forgiveness. Eustace needs to be converted. Digory must learn to obey. In each tale the children learn that courage, resourcefulness, and sheer hard work are necessary in their adventures. The presence of death is part of the atmosphere that teaches them these things. The Last Battle is the only children’s story know of in which everyone and everything dies. But after their deaths the children find light, not darkness; they have escaped from death into life. (But Lewis is not giving us universalism in fancy dress. Susan does not get into the final Narnia.)

Behind all these ideas stands imagination. Lewis constantly appeals to the reader’s imaginations: Have you heard it? Can you remember? Can you see it? Here is where he explains spiritual reality. The fact that we cannot see or touch something does not mean that it does not exist; empiricism cannot explain everything. The Green Witch in The Silver Chair tries to make the children doubt the reality of sun and sky and lions by saying they are made-up things, only products of the imagination. Naturally in Narnia such an argument fails, for using imagination helps us know reality. As the witch strums her mandolin she says, “Your sun is a dream; and there is nothing in that dream that was not copied from the lamp. The lamp is the real thing; the sun is but a tale, a children’s story. (A children’s story symbolizes spiritual reality for Lewis.) To too many people the supernatural is merely an imaginative—and therefore false—copy of the physical world. The witch equates her underworld with our world; the lamp in her world is the reality of which the sun is a mere image. She does the same thing with Aslan, calling him an enlarged version of cat: “And look how you can put nothing into your make-believe without copying it from the real world, this world of mine, which is the only world.

Shelley in “A Defence of Poetry” says that “a man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others.… The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.… Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.” Christ’s command to love your neighbor as yourself is an appeal to imagination.

Lewis uses that idea in Narnia. He draws the reader into the tales by imagination, and stretches and exercises that faculty so that children will recognize good and evil (for instance) in the real world because they have with their imaginations experienced it in Narnia. Aslan uses that faculty to teach the children who he is in England. Lucy and Edmund find it hard to part with Aslan, knowing they are too old to return to Narnia:

“It isn’t Narnia, you know,” sobbed Lucy. “It’s you. We shan’t meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?”

“But you shall meet me, dear one,” said Aslan.

“Are—are you there too, Sir?” said Edmund.

“I am,” said Aslan. “But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there [p. 209].

We can say of Lewis what he says of another fantasy writer in “William Morris”: “He seems to retire far from the real world and to build a world out of his wishes; but when he has finished the result stands out as a picture of experience ineluctably true.… There are many writers greater than [Lewis]. You can go on from him to all sorts of subtleties, delicacies, and sublimities which he lacks. But you can hardly go behind him.”

General secretaries of the World Council of Churches are not given to irresponsible statements for public consumption. At Nairobi, however, Dr. Philip Potter evidently felt the need to create a diversion, for he fired an unexpected broadside at the British. That people he called “one of the most racist in history”; they have, he said, “established a racist system wherever they have gone in the world.” This remark, made in a press interview, has caused much ill feeling in Britain. Some of us wish that he would further underline his hatred of racial discrimination by directing his fire at a Russian Empire that was collecting dependencies when Britain was relinquishing them.

The normally irenic archbishop of Canterbury felt constrained to deliver a rebuke—in more courteous terms than this piece of crass non-ecumenicity deserved. Dr. Coggan admitted that the British and other Western nations had much to repent of. “We have been racist,” he said, “in many of our attitudes in the past, but during the last thirty years we have been engaged in a process … of rectifying the situation. Some kind of historical balance must be kept if the truth is to be told.”

The need for balance and truth-telling was stressed also by an African priest, writing in a prestigious Anglican newspaper. The democratic system Britain had given her former colonies, he pointed out, “has been dethroned and replaced by a bogus democracy which in fact is a cloak for African-type hitlerism and is dishonestly called a one-party system of government.” No one who looks around Africa today is likely to deny it.

But back to Britain. Let me update my race-relations comments on this page of six years ago when I forecast troublous days ahead. First a few facts about England and Wales (Scotland and Northern Ireland are so far less affected). England and Wales have an area rather less than that of Florida but a population roughly equal to that of California, New York, and Texas combined.

Since Britain is edgy about identifying its residents according to color, one can only estimate numbers, but 1.3 million from immigrant families will not be far out. That means 2.6 per cent of the population trace their ancestry to former British possessions in Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa (the latter group includes a sizable influx of Uganda’s Asians whom President Amin deported in 1972, and whom Britain took in as an act of compassion against black racism that Dr. Potter might applaud).

How are the immigrant families as a whole faring? The Race Relations Act is there to protect their interests, but it would be foolish to deny evidence of race discrimination in a land that in modern times ruled millions of black and brown peoples.

A visiting American radio speaker this week advised the enactment of good strong laws against discrimination, lest Britain experience the agony America has known too well. I know what she meant, but you can’t legislate for changed hearts, and Britain is in any case finding variations on the problem that America has scarcely known. It could not be otherwise when Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims are transplanted with their languages, cultures, and traditions into a distant island nation that is nominally Christian.

That nominal Christianity is a real stumbling block to those educated in African mission schools; they are bewildered and distressed at the religious indifference they often encounter here. It is a stumbling block also to the West Indian community, which was greatly augmented after the 1952 McCarran Act made it more difficult to enter the United States. They had no difficulty with language, but they could not abide the lifelessness of church services, and so they formed their own churches in Britain. We cannot blame them. The indigenous British churches were the losers. And it underlined differences, for that section of immigrants looked for integration.

Not so the Asians, who generally form communities within communities. It is hard to fault this either, but conflict arises when, for example, a Sikh would rather go to prison than offend against his religion by replacing or covering his turban with a crash helmet, which British law requires of all motorcyclists.

The authorities have tried desperately hard to be fair to all. Sikh bus conductors, for example, have been allowed to retain turbans in place of the normally mandatory uniform cap. British publishers have been asked to “show black people in ordinary situations” in reading materials intended for young people. Immigrant communities, for their part, organize their lives to insure minimum exposure to potentially discriminatory situations, but this frequently involves withdrawal inward.

It is hard to put a precise finger on root causes. No one is likely to emulate the cartoon landlady saying to a black applicant for a room, “Sorry, no coloreds—it’s not the neighbors, it’s me—I’m prejudiced.” In Britain’s October, 1974, general election, none of the anti-immigration National Front candidates got more than a few hundred votes.

Where, then, are the tensions seen? In Leeds last November, five policemen were injured in ghetto violence. A few weeks later the city (population 750,000) opened its first race-relations festival in an effort to ease tensions among its 25,000 immigrants. City authorities, however, imposed “insensitive” restrictions on the festival, refusing to permit singing and dancing events to run beyond midnight in colored areas with high unemployment rates and poor amenities. This reportedly caused irritation and a sense of injustice in the colored community.

In Liverpool, Home Office minister Alex Lyon after a tour of the area described an immigrant group he met as “more desolate and despondent than any” he had seen. A community-relations officer in that city (5 per cent immigrant population) says that blacks, who live in their own areas, “have always been at the bottom of the list when it comes to homes, schools, or employment, and the feeling is that they always will.”

A survey of nearly 300 industrial firms showed that colored workers were at a disadvantage in the kind of employment offered and in the procedure of obtaining it. Most employers simply did not upgrade colored workers. Trade unions did little to help and were accused sometimes of allowing discriminatory practices to develop. During 1973–74, the Race Relations Board reported a 69 per cent rise in cases of alleged discrimination in England’s industrial northwest.

In a symposium on race held a few years ago, an Indian Christian said: “It is impossible to distinguish in Britain between a Christian and a non-Christian by his behavior. Where the colored immigrant is concerned they all behave alike.” I don’t believe this is true—but we do still have a lot to learn.

J. D. DOUGLAS