Rachel Starr Thomson

Years ago, when I was still writing and e-mailing out the essays known as Letters to a Samuel Generation, I decided to write a series on the Lord’s Prayer. The resulting nine articles were some of my favourites — they just expressed so much about who God is to me and what it means to be a believer living God’s purposes in the world. Eventually I compiled them into a little book called Heart to Heart: Meeting With God in the Lord’s Prayer.

The year after that, my best friend Carolyn and I were tossing around ideas for a small-scale ballet production, and we realized we could use narrations from Heart to Heart, choose songs that reflected on the themes of the Lord’s Prayer, and create a whole performance around that. So we did. It’s called Father, and right now, we’re touring it in Southern Ontario for the second summer in a row.

In churches, schools, and other venues, I get to stand up and share words that come from my heart with people. And afterwards, I’m so blessed to hear the impact they can have. It’s a surreal experience for me, a writer with all the typical loner habits and instincts. But I love it.

Tonight, we’re going to share Father with a community that desperately needs to be reminded of the love of our Father God, of his kingdom coming, and of the promise of deliverance from evil. In this community, a little girl was recently abducted from her school and murdered. The killers have been caught. But that doesn’t stop the hurting.

The church that’s hosting us will be holding a funeral service tomorrow. Tonight, they’ve invited hundreds of people to come and see Father. In the audience will be teachers from the little girl’s school, and others who knew her — who have been so deeply affected by this tragedy.

Moments like this remind me that nothing is all about me. Not writing, which sometimes feels so insular. Not performing, which can tend to focus attention on the performers. No — even these things are about community. They’re about the powerful messages God has for us to share and the love He wants us to give to others. They’re about mourning and healing and hope.

You can pray for us tonight — and join us in praying. “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen.”

It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem. In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God “set bars and doors” and said, “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.” But have we even come that far? Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat?

- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

The book is out! I sent out the official announcement this morning, as you can read below :).

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Dear friends,

Tales of the Heartily Homeschooled is now available for pre-order! You can purchase your copy of Tales at www.littledozen.com/thh.html. Pre-orders close June 30. As a special thank-you to those who order before June 30, we are offering a free Ebook Edition of Theodore Pharris Saves the Universe, the novel Rachel wrote when she was 13!

Pre-orders help us cover the costs of publishing–and they get the book into your hands early! Your books will be ordered and sent to you in the first week of July, when the book is just becoming available to the world at large.

When we started writing Tales as a series of emails to each other, we didn’t really imagine how much you’d share with us! We thank you for your friendship, encouragement, and support as we’ve worked to bring Tales to print. It’s been a marvelous journey!

Blessings,
Rachel and Carolyn

authors, Tales of the Heartily Homeschooled
www.littledozen.com/thh.html

Today (being the day I am writing this post, and not necessarily the day I am posting it) I spent well over an hour formatting Theodore Pharris Saves the Universe, my very first novel, so that I may release it today (being the day I am posting this, June 13) as an ebook on my Web site.

I had less formatting to do than I thought, because I apparently worked on it sometime in the past that I have forgotten all about, but one task demanded most of my attention: I had to go through the manuscript and turn every single straight apostrophe into a curly apostrophe.

I have discovered that continually hitting “Find,” then hitting the actual text window, then hitting the apostrophe key, over and over again, is probably the best and fastest way to develop carpal tunnel. Also that I don’t care for curly apostrophes in Georgian font.

And yet, I am geeky enough to have found the job somewhat glamourous and exciting purely because it involved a book.

By the way–Theodore Pharris is available on my Web site! You can read more about it or order it here.

I just finished reading Being the Body by Charles Colson and Ellen Vaughn. A friend lent it to me months ago, but during the school year I don’t get much chance to read.

Anyway, the book’s central theme is the Church in its worldwide (“the church universal”) and local (“the church particular”) incarnations. Colson presents a small host of principles, purpose statements, and stories, all focused on what it means to be the Body of Christ in the world and how we can live that out.

He has some good things to say, but to me, the best part of the book was the stories. I couldn’t actually tell you what most of his overall points were, but I can relate most of the stories in detail. They’ll stay with me for a long time–the stories of Rusty Woomer, the murderer who became a Christian on death row and shone the light of Jesus till the minute he died, the Christians in Eastern Europe who helped bring down the Soviet empire from within, the priest who volunteered to starve to death in Auschwitz so another could live, the Russian girl who found God in novels, snow, and logic.

These stories are inspiring and powerful and will stay with me. It occurs to me that storytelling is so powerful because it takes us past principle and purpose and says, “Look, here’s what love looks like. Now go out there and love.” And the stories themselves go so deep into us that we can’t not hear them and be changed.

As a writer, I was also challenged (and encouraged) by these words in chapter 26, “Being Salt”:

“Being salt demands an understanding of our cultural environment and the use of innovative strategies for infiltration and influence. Writers have been doing this for centuries, with the result that much of the classic literature of the past three hundred years contains Christian truth. The great Russian works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Pushkin, for example,with the Christian message salted in their pages in such a way that the Communists forgot to ban them, were the books that led Irina Ratushinskaya toward Christ.

“In many ways, literature has the most lasting power to shape ideas. Great books are read, reread, passed around, discussed, debated, and then passed on to succeeding generations.

“Today, many writers reveal in their work the incoherence, shattered logic, and relativistic chaos that mark a culture that has lost its understanding of order and truth. So when a writer who is a Christian crafts words and stories that spring from a world-view informed by truth, he or she is salting modern culture.”

And that, in large part, is why I write.

As previously mentioned, I didn’t like the new movie version of C.S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian. I felt that it missed the spirit of Lewis’s book. My musings on the subject have helped me realize how much seemingly little things can affect a story.

Prince Caspian’s age, for example. It was obvious from the movie posters that this had been changed. In the books Caspian is a little boy, maybe about 11. In the movie he is a young man, maybe about 19. When I first heard about this change, I shrugged it off as no big deal–how much difference could that actually make?

As it turns out, a lot! After our varying levels of disappointment with the new Prince Caspian, my friends and I gathered to watch the old BBC version we’d grown up on–a version which, while it lacks CGI or any budget to speak of, stays very close to the books. And there was Caspian again, the Caspian I remembered: fresh-faced, starry-eyed, and clinging to faith.

In Lewis’s story, Caspian is a child. He thinks like a child. He’s bold like a child. He’s black and white as children are, resilient, and willing to believe in the impossible. He doesn’t know for sure that Aslan, the kings and queens of ancient times, and all the mythical creatures of Narnia exist–but he hopes against hope that they do. Once he discovers two dwarves and a talking badger in the woods, nothing can shake him from his faith. We know Caspian will make a good king, even if he doesn’t, because he glories more than anything in Aslan.

The Caspian of the movies is far more adult. He’s caught up in political machinations, desires for revenge, deep doubt, and competition for the throne. His story isn’t a bad one–but it’s not the story C.S. Lewis told.

As I’ve thought on it, I’ve come to believe that C.S. Lewis was painting the idea that “a little child shall lead them.” He wrote about child-heroes not only because he wrote for children, but because for all of us, the way to the kingdom is by becoming–and believing–like a child.

On May 16, opening night, I curled up in a theatre chair in a row of friends and prepared to take in Prince Caspian, the movie adaptation of a children’s classic.

I am not one to insist that a movie exactly mirror a book. I studied screenwriting for a little while and even tried penning a couple of screenplays, so I realize that these two radically different art forms take an entirely different approach to storytelling. I wouldn’t have complained if the movie had simply approached the story differently.

I am complaining, however, because the movie wrote a whole new story! True, it features the same characters and (sort of) follows the same events. But the heart of Prince Caspian, as C.S. Lewis wrote it, was gone. I realized this but couldn’t quite put my finger on the problem. I knew it had to do with faith and the centrality of Aslan to the whole story, but beyond that, I was left trying to figure out why the story I loved had disappeared.

My friend (and author of TorahBytes) Alan Gilman hit the nail on the head in his blog post, “Prince Caspian the Movie Misses the Mark“:

“One of the things that make C.S. Lewis’ writings as poignant as they are is that they effectively communicate God’s truth within a society that has lost its spiritual moorings. As intellectuals redefined reality for the modern world, pushing it away from a biblical understanding of God and life, Lewis calls us back to the old stories.

“The movie version of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe gave us hope that Lewis’ legacy was being preserved for a new generation, that the biblical world view would at least be part of the contemporary discussion. The movie version of Prince Caspian, on the other hand, reminds us that Hollywood cannot be trusted with that legacy.“

I encourage you to check out the entire post at torahblog.blogspot.com

Religion BookLine, a division of Publishers Weekly, published this interview with Andy Crouch, author of Creating Culture, today.

Crouch says,

“As I read the work of academic sociologists like Peter Berger I became really convinced that the only way that cultures change is when people make more culture—which called into question a lot of the strategies that Christians think they ought to use to change culture, such as protest. There’s lots that’s worth protesting, in our culture and in every culture, but protest alone doesn’t change culture, and analysis doesn’t change culture, and withdrawal, which has been sometimes a strategy that Christians have adopted, doesn’t change it. It only changes when you create something.”

It definitely sounds like a book I’d like to read.

“The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the LORD hath made even both of them.”

Proverbs 20:9

I wrote the fantasy novel Worlds Unseen six years ago. At the time, I had some loose ideas about what it could say–besides telling a good story, which was my first priority! It touched on some of my beliefs about life: the spiritual realities behind the physical world, nature’s allegiance to its Creator, and the way most of us live our lives ignorant of the world’s true history and what it means to us today.

Worlds is primarily about Maggie Sheffield, a very normal young woman who stumbles into the spiritual realities of her world by accident and must learn to deal with them. However, equally important to the story are the two Gifted: a wanderer named Nicolas Fisher, who hears things no one else can, and Virginia Ramsey, a blind girl who sees visions.

Proverbs 20:9 made me think of these two immediately: “The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the LORD hath made even both of them.” In Worlds Unseen, Virginia and Nicolas are not only Gifted, they are gifts–gifts to the world. Those who believe what the Gifted tell them will arrive at the truth about life, and with it, real freedom.

In the story, though, Nicolas and Virginia are both outcasts. One wrestles to accept his own gift and thus refuses to live among people; the other is feared and ultimately betrayed because of the truth she sees. It’s not easy to be the only people in all the world who understand what life really is–especially when the truth shatters everything we have believed.

Nicolas and Virginia aren’t without parallel in our own world. They are my fantasy version of the Old Testament prophets, of the New Testament apostles and saints, of everyone to whom God has given clarity of vision and ears that understand. Often, these real-world Gifted were despised and rejected, driven out and even crucified. Isaiah was one such Gifted man. David, king and psalmist, was another. Mary; Anna; the Apostle Paul. John the Beloved, witnessing the Revelation while in exile on the Isle of Patmos, was one. And ever since their days, God has not ceased to send to us people who see and hear, and who will open our own understanding if we let them.

Perhaps you can think of someone who has filled this role in your life. A parent; a sister; a friend; a teacher. A singer or poet. Such people do not create or renew truth. They simply show us, through scripture and by the Spirit of God, what has always been there.

Perhaps, in the darkness of the world around, the one who sees and hears is you.

Like my fictional Seventh World, the people around us live in darkness and deception. We who have the Word of God at our fingertips and the Spirit of God in our hearts are in this world, not just as passers-by, but as gifts. In prayer, Jesus said of His disciples, “As thou [Father] hath sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world” (John 17:18).

You, believer in Jesus, are in this world not as an accident and not as a judge. You are here as a gift, bearing the gifts of sight, hearing, and true reality.

May we use these gifts well: to bring into the darkness a burning, holy light.

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Worlds Unseen is available for purchase or as a free ebook from www.LittleDozen.com. It’s sequel, Burning Light, is due out December 2008.

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This post is cross-posted from Peculiar, where I blog each week on scripture and walking with God.

Sam Torode of Boundless loves words, too! As it happens, I love his words (and his wife’s). Intelligent, articulate, and, in this case, all about Winnie-the-Pooh. Go read it.

The lovely ladies of the YLCF also like words. The proof is in the bookshelves.