Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, Book 16 of 2016

C.S. Lewis in 1917

There are two kinds of people in this world: 

• Those who think prayer is a monologue. 
• Those who think prayer is a dialogue.

[If you are thinking, 'What about people who don't pray at all?' they are in group one.  If no one is listening, then prayer is a monologue.]

I have been both at different times in my life.  So has C.S. Lewis.  The picture above was taken just before he volunteered to serve in World War I.  He was 19 years old and did not have to go.  Lewis is from Northern Ireland and would not have been drafted.  Lewis had recently become and atheist and would remain one for another decade until he became a believer in 1929 and a Christian shortly after.

At about the same age as Lewis, I volunteered for the Vietnam War.  Lewis served in that horrible war and was twice badly wounded.  He remained an atheist as he recovered from shrapnel wounds.  I never got closer to the Vietnam War than western Utah.  But like Lewis I was injured in an explosion.  His was hit with German artillery fire.  I was close enough to a missile interstage detonator explosion to be blinded by shrapnel and almost lose two fingers.  

We both recovered, but in the course of my recovery, I came to faith.  The experience of blindness, and not being sure I would see again, made the universe look vast and me feel as small as an oxygen atom.  

As I recovered I became a believer and then a Christian.  They are very different.  Over the four decades since I first believed, I have never stopped being a believer, but have had many struggles with being a Christian. It is not belief in Jesus that was a problem, or the basic principles of faith expressed in the Creeds of the Church for nearly 2,000 years.  

My problem was with the culture that has surrounded Christianity in America and through most of western history since Christians took political power.  I came to faith in a Baptist Church in Utah.  The members of that Church saw themselves as a resistance movement against all the sins of the world and most of modern science and philosophy.  The Evangelical Church in America in all of its expressions is anti-intellectual.  And in the past half century it has become almost incredibly materialistic, given the life of Jesus.  

I quickly became discouraged with trying to be part of a culture that seemed collectively delusional.  Just when I was ready to give up completely, a military chaplain on our base in Germany gave me a copy of C.S. Lewis' "Mere Christianity."  The day I got the book our unit was going to Heidelberg to watch fireworks.  I read the book on the bus, then ignored the fireworks and read the book on the bridge where we went to watch.  

Reading that book convinced me to leave the Army at the end of my enlistment and go to college full time.  I wanted to be a Christian with a brain like Lewis.  

I did go to college and eventually read all of the 40 books C.S. Lewis wrote, many of them several times.  This reading of "Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer" might be the fifth time I read this wonderful, practical book.  

Most of us feel the urge to pray and then feel modern life and thinking fight against the urge.  Does prayer for the sick really make sense?  Could any sane parent keep her sick child at home and pray instead of going to a doctor?  In a series of "letters" to a friend on prayer, Lewis talks about how he prays.  He also talks about how and why he struggles with prayer. 

Of course, the book has nothing to say to people who do not believe in God, but it does show how a sane and brilliant man who fervently believes in God prays.

Book 15 of 2016: Homer's Iliad--One of the First and Great War Stories

The Iliad of Homer one of the first and one of the best War Stories of Western Literature.  It opens with "The Anger of Achilles" and ends with funeral of Hector, the great hero of Troy. Hector was killed by Achilles in the last of many fight scenes.

In this reading, I was struck by how much the combatants "talk smack" to each other. They insult and provoke each other like professional wrestlers before cutting each other to pieces with sword and spear.  Hundreds and hundreds of men die in this story, many of them falling to the ground and "biting the earth" as they writhe and gasp on the way to Death and Hades.  

The meaning of "biting the dust" is just the same for us as when Homer sang his poem 3,000 years ago: fall headlong in the dust, and bite the earth [πολέες δ᾽ ἀμφ᾽ αὐτὸν ἑταῖροι//πρηνέες ἐν κονίῃσιν ὀδὰξ λαζοίατο γαῖαν].

Dozens of times as I read "he fell headlong in the dust and bites the earth" I heard the refrain from "Another One Bites the Dust" by Queen.  

With spears, swords, arrows and not a few big rocks, the combatants smash skulls, tear out eyes, rip open bellies, tear flesh and break bones. The poem glorifies combat and bravery.  There is no doubt Homer's audience thought that to die bravely in combat was the best death.

The war that leads to so many deaths of brave men, the 10-years war between the Greeks and Trojans, was unnecessary.  It was the wounded pride of King Agamemnon of the Greeks that started the war.  In the Iliad, "...the face that launch'd a thousand ships" was the bearded face of King Agamemnon, not the lovely face of Helen of Troy. Christopher Marlowe's play Dr. Faustus in 1604 is the first reference to Helen causing the war and the source of the quote in the line above.

The song "If" by Bread in 1971 made the Marlowe's view part of pop culture and echoed in my head as I read Iliad.

Of course, it was her kidnap/elopement by Paris that was given as a reason to fight, but Helen, as all women of the time, was property.  Thousands of men in a thousand ships went to war following a proud and angry king.

The Trojan War is tragedy and loss even in victory.  Agamemnon is betrayed and killed when he returns home.  Achilles dies in Troy.  Ulysses wanders another ten years before his return.  That story is the "Odyssey."

I last read Iliad in the 90s and at the time liked he Odyssey better.  Now that I have served in an ill-conceived unnecessary war myself, I like Iliad better.  All those brave deaths, all that "biting the earth" for no reason in a losing cause is now part of my life.

Every Time I Put My Helmet On, I Could Die

In Michigan earlier this month, a drunk, high or otherwise screwed up pickup driver ran over nine bicyclists, killing five and maiming the other four.

So many cyclists are on social media acting surprised.  They shouldn't be.  Riding a two-wheeled vehicle is dangerous anywhere.  Sharing a road with hundreds of two-ton vehicles makes it more dangerous.  When the drivers of those vehicles hate bicyclists, someone is going to get hurt, and that someone is not the driver of the two-ton vehicle.

And the hostility on the road from the two-ton cowards in pickup trucks is increasing.  The Republican nominee trashed John Kerry last week for crashing on his bike during a State Department trip.  Dumpy Trump told his even fatter fans that he, Donald Trump, would not fall off a bicycle.  Because, of course, Trump would never get on one.  Many conservative talk show hosts have attacked bicycles for various reasons that can be summarized in a fat man's envy of men who are in shape.

Most of the real hostility I have suffered on a bicycle in the last 20 years has been from pickup trucks.  If a driver swerves, spits, hits me with a can or bottle or yells "Faggot!" it is a fat guy in pickup truck.  If there are bumper stickers on the truck, they are Republican/conservative.

In Iraq when we were on the airbase, we did not have to wear battle gear, but when we went outside the wire, we wore helmets and body armor.  In Iraq, putting on the helmet meant leaving the patrolled perimeter of the Ali Air Base and flying to somewhere that we had not "won the hearts and minds" of the local people.

Although we were safe on Ali Air Base, there was on place I felt vulnerable.  I rode the perimeter of the airfield to get everywhere on base.  This nine-mile road was mostly far from the perimeter, but near the junk yard on the east side of the base, the perimeter fence was an easy rifle shot away.  As I rode around the base, especially at night with a red light blinking under the bike seat, I imagined an Iraqi with an AK-47 looking at me like I was an arcade target.  And the Arab aiming his Kalashnikov would not even know that I am half Jewish by birth, so for him I would be a double score target.

In the end I rode more than 5,000 miles in Iraq and have ridden more than 150,000 miles in the last two decades, so I know rationally, that road riding is statistically safe.  But now that I have turned in the camouflage helmet, I am very aware that the greatest routine risk I face is a porcine pansy in a pickup truck.  Sometimes people ask me how I can enjoy riding in New York City or Philadelphia or Paris.  There may be heavy traffic in cities, but there is not the malice of cowards in pickups.