Another break

Again, this is due to health problems and needing a little time just to reorient myself. I probably won't be long. Probably be back and posting tomorrow night. Hopefully not longer. God Bless all of you and keep you.

Hunter's Fragment: Part 2

Comfort... for a little while. A warm inn with warm food. At least it was comfort of the body. Lukas has not been entirely successful with comfort of the soul, but that was a different matter. In a way, it had been a very long time since had been truly happy. But what could he say? Life at the edge of the wild was hard, and happiness was in scarce supply. He devoured his stew. Not the best he had ever tasted. Not the worst either. It had just enough meat to keep him from being hungry later on.

 He was so absorbed in his meal he almost didn't notice the man who sat down across from him. The man was old, disheveled, weary, and weather beaten: like Lukas himself. Lukas found the food more interesting. He stayed silent.

"I take it you're hungry," said the man across from him. Lukas didn't look up from his food, he didn't tend to waste words on people who stated the obvious. There was a long silence. 

The man sighed, "I'm sorry Lukas." 

Sorry? The word bounced off of his mind like eastern rubber. Lukas was not the type of person to harbor bitterness, so he shook his head, "You did your duty Conrad, that's all. God knows I needed to get out of there." 

"I didn't know you believed in God," said Conrad. Lukas shrugged. He didn't know if he did either. Another long silence. Discussions of religion could be as dangerous as they were pointless. Lukas's spoon scraped the bottom of the bowl. What a pity that there was no more left. Now he had to go to work. 

"Are you ready lad?" Asked Conrad. Pointless question. Lukas was always ready. The sword on his back seemed to itch for black blood. Somewhere far away, something fell howled in the darkness. 

"Yes " he said.  And his hand itched for his sword. 

Hunter's Fragment

The wind blew hard, loudly and ominously, tearing through the beleaguered countryside like so many fell ghosts. All around, ominous groaning emanated from trees that were only one hard gust away from crashing towards the ground.

            All in all, it was not the sort of scene anyone wanted to be in, when he had already been walking for a whole day and a good part of the night. The unforgiving cold sank deep into bone.

            But Lukas was a different breed; he had a temperament that years of training far harsher than anything this weather could bring had forged. The sinews in his muscles were so prepared that he could barely feel the cold stinging against his exposed hands. He was in his own element, certainly, but he was anything but calm,

            Why did every thought of her haunted his waking actions? He had been told never to feel: never to let an inch of sentiment cross his mind. And yet here he was. What would Epicurus say? He had no clue. It really didn't matter. Her face haunted him more than any teacher or instructor’s. Had he known this girl for how long? No. Two days at most. Still, all the education and lectures seemed like a pale haze compared to it. He wondered if he was falling in love. He hoped not, because he could be executed for that if it became known, but he felt sure that wasn't the reason. There was something about her that kept teasing the edges of his head. There was something important he had forgotten. He just couldn't tell what that was.

            He shook his head violently. There would be other times to face his personal demons, but now was not one of them. Tomorrow wasn't going to be one of them either. In fact, Lukas had learned from long experience not to face personal demons. It was best to let the demons be, and usually if he concentrated hard enough, he could drive the offending thoughts from his mind. Sleep was the only thing he truly dreaded. Long discipline had taught him to keep his doubts silent in his waking hours, but nothing kept them from his dreams.

            He forced himself to focus: on the path ahead, on the cruel, painful wind, on the distant sound of sheep bleating, on anything that kept her eyes out of his mind, but nothing seemed to work. Not this time. Nothing was able to rid his conscience of her eyes, those eyes that always seemed to remind him of what he could never remember no matter how his mind tried. He had just about given everything up for lost when he saw a small, golden chink of light half a mile up the road. An inn! Not a nice one by any means, but still, it was somewhere to stay the night! It provided a welcome distraction. His mind fixed on the ethereal glow of the candlelight, banishing his poltergeists  back to the shadowy corners of his soul. 

 - Brendan 

Death of History

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, there was a place where we did not regard fiction as something that materialized out of some inner self. Instead, she was seen as the product of learning, life experience, and reason. She grew wise and fruitful, taught by her ancestors. But no longer. Instead fiction became a work of the inner genius, and so she had no need of learning. But what she didn't know, was that without learning,  she cut herself off from the past, and so had no idea what the great writers who came before actually wrote.

We in the west are very future oriented. The inexorable, incessant advance of technology compels us to look ahead, not behind. The media ingrained the idea of a future Utopia so firmly in our minds, that the idea of searching in the past for any wisdom seems ludicrous. The past was the land of uneducated barbarians and illiterate brutes; real art, the media says, is found in the contemporary, the shiny, and the modern.

Now, the only time we look back is to try to peer into the past like it is a looking glass. We take antique authors who seem to have 'modern' ideals, celebrate them as progressives (even though almost all of them are very different from a modern mindset) and ignore anything to the contrary.

Let me be really clear here. The chronological snobbery of our culture runs deep. Although it has it's roots in secularism, it infested Christianity as well, taking a new form in virulent anti-traditionalism. For some odd reason, evangelical protestants, particularly American evangelical protestants, claim that by being anti traditional, they are acting on the ideas of the Reformers or the Founding Fathers. As they have not studied tradition, they usually don't know that nothing could be further from the truth. Both the Reformers and the Founding Fathers were avid students of history and tradition. They understood that the past holds the examples that are needed to build the future.

We as writers and as Christians need to develop a healthy respect for history and the past and realize its profound importance. Those that came before make who we are now. Alright now, end history rant. I digress

Love corrupts

That was a shocking title, wasn't it? Perhaps a little much so, but oh well. I'm not bashing the concept of love. This is a Christian blog after all, and given that apostles of our Lord said 'God is love', it really wouldn't do to bash it. We all know (or at least we should), that love is an essential element in our heroes. What we sometimes don't realize is that love is an essential element for our villains.

Of course, I should clarify my terms here. What do I mean by love? Obviously I'm not using the Christian definition of agape, or selflessly putting one's neighbors above yourself, but neither am I  using it to describe eros, since what I'm trying to describe is not necessarily sexual (although falling in love and sexual lust could fall into this). What I'm going for is a more common term: anything the character has a passion for--an obsession.

Every villain has a obsession: something they love above all else. Without it they wouldn't be motivated to act. A villain with absolutely no emotion is a rather dull character, since nothing drives them to cause mayhem. The fact is that villains love, in a twisted sense of the word: sometimes they love themselves, sometimes they love security, sometimes they love the hero, but whatever their love is, it's always corrupted.

The main difference between the heroes' love and the villains' is that the villains' is myopic. The villain takes one good thing and stretches it to the point where it starts to create havoc in the world. So much havoc, in fact, that the thing he loves is deeply hurt. The Hero's love is Divine, it stems from God himself, and thus desires self sacrificing service. Even in non-christian books, the characters that love often come very close to Christianity in their ideas. The villains' love is a diabolical love, that is ultimately rooted in idolatry. This sort of love is corrupting. Both the hero and the villain are subjects of passion, the difference is in the passions' nature.

And they did not marry...

No, this blog post is not a vent about personal, deep, romantic heartbreak. Your suspicions were apt though. Writers have an annoying tendency to weave their personal lives, especially their love lives, into their writing (Dante anyone?). No, this is more about exploring the Christian fiction's addiction to the 'married happily ever after', as if that was the be all and end all.

 We should have some fiction where we have a happily ever after married couple.  I think it's a great idea, for three reasons: firstly, because it's relevant to the millions of married christian couples out there, secondly, because the mysterious union that symbolizes Christ and the Church can be appreciated by anyone, and thirdly, because western idea of a 'happy ending' is a highly christian idea. But we must be careful that we don't go too far.

Here's a radical statement--the guy doesn't have to get the girl. Here's another--the girl doesn't have to get the guy. I can feel all you romantics cringing right now, but please just hear me out. Real life contains a lot of different stories, and not all of them include romantic happiness. Many Christians in our sex obsessed age react by trying to make marriage sound more appealing. There's nothing wrong with this, per se. Marriage is quite a lot better then mindless sex, however, in some Christian fiction, we've fallen into the trap of advertising.

We've gone from saying that marriage is good, to holding it up as a reward for being a good Christian. It isn't. In writing, we have to walk the careful line between affirming its goodness and advertising it. Making it a guaranteed gift only cheapens it.  Instead, we should realize that marriage is what it is: a calling from God. Just as some people's story ends with blissful marriage and happily ever after, other people have a different calling--one that is just as good in its own way--and we, as Christians, should write stories in which some get married happily ever after, and others don't.

Greeks and Star Wars.

No, that wasn't a typo. I said Greeks and Star Wars, not Geeks and Star Wars. Yes, the guys who wore white and liked philosophy--that's right. I'm going to talk about two Greek philosophers and their relation to the Jedi and the Sith.

I kid you not!

You see, back in the days of ancient Greece there was once a man named Zeno, who taught his students a vaguely platonic philosophy called stoicism. He taught that everything in the universe was bound to a logos, an ultimate order of the universe; that the logos surrounded them, penetrated them and bound the galaxy together. Their ultimate goal was to sync their lives with this logos. They always valued composure over passion. Order over emotion? Sound like anyone you know? Exactly! It's the code of the Jedi; or rather, the code of the Jedi is repackaged stoicism in a more palatable form, so the Christians would hardly blink an eye.

At the same time as the stoics, there was a competing school of thought called epicureanism.  They were complete opposites; they believed that pleasure was the ultimate good, and that pain was the ultimate evil, and that the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain was the way to true happiness. That is exactly what the Sith teach, only the epicureans were nicer. The Sith seem like a stoic caricature, not an accurate picture of epicureanism.

So that's my random thought for the day! You may all carry on with your lives now.