So how do Christians living in a diverse society respond to moral issues?  Do we focus on our personal morality and leave the public morality to secular politicians?  Or can we perform some civic role that helps guide the broader culture and do so in a constructive, not off-putting way?  Rather than propose a single path, I will instead make a series of observations and suggestions for Christians to consider as we interact with a world that does not necessarily share our views.

1) Clashes between Christ and culture are unavoidable.  John Howard Yoder records 51 separate times in which Jesus himself confronted injustices, and throughout history his followers have followed suit.  Early Christians were instrumental in ending cruel Roman practices like gladiator games and infanticide, and ever since, Christians have led moral campaigns against abuses such as slavery.  Even minority groups like the Anabaptists who seem isolationist must engage with culture—their pacifism, for example, stands as a powerful moral judgment on society.

Christians must always discern which injustices merit a fight, but a pietistic withdrawal is bad for both church and state.  Nazi Germany posed the severest test to Luther’s doctrine of two kingdoms, a test which the church mostly failed.  Practicing an individualistic faith, with no strong tradition of opposing the state, German church leaders waited far too late to protest.  Indeed, many Protestant leaders initially welcomed the Nazis as an alternative to communism and Christians adopted a motto which now seems incomprehensible: “The Swastika on our breasts, the Cross in our hearts.”

Eventually a minority did wake up to the threat.  Martin Niemöller published a series of sermons with the in-your-face title Christus ist mein Führer (“Christ [not Hitler] is my Führer”).  He spent seven years in a concentration camp; Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed in another. Hermann Maas, who is counted as among the The Righteous of the Nations by Yad Vashem, spent the last year of the war in a forced labor camp.  In the end, faithful Christians were the only significant group to oppose Hitler within Germany.  Trade unions, Parliament, politicians, doctors, scientists, university professors, lawyers—all these capitulated.  Only Christians who understood their loyalty to a higher power resisted.  Their courageous stand attracted the world’s attention: from 1933 to 1937, the New York Times ran nearly a thousand news accounts on the German church struggle.

When the war ended, the eastern part of Germany found itself under a different kind of totalitarian rule, the beginning of four decades of Soviet domination.  A few years ago I interviewed a pastor in Saxony who recounted personal stories of the difficulties that Christians faced under communism.  His children had limited educational opportunities, and he had to work as a plumber to supplement his meager pastor’s salary.  “After the wall came down…” (a phrase I often heard), everything changed.  Although less than 20 percent of Saxony’s citizens now belong to a church, he estimates that 70 percent of those in parliament are active, practicing Christians.  Having lived under Nazism and then communism, Christians quickly stepped into a cultural vacuum to help the newly free society lay a foundation for morality and legal structure.  They knew all too well what can happen when Christians are excluded from the public square.

As that pastor has since learned, effecting change in a democracy is messy, tedious work, a challenge far different from surviving totalitarianism.  To bring about a moral consensus in a democracy requires cunning, persuasion, and compromise.  Stephen Monsma, a Christian who served in the Michigan state legislature, has written of the painstaking struggles to get drunk-driving legislation—an issue that invites a clear moral consensus—passed in his state.  He likened his original vision of doing good to sitting by a cozy fire in his living room choosing luscious vegetables and beautiful flowers from a seed catalog; the actual work, he said, more resembled the gardener’s chores of digging, pulling weeds, and fighting off insects.

Moral issues tend to present themselves in absolute terms of right vs. wrong, yet by its very nature democratic politics depends on bargaining and compromise.  While he was in office, Surgeon General Koop attracted heated opposition from conservatives who had an all-or-nothing approach to morality and opposed any compromise on abortion.  Koop, who shared their iron-clad belief that all abortion is wrong, came to conclude, “One of the problems with the pro-life movement is that they are 100-percenters.  Historically it is true that if the pro-life movement had sat down in, say, 1970 or 1972 with the pro-choice people, we might have ended up with an agreement on abortion for the life of the mother, defective child, rape and incest, and nothing more.  That would have saved ninety-seven percent of the abortions since then.”  Only after losing the absolute battle did the pro-life movement shift tactics to restrict abortion funding, require parental consent, and limit late-term abortions; since then hundreds of such laws have passed in state legislatures.

Democracy requires us to recognize others’ rights even when we fundamentally disagree with them.  It requires a civility in which I respect a person’s ultimate worth, and seek to persuade but not to coerce.  For this reason modern democracy grew out of Christian soil.  We must exercise the skill of ethical surgeons in deciding which moral principles apply to society at large.

2) Christians should choose their battles wisely.  Peter Berger has written of the “world maintaining” and “world shaking” functions of religion.  Founders of the United States recognized that a democracy, with less imposed order and more freedom, needs a religious foundation to guide and motivate its citizens.  In John Adams’ words, “We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion…. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”  The nation’s leaders counted on the church for this world-maintaining function, to teach and equip citizens to be good.

When the church moves into the world-shaking business, though, it needs to do so wisely and with care.  Alas, Christians involved in politics have tended historically to go off on tangents.  In the 1840s and 1850s a major campaign with the odd name “Know-Nothing movement” demonized Catholics and raised hysterical fears about them.  Historian Mark Noll has written about a Philadelphia fracas in 1844 sparked when a Catholic bishop requested that Catholic schools be allowed to read from their own version of the Bible rather than the King James Version; rioters burned several Catholic churches and killed more than a dozen people.  As late as 1960 the National Association of Evangelicals urged all evangelical clergy to proclaim the dangers of a Catholic president on Reformation Day, just before the election.

The landmark moral campaign by churches was Prohibition, which absorbed more sheer energy from evangelicals than any other political effort.  To their credit, the leaders understood well how democracy works and how to attain a public consensus.  Prohibition succeeded because of a relentless campaign of education, skilled organization, and effective lobbying.  Its advocates persuaded the general public that drinking had dire costs in terms of health, life expectancy, poverty, family breakdown, inefficient workers, and social decay.  Early feminists joined the campaign, broadening its base.  A Prohibition party actually ran candidates for President, and in two decades the United States went from having five dry states to passing a constitutional amendment for the entire nation; 46 of 48 states ratified the amendment.

For five years the nation mostly complied with the new law.  Then drinking slowly began to rise again, accompanied this time by mob activity, political corruption, and crime.  The legislation was too severe, and it alienated other religious groups such as Jews and Catholics.  In the final analysis, judges historian Paul Johnson, “what looked at first like the greatest victory for American evangelicalism turned instead into its greatest defeat.”  The failure of this moral crusade drove Protestants out of the political area, and not until the late twentieth century would they return in large numbers.

The more we focus on tangential issues, the less effective we will be in addressing matters of true moral significance.  I hear very little from evangelicals about the impact of gun proliferation on violent crime, much less an issue like nuclear disarmament.  I hear almost nothing about health care for the poor and protecting widows and orphans, both biblical mandates, and scant mention of the thirteen million children who die worldwide from malnutrition in a year.  I hear talk about family values, but when an administration proposed legislation to allow mothers to take unpaid leave after childbirth, conservative religious groups opposed it.

Too often the agenda of conservative religious groups matches line for line the agenda of conservative politics and does not base its priorities on the Bible.  Much of society’s alarm about conservative Christians getting involved in politics now traces back to tangential campaigns and a loud silence about important issues.

(More to come)

According to Craig, the audience laughed uproariously throughout the film, relishing the depiction of Christians as repressed, intolerant, even homicidal.  The director enjoyed a standing ovation and then fielded questions from the audience.  Someone asked if any conservative Christians had seen it.  “I’m ready for that fight,” the director replied.

I’ll let Craig relate what happened next, as reported in his book A Purple State of Mind:

I struggled to compose my words.  My voice cracked slightly.  I eked out, “Jay, thank you for this film.  As a native of North Carolina, a fellow filmmaker, and an evangelical Christian…”

I never use the word evangelical.  It is so loaded with negative baggage that I usually attempt to distance myself from such associations.  But in this instance, it seemed quite right.  I was speaking for my community, responding to a particular stance we’d staked out for ourselves.  Jay stepped back, ready for that fight.  He tensed up, preparing to launch a counterattack.  The crowd sensed that things were about to get ugly.  My next words caught them off guard:

“Jay, I apologize for anything ever done to you in the name of God.”

The entire tenor in the room shifted.  Audience members turned around.  “Did I hear that correctly?”  They craned their necks.  “Who said that?”  Jay fumbled for words, not knowing how to respond.  He was ready to be attacked.  He was not prepared for an apology.  He offered a modest, “Thank you.”  The audience was literally disarmed….

Audience members approached me afterward with hugs.  A lesbian couple thanked me.  Gay men kissed me.  One person said, “If that is true, I might consider giving Christianity another chance.”  Tears were shed far and wide.  All it took were two little words: “I apologize.”

My students leaped at the occasion, talking to the cast and crew, inviting them to join us for further conversation.  Our “enemies” became fast friends, joining us for lunch.  The cast came to our class the next day, answering questions for an hour.  An actor admitted how scared he was to enter our church meeting place.  Onstage, he confided, “Coming into this building, my heart was beating more than at any audition I’ve ever had.”  The producer said, “This was the most significant moment of our week.”   A simple apology set off a series of conversations and exchanges about our faith and how we live it.

In the years since, Craig and his students have hosted the cast and crew of other movies that touch on spiritual themes, including some that mock Christians.  The writer of Higher Ground reported, “I was invited to speak at their rented church for a Q and A and it was honestly the most moving experience I can remember in a long time.  They were the antithesis of judgment…”  Experiences such as these help convince me that the approach of admitting our errors, besides being most true to a gospel of grace, is also most effective at expressing who we are.  Propaganda turns people off; humbly admitting mistakes disarms.  Far from claiming to have it all together, Christians regularly confess that we do not.  After all, Jesus said he came for the sick and not the well, for sinners and not for saints.

Leadership magazine reported on four complaints heard from spiritual seekers.  You don’t listen to me.  You judge me.  Your faith confuses me.  You talk about what’s wrong instead of making it right.  Pondering those complaints, it occurs to me that Christians often fail to communicate to others because we ignore basic principles in relationship.  Jesus, Paul, and John, and James each stressed one principle above all others: Love God and love your neighbor.  By not listening, by judging, by speaking lofty words that don’t translate into action, we deter a thirsty world from the Living Water that can truly satisfy.

The new/old look of downtown Warsaw

The week before Thanksgiving, my favorite American holiday, I visited Poland to help the publisher of my books there, Credo, celebrate their tenth anniversary. Warsaw is a lovely city, situated along a broad river. Its main street, now a cobblestone pedestrian mall, winds past baroque churches, a university, the royal palace, and an Old Town of narrow alleys and medieval-style buildings. The visitor quickly learns, however, that these “old” buildings are actually new, rebuilt after the destruction of World War II.

Thanks to movies like Roman Polanski’s The Pianist and books like Leon Uris’s Mila 18, many of us know about the 1943 uprising of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. German Nazis first corralled Warsaw’s Jewish population of more than 300,000 into a dense central area of the city surrounded by concrete walls and barbed wire. For three years the Jews suffered disease, overcrowding, and starvation. Then the Nazis began a program to transport them all to extermination camps.

Warsaw Jews rounded up for extermination

After some 250,000 Ghetto residents had been rounded up and killed at Treblinka, the survivors rose up in the largest single revolt by Jews during the Holocaust. Poorly armed but fighting for their lives, the rebels held off the Germans for four months until finally the SS brutally crushed the uprising. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising stands as the strongest refutation of the common perception that all Jews went “like sheep to the slaughter” during the Holocaust. Nevertheless, the resistance was futile: in the end only 100,000 of Poland’s three million Jews survived the war and Hitler’s extermination policies.

The following year, in an event far less known, Warsaw’s Gentile population also rose up against the Nazi occupiers.  By the autumn of 1944, Germany’s defeat seemed inevitable. After the D-Day invasion, Allied forces had proceeded to reclaim much of Western Europe and Soviet forces had rolled back German advances to the East. Indeed, the Soviet Red Army had marched to the very suburbs of Warsaw, less than ten miles from the capital. The Polish Home Army, an underground network of 50,000 insurgents, chose August 1 as a day to begin the liberation of their city. Bands played, the red-and-white Polish flag suddenly appeared all over the city, and women gaily danced with Polish soldiers in the streets. Surely, they thought, the Russian army would support their revolt, or at the least the American and British allies would provide air support or airdrop needed weapons.

Neither happened. Instead, the Soviets halted their advance, dug in, and watched. The Home Army won a few skirmishes in the early days, infuriating SS chief Heinrich Himmler, who decided to destroy the city as a lesson to the rest of Europe. The German army rushed tanks, rocket launchers, and machine guns to the city, and the German air force filled the skies with bombers.

Why did no one come to the Poles’ defense? Josef Stalin harbored a personal hatred of the Poles because of bitter memories from the Soviet-Polish War, and he also had plans to incorporate Poland into the Soviet empire. Already the Russians had slaughtered 8,000 Polish army officers in the infamous Katyn incident. Poles who rebelled against Hitler’s occupying army may well rebel against the Soviets who would displace them, so why not let the Germans do the dirty work of destroying the rebels?  The Allies asked Stalin for permission to use nearby airbases or at least make airdrops; he refused. When Churchill proposed aid missions despite Stalin’s objections, Franklin Roosevelt responded, “I do not consider it advantageous to the long-range general war prospect for me to join you in the proposed message to Uncle Joe [Stalin].”

Free from outside interference, the Germans began a systematic program of slaughter and destruction.  On one bloody day known as the Wola massacre, they executed at least 30,000 civilians including women, children, and the elderly. For 63 days the Polish Home Army held out, starved of food and ammunition, often hiding in Warsaw’s sewers as a protection against the relentless bombing. In all, some 200,000 civilians died in the fighting. The SS chief Himmler decreed, “The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation.” He got his wish. The entire population of Warsaw was sent to transit camps and German engineers moved from building to building, dynamiting each one. In all, 85 percent of the buildings in Warsaw were destroyed.

Central Warsaw destroyed by the Germans

Here are three eyewitness reports from those 63 tragic days:

“Imagine the scene: executions here, houses ablaze there—and then they burnt the bodies. You don’t forget a smell like that.”

“Imagine a narrow tunnel the shape of an egg, and having to run bow-legged with one foot on each inner shell of that egg, over sediment of toxic chemicals and decomposing bodies of the many who died down there, from suffocation or carbide gases the Germans used.”

“We did not only grow up quickly during those days, we grew old. At first it was a big adventure.  But we hadn’t thought what it would be like to see your comrades lying on the ground, their entrails lying beside them, begging their friends to kill them, to put them out of their pain.”

I learned about the Warsaw Uprising by visiting a museum opened in 2004 on the 60^th anniversary of the revolt. According to my Polish guides, the aftermath of the war ushered in a new kind of atrocity, the execution of truth, as the Soviet conquerors nearly obliterated this tragic/heroic event from memory. In a bitter irony, once Stalin’s forces took over Poland they arrested leaders of the Polish Underground State, accused them of being fascists and Nazi sympathizers (!) and wrote history books portraying them as traitors to the Polish people. Until the fall of the Soviet empire in 1989, Polish schoolchildren learned this revisionist history, a view corrected only by the whispered contradictions of their parents.  The name of the Home Army never appeared in print and propaganda films reinforced the official Soviet line.

Monument to the Warsaw Uprising

I visited the museum on a Sunday, and earlier that day I had slipped into a couple of churches in downtown Warsaw. Poland is 96 percent Catholic and both churches were packed with worshipers, a rare sight in modern Europe. I could not understand the language, but as I stood at the back I thought of the devout Poles who had prayed first for deliverance from the Germans and then from the Soviets.  Appropriately, my first book translated into Polish was Disappointment with God. Poland has the misfortune of being a relatively flat, fertile land positioned between two great empires, and its history records many invasions from both directions. 

Today the sun shines more brightly over Poland. Its economy is growing, a contrast to most European countries. Sipping coffee in Starbucks, I watched Polish young people in jeans and leather jackets laughing together as they strolled a mall populated with Western shops and fast-food restaurants. After nearly a half-century under Soviet rule the Poles rose up again, a revolt led this time by shipyard workers and coal miners and the very first Polish pope. Improbably, this gunless revolution set their nation free at last.

I returned to the U.S. just in time for Thanksgiving, with renewed reason to give thanks for a country that since independence has not lived under foreign occupation. Like most Americans, I am fed up with a dysfunctional Congress and a presidential campaign filled with pettiness and over-the-top rhetoric. Living in a democracy, we have no one to blame but ourselves. The citizens of Poland are still relishing that privilege.

It is a good thing, I’ve found, to suspend the life of the mind for a few weeks and join the world of manual labor; after all, far more people in the world spend their work hours using muscles than using brain synapses. You sleep better, end the day sore yet with a feeling of measurable accomplishment, and eat anything you want without gaining weight.

I remember vividly our 1992 move from downtown Chicago to a forest in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies. We loved our life in the city, filled with concerts, theater, great restaurants, ethnic diversity, and a grace-filled church. Over time, though, the busy and crowded urban scene complicated my writing life. I had moved to Chicago as a young journalist and found the metropolis a marvelous place for journalism: I needed only to walk outdoors to find a mugging in process, or someone having an epileptic fit, or a homeless person eager to be interviewed. Eventually, though, I wanted my writing to move in a more reflective, personal direction, which the noise and frenetic pace of the city worked against.

We looked all over the United States and made what seemed at the time a risky decision to relocate to rural Colorado, where we knew no one, and begin a life dramatically different from what we had known in Chicago. We found a house on a hill with a view of snowcapped mountains to the west. We had to look hard to see signs of any other houses poking through the trees. We arrived a few days before the moving truck, and after unloading a U-Haul trailer with a mattress, two plates, two place settings, two suitcases, and my computer, we spent the first night in an empty, echoey house. Accustomed to the background noise of the city, we found it difficult to sleep amid such silence. The next day we awoke to a stunning sight: six inches of fresh snow had transformed the landscape into a glistening white wonderland. Think Narnia at Christmas—that was our front yard.

The view we lose.

I have always found the natural world nourishing to creativity and, more, a pathway to worship. “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands,” wrote the psalmist. It baffles me that places of great natural beauty do not foster religious faith—how can Oregon and Washington have the lowest church attendance of any states? Nature was one of the key forces that brought me back to God, for I wanted to know the Artist responsible for beauty such as I saw on grand scale in photos from space telescopes or on minute scale such as in the intricate designs on a butterfly wing.

When I would hit a block in writing, or experience grief and sadness over a friend’s illness or death, I would hike up to a pile of rocks behind my home and sit, looking out over an unspoiled landscape which reminded me that the world goes on in its fierce beauty, regardless of any crisis great or small. Several times a curious red fox discovered me sitting on that rock and squatted warily nearby, his golden eyes and twitching ears alert to any movement I might make. Once I stumbled upon a cluster of Calypso orchids, a rare plant that I had come across in the writings of John Muir, who recounted the two greatest days of his life as the time when he camped in Yosemite Valley with Ralph Waldo Emerson…and when he found a Calypso orchid on a hike. And I only had to look in my back yard.

My writing did take a more personal turn. My first books composed in Colorado were The Jesus I Never Knew and What’s So Amazing About Grace?, and then came others like Soul Survivor and Reaching for the Invisible God. Soon Janet and I began traveling internationally, more than seventy countries in all, and this too informed my writing. Home became a refuge, allowing us to venture to other places because we knew we could return to the welcoming solace of Colorado.

Initially the move took a toll on Janet, who had thrived in Chicago as a social worker heading up a senior citizens’ program. After a few months in Colorado she accepted new and challenging work as a hospice chaplain. Many nights a jarring phone call would interrupt our sleep (people die at inopportune times) and she would make the trek down the hill into Denver to attend the bedside of a dying person. Later she worked at an assisted living facility managed by Orthodox Jews.

Why, then, did we decide to move again this year? In a word, age caught up with us. We had lived on several acres, which meant managing a Ponderosa pine forest subject to beetle kill and blizzards. In the locally famous blizzard of 2003 seven feet of snow fell over a two-day period. As Elihu reminded Job, “He [God] says to the snow, ‘Fall on the earth,’ and to the rain shower, ‘Be a mighty downpour.’ So that all men he has made may know his work, he stops every man from his labor.” Indeed, everything stopped in our part of the world that week.

I went snowshoeing, lunging in the soft powder to make each arduous step, and stood atop a hill listening to what sounded like rifle shots echoing through the canyon. With a start I realized they were tree branches and whole trees snapping from the weight of snow and falling to the ground with a great whoosh. We had no electricity for a week, which meant no heat and no water since the well pump had lost power too. We stayed warm by burning wood and running a small gas fireplace around the clock. Each night for a few minutes we turned on a battery-powered radio and listened to reports of war, for that was the very week the U.S. had invaded Iraq. Reports from the desert seemed very far away as I looked out my window on the moonlit whiteness.

Shoveling snow, sawing trees, pushing a lawnmower up a 30-degree slope—all these things took a toll, so this year we decided to look for a place to spend the next season of life. Once again we considered other parts of the country, especially the Southeast where our families live. Frankly, we could not find a place more appealing than Colorado. We have spectacular mountain scenery, great snow, plentiful wildlife, few bugs, 300 days of sunshine annually, no air-conditioning, and wide open spaces with few traffic jams. Why go anywhere else? (I know, I know, I sound like a hack writer for the tourist bureau.)

At the same time we wanted to simplify our lives and find a more, ahem, age-appropriate place. In our search we found a townhouse that will involve much less maintenance. We traded in a well and septic tank for treated water and a sewer system. We gave away the lawnmower and now leave snow removal to professionals. We even know the folks in the adjacent townhouse who will share a wall with us. And I have room for my twenty-six bookcases in a large downstairs office area.

The view we gain.

Life always involves tradeoffs. We have lost a view of year-round snowcaps but gained a mountain stream in our front yard. A fly fisherman with a strong arm and good aim could fish from our balcony; we’ll probably just sit on the deck and enjoy the view and the sound of rushing water.

The day before we moved, as if to remind us of that first magical day in Colorado in 1992, a freak October storm dumped a foot of fresh snow on our town. It delayed the move by several hours, as the moving truck had to send for chains to make it up our driveway, but when I took the first carload to the new place, I saw a sight reminiscent of our first morning in Colorado nineteen years before. I’ve included a photo of the stream cutting through fresh-fallen snow. As I stood at the window and watched, a herd of elk kicked their way through the snow to the creek for a drink. To my left, a kingfisher perched on a branch in search of trout small enough to swallow. Nature itself was sending a committee to welcome us.

The welcoming committee

We hope the future years in our new home prove as pleasant and productive as our last two decades have been. We still miss many things about Chicago and the urban life, yet Colorado has replaced those qualities with peace and solitude as well as a greater appreciation for the outdoors. We’re grateful for those advantages, and plan to enjoy them for, oh, the next nineteen years or so.

Earlier this year a study included both Australia and New Zealand on a list of nine countries where, if current trends continue, religion will go extinct within thirty years.  As in Europe, church attendance Down Under has declined precipitously in the past fifty years and society has grown increasingly more secular.  The current Prime Minister of Australia, though raised Baptist, openly professes her atheism.

Our presentations followed a similar format to the May tour in Britain (see the blog posted on May 25 at http://www.philipyancey.com/archives/2687).  In the course of the evening we went through four Seasons of the Soul, beginning with the new life of spring and proceeding through the joy of summer, the doubts and struggles of autumn and finally the hard times of winter.  As judged from comments afterward at the book signings, audiences responded most intensely to the “winter season” of faith.  Western Australia is suffering from an extended drought while the eastern part of the country is still recovering from a devastating flood that covered an area larger than Europe.  A century-and-a-half ago Matthew Arnold wrote of the ebbing of the Sea of Faith in modern times, a retreat that leaves the world with “neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.”  That last void, nor help for pain, may edge people back to faith, especially those who live in developed countries with so many allurements to pleasure and entertainment.  Sexy advertisements and a shallow celebrity culture somehow lose their appeal when your three-year-old child lies dying in a hospital, or when you do.  I heard story after heart-breaking story of cancer and flood victims and teenage suicides and drug overdoses and Alzheimer’s-afflicted parents.  Where else do you turn but to God when all of life seems frozen in a perpetual winter?

One of the sketches performed by the actors comes from the play Shadowlands.  “Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world,” proclaims the confident professor C. S. Lewis from a lectern.  Yet later in the sketch, as he comes to terms with Joy Davidman’s imminent death, and then tries to comfort her son Douglas, his confidence has melted into confusion and doubt.  The book he wrote about Joy’s illness and death, A Grief Observed, has a very different tone than his earlier treatise The Problem of Pain.

Rather than megaphone, I prefer the image of pain as a hearing aid: while the Bible generally ignores the messy question of causation, it encourages us to “tune in” to the redemptive power of suffering.  Some respond by switching off the hearing aid and turning away from God.  Others follow the Apostle Paul’s example in allowing God to wrest goodness and growth from the bad things of this world.  Even wintry times offer reasons for hope.  We saw this most clearly at the site of our last event, held in New Zealand’s second largest city, Christchurch, site of a devastating earthquake last February.

_____________

o the casual visitor New Zealanders seem shyer, more introverted than their Australian cousins, more British in personality than American.  First impressions may deceive.  An Australian described for me the difference between Aussies and “Kiwis,” as they call their neighbors.  “We Australians like to present a macho image, but the Kiwis are the real tough ones.  I think it’s because they don’t have many natural enemies: no snakes, few venomous spiders, no dangerous mammals, no droughts in the Outback or floods in the plains.  So they invent their own physical challenges.  The first man to climb Mt. Everest hailed from New Zealand.  Outward Bound started there.  You can bungee jump off bridges or even a TV tower in downtown Auckland.  The more adventurous go for ‘black-water rafting’ in which you ride the rapids in total darkness inside a cave.”

On this trip we tried neither bungee jumping nor black-water rafting, though we did have an unscheduled adventure.  As our plane descended through a storm toward Auckland, suddenly a ball of light smashed into the window with a loud bang that shook the entire aircraft.  A moment later the Air New Zealand pilot reported dryly, “You may have noticed that our plane has been hit by lightning.  No worries.  These things happen, and all our instruments appear to be working correctly.”  The few Americans on the plane were already jittery in view of the date: September 11.

After one night in Auckland we flew on to Christchurch in the South Island.  The earthquake there made front-page news until it got dwarfed by the much more deadly earthquake and tsunami in Japan a month later.  We toured the downtown area, much of it cordoned off, and saw heaps of rubble where skyscrapers had recently stood.  The famed Anglican cathedral lost its spire and may have to be demolished, while only a buttress of steel containers keeps the main Catholic church from collapsing.  More than a thousand buildings in Christchurch face demolition.

Often after a natural disaster, communities look to churches for help.  For example, six years after Hurricane Katrina, long after the federal government has moved on, churches in Houston and Dallas still send weekend teams to repair and rebuild houses in New Orleans.  In New Zealand, denominations banded together, assigned response teams to the neediest areas, and organized a food bank and tool bank.  More than 700 aftershocks have hit the area, creating an oppressive mood of fear and anxiety.  In a city whose very name expresses their identity, the churches hope to convey “the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God” (2 Corinthians 1:3).

As I told the group gathered in Christchurch, on the surface winter looks like death.  Trees once resplendent with leaves now appear as dead sticks.  Yet botanists tell us that most plant growth occurs during winter, below the surface, as roots spread out and absorb the moisture and nutrients they will need for the vitality of spring and summer.  May it be so, not just in Christchurch, New Zealand, but all across that nation and its larger cousin Australia, once known as “the great Southland of the Holy Spirit.”

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Web Administrator Update:  Here is an interview Philip did for a New Zealand TV channel carrying Christian news and public affairs programs.

http://www.koorong.com/tickets/2011/yancey.html.

And for you Kiwis, here’s a link to events in Auckland and Christchurch:

http://www.manna.co.nz/events/PhilipYancey/

Fear

Despite our aching legs, we felt a huge sense of accomplishment, exactly the kind of feeling you expect after climbing a mountain. We did a few more that summer, then the next, and after a while climbing 14ers became a summer staple.  It gave us a chance to see our beautiful new state in all its glory.  About half of Colorado’s 14ers seem more like hikes than climbs, as you rarely have to use your hands.  The other half, however, include lots of exposure (I have a latent fear of heights so I keep looking up, not down when I inch across precipices or cling to a ledge), huge boulder fields, tricky maneuvers around rock towers, and the challenge of fickle weather.  The scariest places have appropriate names: Highway in the Sky, the Knife-Edge, the Bowling Alley, the Keyhole.

Typically a climbing day starts at 3 or 4 a.m., when we pack food, drive to the trailhead, and begin in the dark, our path lit only by headlamps and perhaps the moon.  Sometimes we camp nearby the night before.  One beautiful spot, the Chicago Basin, is ringed with three 14ers and can only be reached by a tourist train and a long uphill hike.  We try to summit by 11 a.m. at the latest, then head quickly down to treeline in case afternoon thunderstorms roll in.

When I had a rollover accident in 2007, I lay strapped to a gurney for seven hours contemplating my life, since the doctor told me that if a bone fragment had nicked the carotid artery, I wouldn’t survive.  I can’t die yet, I thought.  I have three more 14ers to climb!  At the time I had done all but three.

A month later a fellow Coloradan named Eric Alexander heard about my accident and sent word through a friend, “If Philip needs any help climbing those last three, I’d be glad to lead him.”  I soon learned that Eric participated in the expedition that led his blind climbing buddy up Mt. Everest.  You may have seen the National Geographic special on this extraordinary feat.  Hmm, I thought.  If he can get a blind guy up Mt. Everest, he surely can get me up anything in Colorado, even with a recently broken neck!  That same summer, after I got out of a neck brace, Eric led me up my final summit, Maroon Peak, a difficult climb near the town of Aspen.  We celebrated quickly as clouds rolled in and then dashed for treeline.

This summer my wife and I followed Eric up another tricky peak, Pyramid, which sits impressively just across the valley from Maroon Peak.  Janet has now climbed 51 and has three to go.  In the meantime Eric has become a good friend.  He has written about his climbing adventures in the book The Summit, available from Amazon.com or from Eric’s website www.highersummits.com.  Eric also travels and speaks about his experiences climbing the highest peaks on six continents (he’s still trying to get to Antarctica).  If you like adventure, his book will cause the hair on the back of your neck to rise: I won’t spoil anything, but suffice it to say that leading a blind man up Mt. Everest is merely one of the challenges Eric has faced.  

No Fear

Eric recorded a few minutes of our Pyramid climb on his iPhone, and you can view them below or at this link:  http://highersummits.nlpgblogs.com/2011/08/12/philip-yancey-shares-some-wisdom-on-pyramid-peak/.

My friendship with Ron goes back more than thirty years, when he headed an organization called Youth Guidance that worked with juvenile delinquents (euphemistically called “non-school-oriented youth,” as if there exists a category of school-oriented youth). As a journalist I accompanied Ron on what turned out to be one of my most fascinating assignments. Chuck Colson’s new organization Prison Fellowship had handpicked two dozen federal prisoners and Ron had selected an equal number of non-school-oriented delinquents to undergo a rigorous Outward Bound-type program in northern Wisconsin.

For the kids, the program achieved its goals spectacularly. Street-wise hooligans learned to cooperate with teammates to master orienteering in the wilderness, for any mistake brought down the wrath of the whole group.  “I know some of you will want to run away,” said the leader as the two-week course began.  “Just remember, the woods are full of bears and wolves, so you likely won’t last long.”  I’ll never forget one bully, seething with anger, who kicked every tree he passed on the first day’s hike.  When it came his turn to rappel off a cliff he got a bad case of sewing-machine leg and blubbered like a baby.  Yet at the end, when he completed a half-marathon run through the forest, you would have thought he’d won the Olympics. He had learned a new set of skills and the maturity to look inside himself for strength, rather than exploiting the weakness of others.

The federal prisoners, however, had a very different experience. Anticipating a retreat away from prison, with lazy days of lounging by a lake and fishing, they encountered instead a boot camp of pre-dawn marches and physical ordeals. The leaders of the adventure program knew every motivational trick in the book, but if a man who stands six-foot-eight and weighs three hundred pounds doesn’t want to edge backwards off a cliff, even if he’s fastened securely to ropes, nothing in a leader’s manual can make him do it—especially if the balker is a convicted murderer.  The prescribed course ends with a three-day “solo” in which each participant finds a spot in the wilderness and spends the time alone with a Bible and notebook. Organizers had not factored in that solitary confinement represents the worst kind of punishment for a prisoner. For the juveniles, everything worked as planned; for the prisoners, nothing worked as planned.

Ron Nikkel moved from working with youth to working with adult prisoners in 1982, joining a loose association of six countries with prison ministries. Under his leadership Prison Fellowship International has spread to 124 countries, making it the largest such organization in the field of criminal justice. Several times over the years I have accompanied Ron on trips overseas.  We visited prisons in Chile at the height of General Pinochet’s oppression. We visited a medieval dungeon still housing prisoners outside Moscow just as the Iron Curtain fell—the only prison under Soviet communism which had a dedicated chapel, built by the prisoners.  Even now, when I go to a new country in Africa or Asia, often I’ll ask Ron for contacts and meet the Prison Fellowship staff.

Thanks to its founder Chuck Colson, Prison Fellowship has a high profile in the United States. Overseas, programs may deliberately keep a low profile, for oppressive governments don’t like outsiders messing with their prisoners. Working under the radar, PFI has devised a remarkable series of creative approaches.  Some African nations do not supply food for their prisoners, requiring the prisoners’ families to care for them instead.  In a shame-based culture, though, families may shun their convict relative, and so PFI runs bakeries and soup kitchens to supply food. In women’s prisons, young children often go behind bars with their mothers, and PFI volunteers provide schooling and day-care for these children. PFI runs educational programs for prisoners and brings in teams of doctors and dentists to provide medical care. In Brazil, PFI has taken complete control of six prisons at the government’s request. Other PFI chapters focus on aftercare, even building factories to provide jobs for ex-offenders.

Ron Nikkel has probably visited more prisons in more countries than anyone in history, observing firsthand conditions that sometimes rival those of Nazi concentration camps. He has headed a United Nations task force on criminal justice.  He likes to quote Winston Churchill, who said you can judge a civilization by how it treats its prisoners. By that measure, he says with a sad shake of the head, we all fail. Scandinavian countries probably show the most humane treatment, but no one has an answer for crime and nearly every society faces a discouraging recidivism rate of 70 percent. For this reason PFI is allowed to operate even in tightly controlled Muslim countries: No one else can help, so why not give the Christians a chance.

Publications from PFI feature stories of reconciliation between victim and offender, including PFI’s leading role in restorative justice after the Rwandan massacres.  Ron does what he does because—despite (or due to) his criminal justice background—he sees no solution to crime other than transformed lives. For this reason, all the good work done by prison volunteers comes in the name of Christ, the one who offers transformation. PFI works across all denominational lines, bringing together charismatics, mainline Protestants, evangelicals, Orthodox, and Catholics.

Why do they do it, these volunteers?  Most with whom I talked in Toronto insist they do it because Jesus commanded it.  Announcing his mission, he included the goal to “liberate the captives,” and he said in Matthew 25 that God will judge the nations on how we cared for “the least of these,” including prisoners.

The great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky credited his conversion to a woman who thrust a New Testament in his hands as he traveled by train to Siberia.  She, a volunteer not unlike those I met in Toronto, showed compassion to one man whom society was sending into exile, and because of her kindness one of the greatest novelists met a life-transforming power.

Although the work of Prison Fellowship International may take place out of the limelight, its impact is incalculable. In many countries today’s prisoners comprise tomorrow’s leaders; for example, after South Africa’s change from white rule a majority of the new cabinet had a prison record, as did their leader Nelson Mandela. Nearly every liberation movement starts with prisoners (think Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma).  And, looking through history, imagine the Christian faith without prisoners: John the Baptist, Jesus, Peter, Paul, John Bunyan, martyrs in the Roman Empire, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Anna Skripnikova, Nelson Mandela, Benigno Aquino, Armando Valladares of Cuba.  In Toronto I saw that a movement begun in chains and behind bars has not forgotten its heritage.

When we moved from downtown Chicago to the foothills of the Colorado Rockies in 1992, we left behind many things: superb restaurants, Starbucks every few blocks, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, jogging along Lake Michigan, the electric buzz of living in a great city.  One definite improvement, though, was wildlife.  If you discount the times I jogged through the Lincoln Park Zoo, most days I saw only pigeons and ugly city squirrels (rats with tails, as a friend calls them).  Yes, coyotes, deer, and even a mountain lion have been sighted in downtown Chicago, but these occurrences are so rare as to merit news coverage.

Now I see exotic wildlife almost every day. A three-compartment birdfeeder full of sunflower seeds hangs just outside my office window, attracting finches, chickadees, nuthatches, grosbeaks, crossbills, pine siskins, woodpeckers, and the like. If I turn a sprinkler on they line up on branches to get a shower from the spray.  Often I see hawks circling in the sky overhead, and twice I’ve watched as they dived down and plucked one of these unsuspecting guests from the feeder.  They swooped over to a nearby branch where they perched, eyes set in a fierce I-dare-you glare, as their talons squeezed the life out of the little bird.

The bird feeder hangs suspended between two trees on an elaborate wire-cable pulley system, my triumphant solution after years of trying to deter squirrels, raccoons, and bears.  It used to hang off a long iron bar attached to our deck, but a bear bent that one like a toothpick.  Last week a huge black bear climbed an adjacent tree, mentally calculated the geometry, and decided my Rube Goldberg contraption had indeed made the feeder inaccessible.  He settled for a civilized drink from the birdbath.

The bird feeder supports an entire ecosystem.  Almost every evening two different red foxes, one of which has a pronounced limp, stop by to sort through the shells for uncracked sunflower seeds. A bit later a gray fox, smaller and shyer, warily cleans up the leftovers.  Sometimes a skunk shambles by.  When the bear pays a visit, he doesn’t bother to sort and greedily scoops shells, seeds, and dirt into his large mouth.

One year a marmot took up residence in the culvert at the end of our dirt driveway, apparently unaware he’s supposed to be living at an altitude of 10,000 feet, not 7500.  Several times we’ve found fresh deer kill in our back yard, evidence of a resident mountain lion, but only twice have we actually seen the magnificent creature.  About the time we moved to Colorado a mountain lion attacked and killed a local high school athlete who was jogging near the school, and a bicycle bridge was later erected in his honor.  I used to jog nervously, my head swiveling back and forth like an owl’s, until I learned a foolproof method for preventing lion attacks.  Farmers and forestry workers in India discovered long ago that wearing a mask on the back of the head will confuse lions and tigers, who normally attack from the rear, grabbing a person’s neck in their jaws and breaking it with a powerful paw-blow to the head. For anyone who wants to jog on mountain trails at dusk, I recommend strapping on a Richard Nixon mask—no credible reports have ever surfaced of a lion attack on someone wearing a Richard Nixon mask on the back of his or her head.

We’ve also seen ferrets and badgers.  Deer and elk treat our yard as a salad bar, destroying anything we plant, and in the fall bull elk bugle and spar nearby.  Once a bobcat stopped by, a lovely creature the size of a large, lanky dog with a small, cat-like face.  Nothing can prepare you for the sight of a creature wearing a coat of such exquisite design wandering through your front yard.

Foxes are my favorite visitors, though.  Sometimes a bold red fox will climb the steps to our deck and sit quietly as we eat outdoors, no doubt hoping for a handout.  One year after a spring snow I followed a fox’s prints to its den and a few weeks later moved my workplace to a tree nearby.  I leaned cushions against the tree and typed on my laptop. Sure enough, three frisky young foxes soon emerged from the den and started playing with their pile of treasures collected from the neighborhood: a pine cone, a discarded work glove, a tennis ball.  After watching a while, I introduced myself by saying, “Hi.” You cannot imagine how high a fox kit can jump.  All three dove headfirst into the den and wouldn’t come out for days. Eventually, though, they got used to my presence and would follow me on walks through the woods.  I felt like the Pied Piper, but when I stopped to catch my breath they quickly hid behind the nearest bush.

Observing all these animals, I’ve learned a few lessons about nature:

• Animals have no concept of grace. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and a fox-eat-squirrel and coyote-eat-fox and cougar-eat-coyote world as well.  With two exceptions, small animals live in a constant state of anxiety, twitching their ears at the slightest sound and whirling around to look for enemies.  (The two exceptions: porcupines and skunks, who have a built-in deterrence system.) Once I tossed an apple core to the ground and my three fox friends surrounded it, tails in the air, legs tensed for a final assault.  It occurred to me that they had never eaten a meal that did not involve hunting and killing.  They worked hard to survive, and knew nothing of gratuitous gifts.

• It’s a tough world out there. In March of 2003 it snowed for three days straight, accumulating to a depth of seven feet.  I strapped on snowshoes and set off to climb a hill behind my home; even with snowshoes I sank thigh-deep in the soft powder and had to lunge forward to make progress.  We had no electricity and roads were impassible so there was no ambient noise, yet every few minutes I heard a loud crack like the report of a rifle: branches laden with snow were breaking free and falling to the ground.  I saw a family of deer trapped in snow.  Panting heavily, they would make a sudden leap and plunge a few feet forward, falling back into snow that covered their backs.  It took enormous energy for them to proceed a few feet.  Any food was buried well beyond reach.  I thought of the animals killed by sudden blizzards, cold snaps, lightning storms, droughts—not to mention by hungry predators.

• Sometimes animals put human beings to shame.  We label deviant behavior animalistic or bestial, even though creatures governed by instinct live within boundaries often scorned by the “higher” animals. “Man alone has the power and freedom to center life inordinately in one impulse,” said Reinhold Niebuhr.  I think of my friends who struggle with addictions.  “You and me, baby, ain’t nothin’ but mammals, so let’s do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel,” belts out the rock group Bloodhound Gang. Funnily enough, I see mammals “do it” all the time in my backyard, and sex for them has little in common with sex for humans.  Take elk as an example: in late September the bull elk suddenly starts fighting pretenders with smaller antlers, then greedily mates 50-70 cows in an exhausting orgy, and doesn’t give sex another thought until another September rolls around.  Yes, sex has power, but most of life centers in eating grass—except for those two weeks each September.  Similarly, with few exceptions animals kill for food, and know nothing of mass murder or genocide.

• Beauty takes place whether anyone notices it or not.  Rick Bass writes of … “one of those secrets of nature that you glimpse only every so often—a north-flowing river, an anomaly of gravity, an albino elk—little things She shows you only so often, just to keep you in awe, or maybe just to reward you.”  Living in the midst of nature, I’ve been blessed to glimpse those secrets.  Mountain biking, I stirred a herd of elk and came across a baby elk still glistening from birth, eyes large with fear, motionless as a rock.  I sat for thirty minutes and watched a father woodpecker teaching its young how to drill a hole in a branch. I’ve seen a jet-black Abert squirrel doing somersaults in grass I had just wet down with a sprinkler.  I’ve watched adolescent elk splash and play in a mountain stream, then gallop across a golf course green to grab the flag on the ninth hole.  Hiking in the splendidly named Oh Be Joyful Valley I have lain down in a field of wildflowers with hummingbirds whistling around in a scene fresh and beautiful as the Garden of Eden.

• Nature goes on, beauty goes on, whether or not anyone is there to observe it. I thank God that during two decades in Colorado, I’ve had that chance.  I echo the sentiments of George MacDonald, who wrote, “One of my greatest difficulties in consenting to think of religion was that I thought I should have to give up my beautiful thoughts and my love for the things God has made. But I find that the happiness springing from all things not in themselves sinful is much increased by religion.  God is the God of the Beautiful—Religion is the love of the Beautiful, and Heaven is the Home of the Beautiful—Nature is tenfold brighter in the Sun of Righteousness, and my love of Nature is more intense since I became a Christian—if indeed I am one. God has not given me such thoughts and forbidden me to enjoy them.”

We spent the night at Dulles, and our scheduled flight to Denver the next day also got canceled due to maintenance issues. Sheesh! We spent most of the day dashing from gate to gate registering for standby seats and finally our persistence paid off. In the end we landed in Denver some 35 hours after leaving Great Britain, sufficient time to have circled the globe. Those who think international travel is glamorous, listen up.

In contrast, the tour of the U.K. went off without a hitch, well, almost. En route to the very first event we found ourselves waiting in a very long line of cars on a motorway. A truck, or lorry, had crossed the median and crashed into a car a mile or so ahead of us, and authorities closed all six lanes of the highway–for six hours!  After sitting without moving for three-and-a-half hours while emergency personnel dealt with the tragedy, we were allowed to make a U-turn and go back up the entrance ramp to find an alternate route.  We barely made it to the venue in time.  Later we learned the sobering news that two women had died in the accident, and that if we had left the hotel on time that morning instead of a few minutes late we may well have been  involved.

I was speaking on the book What Good Is God? accompanied by a Christian theatre company called SaltMine. The first half of the program, I sat onstage with an interviewer, and in between our chats three actors did a series of five- to seven-minute sketches, some of which they wrote themselves and some adapted from such works as The Hiding Place, The Screwtape Letters, and Shadowlands. After a tea break (this is Britain, after all) the actors did one more sketch and I spoke for about 40 minutes.

We’ve done three similar tours in the U.K., as well as a tour in South Africa and Australia and a scaled-down presentation in the Middle East, and we plan to return to Australia (and New Zealand too this time) in September of this year. It feels far less lonely to stand on a platform supported by such consummate professionals. With moments of hilarity and poignancy in their dramas, they grab an audience and deliver them into the palm of my hand. Could a speaker ask for more? Dave Pope, a singer of note in the U.K., organized each of the programs, and the logistics were quite complicated. Several stagehands and technicians drove a couple of vans full of props, electronic equipment, and books for sale, and a caravan of five vehicles traveled between cities each day to stage the productions. In all we covered 2000 miles to put on ten performances.

As you may know, the church in Britain is a sad shell of its former days. The most impressive building in every town is the stone church with its pointed steeple, but most of those churches are virtually empty on Sunday. Much like the church congregations, the audience attending our events tilted heavily toward the gray-haired. And yet I find in places like Australia and Britain, the church is far more likely to show unity, with little denominational competition at stake, and also to express faith creatively. Much of the best worship music comes from Britain, and the kind of theatre talent produced by SaltMine would be hard to match in the United States.

The highlight for me each evening was sitting at a table to sign books and in the process hearing stories of people I have somehow connected with through my books. A woman whose 23-year-old son committed suicide. A young girl who rolled up her sleeve to show her self-mutilation as a “cutter” before her conversion. An elderly man who said, “Pray for my daughter please—she’s a prostitute and drug addict.” An Iranian believer who had just received his residency permit in Scotland after an eight-year wait and who asked me to sign his Farsi-language version of What’s So Amazing About Grace? A chaplain who leads a study on that book in a Glasgow prison. A surgeon who trained with Dr. Paul Brand in India. I never tire of hearing that something I work on alone in my basement office reaches out, in this case across an ocean, and connects with another person in very different circumstances.

We had no time for tourist excursions on this trip. After getting to the hotel after midnight, we’d sleep, get up and exercise, then load the car for the next day’s drive, arriving in time to arrange the set, do sound checks, hold a reception, and face a new crowd. Yet simply driving through the British countryside in Spring is a feast for the eyes: lambs frolicking in the fields, bright yellow rapeseed blooming, English gardens fronting the road in towns and villages. And one night we traveled to Stratford-upon-Avon and saw a magnificent production of Merchant of Venice by the Royal Shakespeare Company. We return not exactly refreshed, but renewed and ready to tackle the next adventure.