FROM THE PASTOR’S PEN
Friends,
As I write this I confess that my attention is a little bit divided: I’m sitting in my kitchen waiting for someone to come fix my hot water heater and Mark Zuckerberg is in Washington D.C., testifying before congress on matters related to Facebook’s misuse of massive amounts of digital information—and both of my distractions make me grateful for the ongoing presence of literature in my life.
As you probably know, Facebook has profited from the misappropriation of users’ personal information; this malfeasance has led to the dissemination of false and misleading information which, in turn, has led (among other things) to the election of Donald Trump. I am horrified by what Facebook has done and by what it has become, and I’m also aware that my ideas about the social media giant primarily have been formed not by the news, or by purveyors of progressive thought, or by those brilliant people who make a living by thinking about and writing about Silicon Valley. Rather, my reaction to Facebook is rooted in my reading of George Orwell’s classic novel 1984. Now, I read 1984 in the eighth grade, but despite the passage of time my awareness that governments can (and do) spy on citizens, that Power seeks to control us, and that information can be used as a weapon, all remain fresh in my mind (even if I had to use Wikipedia to remember the name Winston Smith).
My hot water heater went on the fritz Friday (naturally), when it was too late to get any parts or service till Monday, and on Monday the plumbers weren’t able to show up, and on Tuesday they told us it would be Wednesday at the soonest (we found another plumber who came right away). During the several days I spent without heated water, I found myself framing my thoughts about cold showers, not by considering how few humans actually get to enjoy heated tap water, nor by contemplating the technology behind my fickle tankless water heater. Instead my mind wandered to Richard Henry Dana’s highly literate autobiographical travelogue Two Years Before the Mast, in which the protagonist speaks of living in constant frigid dampness while suffering an abscessed tooth, in high seas south of Tierra Del Fuego, in midwinter. It made me feel a little better. If, despite that morning’s cold shower, you found me smiling on Sunday in worship it is because I was happily not trying to stay clean in a wooden sailing ship that was doing its best to avoid icebergs in Antarctic waters.
Over the years that I have been a parent of school-aged children, I have heard teachers and school administrators brag about the strength of their school’s science, technology, engineering and math (or STEM) programs, and, indeed STEM seems to be the focus of much of our nation’s pedagogical energies these days—so much so that when I ask those tasked with the work of educating my children about programs for teaching writing and for exposing students to great literature, it often is the case that my kids’ teachers look scared.
I love science for its ability to inspire curiosity and to teach people how to observe the world around them. I am grateful for technology and for the engineers to invent it because technology has lifted many of the burdens I might otherwise be bearing. And math is a beautiful language that helps us to understand the cosmos.
But when science, technology, engineering and math, lead humanity to dangerous places, as indeed they do from time to time (tune into the Zuckerberg hearing, for example), we will know of our peril primarily because we have read Ursula Le Guin and Madeleine L’Engle. When our nation’s leaders fail us we will know because we have read Margaret Atwood, and Leo Tolstoy. We will remember those who suffer the most because we have read Alice Walker, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and John Steinbeck.
So three cheers for literature. May we all read good books filled with stories that are powerful, and magical, and wonderful, and awful, and scary, and funny. May those stories tell us about life. May they makes us better people, better citizens. May they fill us with caution and hope, joy and sympathetic sorrow. I have nothing against nonfiction books (after all, I have written three nonfiction books), and we all should be reading the newspaper and magazines. But let us never neglect literature. For the stories we tell just may save us.
God’s Peace,
Ben