You are Dangerous

"[Fangorn] often comes here, especially when his mind is uneasy, and rumours of the world outside trouble him. I saw him four days ago striding among the trees, and I think he saw me, for he paused; but I did not speak...and he did not speak either, nor call my name."
"Perhaps he also thought that you were Saruman," said Gimli. "But you speak of him as if he was a friend. I thought Fangorn was dangerous."
"Dangerous!" cried Gandalf. "And so am I, very dangerous...And Aragorn is dangerous, and Legolas is dangerous. You are beset with dangers, Gimli son of Gloin; for you are dangerous yourself, in your own fashion."—J.R.R. Tolkien

People who carry wands and battle-axes are not to be messed with. It's also a good idea not to mess with politicians, tycoons and football players. But we are beset with more dangers than that, for ordinary people are dangerous, in their own fashion. Even children have an ability to hurt or heal; the antics of a carefree child can do wonders for a parent consumed by anxiety about the future. In C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces, the repercussions of Orual's actions reverberate among both men and the gods—before she has any political power. She is puissant because her life is intertwined with the lives of other people, especially with the lives of her sisters.

When two people interact, their souls brush together and, many times, begin to interlock. Relating involves submission to an outside influence, even if a weak one; it involves a making bare or vulnerable some part of the being of both parties. This gives humans many kinds of power over each other. All humans can love or hate. Even small demonstrations of affection—a smile, a wave, an arm around the shoulder, a few simple kind words—can have great impact. I once heard one of my sisters crying bitterly in her room. I went in; she was lying face down, weeping into her pillow. I laid my hand on her back, trying vainly to think of some appropriate words. Presently, her sobbing subsided. My hand was a conduit of my love to her, a love which had a power I had not guessed at.

Many other types of power are inherent to humanness. We can shock, as films often do; we can advice and persuade: "But Brutus is an honorable man!" We can manipulate the emotions of others, as with the popular boy who flirts with girls he cares nothing for. We can teach by example—the most effective of didactic methods. In a very few words, we can change someone's opinion of his friend. An enthusiastic, "I love Chris," can drastically shape someone's opinion of Chris, as can "Did you know he eats his boogers?" We can give a girl flowers, or vandalize her car. Sex can be the sealing act of love—when used as God would have it—or cause immense destruction in the lives of those involved, and in the lives of their families and friends. Those with a talent in art or music can make us gawk, or dance, or cry—even without the talent of Dürer or Mendelssohn. Perhaps the greatest of human powers is prayer, a petition for intervention by the greatest of powers. Power is available even to the weak.

Jean-Paul Sartre, in his early philosophy as expressed in Being and Nothingness, held that love was self-contradictory. I object to Sartre's view of love, but the love of a fallen being does have an inherent inconsistency. For love involves the desire to draw close to, and once a fallen being has drawn close to its beloved, it will inevitably damage it; but surely to love is to wish the best for the beloved! We must be struck with a terror of damaging that which we love, for even without prowess, we have power. And we must be even more afraid of damaging that which we do not love, for it is that which we do not love that we are most likely to destroy without conscious intention.

We must also be struck with our potential for good—a potential we underestimate. Your smiles, your patience with the obnoxiousness of another, and underlying it all, your love are of much greater value than you suppose. Remember that a greater return is demanded of him who is given five talents than of him who is given two. A young man once had a long talk with his teacher after class. As he walked home, he cried, though his teacher had given him high compliments. He cried because he saw his own wasted potential. He saw that he had spent his strength in frivolity and sin and cried because he feared the responsibility that came with the blessings given to him.

On my first day of "Invitation to the Humanities," Dr. Eric M— gave a challenge to the class. He told us, "You are weapons of either good or evil. There is no neutral position. Which will you be?"

The Sweetness of Humility

"What kind of tree is that?" I asked my Chinese friend Jerry. The name he used had a familiar sound, but I couldn't remember what it meant. "Is the fruit edible?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, "But don't eat it; it isn't ripe."

"I'm going to eat some," I said, "Just to figure out what it is."

"Don't."

"Why not? Is it poisonous?"

"No, but it is incredibly bitter."

I plucked one of the hard green fruits and bit into it anyway—and immediately spewed it out in disgust. It was more bitter than anything I had ever eaten. It was a long time before I forgot the Chinese word for walnut.

Pride is as acrid as a green walnut. I have heard from a young age that I should forsake pride, but my sinfulness is such that I do not begin to relinquish a sin until I repulsed by it. Over the past several months I have tasted pride's acerbic flavor, and now I hate it—and as I result, I also love humility and its sweetness.

Indeed, humility is sweet. A scene from C.S. Lewis' Perelandra makes a profound comment on the nature of humility by picturing the innocence of the Green Lady:

[The Green Lady] stared for quite an appreciable time [into the mirror] without apparently making anything of it. Then she started back with a cry and covered her face...

"Oh—oh," she cried. "What is it? I saw a face."

"Only your own face, beautiful one," said the Un-man.

"I know," said the Lady, still averting her eyes from the mirror. "My face—out there—looking at me. Am I growing older or is it something else? I feel...I feel...my heart is beating too hard. I am not warm." (116)

"That thing" (she pointed at the mirror) "is me and not me."

"But if you do not look you will never know how beautiful you are."

"It comes into my mind, Stranger," she answered, "that a fruit does not eat itself, and a man cannot be together with himself." (117)

The Green Lady's beauty was not for herself: it was for the King. While she must have always been conscious of her own beauty in a vague way, she did not even know what she looked like. We speak of someone being "stuck on himself"; the Green Lady was stuck on someone else. Here is humility, not as a dry "spiritual" attribute, but as a charming addition to the Lady's physical beauty. The Apostle Peter understood this well.

Don't be concerned about the outward beauty that depends on fancy hairstyles, expensive jewelry, or beautiful clothes. You should be known for the beauty that comes from within, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is so precious to God. (1 Peter 3:3-4)

Humility is also becoming to men. Once an unusually intelligent linguist was explaining some of the peculiarities of the Thai counting system to my father, my brother and me. He mentioned some of the speculations that certain linguists had relating to the subject, and then added, "But that doesn't really matter to us, does it." His apparent lack of interest in the details of the linguistic speculations demonstrated that he had told us this for our own interest and not to flaunt his superior knowledge, while his warm smile and use of the word "us" created an aura of camaraderie. He regularly spoke in this manner, and I loved him for it and respected him far more than if he had used his knowledge to diminish me.

Another example of sweet humility is to be found in Proverbs 30, where Agur son of Jakeh writes:

I am weary, O God; I am weary and worn out, O God. I am too ignorant to be human, and I lack common sense. I have not mastered human wisdom, nor do I know the Holy One.

Who but God goes up to heaven and comes back down? Who holds the wind in his fists? Who wraps up the oceans in his cloak? Who has created the whole wide world? What is his name—and his son's name? Tell me if you know! (1-4)

Here is profound humility. Not only does Agur not claim to understand the wisdom of God, he cries out that he has not even mastered common sense and human wisdom! As his oracle continues, it becomes apparent that he does have some wisdom to share. But even his wisdom is sometimes expressed in terms of things he does not understand (see verse 18).

One of the sweetest things about humility is its accompanying confidence. In an ironic paradox, pride, which presents itself as strong and confident, has a close relationship to insecurity, while humility, which overlooks itself, can be built only on an inner confidence. Insecurity tells a person his current size is unsatisfactory and that he has to inflate himself, whereas a person who is confident—that is, someone who trusts in God, for trust in anything else is false confidence—is able to honestly and sorrowfully admit his own faults. A humble person feels no need to respond in kind to deflating remarks because he has no pockets of hot air puffing him beyond his real size.

If pride is a green walnut, the bitterest taste ever to touch my tongue, humility is a honeycomb, the sweetest of all flavors.

Thoughts from an Unsuccessful Elk Hunter

Seeing a live, wild animal close up in the woods without being seen is strange and wonderful. Elk droppings, still wet through, on the path ahead make elk seem real in a way, but seeing the ruddy, course hair and muscular sides of an elk brings that feeling to a new level. Knowing elk exist and inhabit the woods you are in is dull compared to watching an animal that can with dignity cover two miles of broken terrain in a few minutes walk calmly past not thirty yards away.

As a boy I would often try to sneak up on birds. And though the birds I was approaching often lived in neighborhoods or parks and were half tame, I had only tried it a few times before I became convinced that even a half-tame animal will only be approached on its own terms. So it thrills me to approach a wild animal like a deer or coyote on my terms.

We value things more when we realize that they could slip away at any time. When a mother jerks her son out of the road as a bus roars by, she gasps and hugs him for a moment before she can bring herself to reprimand him. She realizes how he could have been gone instantly, and that makes him seem the more precious. Seeing a deer walk by is a fleeting experience. Nothing is holding the deer near to you; it could slip away at any time, so seeing the deer is the more precious.

To the man stalking in the woods, an elk is a phantom that leaves behind a lot of sign but has no physical presence. Trees in all directions point up, but there is nothing between them. A wood is like the landscape of the moon. On the moon, stones are strewn about, but nothing is there. In the woods, hoof marks are imprinted deep in the mud, but they are left by a creature of ether. There is “only a host of phantom listeners”* in the empty woods that tease a man’s imagination and subconsciously convince him that nothing is there.

So when a deer moves through the empty woods not thirty yards away, the woodsmen is struck simultaneously by how ordinary the deer is and by how outrageous it is that the deer is walking calmly in front of him as if he were the vapor. The deer is opaque, gray like a rock. It makes sound; it takes up space. It is ordinary.

And yet electric. Its own demeanor is demure, but the woodsman feels the wonder of it in every part of his tingling body. Something far off has abruptly drawn near. Seeing it is like being hit by lightning. There is no warning, the shock is intense, and then it is gone.

It is easy for someone who enjoys animals to wonder why a hunter would want to go out and kill a living creature. A common misconception is that hunters are sadists who enjoy destruction. But as a man who belongs to the world cannot understand the joys of knowing God, a man who has not been hunting cannot know its thrills. Someone may have a lot of fun playing with his dog or riding his horse, but I cannot believe he enjoys his animals as much as a hunter enjoys the wild creatures he sees.

*From Walter de la Mare’s poem The Listeners.

Milton's Fiery Language

...Instead of Fruit Chew’d Bitter Ashes, Which th’Offended Taste with Spattering Noise Rejected...

John Milton may have had bad eyes, but his tongue and ears displayed masterful skill. The flames of his passionate language still leap from the page more than three hundred years later, as in this passage from Paradise Lost about how God tormented the demons as they tried to applaud after Satan bragged to them about his success in tempting man (Book X, lines 545-562) :

...Thus was th’applause they meant,

Turn’d to exploding hiss, triumph to shame

Cast on themselves from their own mouths. There stood

A Grove hard by, sprung up with this their change,

His will who reigns above, to aggravate

Their penance, laden with fair Fruit, like that

Which grew in Paradise, the bait of Eve

Us’d by the Tempter: on that prospect strange

Their earnest eyes they fix’d, imagining

For one forbidden Tree a multitude

Now ris’s, to work them further woe or shame;

Yet parcht with scalding thirst and hunger fierce,

Though to delude them sent, could not abstain,

But on they roll’d in heaps, and up the Trees

Climbing, sat thicker than the snaky locks

That curl’d Megaera: greedily they pluck’d

The Fruitage fair to sight, like that which grew

Near the bituminous Lake where Sodom flam’d....

Had I written this, no one would bother to read it:

They meant to applaud, but instead, they hissed very loudly! They had been feeling triumphant, but now they felt embarrassed, because the hissing had come from their own mouths.

There was a grove nearby, which grew up when they changed into snakes...

Unlike mine, Milton’s language is concise. The way he phrased his sentences allowed him to say a lot with few words. He rarely used more than one adjective or adverb per word, often opting to let the word fend for itself. Consequently, his verse is strong, like lemon juice concentrate.

The few words he did use are robust with energy. They are strong enough to carry the weight of the epic without assistance. He choose “stood” over “was,” “sprung up” rather than “grown up”; even “hard by” instead of dull-sounding “nearby.”

Milton was a painter. With a small number of strokes, he could conjure up entire scenes full of sensory detail. The reader can’t help but envision the fabulous events Milton describes in concrete detail. Instead of saying, “laden with fair fruit like the fruit of the Tree of Life,” Milton packed in a verb, a strong noun, and a haunting phrase, “the bait of Eve”—as if Eve were an animal baited by a demon hunter. Instead of saying simply, “the Fruitage fair to sight, like that which grew near Sodom,” he includes a grimy lake; moreover, Sodom doesn’t sit vague and dull—it burns. Milton rendered this clause so successfully that he created an aura of Hell, without explicitly reminding us where the scene in question was taking place.

Writing was the art that allowed this blind man to paint brilliant scenes, which like the picture of the Dawntreader in CS Lewis’ book, start to move when one looks at them, and are likely to swallow one up into the extraordinary story they comprise.

America—The Hope of the World?

Partway through a paragraph, I stopped reading. My mind had hung up on a gripping phrase several sentences earlier. I backtracked and reread the sentence: “History textbooks go even further to imply that simply by participation in society, Americans contribute to a nation that is constantly progressing, and remains the hope of the world.” (Lies My Teacher Told Me, pp. 257-258) There wasn’t anything exceptional about the first part of the sentence, but the last bit grabbed my attention—“a nation that is...the hope of the world.” The phrase echoed and reechoed in my head. “The hope of the world.”

Is Loewen right? I wondered. Does America consider herself the hope of the world? Maybe the reason that this statement struck me so hard was that it hit home. It had an eerie ring of truth though I had never heard anyone say anything like it before. I realized that I often did think of America this way, subconsciously supposing that she could cure any kind of problem: Are you persecuted in your home country? Immigrate to the Statues! Are you poor? Wealth is to be found in the US! Is someone somewhere in the world in trouble? Don’t worry. America will come to his aid.

America is a privileged country, so sometimes poor and persecuted people do immigrate and find wealth and release from persecution. But only a small percentage of the people in the world can immigrate to America. America cannot rescue every hurting person in the world. In fact, she cannot rescue even one. Making someone wealthy might make them comfortable for a few decades, but in light of eternity that is negligible. The same can be said for release from persecution. America may be able to give some measure of temporal relief from suffering, but can she do anything to ensure that this will have any kind of permanence?

No, of course not—only Jesus can do that. This is the strength of Loewen’s phrase “the hope of the world”—for a Christian, it should immediately bring Jesus to mind. Jesus is the only hope in a dying world. He can give the eternal life that America cannot offer. If we think of America as the hope of the world, we are breaking the First Commandment by “having something else before” Him.

God chastised the Israelites for trusting in Egypt (Is 30:1-7). To put our hope in America is as foolish now as putting one’s hope in Egypt was back then. America will never save anyone. When I think of America as the hope of the world, I am showing my preoccupation with the things that America has to offer—only things of this world. I need to remember that the greatest nation on earth is nothing to God, and only Jesus can save anyone in the eternal sense of the word.