Life with a Capital L by Matt Heard

My headmaster, Mr. Hinton, asked the staff to read Life with a Capital L by Matt Heard over the summer. He wanted us to reflect on the ways we can lead with love when it comes to our students. Then he asked our brand new Seminar team to lead the discussion. 

Talk about trial by fire!

The book begins with a discussion of a painting Calle There is Life Everywhere by Nikolai Yaroshenko. The painting depicts several people trapped in a train freight car marveling at the birds eating just outside the barred window. Yet on the other side of the car, another cellmate looks out the opposite window, apparently heedless of the life just outside the car. 

Heard uses this painting as a discussion jumping off point: Even in the midst of extreme hardship, life and love remain. 

To begin, Heard defines what it means to be human: “My humanity is my capacity to embrace the significance of my existence – and yours – as images of God in his creation” (10). This understanding definitionally puts us into relationship with others in order to be fully human. 

As humans, formed for relationship, we experience a deep longing: “My longing can serve as a connection, a sort of breadcrumb trail that I can follow as I’m orienting myself toward Home. In my deepest longings I can gain clues regarding who I am in the universe” (25). As C.S. Lewis says, we long for something eternal that can only be satisfied by the eternal.

Yet we can easily use that sense of longing in a pursuit of inferior objects: “A superficial and therefore short-circuited engagement with my longings leads to a superficial and therefore short-circuited engagement with the gospel...A more substantive engagement with my longings has to be accompanied by an authentic, substantive engagement with the gospel” (33-34). Jesus message of Good News must center our deepest longings.

Yet even this focus on the eternal can lead us astray: “Something is dreadfully awry with the ways too many of us minimize and reduce the gospel: Receive forgiveness. Gain heaven. Behave morally in the meantime. Subscribe to a doctrinal statement. Go to church. Tell others about him” (47). We can and must begin that eternal life NOW.

The doorway to that life is Grace. To enter true eternal life we must come to recognize the grace that God does out extravagantly: "Grace is God lovingly giving me what I need instead of what I deserve. It's God lavishly giving me what I long for but not necessarily all that I think I want" (56).Truly understanding and living in gratitude for that grace allows us to enter in to the feast that life is meant to be.

Living Life with a Capital L richly rewards us in the here and now. We experience freedom: "If I'm going to actually experience freedom, I've got to learn to pursue Life by practicing righteousness--learning to walk righteously. That will involve--drum roll here--obedience" (83). Not obedience to human-made rules--that's legalism--but obedience to God's commands as a response in gratitude. Our rebellion to God creates our own prisons. Only obedience to God frees us.

We also gain protection for our hearts. Lewis describes "Men without chests." These are people governed by minds and bellies. "Full humanity means an engaged heart. An engaged heart means I am actively balancing my mind and my emotions, which will activate my will in a healthy way" (94).

We can truly appreciate beauty. "Beauty speaks to me, sings to me, welcomes me and summons me into the presence of something that is life saving, life affirming, and life giving" (107). True beauty points to the divine. All other forms of "beauty" are counterfeits designed to lead us away from Him. Life with a Capital L points towards God and therefore towards beauty. And beauty os the portal to abundant life.

We gain illumination. We naturally live in the dark. But the Word "is a lamp unto our feet." Jesus is that light, and that light shows me how to be fully human.

Our lives become part of bigger story. Our society is one of atomized humans each acting in his own story. We lack connections to anything greater than ourselves. But the gospel-centered life connects us with God's glory. We become "men and women who, with the turn of every page of their stories, discover new paragraphs of purpose as they echo God's significance and experience his enoughness in the drama of their everyday lives" (143).

We experience true worship. "Every activity of my life--my vocational calling, my recreation, my relation. ships, my education, my sacrificial service, and my communication of gospel hope. people whom God places in my life, even my intentional rest--every endeavor be comes a way of acknowledging God's worth in my life (156).

We learn to give life a way and truly love. "At any given moment, everyone of us is predominately more a bucket or ap pipe. I call it plumbing theology" (164). We are either bottling up God's love or we are a conduit. Living Life with a Capital L allows us to channel that love through ourselves and towards others, thereby experiencing more love ourselves. Oftentimes, "we're not enjoying Life or loving others as well as we could because we're not experiencing God's love as fully as we could" (170). Be a pipe.

We experience time in a new way. Psalms says, “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom”(90:13). We often move through our days with little reflection or understanding of the gift that we have been given. “The average human looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, moves without physical awareness, inhales without awareness of odor or fragrance, and talks without thinking.” (Leonardo da Vinci). But a life lived in appreciation of the grace that has been given shifts our focus and time becomes the gift it was always meant to be.

And yet we are broken. Living Life with a Capital L redeems and makes room for that brokenness. “In the echo of explosions along our journey, it’s tempting to forget that Life with a capital L actually unfolds in the midst of the land of the shadow of death. It’s a place where broken hopes and shattered dreams happen more often than we could ever be comfortable with” (199). We can experience the redemption only the broken can participate in. And we can extend that grace to others.

We can live in the shadow of heaven. As Lewis so eloquently state, “There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else... It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our [spouse] or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work” (216). Heaven is the ultimate form of life lived with a capital L. And as we live that way on earth, we reach our hands towards heaven.

This book is a sweet and beautiful reminder of the goodness of God. Told largely through stories, it is an easy read but a difficult journey. Life with a Capital L is the "abundant life" promised by Christ. And it is ours if we desire it. 

 

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo

For our summer reading, Mr. Hinton asked us to read The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo. She is the same author who wrote Because of Winn-Dixie and the Tale of Despereaux. In short, her books are delightful and this one proved the rule. 

Edward Tulane is a stuffed rabbit of the finest quality and craftsmanship, wearing clothes of the most gentile fashion. And he knows it. Although his girl Abilene dotes on him, he could not bring himself to appreciate her in the same way. Only grandmother Pellegrina recognized the haughty spirit of the bunny. 

This story goes as stories must and Edward is separated from Abilene. Through a series of misfortunes he is accidentally thrown overboard into the sea. Of course toy rabbits cannot die and Edward had months to consider his plight while on the ocean's floor. He eventually lost hope that Abilene would come for him and began to suspect that Pellegrina was somehow behind his travails. 

A storm eventually results in tumbling Edward into the net of an ancient fisherman. In his joy at being rescued, Edward forgives the man for calling him an "it." Nellie, the wife of the fisherman, recognizes the marks of greatness in the naked, water-logged toy. Although to his shame, Nellie believes him to be a "she." Whose name is Susanna. Who wears frilly dresses. And yet... Edward found himself listening to Nellie's stories as he had never listened to Abilene's prattle. Nellie, in her simple way told him of her children she loved and those she had lost. Perhaps the ocean bottom had seeped into his brain.

It couldn't last. Fearing her parents were becoming too attached to the "rabbit child," their daughter Lolly sent Edward off to the dump. Edwards heart broke and yearned for Nellie and the old man. Contemplating Pelligrina's disappointment in him, Edward began to realize he had not loved, but only tolerated Abilene. Maybe his feelings towards Nellie were love. But it was too late.

Suddenly the dog of hobo sniffed Edward and fetched him as a prize for his master, Bull. And so Edward set off on the life of a tramp, Malone, a rabbit on the run, sleeping under the stars and contemplating his life so far: those he began to realize he loved and those he had lost. He lost Bull as well, tossed from the train by a cruel companion.

Eventually Edward is rescued by a boy named Bryce who believes Edward would make a fine present for his sick little sister, Sarah Ruth. Edward actually feels joy at the thought of being a child's toy again. Rechristened Jangles, Edward soon realized Sarah Ruth existed in a precarious situation of poverty, sickness, and abuse. After six months Sarah Ruth succumbs to her illness. Her neglectful and abusive father weeps as his loss. When Bryce says the man has no right to mourn, he replies, "I loved her." "I loved her too, thought Edward. I loved her and now she is gone. How could this be? he wondered. How could he bet to live in a world without Sarah Ruth?" (p. 150)

While on the run with Bryce, Edward chances to meet old Pellegrina. In desperation, he thinks, "Look at me. You got your wish. I have learned how to love. And it's a terrible thing. I'm broken. My heart is broken. Help me." Pellegrina walked away. But neither Bryce nor Edward will see his luck change. Edward's china head is smashed into pieces by an angry restauranteur. But Bryce, displaying sacrificial love, takes the rabbit to a doll mender. Given only two options, pay for the repairs or give up the rabbit, Bryce surrenders the only remaining tie he has to Sarah Ruth. Edward will live again. 

Sitting on the shelf with the other dolls for sale, Edward has decided he is done with love. It is simply too painful. And yet... he was haunted by the last words of an antique doll as she went out of the shop, "Someone will come; someone will come for you." Hope flickered, but the years passed. But the old doll was right; someone did come. In fact as little Maggie begged for the the rabbit, Edward recognized his old pocket watch around the neck of her mother. Abilene. 

And Edward went home.