The Fault In Our Stars by John Green

(Warning: If you haven’t read “The Fault In Our Stars” or seen the movie, there are spoilers.)

We are all going to die. How’s that for a spoiler?

John Green’s “The Fault In Our Stars” makes this very clear from the first page. The book’s narrator, Hazel Grace Lancaster, a teenager in Indianapolis, Ind., is suffering from depression due to her repeated contemplation of death. That wouldn’t be particularly out of character for any American teenager, but Hazel Grace has an excuse – she has terminal cancer. The only thing holding it tenuously in check is a drug whose effects over the long term are uncertain. 

In the course of going to a cancer support group at a nearby church, Hazel Grace meets Augustus Waters, another teenage cancer victim who is immediately smitten with her. Through the story that follows, the two discover how to care about each other despite the mounting obstacles that disease and doubt throw at them. 

“The Fault In Our Stars,” of course, takes its title from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, when Cassius laments the fact to Brutus that, though they both seem fated to be slaves to Caesar, they themselves are to blame. This reference is one of several namechecks that Green employs to boost the philosophical heft of his story. At first blush, it is not possible that two cancer victims could be responsible for their fate. The disease, and so, we are led to believe, the universe, does not care who lives and who dies. But death is not the issue here. It is how our characters meet death, and life. 

As has been observed this week with the premiere of the film based on the novel, “Fault” is the latest in a number of works catering to the “young adult” reading market. It is in our teens when the burden of existence hits us with its most vehement force. We suddenly find ourselves thrust, in some aspects unprepared, into making choices between our happiness and others’, having to do without, perceiving the inequalities of life, and we are struck by the colossal, inescapable unfairness of it all. Our inadequacies and our urges impose themselves with soul-crushing ferocity. Some do not survive the impact. These first stirrings, we perceive, point to a hole within us that must be filled, and refilled, we think, for as long as we breathe. And so, we begin to make choices. Hazel later tells us that people often don’t understand the choices they’re making.

One of the great early realizations of my life came when a child my age died. Suddenly, I understood that it wasn’t just something that happened when you’re older. It could happen to me. And so, for years afterward, I would pray myself to sleep, pleading with God to let me at least live through the night. I didn’t want my parents to suffer my leaving them. And even though I believed in a heaven and eternal peace, I wanted no  part of it just yet. I wanted to live.

Hazel, however, does not believe. She later admits that she sees a belief in heaven as “a kind of intellectual disengagement.” Forever, she tells Augustus, is “an incorrect concept.” But the novel opens in a church, with a support group that Hazel tells us is “depressing as hell.” The group is led by a testicular cancer survivor who reminds them each week that they are meeting “in the Literal Heart of Jesus.”  Make of this what you will – at first, the leader Patrick seems easily dismissible comic relief peddling the lame consolations of the church. These show up later in the encouragements that decorate Augustus’ home – hung on the walls by his parents to keep their spirits up. “True Love is Born from Hard Times.”  

This is a recurring motif of the story, that “Fault” will be different from the usual life-affirming fictions we turn to about cancer patients fighting the disease with dignity and courage. What we will see is honesty, not sugarcoated inspiration.  But the more I thought about the story, the more I realized: Where else would the characters be but the Literal Heart of Jesus? And though we may feel encouraged to laugh with the angry, borrowed cynicism of a teen at an emasculated worship leader repeating easy catchphrases, but we are dismissing another victim, not only of cancer, but existence. And we are all, in some sense, victims of existence. A young person with cancer is only able to live day to day, but aren’t we all just doing the same? To paraphrase Philip Roth, life isn’t a battle, it’s a massacre.

Augustus lets us know from the beginning that he expects his life to be extraordinary. He confides to the group that his greatest fear is oblivion. It is his belief in a life beyond this one that makes him anticipate a purpose. “I was supposed to be special,” Augustus says when his cancer reoccurs, and he feels cheated when it seems he will be denied everything he has hoped for.

One can take the spiritual metaphors a step further. For example, cancer as sin. Augustus is killed by a cancer, which is in fact, himself. The cancer grows and cannot be escaped. “The Fault In Our Stars,” it seems, is that there is a fault after all. But this story isn’t interested in a cure as much as a diagnosis of the depression known to the sick and the whole. Augustus seems the step-child of the two philosophers Green mentions. He shares Kierkegaard’s love of metaphor and is his own individual. Though he has faith in his own personal immortality, he has been through enough to intimately understand doubt. Like Martin Heidegger, he has accepted the inevitability of death but knows the difference between what we think we know about life and what we understand through experience. It’s not necessary that the reader know these things, but Green keeps pointing them out, along with the gentle nudges in the direction of existentialism, such as a reference to “Waiting for Godot.” He wants this story to be more than what it appears on the surface.

And so we have just the sort of scenario ripe for teen ridicule – a couple of doomed lovers fated to die young, finding in their brief time together that one eternal truth the movies and pop music taught us – that through love they can briefly touch immortality and find peace. But just a second. Didn’t we start off talking about death? So we did.

Over the novel’s course, we understand that both Augustus and Hazel have a short time left on earth. And tucked into “Fault” is a devilishly post-modern device – a parable on the roles of the reader and the author. Grace begins her association with Augustus by recommending her favorite book “An Imperial Affliction,” by Peter Van Houten. We learn a few details about the story and the author through their conversation. The novel’s protagonist is a young girl dying of cancer. The book ends in mid-sentence, to mimic, we suppose, the interruption of life by death. The author is now a recluse living in Amsterdam. But Hazel Grace wonders what happened to the characters once the book is done, and would like to know before she dies. Augustus sets the plot in motion by eventually bringing her face to face with the author.

Do the characters in a book die when the book is over? We presume our fictional worlds go on, just as life on earth continues without us. But if we were to meet the author of our story, what would we ask him? That’s why one can look at Hazel and Augustus’ trip as a journey to meet God. They fly through the clouds to encounter the elusive man who gave them a kind of wisdom, the man who lives in a libertine city and set in motion the universe within the book they adore. And of course, he has no answers to give them, displays indifference to their pain, and ridicule for their condition. (Your mind can’t resist the connection when you see Willem Dafoe playing Van Houten, since one of DaFoe’s most notorious roles was that of Jesus.)

They instead move on to the home of another author, Anne Frank. Hazel, with weakened lungs and uncertain stamina, climbs the endless sets of stairs in the Frank house to get to a hiding place, one of the world’s most famous, where a little girl was able to transcend her own life by transferring it to the pages of a book. We can protest that Anne’s story itself is often lost in sentimentality, her humanity scrubbed clean by our need for a pure heroine, where we even divorce the triumph of her optimism from the reality of her death in a Nazi concentration camp.  But Anne still endures, partly through our devotion as readers and partly through the belief that she still has something to teach us.

A few moments stand out as we move to the story’s close. Like their earlier association with “An Imperial Affliction,” both Augustus and Hazel live beyond their lifetimes. Augustus gets to hear Hazel give a eulogy for him, and he leaves her a eulogy through an e-mail to Van Houten. After Augustus’ death, Van Houten reappears, to reveal that his alcoholism and anger come from the loss of his own daughter. The author called our young heroes “side effects of an evolutionary process that cares little for individuals,” but he told his dying child they would be reunited in heaven. Even God must deal with the loss of his child.  

Hazel perceives in herself, following a conversation with her father, that she has come to terms with some belief in eternity. When he tells her that the universe deserves to be noticed, she later says that we want to be noticed by the universe, each of us, as individuals. The Christian retort to that idea is that, the universe did show just such a concern, but in our never-ending need to be special, we disregarded that concern because it wasn’t on our terms.  After turning the idea around in her mind for a while, Hazel finally says, “Who am I to say these things may not be forever?” We have circled back to the Literal Heart of Jesus, looking for a message from beyond, and a kind of peace is made for the sake of peace of mind.  

“Some infinities,” the novel tells us, “are bigger than others.” This is a paradoxical way of saying a few things. We might feel something like infinity in a short time shared in the presence of a beloved other, based on our ability to elevate and venerate those moments. But there is an even greater infinity beyond our perceptions, an infinity we can only momentarily touch in this life, an infinity beyond death and the meanings we invest in life – an abundant infinity, the same infinity that hung the stars.

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

 You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
The Alabama Baptist wrote about the book here.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.
Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 
Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

Read a piece I did for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
Read another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

What will the future of Christianity look like, God willing?

It’s a question that often gets lost among Christians in various debates over theology and the nature of the Second Coming of Christ. Among those who don’t believe, the more obnoxious contend that the faith will eventually die out as human beings become more educated and immune to, as Christopher Hitchens called them, “the sinister fairy tales of Christianity.” 

Most of the life of Christendom has been about defining the faith in the here and now, which might explain why Christianity sometimes gains a foothold in a culture without making any preparations for a long-term hold there. Witness the progress of the faith in Europe and Africa today, compared with those same continents in the 19^th century. 

Tucked away in Arthur C. Clarke’s “Rendezvous With Rama” is an interesting character who might answer a few speculative questions about the church universal’s future. “Rendezvous” is a classic science-fiction tale about humanity’s encounter in our solar system with alien technology, but not with aliens themselves. It is a work of “hard” science fiction – in other words, the scientific concepts at times take precedence over the normal fictional demands of characterization and dialogue. Whatever people are mentioned in the telling seem to be defined more by their occupations – commander, engineer, medical officer, etc. 

“Rama” is a 30-mile long cylindrical spaceship that rotates its way into the solar system in the 22^nd century in Clarke’s work. (I have previously written about his novel “Childhood’s End” here.) At first mistaken for a comet, Rama is unmanned and has long been dormant. But a group of humans link up with the ship and begin exploring inside it, they find structures that look like cities with no citizens, seas and land with no biological life, and a myriad of questions without answers.

The book itself, like some of Clarke’s other works, draws on familiar images and stories from not only the Bible but world mythology. Even the name Rama, a figure from Hinduism, shares time among the pages with allusions to the myth of Icarus and the Book of Revelation. Early on, a reader may even get a slight shiver when a meteorite strikes the earth, destroying several Italian cities, on the ominous date of September 11.  And there is the significance within the craft of the number three, weighted with its own Biblical importance. 

Among the group exploring the craft is the enigmatic Lieutenant Boris Rodrigo, a quiet, dignified communications officer, Clarke tells us, who is a devout member of the Fifth Church of Christ, Cosmonaut. Though the church’s theology is mysterious, it basically begins with the belief that the Lord was an alien visitor from space, with its beliefs revolving around that one central tenant.

Clarke, incidentally, was various described as an atheist, a skeptic, an agnostic and a deist. He made various comments throughout his life on religion, including, "I do not believe in God, but I do not disbelieve in her either." He also carried on an interesting correspondence with C.S. Lewis. 

His creation of Lt. Rodrigo is interesting in several ways. Take his description – Rodrigo, like other “Cosmo Christers,” is “universally respected, and even liked,” a man of pathological honesty.  “Invariably, (the Cosmo Christers) were efficient, conscientious, and absolutely reliable.” Understand, for the novel, this is as close to a biography as any character in “Rama” can hope for. Why are Cosmo Christers so respected? Well, obviously, it’s because “they made no attempt to convert others.” How they managed to survive as a faith is left to the imagination. A slightly more cynical person might say that someone opposed to organized religion would naturally create a character who didn’t hope to convert you. 

The Cosmo Christers also have a certainty about their theology which leaves them self-assured, an added bonus in navigating the dangers of space. But there was “also something slightly spooky about them.” Commander Norton, the head of the expedition, doesn’t understand how men with advanced scientific and technical backgrounds can swallow some of the beliefs the Christers abide. Norton wonders what might happen if such a man, in visiting Rama, discovers something that confounds his theology, or confirms it. But Rodrigo isn’t alone. Part of the experience within Rama is one of constantly being swallowed up – both within it physically and mentally lost in all of its puzzles.

Clarke’s characters assume that alien civilizations capable of constructing something like Rama must be highly developed moral creatures – or else, they would have destroyed themselves. But Clarke’s humans, scattered on various moons and planets within the solar system, still show the usual human weaknesses for self-interest, mistrust, and violence, as the story unfolds. Each community, on each world, fears what Rama may mean. 

But not Rodrigo. He shares his thoughts with Norton that “Rama” may in fact be an ark sent by an alien race to “save those worthy of salvation.” Though Rodrigo has no idea who was controlling Rama, he suggests that “it could be a pure robot. Or it could be – spirit. That would explain why there are no signs of biological life forms.” Norton convinces Rodrigo to transmit his theory to earth, comforting himself that if he’s right, he just “increased his chances of being among the saved.”

If you’re waiting around within this novel to find out the secret of Rama, you will end the novel with much the same sensation. The story generates a respect not only for the fictional world created by Clarke but the scientific conundrums he stores within the story.  We aren’t necessarily meant to find answers in “Rama,” just awe and a respect for our insignificance in the cosmos

It’s an interesting decision CIarke makes in creating the character of Rodrigo, who figures out later how to diffuse a warhead which could destroy Rama or provoke the intelligence that constructed it. He creates a sympathetic character and in the process speculates that if Christianity is to survive into the vastness of space, it must embrace a new conception that takes in that vastness. 

“In the beginning was the Word” is the opening of John’s Gospel, which calls to mind the beginning of Genesis, opening with the world’s creation. By drawing back the curtain on his Gospel at the initiation of human reality, John places Jesus squarely within the Trinity at the side of the Father in eternity past.  “All things were created by Him,” John continues on. One wouldn’t have to associate Jesus with an extraterrestrial, since the original understanding of the Christ is as a figure “born from above.” 

But his belief in Christ also means Rodrigo is the most grounded character, the least likely to be consumed by the mysteries within Rama. He already understands there are certain realities beyond what we perceive, and a higher One than all. Because of this, he comes closest to Clarke’s conception that "the purpose of the universe…is the perpetual astonishment of mankind." The heavens declare the glory of God...

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

 You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
The Alabama Baptist wrote about the book here.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.
Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 
Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

Read a piece I did for WestBow Press about writing the book here.

Read another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

The Spiritual Fruits of 'To Kill a Mockingbird'

The one time we see Atticus Finch in an act of worship in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” his daughter Scout tells us that he likes to “be by himself in church,” rumbling the notes of “Nearer My God To Thee” a few beats behind the congregation. So even in the “fake peace” of Sunday, as Scout calls it, Atticus is as he appears throughout the novel, an outsider with his own way of conducting himself. 

I’m not going to call “To Kill a Mockingbird” a Christian novel. Christianity permeates it, like the fake peace of Scout’s Sunday, because the characters within call themselves Christians. There are scenes of Christian devotion, and the Bible is directly and indirectly referenced throughout. But the book’s tone is perhaps more accurately called humanistic, and one of the book’s qualities is that Atticus is at once the most Christian of all the characters and the least like any of the people he sits among in church. 

“To Kill a Mockingbird” tells the story of Scout and Jem Finch, the children of the small-town lawyer Atticus. He raises the children by himself – or more accurately, with the help of his black housekeeper Calpurnia and later, his sister Alexandra – in Depression-era Maycomb, Alabama. Atticus is a state legislator, a learned man, an aging widower, a dead-eye shot and an enigma to almost everyone who knows him. Scout, who tells us the story, says that he treats his children with “courteous detachment.” He is content to nudge them in the directions he wants with only a little instruction. When Alexandra insinuates that he could be a much better parent, he angrily insists that he is doing the best he can. 

The Apostle Paul says in his letter to the Galatian church that the fruits of the Spirit, to be sought after by Christians on a daily basis, are love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. These things are unattainable in their totality apart from God. He then adds that “against such things there is no law.” Any reader will recognize these qualities in the lawyer, though he occasionally seems too pensive, formal and withdrawn to be joyful. But Atticus, if he’s anything, is civilized, one character states. So we might well wonder if Atticus’ sensibilities aren’t so much Scriptural in character as cultural. As a lawyer, named for a learned Roman, he is concerned with the preservation of civilization. 

Then again, Atticus takes the case of Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white woman. He knows he will lose, yet he says that real courage is seeing something through even in the face of certain defeat. Why does he take on this client? “I couldn’t go to church and worship God if I didn’t try to help that man,” he says. He won’t “let this cup pass” from him, quoting Christ.  

But what is the only thing Atticus says is a sin? According to Scout, that would be shooting a mockingbird. In fact, the one defining quality of Atticus Finch seems to be that he won’t render an unqualified judgment on anyone. Just as he does the best he can, he expects others will too. Even when he faces down a mob, he says almost benignly – and a little acidly – that all mobs are “made up of people you know.” 

Christ hovers in the background in Maycomb. Jem tells Dill that the only movies that play in Maycomb are Jesus pictures at the courthouse. Miss Maudie tells Scout she is a Baptist, though not a hard shell one, and she was even accused by the foot-washing Baptists of immorality because of the care she invested in her flowers. At Aunt Alexandra’s Missionary Circle party, we see Scout told how lucky she is to be part of a Christian home in a Christian town. We are also treated to the judgments of the circle ladies, who disdain the benevolence shown the town’s blacks through the Robinson case. Those up North with their expressed openmindedness are dismissed as hypocrites, the same judgment Jesus rendered on the Pharisees. This is interrupted inevitably by the news of Tom’s death. 

The most spiritual moment comes earlier when Scout and Jem accompany Calpurnia one Sunday to First Purchase African M.E. Church in “The Quarters.” In the house of worship, the children encounter an experience mildly familiar to them and yet different. 

The music superintendent leads the congregation in hymns from a single book, speaking the lines first so they can sing. This illustrates the church’s poverty and the illiteracy of its worshippers. The Rev. Sykes gives a sermon on the evils of sin, but points out individuals from the pulpit who are on thin ice spiritually. He even shuts the doors of the church to insure that Tom Robinson will get an adequate love offering, insisting on more giving until the appropriate amount has been reached. Three more weeks of collections will follow for the accused.  

First Purchase is the only church in town, Scout tells us, with a steeple and a bell. Its name is significant, as it was the first thing bought with money earned by emancipated slaves. Paul told the Corinthians that they “were bought at a price” through Christ’s sacrifice. And perhaps because of the humbleness of the setting, this congregation seems a fitting “first” purchase, as they are last in the calculus of the county’s social equations.  

There’s been enough ink spilled in turning Tom Robinson into a Christ figure. He suffers and dies, wrongly accused and easily dismissed by the town’s whites. One way of looking at the construction of the novel is that Harper Lee spends two-thirds of it telling the story of a small town through the lives of one family, then takes one incident of crisis to illustrate how each member of the community responds to or ignores the moral and spiritual imperatives Tom Robinson presents. 

At the novel’s close, it is Atticus who has a crisis – the white trash Tom Ewell is dead after attempting to kill the Finch children in a fit of revenge, but Atticus believes Jem is responsible for the man’s death. Sheriff Tate knows that Boo Radley is the killer, but he insists on the fiction that Ewell fell on his knife. Why? Because it would be “a sin” to subject Boo to the scrutiny that would follow. Heck Tate decides that Ewell’s death is just, because Ewell was responsible for the death of Tom Robinson. “Let the dead bury the dead,” he insists. 

These are the words of Jesus. In Matthew 8:22 and Luke 9:60, Jesus is recorded as saying this to a man who insists he will follow Jesus once he has first buried his father. Jesus is telling the unnamed man the price of being one of his disciples - one must follow Him above all else with no regard for even the closest family connections.

We could believe that Heck Tate is saying that Ewell’s death is somehow atoning for Tom’s death, or perhaps Heck believes, like a disciple, that following his conscience at all costs means doing something that forsakes even his oath as a lawman. Or maybe it’s just an ironic turn of phrase.

Has Atticus’ unshakeable benevolence been changed by his children’s brush with death? It’s possible, just slightly. Only a few pages before, he seems unable to grasp that Ewell would really have killed his children. Tate assures him that some men deserve shooting, even though it would waste a good bullet. 

Atticus’ famous admonition – that you never really understand a person until you climb up in his skin and walk around in it – seems inadequate to this moment. Not every person appears worthy of this respect, and not everyone is understandable. He as much says so at the very end of the novel, when he tells Scout that most people are good “when you finally see them. “ Most, not all. A grudging admission? Maybe. 

Scout earlier tells us that one of the few decorations at First Purchase is an engraved print of William Holman Hunt’s painting “The Light of the World.” It depicts Jesus, crowned and enrobed, knocking on an overgrown door that can only be opened from the inside, as there is no handle. The painting depicts Christ’s outreach to the obstinate mind, and reminds us that not everyone will respond to salvation. 

The incomprehensible aspect of salvation, of course, is that Christ is the ultimate expression of God Himself walking around in our skin. And though there are Bob Ewells and Missionary Circles the world over, Christ felt their purchase was worth it.  

I wrote about "Go Set a Watchman" here. 

  

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

 You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
The Alabama Baptist wrote about the book here.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.
Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 
Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

Read a piece I did for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
Read another interview with the fleegan book blog here.