jLife

Hi there,

I know, I know. You thought it was over. Not quite. If you’ve got the time I hope you will read this last email. I also put a shorter version of this story on my blog if you want.

If you read one, neither, or both I just want to take the opportunity to say I hope your studying pays off and you have a wonderful winter break!

V. Apocalypse Resolved

It started with the Nav E-list struggle. After winning, I had to think about what to write – I was at a point where I could generate words for an email once a week and I wanted to add something more. So I snuck a poem in at the end of email four. I was sure people would find it, but to my surprise no one did. So in the next email I put (what I thought) was a simple set of clues: numbers that when you used A=1, B=2, you get: “hidden in last email.” Only a few people figured out the code, and to my knowledge no one has found the poem.

Then I got reckless and hid a message in red letters in the email six, even putting a clue in the subject line. Well, my big brother figured out the puzzles in five and six. And at that point I hit a crisis. I realized my writing was becoming self-centered. I wanted to practically glorify God in my writing.

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“It’s all part of the plan”

The Joker

I really enjoy puzzles, clues, and riddles. And I remember feeling like a kid in a candy shop the summer before “The Dark Knight” came out in theaters. The marketing group responsible for hyping the movie created a series of online challenges meant to challenge the hardcore fans.

I knew that somehow, someday, I would do something like that.

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“Good writers borrow, great writers steal outright.”

Alan Sorkin

I needed some underlying structure to help me write. So I turned to one employed by C.S. Lewis in his seven Narnian Chronicles: The Seven Heavens. I would have at least seven emails, enough to cover me for most of the semester, and it would give me a rich theological framework for writing about Jesus.

Each planet has a name, a metal, a day of the week, specific imagery, and various characteristics associated with it. After reading Planet Narnia and studying the information on the website I was ready to start writing.

Each email would be based on a planet, employing that planet’s imagery and characteristics. The theology would be similar to Lewis’. I would show how each planet is fulfilled in Christ. The Solar Christ, the Lunar Christ, etc.

C.S. Lewis started his series with his favorite planet, as did I. He was born under Jupiter and loved that planet the best. But I was born under Sol, and loved the solar imagery and character. I also decided to do my planets in the proper order and go from Sun to Saturn.

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Email 7: Sol

Sunshine, won’t you be my mother?

Sunshine, come and help me see.

Because Sol is my favorite, it was one of the most natural ones to write about. I employed standard solar imagery of the sun and gold. I used the word enlightenment, and showed people how Christ’s victory over death freed us from being greedy. There’s even a dragon in there! I am however, most proud of the philosopher’s stone reference. That was just meant to be.

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Email 8: Mercury

I gotta go faster, keep up the pace

Just to stay in the human race

Though Sol is my favorite, I wish I could be more Mercurial. Mercury is all about speed, so of course I mentioned the Flash. I talked about how to be witty, using Christ as my guide. Mentions of twins, quicksilver, and thievery also made it.

That being said, that email was the hardest to write. I don’t know why.

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Email 9: Venus

I’ve got a girl

She tastes like rain on my tongue

Lewis struggled to write about how Jesus could be Venereal. And the best I could do were some ramblings about how the feminine ideal pointed men to God. It was honest, and I’m glad I wrote it, but my theology about women needed some more work – a reflection of my inexperience with the feminine.

I started to get cocky, and strongly hinted at copper and Venus itself in the introduciton. Notice also the poetry, the poem I selected, laughter, warm wetness, and sexuality.

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Email 10: Luna

The Moon is a magnet

Everyone’s at it

When I set my Lunar email to D for editing, she said it was her favorite so far. Luna was where I got really excited and stuck in a whole lot of clues and false leads. I wrote the main part in one night, way before it was time to send, so I used all that free time to cook up ways to confuse people.

I hid “Marc Spector” in there as a red herring. I was hoping that everyone would think I was simply up to my old tricks. I deliberately misquoted Tolkein and used silver instead of gold. And that bit about Argentina was a fluke. I learned about the etymology of the name in Wines class and decided to throw it in. Confusion, hunters, black and white horses, and water all come into play.

Also, there is a divider in the text comprised of 30 o’s. Those are meant to reference the lunar cycle and divide the email between the uncertain below Luna, and the perfect, unchanging above.

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Email 11: Mars

There’s War in my blood

Love ain’t the tune in my lungs

I came into Senior year with a great deal of frustration with the happy-sappy attitude I saw in many of my peers. But it took the arrival of Dick Keyes, and his Sunday School lesson about sentimentality for me to understand that this was what I had blogged about months earlier. Marrying an assault on Sentimentality with Mars was a match made in heaven. Words poured out of me for this one, and I had to seriously limit how much I wrote.

This email is all about martial characteristics: becoming hard, disciplined, waging war, chivalry, etc. And please note the use of iron, Tuesday (In the blog version), and trees.

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Email 12: Jupiter

Oh, who would ever wanna be King?

Writing about Lewis’ favorite planet was going to be tricky. Jupiter didn’t come naturally to me, and I knew I wanted to do it right. In the end I settled for doing less rather than more. There’s all the right talk about royalty, sacrifice, and jollity in there. Oh, and that bit about Seneca and Cayuga? The Jupiter part of the Planet Walk is located there!

In the spirit of Lewis I hid the key to the whole puzzle in this email. But I wouldn’t say anything about it until the next week.

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Email 13: Saturn

There will be sorrow
There will be sorrow
There will be sorrow no more

I looked forward to writing about Saturn from the very beginning because to me, the pain and suffering of life have been the most real experiences and most resonant places inside of me. Saturn is a “bad planet,” but when taken aright he does lead to insight that is hard to get in other ways.

The metal Lead shows up in my email, as does Father Time, and the phrase “ringed by ice” refers to the Saturn’s rings.

At the end I used the word “Apocalypse” because it means both the end of the world and “revelation.” The end of that email started the chain of clues that would lead my sharper readers to the whole puzzle.

To solve the puzzle, you will need to highlight the text to discover the hidden text. That points to an email address I cc’ed which tells you to search for more whited-out text in email 12. In email twelve is a link (spelled backwards) that points to a video on my old blog. The video links each email with each planet, and then points the person to <www.planetnarnia.com>

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VI. Confession

So that just leaves us with the question of why. I suppose I write this stuff because I wish someone had done that for me. I am constantly looking for hidden layers and meanings in things. So to me, most Christian writing, music, or teaching is either very simple or very dull. I wanted something engaging, mysterious, and deep. No one else was doing it, so I decided it was my duty to fill the void.

I was very fortunate to have grown up in the family that I did. My parents are two of the smartest people I know, and they raised me on a diet of theology and philosophy. I went to a Bible School in Austria where I got a primer on theology and the “big story” of the Bible. So when I arrived at college I was ready to play with the big dogs.

But there were very few big dogs. KJ at Chesterton House provided good conversation, but he didn’t have time to mentor me and provide intellectual camaraderie. And let’s face it, those who are fixated upon research and knowledge often cannot escape the drive to continue learning.  These types often get jobs in labs or as researchers, far from being campus ministers and understandably so.

So these emails are for me, for God, and for the Christians who show up on campus and grow tired of playing “pick the duck” on bible study handouts with the key points in all caps (I hate all caps).

I believe in the God of Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Augustine. I believe that the gospel is far more subtle and interesting than most of us have been taught. One preacher I heard said Paul used a word like “polypoiblos” (which means multi-faceted), to describe how complex and interesting the gospel is. I really hoped to discover that as I wrote.
What really makes me sad is to see clouds of ignorance and anti-intellectualism cloud the evangelical world today. We could really use some of Sol’s light to pierce through the darkness and revive the stagnant and irrelevant world of Christian thought.

I was born on August 16, under the influence of Sol and I am a champion of Fortuna Minor. Long live the eye of the universe! Long live Jesus the Philosopher-King!

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A New Beginning

So now what? Well, I’ve done a lot of writing and thinking over the past semester. I think it’s time for a long-overdue vacation. I’ll be in Honduras during January learning about what social justice work will look like in the future.

When I get back it’ll be time to see how the poll turned out. See you then!