The Molten Soul: Dangers and Opportunities in Religious Conversion
By the Rev. Gray Temple
Church Publishing, 2000
Book Review by Scott MacDougall

Gray Temple is rector of St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta. He is a self-identified liberal. And he is also a Pentecostal. This “double identity” is one he joyfully embraces, as it gives him an opportunity to put into fruitful conversation two worlds often thought to be at odds. The unique perspective this has afforded him is inscribed on every page of his book.

The Molten Soul is intended to be a guide for keeping one’s soul “molten,” by which Temple means pliable, flexible, alive to God and open to the Spirit, as opposed to “congealed” in the rigidity of empty religiosity. Speaking primarily to those at the conservative end of the spectrum, Temple lays out a plan for maintaining one’s moltenness by recognizing and avoiding traps hidden in conversion; by replacing sterile “religion” with a “righteousness” founded on a strong personal relationship with God the Father; by overcoming resistance to growth; by releasing the Bible from the pressure to be an inerrant and ultimate authority; by placing the incarnation and theories of atonement in the proper theological and spiritual contexts; and by living in Spirit-filled communities.

By design a book for non-academic laity, The Molten Soul is written in an accessible, conversational style, which makes its untranslated Latin and German passages not only annoying but puzzling. On matters such as the judgment of God and the importance and theological implications of seeing Jesus as truly human, Temple offers insights that are clear-headed and helpful. His book is punctuated with useful bits of axiomatic wisdom, such as this conclusion: “Being human is a badge of honor. It is the necessary condition for receiving God’s fullest self-revelation.”

Though reading The Molten Soul is a worthwhile experience, for many it is not likely to be a comfortable one. In Temple’s attempt to champion his liberal views (though in a “post-conversion” light) and simultaneously affirm the value of conservative approaches to faith (though not without significant critique), he has written a book with plenty in it to challenge any reader, liberal or conservative. Of those I struggled with personally, I will describe two.

The first is the way in which Temple discusses Pentecostalism as mysticism. He writes that “mysticism replaces religion,” a provocative way of saying that a direct encounter with God explodes empty and routine religiosity, making the frozen sap of the soul run freely and productively. Temple’s view is that the value of Pentecostalism lies in its offer of a direct experience of God. In this respect, he can claim that Pentecostal spirituality is mystical, but he goes on to qualify this by writing that Pentecostalism is mystical in a “democratic” sense — he calls it “mysticism for the rest of us” while other approaches to mysticism are considered “elite” or “aristocratic.”

Though a number of mystics have been plebeians and peasants, mystics are often thought of as spiritual aristocrats. What Temple appears to object to about “traditional” forms of mysticism is their reflective or learned character. This is what makes them “elitist,” in contrast to the spontaneity of a Pentecostal experience. Temple commends “user-friendly” methods of access over those demanding a massive dedication of time and effort to study. But if one lacks the intellectual and spiritual tools needed to understand what is encountered in experiencing the divine, one will be lost. The intellectual and spiritual tools that Temple downplays as unnecessary in this context are, in fact, critically important. In all likelihood, Temple would agree: in his book he laments and tries to redress a Pentecostal tendency toward anti-intellectualism. Even so, his arguments above would seem to have the unintended consequence of supporting it.

The second broad challenge The Molten Soul poses for me is Temple’s general tendency toward reductionism in his approach — a propensity for expressing extremely complex ideas and phenomena in over-simplified or schematic ways. In his assessment of general human nature — spiritual and otherwise — much of Temple’s perspective is indebted to the work of Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist who located the root of all human behaviors in a universal fear of death. In addition, as part of his discussion of spiritual development, Temple draws on James Fowler’s work on the stages of faith. Such frameworks can be illuminating, but here they tend to be applied in very schematic, perhaps reductionist, ways. Can all human proclivities really be reduced to a fear of death? Can people really be slotted into stages of spiritual growth as easily as Fowler and Temple contend? These kinds of theories and frameworks ought to be suggestive rather than descriptive, indicative rather than prescriptive. As the periodic overhauling of psychoanalytic theory has shown, no overarching hypothesis on the nature of the human condition can ever be universally true. Some phenomena will always resist being defined by it. Likewise, no person fits neatly into any graduated model of human development. In the case of Fowler’s stages of faith, for instance, various aspects of a person’s spiritual life may have developed more rapidly or slowly than others. Human psyches and souls are more fluid and complex than rigid formulations like Becker’s and Fowler’s would have us be, and this lack of nuance mars Temple’s argument. It is a pity that this book about remaining molten starts to congeal a bit in its reductionism.

Whatever the particular challenges or questions The Molten Soul raises in a reader, this is a book that accurately describes the bondage into which one can easily fall after conversion if one does not stay molten, such as adherence to stringent rules or iron-clad dogma or indulgence in moralizing. Temple shows how we become destructive to ourselves and others in this state, how the unhealthy psychic and behavioral habits and pathologies we have before conversion merely take on a “holy” garb after conversion if the roots of those problems are left untreated. If we become trapped in our own morality or in other people’s ideas of what it means to be “religious,” our spiritual life solidifies into something moribund, thereby becoming destructive instead of life-giving. For Christians of all stripes, Temple’s exhortation in The Molten Soul to keep growing and to remain open and vulnerable to the Spirit is quite valuable.

House of Sand and Fog
Currently in limited release
Rated R, 2 hours, 6 minutes
Movie Review by Anne Nelson

House of Sand and Fog takes the viewer into the heart of cultural alienation. The two principal characters are both outcasts from their own society. Kathy Lazaro, played by Jennifer Connelly, is a young woman cut off from her family and struggling to overcome drug addiction. Massoud Behrani, played by Ben Kingsley, is an exile from Iran, a colonel from the former Shah’s army. Both actors give extraordinary performances portraying characters who have been set adrift in a California landscape by the tides of their personal histories. For each of them, the symbol of security is a home, or more specifically, a house — the modest bungalow Kathy has owned since she inherited it from her father. But her own dysfunction has led her to ignore the legal papers that mistakenly signaled her eviction, and set a relentless bureaucratic process in motion for her dispossession. By the time she realizes what has happened, she’s on the street and Behrani, the exile, has acquired the house as a bargain, which he badly needs as a foothold to material security in his adopted land. Both characters desperately need this piece of property. Both are in the right, and both, out of pride and anger, are in the wrong, committing terrible mistakes in pursuing their private justice — and leading to a situation that epitomizes the classic definition of tragedy.

The film captures the anomie of exile with uncanny precision — due, perhaps, to the experience of director and screenwriter Vadim Perelman, who fled the former Soviet Union as a child and lived on the streets of alien cities before he finally established himself as a commercial director in Los Angeles. Behrani, the former Iranian colonel, is a proud man who is willing to work round the clock at menial jobs to support his family and maintain appearances, yet finds it impossible to get ahead, until Kathy’s house offers an alluring prospect of profit.

The film’s strongest note of humanity is sounded by Behrani’s wife Nadi, played by the extraordinary Iranian actress Shohreh Aghdashloo. Much of the film is in Farsi, with subtitles. Nadi is the beating heart of the family, desperately trying to convince her husband that the family itself is the treasure in question, not its material standing. She is confined to her home, protected yet imprisoned, by the traditional role of women in her culture and by her inability to speak English. Yet only Nadi is able to reach out in compassion to both parties of the conflict, but in doing so, she and her young son become their joint victims.

Director Perelman adapted House of Sand and Fog from a novel by Andre Dubus III. The screenplay, compelling in many scenes, suffers from an overly long and complicated denouement, in which too many twists — only some of them credible — accompany the characters on their inevitable downward spiral. But like every important film, House of Sand and Fog offers us a glimpse into an unknown world — in this case, the plangent dreams of the millions of immigrants who live among us. They may function with competence and determination in this country, but beneath the surface, a part of their souls must be stranded in the past, and their aspirations necessarily arise out of a conflicted context, into an uncertain future.

JESUS AND NONVIOLENCE: A THIRD WAY
By Walter Wink
Fortress Press, 2003
119 pages, $6
Book Review by Scott MacDougall

This slim volume from Fortress Press’ Facets series offers readers an introduction to Walter Wink’s approach to the theory and practice of nonviolence. Wink’s book provides tantalizing statistics on the success of nonviolent efforts to effect social and political change, achievements that, he says, world leaders, media moguls and history books are content to ignore.

Though nonviolent movements are likely to take longer to achieve their goals, Wink offers evidence that they result in a more stable society and take far less of a toll on human life than violent conflicts. Not even “just war,” in the end, makes any sense. “No war today,” he writes, “could be called just, given the inevitable level of casualties and atrocities” (54).

Though the world at large is likely to continue replaying cycles of violence and oppression, Wink believes this is not an option for Christians: nonviolence as a mode of being is the lifestyle modeled by Jesus himself. This is the “third way,” an alternative to fight or flight responses that we can choose in the face of a threat. According to Wink, it is the only sort of response fitting for the Christian. There are practical factors in this, but more important are the ethical considerations that, as Christians, we must take into account. Wink believes that the nonviolence of Jesus provides a way for us to truly love our enemies into repentance, transform human relationships and the human actors in those relationships into those that more closely resemble the form they will take in the “Reign of God” (72), effect change without sliding into lawlessness and chaos, demand that we seek and root out the violence in ourselves, and — because the nonviolent response demands a willingness to suffer and even to die — walk in the way of the cross.

The nonviolence of Jesus, the third way, displays a range of characteristics. It identifies creative responses to violence in which the “weaker” one asserts his or her humanity and takes the moral high ground. Ridicule and humor are powerful weapons, tools that expose the injustice of the situation for what it is. The goal is to shame the oppressor into repentance by making the powerful see the oppressed in a new light. Throughout, one must be willing to suffer, to transgress laws and rules, and to endure the penalties for doing so. Wink provides interpretations of biblical passages that illustrate how this looks and the way it functions.

Nonviolence is never to be a mask for cowardice — it is a conscious choice one makes when the possibility of violent reaction is just as likely as any other response. In addition, nonviolence ought never to be the means for preserving one’s righteousness — one must be willing to assume even the guilt of murder to prevent the suffering of others, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer was in plotting to take Hitler’s life. Wink’s approach to nonviolence is not simplistic or categorical. It is nuanced and complex on the one hand, and avoids falling into senseless relativism on the other.

Each of the six chapters of this small book are concluded by a series of questions for discussion, making this book a good candidate for use in an adult education class. The topic, for obvious reasons, could not be more timely.

Mudhouse sabbath
By Lauren F. Winner
Paraclete Press, 2003
176 pages, $13.95
Book Review by the Rev. Dr. Clair McPherson

I have long been convinced that the best approach to other faiths is to learn from them rather than to argue with them. This seems especially apt in terms of liturgy, ethics, and spirituality. Though we may safeguard our own share of the truth, what possible problem could there be in borrowing the disciplines, or the moral insights, or the hymns of another vision? As the fourth Gospel put it, the Spirit blows wherever.

In that spirit, I welcome Lauren Winner’s recent extended meditation in prose, Mudhouse Sabbath. This is a wry, gentle, but probing challenge for Christians, and especially for Episcopalians: to consider the Jewish theological lifestyle, and face the fact that, in terms of comprehensive religious living, it puts most of us to shame.

She starts with the most obvious: the Sabbath. Most Christians have been taught to think that Sunday is “our Sabbath,” but what we generally practice is scarcely even a shadow of real Shabbat observance. We “go to church,” maybe visit the sick — and that’s about it. As Winner puts it, our Sundays really are more a matter of “an afternoon off.” The Sabbath, as observant Jews keep it, is by contrast enormous, something holy: “which means, literally, ‘set apart.’ ” For too many of us, it means set apart for the watching of sports, the taking of naps, the attending of cinema.

She goes on to consider Jewish practices involving food, hospitality, mourning, the care of the body, fasting, candle-lighting — the little things and the critical things that make up the glue that holds human life together. Observant Jews weave these things into their lifestyle; most Christians ignore them.

Some Christians, in fact scorn them. Taught from infancy that religious practices are not “necessary for salvation,” many Christians seem to think that such acts are therefore some sort of impediment to it. Winner helpfully addresses this at the outset:

Spiritual practices don’t justify us. They don’t save us. Rather, they refine our Christian walk. The spiritual disciplines — such as regular prayer, and fasting, and tithing, and attentiveness to our bodies — can form us as Christians throughout our lives. Are we obligated to observe these disciplines? Not precisely, no. Will they get us into heaven? They will not. (xii)

Justification, we know, is on another level entirely. But these practices are supposed to be part of our joyful and thankful response to justification. They are the happy things we can do — not to “get saved,” but because we have been granted salvation.

All this for me is something rather personal. I grew up as a Christian in a Jewish community; Winner is herself a Jew who became a Christian. I treasure her words: they remind me of my childhood, when I saw what a full theological lifestyle looked like. Most of my year was secular, most of my life worldly and most of my thought agnostic. Not the people next door: every season was Jewish, all business was referred to Scripture and every day was one the Lord had made. It was only years later that I realized that we Christians could make the same claim, live the same way and ascribe to the Lord the honor due his name. Winner gives us just that nudge in the right direction.

Christ On Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles our Judgement
By the Most Rev. and Rt. Hon. Rowan Williams
Eerdmans Publishing, 2000
Book Review by Neva Rae Fox

An excellent resource for Lenten study groups is this small volume by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. Although the book was published a few years ago, it has striking relevancy to our struggles and disputes of today. Employing, and explaining, the biblical accounts of Jesus’ trial as the entryway to deeper insight, the Archbishop applies the lessons learned to many issues we confront. The subtitle captures Williams’ intent — to show us how much more we need to learn and how essential our posture of openness to new insights is to true growth. An extremely valuable series of questions follows each chapter to challenge our complacency and certainty. Individuals and groups will benefit from this small work because we have a wise Archbishop whose teaching is both deeply profound and constructively provocative.

We Thank You, God, For these: Blessings and Prayers for Family Pets
By Anthony Chiffolo and the Rev. Rayner Hesse
Paulist Press, 2003
Book Review by Peg Helmholz

The very best thing about this book is that, without being cute or patronizing, it acknowledges the complete range of emotions we share with our pets — from unspeakably silly to deeply sad, with all that juicy everyday love in between. Clearly, the authors, the Rev. Rayner Hesse and Anthony Chiffolo, know that there’s nothing silly about the deep spiritual attachment many of us are blessed to have with the animals — and they aren’t all dogs and cats — who share our lives. They dignify those relationships with this collection of prayers, liturgies, poetry and stories from a wide variety of sources. The wisdom with which the authors treat the subjects of illness and death of pets would alone make this a worthwhile book, but it’s ultimately a book of thanksgiving, and much of it is very funny. It would make a wonderful gift for your vet, your cat sitter or your ferret.