Leslie Leyland Fields

A quick greeting to those of you who have stopped by from August 11th and 12th Focus on the Family broadcasts on"Shattering the Popular Myths of Parenting"!

I'll be short and sweet here (I AM short, and I'm only sometimes sweet---but I'll try to muster both here and now simultaneously for our mutual good!)

Let me know what you think of the myths, such as, "Parenting is our highest calling" (is it? Or does God call us to something more?), and "Having Children will make you happy and fulfilled" (Is this why we have children--for us? Isn't the Christian life, and parenting, about more than our personal fulfillment?)

But there's much more that goes on here in these pages. This is the spot where my Christianity Today columns and articles will live after their in-print and online postings. I'll hang them up in this closet for your reading pleasure----and for more comments. AND I promise some cool graphics to with the text in a few days. (Have just returned from Central American last night, and am trying to catch up on LIFE.) And there will be other postings as well, since the world continues to be a fascinating, tumultuous place requiring thought, response, laughter, hope, and beauty---all of which you I hope you find here.

I think I'm still being pretty sweet, but I'm wearing out the "short"---so here's the close, from one of my favoite writers who speaks truth about Life, my life a nd yours.

"Listen to your life.See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness. Touch, taste, smell your way into the holy and hidden heart of it, becuase in the last analysis, all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace."

---Frederick Beuchner

May we all keep listening.

In Peace and Hope,

Leslie

Stones to Bread

"The Power and the Glamour"

Searching for Beauty amid Hollywood's beautiful people.
Leslie Leyland Fields | posted 7/25/2011 11:27AM

Related articles and links | [no previous page] 1 of 2 [next page]

I recently returned from Hollywood. I was flown there and back, housed more than comfortably at the Hyatt Regency on Avenue of the Stars. I was there (ahem!) on official Christianity Today business, accepting an award for an article about food and animal welfare. I can still see the plush of the red carpet, the glamour of the designer gowns, the gleam of the chandeliers in the grand ballroom.

Given the deeply theological person I am, and given the sophistication of CT's readers, let me get to essential matters: What did I wear? A black chiffon dress with just one problem: a visible hole near the hem, which I discovered five minutes before show time. I had to wear it-I had brought nothing else. So much for class and beauty.

I slunk into the ballroom late feeling disheveled and underdressed, with barely enough time to fix my face. I found myself surrounded by flocks of unearthly beautiful people. I sat across the dinner table from a bejeweled and tuxedo-clad couple who treated me to stunningly perfect profiles. During the televised ceremonies, a parade of famously gorgeous faces filled the stage and mega-screens mounted beside it. At the after party, in line for exquisite vegan fare, I stood in front of-or, rather, beneath-one of the presenters, a goddess in a swooping gold lamé gown, bronze makeup, and a flawless face. I could hardly stop staring. Among such company, I was, at best, faceless.

And how does such beauty enter a ballroom? Not the ordinary way, I discovered. The celebrities waited behind a 40-foot banner with the Genesis Award logo in front and a red carpet at the base. A gaggle of photographers, some of them perched on ladders, jockeyed for position. The entire area was heavily guarded and cordoned off from riffraff like me. When a celebrity emerged onto the carpet, the ballroom lit up and the shouting began: "Over here! Here! Look this way!" Like a fluid mannequin, she would move into poses, locking her eyes onto every camera she could see, her face following the voices. With lights exploding, faces radiant, hands and voices raised, the mood was exultant. I felt like I was in church.

In such a place, I thought of a C. S. Lewis quote: "The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing ... to find the place where all the beauty came from."

Was this the place? Had I found it?

Like so many others, I am in pursuit of the beautiful. "Beauty will save the world," said the Prince in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot. I almost believe this. I live on an island in Alaska, on a cliff over the ocean, beneath spruce and snow-covered mountains. I follow beauty's trail into landscapes, music, theology, literature, art. Yet as stunning as it all is, somehow I know-as the glittering audience in the ballroom that night knew-it is not enough. We long for more, for beauty as not just idea or place or artifact, but the human-beautiful. Beauty in the flesh, personal, animate. Beauty like us, only better.
We long for beauty as not just idea or place or artifact, but the humanbeautiful. Beauty in the flesh, personal, animate. Beauty like us, only better.

But their beauty, and our need for it, appeared a calamitous burden. So many faces I saw that night had been visibly altered-plumped, sliced, stitched, patched, pulled. "Nothing is in its final form," Lewis wrote in Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold. I marveled at what we have done to the face and body searching for that form. Some stars were so changed by surgeries, I almost couldn't recognize them. Some, like the couple facing me at the table, wore rigid, inexpressive features. The towering goddess in the thick eye shadow could not seem to turn her eyes to look down at me. Their beauty kept them distant, unrecognizable, less human.

For all this disappointment, I know there will always be a shouting crowd at the edge of the red carpet. We won't stop elbowing to see the made-up lovelies on the rug, even knowing they are marred and fake. It gives us hope that we ourselves can be fixed. We all want this: better bodies, better faces, better selves.

I have reason to hope, because there is another red carpet day coming. The screen will roll back, and out from a blinding flash of light, he will emerge. We will see his face and form and gasp: Here is what we have been longing for all our short lives. Here is where all the beauty comes from. And as he comes near, when we look close in his face, we will finally be given our own true faces, like his: holy, human, beautiful.

Copyright © 2011 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

Previous Christianity Today articles on Hollywood and Beauty include:

A Holy Longing | Beauty is the hard-to-define essence that draws people to the gospel. (October 2, 2008)

Pop Culture: Why Hollywood Doesn't Like You | (August 10, 1998)

Is Beauty the Beast? | After I stopped hating good looks, I was able to put beauty in its rightful place. (July 14, 1997)

Previous articles and columns from Leslie Leyland Fields include:

People of the Nook | What Bible smartphone apps tell us about the Book. (May 16, 2011)

A Feast Fit for the King | Returning the growing fields and kitchen table to God. (November 5, 2010)

The Myth of the Perfect Parent | Why the best parenting techniques don't produce Christian children. (January 8, 2010)

Stones to Bread: Leslie Leyland Fields
(originally appeared May, 2011 in Christianity Today)

Related articles and links | 1 of 2

A couple of Sundays ago, my husband, son, and I enacted a mini-drama from a script that has likely played out in every churchgoing family in America. Never mind that we live in Kodiak, Alaska, thousands of miles from the rest of the country. Electronics, we know, are borderless.

During the sermon, with our heads intently bent over our study Bibles, my husband and I glanced down the pew to see our teenage son leaning over his cell phone. Texting during the sermon? My husband, later claiming self-defense, drew his own cell from his holster and began furiously sending texts to the other end of the pew. Teenage son didn't respond, which drew more urgent messages. No response again. By now we were steaming toward a march around the center pews to snatch the offensive item from the perpetrator's hands. Thankfully, "we'll get him later" prevailed.
By now you've already guessed the ending of this vignette. The response to our accusations: wide eyes and sly protestations of innocence before whipping out the cell phone-with the Bible fully downloaded on it. Ah, the snarky pleasure on his face.

It's true: I'm a dying breed. I've been lugging around this doorstop version of the Scriptures partly for its inconvenience. It reminds me of its import and my commitment to the words I so laboriously carry. But since this event, I've downloaded the Bible on my iPhone, and, like millions of others, have begun to use it, which has caused me to wonder: Are we Christians still people of the book? And if we're becoming instead people of the Nook, does it matter?

The moment the new icon appeared on my screen, I scrolled to Habakkuk and read it from start to finish. I chose that particular book for a reason. Just three weeks before, I watched breathlessly as my brother-in-law unrolled the Habakkuk scroll, one of the first pulled from the Dead Sea caves in 1948, on my living room rug. It was at least six feet long, on delicate parchment. I even touched it. Before you report me, or worse yet, doubt me, let me assure you: the scroll is a facsimile. It is a fake so real, with such exacting detail-burn marks, frays in all the right places-it bears a stamp to foil attempts to heist and pass it off as real. (Disclosure: My brother-in-law directs the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation.)
I viewed the scroll with head-spinning confusion: One of the most ancient documents reproduced through the most advanced technologies to look and feel as aged as the original. Its appearance instantly reminded me of the Bible's historicity, the marvel of its faithful passage through the centuries, the significant cost in human lives for its preservation.

Our eagerness to put the Scriptures onto scrolls fi rst, and onto electronic screens later, is more than a love of invention and gadgetry.

I did not consider these things while scanning Scripture on my three-inch screen this week. It's hard for me to remember that these words that now accompany my daily tasks, accessed at my slightest whim, cost anything more than money. It's hard for me to remember that the words in this book, now sharing the same battery and housing as my photos and games, in the same purse compartment as my lipstick and breath mints, have any history behind them at all.
But as I paged through Habakkuk's horrific prophecies of Israel's coming destruction, I came to these final verses: "Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, ... and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation" (3:17-18, ESV, emphasis mine).

My breath stopped. My eyes stung. These 2,500-year-old words delivered through a state-of-the-moment widget spoke to the oldest human problems-the problem of suffering, the problem of trust. I needed these words; a friend had just died. I needed them then, and I will need them again.
This unprecedented ability to carry the words of God almost weightlessly everywhere I go, and to read them on the same device that helps me manage my life, strikes me as utterly theologically fitting. I am reminded of the priesthood of all believers, and the Scriptures' self-definition as the "words of life"-meaning, surely, at least this: words that are to inform and infuse every part of our lives, commingling with breath mints, photos, and phone calls.
We may forget at times the lineage of these words, but our eagerness to put the Scriptures onto scrolls first, and onto electronic screens much later, is more than a love of invention and gadgetry, I believe. It's a timeless need for life-giving truths. It's love for the Book.

Mark Miwerds
May 20, 2011 7:11pm
I need to add to my initial comment that all the digital Bible versions and helps IN NO WAY replace the printed Word that I still refer to just as much. They merely supplement. There is something about having an actual Bible in my hands and from which to read and study that I would never be content to do without. I expect I'll always bring a printed Bible with me to church services, and the many margin notes I have in them would take a lifetime to transcribe into my digital versions (which may be my next and biggest project).

Mark Miwerds
May 20, 2011 6:33pm
I am overjoyed that I can now study a dozen different Bible translations and compare them with a couple of the Greek MSS on my trusty laptop and without having my entire table or living room floor covered by large, open books. Roughly the same applies to handheld devices. For all the bad and evil the Internet offers, I still believe computers and the Net have been a wonderful gift from God to Christians. I have various browsers set up so that one click brings me a selected Bible reader, set to the very place I left off the day before. I find that my knowledge and understanding has increased greatly, and this experience is incredibly edifying, allowing me to better serve others. I really can't say enough about it. My thanks go out to all those Christians who offer the many free and downloadable software programs and the many Bible versions that are also free to all of us. God will reward you in your efforts and service.

John Hale

May 16, 2011 6:25pm
Maybe it's because I use an iPod touch, not a tablet, but I still need a printed Bible to best get to passages during a service. Our pastor goes from passage to passage during his sermon, and it still remains faster to find them with a regular Bible. Where my iPod touch is useful is when I want to find a particular word or phrase, or want to compare different translations at an online parallel Bible. So I don't think Gutenberg has been quite ran off yet by the Nook and its kin, but instead has found a new friend that supplements rather than replaces.

Ben S.
May 16, 2011 5:47pm
So readily available in pocket and purse, searchable down to word and verse - I find it very useful too, but can't help think it will be yet another reason for us not to commit the Word to memory in the only place that it changes our hearts and lives, not to master the entire context of verses, passages, books rather than catchy verses and phrases, not to value and esteem it as the living and ultimately objective Truth that never changes when there are 100's of versions available in every phone. At least that seems to be the trend line ever since Gutenberg began to make it more and more available up to America today.

Dwayne Nelson
May 16, 2011 5:41pm
I am a person of the Book on the Nook. I downloaded a copy of the Zondervan NIV Study Bible to my Nook Color. I am finding that I read the Word more frequently now because I carry my Nook with me everywhere.

Dear Calvin Conference writer! Here are the main quotes from my presentation:  You might be interested as well in "Sentencing Ourselves to Pieces," just below, a brief essay on the necessity of teaching and reading whole books (rather an excerpts--as some are now insisting).

(Apologies to other subscribers! But I hope you'll take a look at these as well. They're fabulous quotes---and I promise to make a real blog entry with these words soon!)

" . .. the job of art IS to generate beauty out of suffering, but in such a way that doesn't prettify or falsify the suffering. What would offend me was if someone looked at a car wreck and called it lovely . . ."

----Alan Shapiro, Interview in The Writer's Chronicle

Sentencing Ourselves to Pieces

I wrote an essay in my sleep last night---about books. Everyone in my dream was holding a book open, tilting their heads, reading  thoughtfully.  Books were not dead, the printed page would live on as a vital and treasured source of knowledge  and experience.

It was a good world. It was a good essay. It was a good dream.  I kept pondering whether I should wake myself up to write it down.  I did not, concluding that my slumbering self would surely remember an essay of this import. Upon waking, however, its particulars and its message of hope eluded me.

I know what happened. I made the mistake of watching  PBS's Frontline "Digital World"  just before bed, and paid particular attention to one interviewee's prognostications about the book:  Marc Prensky, the author of Digital Game-Based Learning,  who describes himself on his website as an "internationally acclaimed speaker, writer, consultant and designer in the critical areas of education and learning. " He says this about books and kids:

You don't have to read them (books) to take in what's in a book. .  . .  If I said to kids, "You  know, you don't have to read all that much. But what I'd really like you to read are these few things and these excerpts, and these parts, and then I'll tell you why you should read them. . . . And no, you don't have to pore through Silas Marner as I did in high school. There are very few books you have to have read."

(I confess I would have been more willing to grant his pain in high school had he named The Brothers Karamazov or Gibbon's 8-volume The Fall of the Roman Empire. Silas Marner clocks in at a mere 200 pages.)

Let me understand this. If a writer's work is truly important and excellent---it earns the exalted status of being pieced and excerpted. And then I wonder, the writers whose work rises to this esteem, how did they arrive at their insights, brilliance, and genius?Through an education built on carefully selected snippets?

We have forgotten why we read, I fear.  We need information, yes. We need knowledge and discernment more.  We need imagination far more.  We need beauty and possibility even more.  Without these, we are sentenced to a single spirit, a single mind, a single life.  This is what I used to say when books lay on every shelf and people at least aspired to read.

We need to read whole books for far more important reasons now. College students can no longer attend  to an entire lecture without facebooking and IM-ing.  We text through our meals, we interrupt our visits for every vibration in our shirt pocket. We finish very little single-minded or single-handed.  We are sentencing ourselves to pieces, dividing our language, our hours, our very selves among multiple media, shrinking our thoughts into bits and tweets, excerpts and texts.  We cannot attend.  We no longer seek silence.  We have lost our ground of being, and cannot remember what holds us together.

Last week I walked into my first graders classroom.  The kids were sprawled on the floor, cross-legged on the carpet, leaning over their desks, all with a book in hand, faces inches from the page, intent.  SSR time, Silent Sustained Reading. For twenty minutes every day. Were these the faces in my dream?

Maybe college classes can do the same. Maybe we can as well. Silent. Sustained. Reading.  Maybe we will remember back to first and second grade, why we read books then, from beginning to end. That slow immersion, that aching marinating in a world of such light, drama and color, whose ending would bring delight, even wonder, and always an appetite for more.  We always longed for more of the book, never less.

"Why are we reading if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?" asks Annie Dillard in The Writing Life. Which can be called as well, "The Reading Life."  Why indeed?  But don't stop with this quote.  Read the whole book. Read as many whole books as you can. Sentence yourself again to beauty and whole-hearted delight.

Training is Not Enough!!

We all want our children to obey us implicitly, to do everything we want them to do. But there's a catch. When the focus of our "training" is primarily about getting our kids to do what we want them to do, we're in for trouble. The lesson is obvious, so I won't beat it to pieces. You can train a killer whale to do flips and tricks on command with yummy bits of fish as rewards, but treats and tricks don't change his heart. Tillie the orca is still an orca. He is still a creature with a wild, whale heart, just what he was created to be.

Our children are too wondrously and fearfully made to be reduced to animal training. They wear the fingerprints of a God who delights in His own creativity, poured out in a nearly infinite variety of faces and personalities, giftings, temperaments, minds, spirits. Don't we know this, how incredibly unique and complex each one of our children is? "Glory be to God for dappled things" Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote exultantly in his famous poem.

Glory be to God for dappled children, I add,