I, geekrevThe closest you want to get to looking inside the mind of Shawn Coons.

I started blogging Shane Claiborne’s book “The Irresistible Revolution.”  It’s a great book that is very challenging, and my hope was that by blogging it I could begin to figure out how to live the gospel that it witnesses to.  But I haven’t kept up with this endeavor and I don’t think I’m going to continue with it.

As much as I wish it was true, blogging and talking about Shane’s book isn’t going to help me live it.  In fact, it just reminds me how sucky I am at living like an ordinary radical. This doesn’t mean I’m giving up wrestling with what’s in the book, or trying to figure out how to live more faithfully.  It just means that I don’t want to use writing about living as Jesus did, as an excuse or substitute to actually living like Jesus did.

Dave tagged me.

(1) Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. No cheating!
(2) Turn to page 123.
(3) Find the first 5 sentences.
(4) Post the next 3 sentences.
(5) Tag 5 people.

From page 123 of Dim Sum, Bagels and Grits: A Source Book for Multicultural Families.

“By chance, Roberta found a terrific shared childcare arrangement close to home with a Mandarin-speaking nanny who was alrady looking after two older girls who had also been adopted from China.  Although Roberta had not planned to focus on Juliette’s Mandarin, she realized that if Juliette was exposed to Mandarin every day, she would proabably keep it, even if Roberta couldn’t help her speak the language at home.  When the two older girls entered full-day kindergarten and the caregiver found other employment, Roberta enrolled her daughter at a day-care program in New York City’s Chinatown, in a Mandarin-speaking classroom.”

I tag Bruce, Sean, Jim, Carol and Ernest.

Jim tagged me in this book meme a week or more ago. I’ve been woefully swamped with a bunch of stuff so I’m just now getting to it. I promise to blog more after I poke my head out of this virtual pile of tasks/projects that include/have included:

• A weekend at home with my three-year old son while Mom led a fabulously successful retreat for 40 women from our church.
• Getting together the summer youth mission trip.
• Planning an upcoming prayer labyrinth youth lock-in.
• An idea for a new World of Warcraft podcast.
• Planning our young adult retreat.
• Writing a proposal for a new worship service.
• My Dad is in town for his every other month poking and prodding at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.
• Trying to pull my weight as social network coordinator for Bruce’s GA Moderator campaign.
• Foolishly thinking that I can put together the beginnings of the next 7% Event for young PC(USA) clergy.

So, much like Prince Humperdink - I’m swamped. So on to the book meme.

1. One book that changed your life:
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume 1 (1929-1964). Geeky , but true. I think it was this book that started my love of sci-fi and later fantasy books. I’m sure I’ve read more sc-fi/fantasy books than any other type of book. And I’m sure it has shaped how I think and what I do and enjoy to a large degree.

2. One book you’ve read more than once:
I’ve reread a lot of sci-fi/fantasy books and series. But I’m having a hard time thinking of a book of a different type that I’ve reread. The only one that comes to mind (although I am sure there are others) is Cliff Stoll’s the Cuckoo’s Egg, which was Cliff’s account of tracking a computer hacker across the internet. I read it in college right after I had got my first Unix account and was exploring the internet. This was before I knew it was called the internet, before anyone had heard of email, and when the web was all text.

3. One book you’d want on a desert island:
Lots of people cheat on this one and name a series of books. If I could do that then I’d pick Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, even if it is unfinished and Jordan passed away a couple of months ago. If I have to pick just one book, maybe something massive like History of the World.

4. Two books that made you laugh:
A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

5. One book that made you cry:
Can’t think of one. A couple of movies, but no books.

6. One book you wish had been written:
Anything more from Julian May’s Pliocene Exile series.

7. One book you wish had never been written:
Anything by Jane Austen.

8. One book you’re currently reading:
The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman, which is the third book in the Golden Compass series. I’m not sure what all the fuss is about. It’s an OK story but it ain’t great. I actually started the Golden Compass this past sumer before all the hubbub, and stopped it because it was kind of boring. The plot of the books is interesting, but the writing and characters leave me dry.

9. One book you’ve been meaning to read:
Everything Must Change by Brian McLaren. I’m sure it’s got great stuff in it about the church, and Christianity and the changing world around us, but I’m a little turned off by all the rockstar-ness surrounding the book and Brian McLaren. Nothing personal against him, but it just hasn’t moved me to read the book yet.

I’m blogging through Shane Claiborne’s book The Irresistible Revolution.  You can check out my first post about the book here. I’m doing this in an attempt to:

• figure out what the irresistible revolution means for me and what I am going to do with it.
• share this book with others.
• create something (conversation/action/community) around the ideas that Shane presents.

Chapter 1 is entitled “When Christianity Was Still Safe” and in it Shane gives us some of his story growing up as a popular, trendy, youth group-going Christian. “Church was a place where there were cute girls, free junk food, and cheap snowboarding trips…quirky songs and velcro walls.” At that point he was born again…and again and again on a yearly basis at a Christian youth festival - “it was so good the first time…I must have gotten born again six or eight times, and it was great every time. (I highly recommend it).”

Out of this Shane develops a common illness to Western Christianity, what he calls “spiritual bulimia.” Devouring all sorts of stuff - devotions, Christian T-shirts, Christian music, and Christian books, but never really digesting it before he vomited it up to friends and fellow Christians. In his words, “I was marked by an overconsumptive but malnourished spirituality.” Shane was a part of varied Christian churches in high school and college - from non-denominational Charismatic to traditional Methodist, but he found them all lacking. I am part of a mainline Protestant denomination, so I found what he said about his Methodist church hitting a little too close to home.

“A solemn deadness haunted the place. I learned in confirmation classes about the fiery beginnings of the Methodist Church and its signature symbol of the cross wrapped in the flame of the Spirit. Where had the fire gone? I learned about John Wesley, who said that if the didn’t kick him out of town after he spoke, he wondered if he had really preached the gospel. I remember Wesley’s old saying, ‘If I should die with more than ten pounds, may every man call me a liar and a thief,’ for he would have betrayed the gospel. Then I watched as one of the Methodist congregations I attended built a $120,000 stained-glass window.”*

But then Jesus wrecked Shane’s life.

“I know there are people out there who say, ‘My life was such a mess…and then I met Jesus and my whole life came together.’ God bless those people. But me, I had it together. I used to be cool. And then I met Jesus and he wrecked my life. The more I read the gospel, the more it messed me up, turning everything I believed in, valued, and hoped for upside-down. I am still recovering from my conversion.”

Shane went to school at Eastern College (where my good friends from Pittsburgh, Dave and Todd, also went.) While he was there he started hanging out with some other students who would routinely go into Philadelphia to hang out with their “homeless friends.” Shane started doing this regularly. He got over his nervousness about the dangerous city, and he became friends with the incredible people he met on the streets. Then, after one of Shane’s friends from school was reading Mother Theresa, they decided to begin sleeping on the street with their homeless friends.

Shane says that that’s when the Bible came alive, he saw miracles, angels, demons and Scripture being lived right before his eyes. And Shane came to know people in poverty in a way that very few of us comfortable folks ever will. There was a homeless woman who struggled to get a meal from a late-night food van so she could bring it to an elderly woman “who can’t fight for a meal.” A homeless man who put a pack of cigarettes in the offering plate because he had no money.

A blind street musician who had Lysol sprayed in her eyes as a “practical joke.” After that she was told, “There are a lot of bad folks in the world.” To which she responded, “Oh, but there are a lot of good ones too. And the bad ones make you, the good ones, seem even sweeter.” There was a seven year old girl who was homeless and who wanted to own a grocery store when she grew up so that she could give out food to hungry people.

Shane concludes the chapter with these words.

“Mother Theresa used to say, ‘In the poor we meet Jesus in his most distressing disguises.’ Now I knew what she meant…I learned more about God from the tears of homeless mothers than any systematic theology ever taught me.”

Question for thought/discussion: When do you spend time with the poor - not serving them but knowing them? When does your church?

*The church I serve isn’t Methodist, but I hate to think of what Wesley would think of our upcoming two million dollar pipe organ.

Shane Claiborne gets it. Not only does he get it, he lives it. Which puts someone like me to shame. Because I want it get it, and sometimes I say I get it, but I really don’t live it. What is “it?” “It” is how we are called to live and be as Christians. It is being an ordinary radical.

Shane* has written a book called The Irresistible Revolution and I’ve decided to blog the book chapter by chapter. I’m doing this partially as a review but more for myself. It is such an incredible book, that I need to wrestle with it some more. Hopefully, this isn’t the kind of book that you just read. It’s the kind of book that you do. So blogging the book is going to be a part of my discernment of where to go from here. Practically speaking this means that I’ll be writing for me as much (if not more) than for you. So if the writing seems choppy or doesn’t flow well, just imagine that you are reading some notes I scribbled on a piece of paper, rather than a two-page, typed, double-spaced book report for freshmen Rhetoric.

Let’s start with Shane’s words from the Introduction to the book.

“My activist friends call me conservative, and my religious friends call me liberal. What I often get branded is “radical.” I’ve never really minded that, for as my urban-farming friends remind me, the word radical itself means root. It’s from the Latin word radix, which, just like a rad-ish, has to do with getting to the root of things. But radical is not something reserved for saints and martyrs, which is why I like to complement it with ordinary. Ordinary does not mean normal…So this is a book for ordinary radicals, not for saints who think they have a monopoly on radical and not for normal people who are satisfied with the way things are.” [p. 20]

The life of an ordinary radical as described and lived by Shane is a foolish life, a life of “interdependence and sacrificial sharing” as opposed to the “mirage of independence and materialism.” Shane lives in an intentional community (shared living space, resources, chores, etc.) in a poorer neighborhood in Philadelphia. He makes his own clothes and is giving away any money he makes from this book. He hangs out with homeless people and has spent time with lepers in Calcutta and Iraqi citizens in the warzone. He is trying to show a different way to those of us who fall into the categories of “unbelieving activists” or “inactive believers.”

Stories are at the heart of this book. Shane uses stories because they compel people in a way that doctrine and ideology don’t (even when they are true). Jesus used lots of stories, maybe because they disarm people and loosen people up. Shane uses mainly his own stories not to hold himself forth as a shining example but because the stories of his life may “exemplify and caricature the struggles and ironies that are close to many of our hearts.”

At the end of the Introduction, Shane offers this hope: “The time has come for a new kind of conversation, a new kind of Christianity, a new kind of revolution.”

I leave you with this question for thought/discussion: Are you a radical? Is the church radical?

*I’m going to refer to Shane Claiborne by his first name as opposed to the more common practice of using the last name. I don’t know Shane, but he just seems like the kind of guy that would want that. And chances are at some point I will type Shawn instead of Shane. I’ve done it a number of times already but have caught and corrected it, but eventually I’ll miss one or two.

1) My two year old son, Ben, and I were doing some errands the other day. While we were driving around he told me that “D is for dismal dungeon.” This is a line from the ABCs of Halloween book we’ve been reading. Call me a geek, but as soon as I heard the word dungeon come out of his mouth I swelled with pride. My son knows the word “dungeon”, as in Dungeons and Dragons! The dungeon is one of the basic concepts of all sorts of gaming goodness! I am a dedicated fantasy role-play gamer from way back when, and I can’t wait to introduce Ben to all sorts of geek games.

2) And speaking of geek games.  I’ve moved on from World of Warcraft and City of Heroes for the moment and am playing Lord of the Rings Online.  And in order to enhance my gameplay, I’ve started reading the LoTR trilogy again.  I’ve read the Hobbit but I’ve never actually read the trilogy.  I started it a couple of times but stopped reading out of boredom.  I know that I lose major geek cred for this, especially since Middle Earth is kind of the building blocks of Dungeons and Dragons and all sorts of fantasy gaming, books, movies, etc.  Maybe this time I’ll get through it.

It’s 1:13 a.m. and I just got back from Borders with two copies of Deathly Hallows. I’m bad with numbers but I would guess there were at least 500 people there, probably more. I saw an occupancy sign that said that know more than 413 people should be in the building. Ooops. It was a younger crowd, a lot of high school kids. A number of families with junior high or grade school kids. And then the occasional loner adult like me.

I managed to get through the first 90 pages off of the bootleg photos of the book, and I’m going to read one more chapter before I go to bed. Then I’ll try my best to keep up with Carrie. Even though I have a head start she reads faster than me so will probably beat me through the book. Others have offered their predictions, so here are mine.

1. Snape is good. Or at least not on Voldemort’s side.

2. Harry wins.

3. Um…there’s some Hallows and they are Deathly…

Ok, so I don’t really have any predictions. Sorry, I’m not really that much of a Potter geek. I like the books, but as far as fantasy goes, there’s a lot better stuff out there. :)

I live in fear of finding out how the final Harry Potter book ends before I read it. I found out the ending of book six before reading it and I still enjoyed the book, but I hate knowing spoilers. Carrie is worried about this too. So we had developed a plan that we thought would keep us safe. Friday night I head to Barnes and Nobles where we have two copies of the book reserved. I wear headphones with my IPod blaring loud music so that I can’t hear anyone revealing anything I don’t want to know.

For the rest of the weekend Carrie and I take turns watching Ben while the other person reads. Absolutely no internet. I know there are going to be hundreds of bottom feeders out there on web forums, World of Warcraft, Digg, and other websites trying their hardest to put the book’s ending in front of unsuspecting readers.

Sounds like a good plan, right? Well, I just read that someone has supposedly taken an advanced copy of the book, photographed every page and made a torrent of it. If it’s true (I’m downloading it right now) then that means the internet will be spoilerville by the end of the day. I may have to start my blackout sooner then I’d like. Of course if it is true then I can also start reading it sooner too, assuming the file is legible enough.

I’ll update you after the file downloads.

UPDATE: Ok, I’ve downloaded it and it’s true.  I’ll include a picture of page 1 below (you are warned).  It sucks because the quality of the photos is readable but not in a relaxing manner.  I’m sure Carrie and I will begin to read it this way but we’ll be anxious to get the books.

So, that means that I’m checking out of the intertubes until I finish the book.  I may check email and a few trusted websites.  But anything internet related that allows any mouth breather to send information my way won’t be seen by me until 900 pages from now.

SPOLIER: PICTURE OF PAGE 1 BELOW (CLICK FOR BIGGER IMAGE)

When I was in grade school (maybe junior high) I remember going to a Iowa Hawkeye basketball game with my Mom.  I don’t really remember the game so much as I remember my Mom getting annoyed at me for reading a book while the game was being played.

I’ve enjoyed reading books for a long time.  Two of my favorites in grade school were Encyclopedia Brown and The White Mountains.  The White Mountains was probably the first series I ever read, and probably the first science fiction I ever read, although I did buy a sci-fi anthology for $.25 from the library around that time too.

For decades I have read most nights before I go to bed.  When I was single and without child I would read every night without fail.  It was the last thing I did before sleep, and I’d look forward to it each evening.  I knew that no matter what happened during the day I would be able to lie down in my comfy bed, and relax my body and mind for 30-60 minutes each night before falling asleep.

Mainly my pleasure reading has been sci-fi and fantasy, almost exclusively.  I’ve tried a few other genres, but they just don’t do it for me.  So if it doesn’t have lasers, robots, dragons, swords, time travel or spaceships - chances are, I haven’t read it.   My all time favorite is The Saga of the Pliocene Exiles by Julian May.  I don’t know how many times I have read these books and the related series.

Currently I am on a quest for another good series to get sucked into.   There are several that I am in the middle of but the authors haven’t finished writing all the books.  A Song of Fire and Ice (which supposedly is being turned into an HBO series), The Wheel of Time (whose author, Robert Jordan, is trying to write the final book while struggling with terminal illness), and of course Harry Potter (closure coming soon - Snape is good!).

In my quest for a new series I’ve decided to go the fantasy route since those are the series that suck me in the most.  So I Googled “best fantasy series” and from the links I found I came up with the following ideas.

I’ve not kept up with the latest couple Drizzt Do’Urden series so I may return to those.  Not the deepest of books, but a little more meaty than your average candy reading.  I’ve read a number of these repeatedly.

I just got Roger Zelany’s, Nine Princes in Amber, and so far I’m not thrilled.

Other options:

I’m pretty sure I’ve read the first book in C.S. Friedman’s,  The Coldfire Trilogy, but I don’t remember it.  This was recommended several places so I’ll give it another go.

The Riftwar Saga by Raymond E. Feist

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman - This won some sort of supposed major award recently and is supposed to be explicitly anti-Christian.

The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb.  Pretty sure I’ve started this one before as well.
That’s the shortlist.  Anyone else have recommendations?