It's All About Me-Ville

This week, everything I've seen and done has reminded me of Deliver Us from Me-Ville. This week I joined a small group of authors for a round of manuscript Bible study (exploring a passage from the Bible without the distractions of chapter numbers, verse numbers or other indicators of context) looking at John 1:35-51, a passage from the Gospel of John that figures prominently in my chapter on community. This week in my free time I corresponded with a few churches and bookstores about doing something related to the book with them. This week I heard from a bookselling group in Canada about the possibility of getting together to discuss the book. Last night I attended the DVD release party for Living Waters, a play I was in last year that wound up being source material for the introduction to the book. I'm on the precipice of becoming that obnoxious author who can't shut up about his book, who won't leave his poor publicity department or his unwitting audiences alone. Now that the book's release is only a few weeks away, it is, apparently, all about Me-Ville.

I find that funny--I'm not going to lie to you. My friends in publishing every so often talk about the "level 5 author," the author who, like the level 5 leader in the book Good to Great, is wildly enthusiastic about the task at hand but shockingly evasive when it comes to taking the credit for success. The level 5 leader is marked by humility and commitment, and as such the level 5 leader, or author or actor or plumber or whatever, is about as easy to find as Sasquatch or the source of that weird smell in my office.

This week, however, I've also been reading and discussing Tolkien's Ordinary Virtues, a journey through the Lord of the Rings in search of character qualities to emulate, written by a friend of mine. The section we discussed this week is about leadership, but it includes such odd topics as mirth and submission. The interesting thing about Tolkien's books and Mark Smith's treatment is the awareness of both that virtues are not necessarily housed where we might expect to find them. In Tolkien's creation, kings regularly need correction, and Hobbits often prove to be heroes. And yet Hobbits themselves often fall short, and kings regularly prove their mettle. The books are about journeys both physical and developmental--an entire cast of characters, an entire universe, really, moving awkwardly and slowly but resolutely from where they are to a better place, one that improves their own lot while serving the far greater good.

I simply can't claim to be a level 5 author. But I suppose I can strive toward becoming a level 5 author, as long as people cut me some slack: I imagine it will be a slow, awkward process for all of us.

The End Is the Beginning

I finished reading Thomas Merton's breathtaking New Seeds of Contemplation today. I ran out the ink in more than one pen underlining ideas and taking notes as I went through the book, but today I turned to the last page and read the last line:

We are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.

And so now I know the origins of the title of nature's most nearly perfect book: Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose by Brian Mahan. I knew that he had Merton in mind as he wrote his book, and I knew that the concept of forgetting ourselves on purpose was explicitly borrowed from Merton; what I didn't know was that the title and beginning idea of Mahan's book was the last, summary thought of one of Merton's finest works.

It strikes me that there's a great responsibility attached to the last word, at least in part because what we declare to be the last word is never really actually that. Someone inevitably picks up where we left off or--worse, we who offer last words are tempted to think--says something like "Glad that's over" and gets on with their own life, their own thoughts.

I'm sure I've written about this before, but it was such a striking conversation for me that I regularly repeat it. I was talking with a friend of mine about the dynamics that settle in when we are regularly gathered together with a small group of people. My friend observed that my impulse is to go for the "last laugh"--the joke that busts everybody up so that all conversation is overtaken by laughter. He, by contrast, intuitively goes for the "last word"--the idea that causes everyone to stroke their imaginary beard and settle into quiet contemplation.

The last word and the last laugh work against each other, since people who are settling into quiet contemplation are not generally prepared for riotous laughter, and people can get so caught up in hilarity that the last word goes unheard or unsaid. Regardless of which predominates, however, eventually our time together ends and we become re-occupied by new thoughts and new jokes. Life goes on, no matter how desperately we try to punctuate it.

That's the way it's meant to be, I think. No idea of human origin is so commanding that it says all that need be said. No joke is so uproarious that people will never find anything else funny ever again. There's a last word, but inevitably, there's a word after that.

The last word of my book Deliver Us from Me-Ville, as I think of it, will be "So be it." Then again, technically that's the last line of the "Afterword," which itself suggests that the real last word came earlier: "Give yourself to the Lord, and sleep well." But then again, again, the "Afterword" is followed by a whole host of other comments--a list of ideas for further reading, a list of acknowledgments of people who helped me develop the book, reference notes for the quoted material in the chapters, and even a quotation from Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

May God in his mercy lead us through these times, but above all, may he lead us to himself.

That's an awful lot of last words; it almost makes me laugh.

The hope of really any author, particularly authors of nonfiction and especially those writing about spirituality, is that the end of their book will be the beginning of someone else's new journey. That journey, it's implicitly understood, does have an ending that stretches beyond each of us along the way. God, suggests Bonhoeffer, is leading us through these times, but one day we'll reach our destination when God leads us to himself.

As he approaches the Shire at the end of his adventure in The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins observes, "Roads go ever on." It's a nice thing to remember as we come to the end of a particular journey: the ultimate journey is ongoing. Samwise Gamgee, however, offers a nice counterpoint to the notion when he takes the last word in The Lord of the Rings: "Well, I'm back." To which J. R. R. Tolkien offers the literary equivalent of an "amen":

The end.