What Would Jesus Do?

What Would Jesus Do?
      A meditation for the Interchurch Council in Blind River.
     Religion, like other institutions, goes through cycles of fads and fashions. A few years ago, we saw bumper stickers with What Would Jesus Do? Or the abbreviation WWJD? This question also showed up on buttons, on t-shirts, on hats, and much else. We don’t see that slogan much any more. Perhaps people have realised that it’s a radical question. If you take it seriously, it can change your life.
     So how does one answer this question? Seems to me, one thing we should do is look at what Jesus actually did. He didn’t do that many things. He preached. He told stories. He gave advice. He healed people. He wandered around with his friends, and accepted hospitality wherever he found it. He visited friends and acquaintances.
     And he got into trouble with the authorities.
     He got into trouble because he visited disreputable people, such as tax collectors, wine bibbers, and prostitutes. The respectable people were exceedingly annoyed by this habit, and used it as evidence that he wasn’t preaching true religion. Religion is for the right kind of people. People like us. People who don’t flaunt their bad behaviour. People who take care to obey the rules, and behave with decorum and good manners, and never, ever sin in public.
     But the respectable people were perhaps even more annoyed by the messages Jesus preached. In particular, they didn’t like the advice he gave. He told people that religion wasn’t about following the rules. It was about loving God and your neighbour. He told the rich young man that he should sell everything he had, give the proceeds to the poor, and follow him on his wanderings. He expected everyone who witnessed this exchange to follow the same advice.
     He told people that helping when needed was more important than observing the Sabbath. He not only told people this, he demonstrated it by occasionally breaking the Sabbath rules. He healed a man on the Sabbath, and scolded the respectable people who objected. Religious truth, whatever they thought it was, wasn’t about the rules, but about how they dealt with other people.
     He told people that what they did for the least important people they did for him. He told people that they should visit the sick, the poor, the prisoners. He said that if someone asks you for a coat, you should give him your shirt, too. If someone asks you to go with him for a mile, you should go with him for two. He pointed to the widow who gave a few pennies as more generous than the Pharisee who gave many dollars.
     He told the story of the good Samaritan to remind us that what matters is not whether someone deserves our help, but whether he needs it.
     What would Jesus do? That’s a question that’s supposed to guide us as we follow him. If we want to follow his example, we too should do what he did. It’s not easy. It’s not comfortable to help people we don’t like, or people that we think don’t deserve what we offer, or people that won’t thank us for helping them. But that’s what Jesus would do.
     That’s what Jesus did.
     2013-10-18
 

Martha Grimes. The Blue Last (2001)

     Martha Grimes. The Blue Last (2001) Jury’s friend DCI Mike Haggerty asks him to find out whether a girl, supposedly saved from the bomb that destroyed The Blue Last and killed her mother, is who the nanny claimed she was, or perhaps actually the nanny’s daughter. Mike’s suspicion that she was an interloper is correct. The mother had a child before her marriage, which she gave up for adoption: the child’s identity is the knot whose unravelling unties all the other knots.
     Along the way Jury uncovers an art fraud, meets a streetwise urchin (with dog) who survives on his own, and makes friends with a number of other odd characters. Grimes lets herself go in this book: she’s really more interested in the characters than the plot, which however is well done and only mildly facile in it solution. **½ (2008)

Ross Macdonald. Sleeping Beauty (1973)

     Ross Macdonald. Sleeping Beauty (1973) Lew picks up a girl at an oil spill, and is worried when she leaves with no forwarding address. His search for her leads him deep into the California ruling classes, where he encounters their casual corruption and overwhelming desire for power. Untangling the mess of lies and secrets takes Lew longer than usual. This narrative gives us more of his character and of the characters he meets along the way, but Macdonald’s characteristic style remains the same: he gives us almost nothing but the objective, observable facts, and lets our responses to them create the mood he wants. A good read. *** (2008)

Edward Beal. The Craft of Model Railways (1937)

     Edward Beal. The Craft of Model Railways (1937) I’m rereading this book. Well, re-skimming it actually. It’s long-winded, poorly organised, opinionated, and badly laid out. Beal commits the cardinal sin of technical writing: he mixes levels of description, giving detailed instructions for some jobs and vague references to “subjects too large for this book” for other tasks. He digresses without warning. He starts on a subject, and then just writes things down as they occur to him, with no apparent effort to organise them. He’ll start a paragraph about, say, passenger train working, with a reminder of the desirability of understanding of how the real railways do it, and then give only the vaguest information.
     The book’s design is awful, with illustrations usually separated from the referring text, many illustrations not explained at all, and incredibly meager information about the layouts illustrated in the photos, despite a whole chapter devoted to “Notable Examples and Enthusiasts.” In short, the book needed thorough and heavy editing and rewriting, which Beal’s publishers did not insist on. At the very least, they should have insisted on sub-heads throughout, which might have made Beal aware of his annoying habit of treating a subject in several chunks more or less widely separated by digressions. Many things in the model railroad hobby have improved over the years, and writing about it is one of them. * (2008)

Ross Macdonald. Black Money (1966)

 

     Ross  Macdonald. Black Money (1966) Several murders connected to a tennis club, gamblers, gangsters, and a university French Language department resolve into a psychological motive: A prof has a thing for young women, a streak of possessiveness, and a fragile, deteriorating nervous system. Macdonald’s style, a cut or two above Hammett’s in my opinion, carries the rather thin story and makes for a satisfying entertainment.
     The characters are believable, but Lew Archer keeps himself to himself, and despite his carefully complete narrative we don’t get a good sense of the man. He is a point of view, a conscious camera, an artistic temperament. The metaphors that express his responses to the weather, the landscape, the anonymous streets don’t tell us about his inner life. The occasional comments on life, distilled from largely bleak experience, are the only clues we have, and they are so gnomic that they lack personality. Once in a while a profound sympathy slips past the mask. Yet we read on, because Archer is such a precise observer of the people he encounters and the places he goes. We can see what he sees, hear what he hears, but our feelings are our own. *** (2008)

Dale Wilson. Canadian Passenger Chronicle 1, 2, 3 (1998, 2000, 2006)

     Dale Wilson. Canadian Passenger Chronicle 1, 2, 3 (1998, 2000, 2006) Just what it says: three albums of photographs, timetables, a handful of first person accounts, and some general history. Nicely put together, each volume is roughly chronological by railroad and region. The photos vary from excellent to barely acceptable, most of the latter good examples of why one should never scan at a low resolution, and never “resize” digital images prior to fitting them into a page. Wilson and his coworkers have been able to trace the histories of most of the cars and engines depicted. I hope the series continues, and that Wilson finds more travellers’ stories for the next couple of volumes. Although the provenance of all the material is carefully documented, these are not scholarly works, thank goodness. Their audience will be limited largely to railroad fans, and the odd student of transportation who needs something to liven up an academic dissertation. Recommended. *** (2008)

Arthur Upfield. Winds of Evil (1937)

   Arthur Upfield. Winds of Evil (1937) An old-fashioned detective yarn, set in the outback of Australia, where secrets of the past obscure the truth about the present murderer, told in the leisurely manner that guaranteed a pleasant railway journey (a bus journey in my case). Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, a half-caste of exquisite diction and manners, solves the riddle; the murderer does the honourable thing by killing himself, and two couples tie the knot. The author is casually and unmaliciously racist, which would no doubt be a stumbling block to younger modern readers, and would need to be delicately excised in any conversion to video.
     Napoleon is an odd mix of the Saint and Hercules Poirot, having the one character’s secretiveness, and the other’s vanity. Upfield also likes to surprise the reader with the results of his ‘tec’s brilliant ruminations, but does play fair in setting all the necessary clues before the reader. The characters are pleasant, with only an very officious policeman being a truly nasty piece of work (but he gets his comeuppance). The plot creaks here and there, and the murderer’s motivation is “sensational” in the early 20th century style: he’s a somnambulist who perpetrates his crimes without conscious memory after he recovers from his trance. (This has been used successfully as a defense in a couple of Ontario cases recently). Apparently it’s the weather that triggers these trances, especially the buildup of static electricity. Tosh of course, but at the time of the book’s writing as plausible as any other explanation.
     Upfield has a good sense of place and society, and gives us a clear and rather attractive picture of life in the Australian outback of the time. The book lists 19 novels by Upfield available in Scribner’s Crime Classic series, but I’d never heard of Bony before this. I don’t think I’ll seek out other of his adventures, but won’t pass them by if I find them. High class pulp fiction, written by a man who mastered the craft, and as far as I can tell was content to make a living at it without pretentious ambitions towards literature. **½ (2008)
   More about Upfield here .

A. A. Fair. Give ‘em the Axe (1944)

     A. A. Fair. Give ‘em the Axe (1944) Donald Lam is invalided out of the US Navy and returns to his partnership with Bertha Cool. They are asked to find some damaging info on a woman who has married the secret love (and boss) of a naive young woman, who wants to split up the marriage and get her man. Along the way, Cool and Lam encounter blackmail, car insurance fraud, and murder. Lam puts it all together, hands the murderer over to the cops, and gets a girl with good legs, too.
     A. A. Fair is one of Erle Stanley Gardner’s pseudonyms. The story is a mildly tough PI yarn, with a faintly film noir atmosphere. Plotting is perfunctory but complete. Fair lays out all the clues and a few red herrings in classic fashion. Characterisation is cartoonish, dialogue fake tough-guy and slick. Fair’s lawyer background shows in the legalities that entangle Cool and Lam, and in a legal deposition scene, where the good lawyer mounts a brilliant cross examination. A pleasant read, worth a place on a collector’s shelf. It would make a good B movie. The copy I have is a Dell pocket book of 1950 or later. Nice cover art. ** (2008)

Ruth Rendell. A Guilty Thing Surprised (1970)

     Ruth Rendell. A Guilty Thing Surprised (1970) An early Wexford, with little of the backstory about Wexford and Burden that give the later books the depth I prefer. Short and to the point: the murder comes about because of an incestuous brother-sister relationship. Rendell here exhibits her interest in morbid psychology which she indulges in most of the non-Wexford books. A good read, but not a great one, with the solution presented in a letter. **

Rex Stout. Prisoner’s Base (1952)

     Rex Stout. Prisoner’s Base (1952) A typical noir Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin romp, quite funny in places, relying on Archie’s ironic point of view and snappy dialogue to move the story along. And it does move. A fair damsel in distress arrives at the brownstone, Archie puts her in the third-floor front room, Wolfe sends her packing, and she’s murdered. Inheritance, control of stocks, conflict in the executive suite, and a few scraps of dirty laundry combine to make a convoluted plot with a simple solution: the fair damsel’s murder is prompted by pure greed. Three women die; Stout is rather cavalier with the corpses. A mild entertainment, with none of the gore that mars the late 20th century version of the genre. **

W. J. K. Davies. Vale of Rheidol Light Railway (1970) & British Rail. Vale of Rheidol Railway (1970?)

     W. J. K. Davies. Vale of Rheidol Light Railway (1970). British Rail. Vale of Rheidol Railway (1970?) Tweo pamphlets giving us a brief but thorough overview of the line, its history, rolling stock, track layouts, and operations. Built to haul freight, from very early on it attracted tourists, and that’s become its only business. When Davies wrote his pamphlet, it appeared the line might close. I don’t how it was kept open, but British rail was certainly wooing the tourists a year or so later, when it published its booklet, in colour yet. A lovely little line, located in a lovely part of Wales, these two booklets inspired an extensive web search, and a desire to ride the line the next time we are in the UK. *** (2008)
     Update 2013: we haven't visited this line yet.

D. E. MacIntyre. End of Steel (1973)

     D. E. MacIntyre. End of Steel (1973) A charming memoir, in the form of reminiscences. MacIntyre starts with his childhood in Montreal, but most of the stories are about his early working life as a clerk for the CPR. He worked in northern Quebec, on the Prairies, and on the CPR branch from Toronto to Sudbury (the Mactier division). He’s an unassuming chap, who obviously got on well with people, and would have risen faster had he been older. He left the CPR when he was barely 22, and set up in business; but this book does not tell of his later life. I enjoyed this book, and found a few nuggets, such as the fact that the CPR was replacing the 60lb rail on the main lines with 80lb rail. The lighter rail was reused on branches and sidings. *** (2008)