INKBLOTS Men's writing gathering, November

INKBLOTS – November, 2010

Wind is blowing hard, rain, dark evening, fire crackling in the sitting room at the McComas’ home, and while I was reading chapter five of The Thundering, a novel on John Knox, branches, good-sized ones, fell on the roof and everything suddenly went black--power outages all over the region, including chunks of Tacoma, especially northend where we live. Crossing the Narrows Bridge in it was reminiscent of November 7, 1940 when Galloping Gertie galloped into the deeps of the channel. I'm happy to report that the new bridge held out as we drove home. All of which made for a mysterious and memorable evening. John brought along a fine bottle of Canoe Ridge, 1999 merlot.

Dougie Mac led off with his new tale of 1950 era, Korean missionary kid, comes home, gets married, finds himself in Marine Corps in Korean War, desperate to find his lost missionary parents. That’s the summary. Dougie read chapter one. Opening with protagonist tinkering with his beloved car, sniffing engine oil—good opening scene, giving us insight into what makes his protagonist tick. Thomas, protagonist and interaction with his dad; father and son at seventeen, curious observation from a guy who has all girls! But it brings up a good point about how important being a keen observer of people, especially ones whose lives are different from our own. Some favorite lines that made us laugh: Just me and the guys, Dad (after asking if he could go to the drive in). (Dad’s laconic reply) Exactly. Doug has a good grasp of the nuanced interplay between different players, cars, even Baptists and Presbyterians (written by a guy who’s been both, either, or, and). This is boy/girl candidly romantic story from the point of view of Christian-raised church guys feeling the pull of the world’s view of sex and romance. A bit over written, in a place or two, though after I had you reread it, it sounded pretty good, so be careful as you edit and revise here. Stands out to me that Thomas’s thoughts about his friends baiting him, and going too far in conversation about girls, and wishing he didn’t always go along with them. Dave pointed out that Lester and Frankie seemed like the same character, different name, a good observation. John kept saying, I liked it. You do a really good job.

Dave read a rewrite of part of his futuristic thriller magnum opus. Cory sitting by himself reading his Bible. Josh asked his uncle how he can know that God loves us. Mom, Mommy, and tears. This seems to be a bit out of the blue, but that may be that I have not kept the big picture together. A witnessing scene is difficult to pull off with authenticity—hard to write what is true and good without trivializing the very thing the well-intentioned author so wants to convey. The danger is actually doing the opposite of what one intends to do: the grand and glorious becomes the sentimental and banal. I’ve had to confront this many times in my writing, it seems. May I suggest going inside Josh’s head (the unbeliever) and make him scoff internally, show him being two faced, being nice and polite to his uncle but in his mind hating him, thinking he’s an ignorant simpleton, thinking he knows better than his uncle and all Christians. Work toward helping your reader see through the fallacies of the critic of the gospel. By showing his unfair scorn, his irrational rejection, his mocking of the witness his uncle, you the writer, thereby, help the reader shift to a more serious consideration of the truth of the gospel. John was pretty blunt about not liking the non-chalance of the killing scene, killing three guys after some effort at evangelism, then drinking a milk shake together. Be careful not to tack on evangelism and Christianity to legitimize your tale. Look for a key phrase that epitomizes the protagonist’s problem: Enemy of God… Weave it throughout, developing it as you go.

John reads new first chapter. “Think we’ll have any trouble tonight?” Dougie when he heard this said, “He’s dead.” Careful of being too predictable. This is a police bust of a gang deal going down in a warehouse in Detroit inner-city. Music softly playing… kids and music softly playing. Softly? Andy’s left eye began to twitch. Shooting, getting shot, being confronted by vengeful gang banger. Good work with the cop talking to the gang member, buying time. Make the officer who’s down, go inside his pain, what does that feel like, so your reader feels the downed officer’s agony from gunshot wound. And more family reflection of his wife, personal things, his kids, his horror that the gang banger is threatening to kill his wife and children. Have the partners earlier chatting about kid’s birthday party next day or that evening. Have his partner down be able to fire, save Andy’s life from the execution style shooting about to happen. Chapter one ends with gun shot, Andy thinks it was for him, all fades to black. Chapter two begins: it was his partner that he thought was dead who shot the gang banger. 

Join us for a SCOTTISH REFORMATION evening, November 27, 2010

In that after Thanksgiving lull, come out and commemorate the 450th of the Scottish Reformation, 1560-2010!

Where? Gig Harbor Library, Peninsula Room (same location as Calvin last year)
When? Saturday evening, November 27, 2010 -- 6:30 pm
Who? EVERYONE! Free and open to the public.

What's going to happen?
      1. Authentic Scottish Shortbread
      2. BAGPIPER: My son Rhodri Douglas Bond playing favorite bagpipe tunes 
      3. Talks, discussion, and Q & A:
             Does the Reformation Matter Today?
             (Rev. Leldon Partain, Rosedale Reformed Church)
And...
Did John Knox Hate Women? His Life & Legacy                                                               (Author/Teacher Douglas Bond, gleanings from research and writing for my forthcoming book, THE MIGHTY WEAKNESS OF JOHN KNOX, Reformation Trust, to release April, 2011)

During the talks, we'll be sharing recent images from Scotland, taken last April on the Royal Mile, Edinburgh, St. Andrews and beyond.

AND I'll be giving away three books (DUNCAN'S WAR, KING'S ARROW, REBEL'S KEEP) to participants in the Q & A time.

Come yourself! Bring the family (coloring for children)! Invite your friends and neighbors!

Bringing the Gospel to Covenant Children

I was asked to read Joel Beeke's excellent little book, BRINGING THE GOSPEL TO COVENANT CHILDREN, and endorse. I thought I'd share a few excerpts and my endorsement here. I wrote of the book (before editor revisions):

“In language every parent can understand, Joel Beeke demonstrates how presumptive regeneration and hyper covenantalism can bar our children from Christ and the gospel and tragically produce Pharisees. Parents who love Christ and their children will not want to miss this clear, practical, confessional, and imminently biblical work on how Christ and his gospel alone transform our covenant children.”

Douglas Bond, author of The Fathers & Sons series: STAND FAST and HOLD FAST, and THE BETRAYAL, a novel on John Calvin 

“Parents confused by neo-Calvinism’s implication that covenant children are justified by parental faithfulness will find refreshing biblical clarity in Bringing the Gospel to Our Covenant Children. In it parents will find confidence to open the Bible and show their children Christ and his gospel on every page. There may not be a more important resource for every Christian parent to read and reread as they evangelize and nurture covenant children in Christ.”  

Douglas Bond, author of The Fathers & Sons series: STAND FAST and HOLD FAST, and THE BETRAYAL, a novel on John Calvin

Here's excerpts from Joel Beeke:

"The fruits of presumptive regeneration are often tragic. Parents who presume that their children are regenerate by virtue of the covenant see no need to tell their children that they must be born again and come to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ. William Young calls this view “hyper-covenantism,” because the relation of children to the covenant is exaggerated to the point that the covenant relation replaces the need for personal conversion. As Young points out, “Doctrinal knowledge and ethical conduct according to the Word of God are sufficient for the Christian life without any specific religious experience of conviction of sin and conversion, or any need for self-examination as to the possession of distinguishing marks of saving grace.” Consequently, what our Reformed forefathers called experimental religion is deemed largely superfluous. Ultimately, though Kuyperian neo-Calvinists may not like to admit it, religious life becomes grounded in external church institutions and activities rather than in the soul’s communion with God. “A system for breeding Pharisees, whose cry is ‘We are Abraham’s children,’could hardly be better calculated,” Young concludes."

And here's Beeke on a biblical, confessional view of paedo-baptism:

"Some Reformed churches depreciate the covenant relation of children, not by rejecting infant baptism and the covenant relation altogether, but by reducing the sacrament to mere form and custom without insisting on what it should mean for the lives both of the parents and their baptized children. In such circles, the church has no eye for the promises of God in baptism, no heart for pleading those promises in prayer, and no clear understanding of how God earnestly calls covenant children to a lifestyle consecrated to Himself and separated from the world….

"Baptism affirms that the baptized child is placed under covenant privileges and responsibilities, but does not make the child a partaker of the saving, internal essence of the covenant. The external covenant relationship can be broken when a child grows to adulthood and abandons God’s Word and the corporate worship of His people. Baptized children must be linked to the internal, unbreakable essence of the covenant through the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit ( John 3:3-7). Only then shall they be given persevering grace for the rest of their lives….

"Baptized children must be directed to Jesus Christ and His sacrifice as the only way of salvation. Christ’s cleansing blood, symbolized by the cleansing water of baptism, is the only way by which our children may be saved…

"Baptism teaches that God, in and through the Second Adam, Jesus Christ, is able and willing to be the Redeemer and Father of our children….

"Knowing such things should encourage us more to evangelize our children and to plead for their salvation, never giving God rest until they are all brought safely into His fold. Then, too, we must teach our covenant children and young people to plead with our covenant God on the basis of His promises to baptize them with the Spirit of grace and to grant them regeneration, repentance, and faith."

Thoughts on Job and Christ

I've been meditating on Job again (finalizing a childrens book in verse on Job), and as I was reading Sinclair F with my son Desmond tonight, it struck me. Maybe I'm wrong, but there's heaps more going on in Job than what appears at early readings (for me anyway--I've been known to be sort of slow on the uptake). Is it valid to say that Job is a prototype and foreshadowing of the humiliation and suffering God the Father would afflict on his own Son when he sent him to earth to offer up himself in our place? 

Job was upright, righteous, fearing God, turning away from evil, wealthy even. Of course no human being is these things perfectly--by a long shot; we all fall short of the glory of God. They are, however, perfect attributes of Christ. And remember that God initiates the humiliation and suffering of Job, offering Job up, as it were, to Satan. Furthermore, the set-up is all about cursing: will Job curse God when he is afflicted or will he bless God? Though Job curses the day of his birth, and is deeply perplexed, Satan was wrong: Job never curses God; nor did Christ, though he became a curse for us, our vicarious curse-bearer. Rather Job worships in suffering (chapter 2, and especially in chapter 19). Yet he does feel very much forsaken by God, who seems far off, doesn't seem to hear or care, so Job thinks, and he feels God is not being just with him, making him suffer consequences more in keeping with others offenses than any he had committed. Whereas with Christ, his Father actually does forsake his Son, who experiences Job's anguish and heaps more, bearing his people's sin and the wrath of God for us, that is, suffering for others crimes. 

Finally, God raises Job up from the ashes, restores him, lavishes wealth on him again, and commands the sorry friends to have Job be their prayer advocate, their go-between to God himself. All things that are not ordinary in a fallen world for most of us, yet all things that God did for his Son whom he highly exalted and gave a name above every name. 

If this is the sense of the big picture of Job, I'm sure others have worked this out far better, and these are rough notes, but I wonder. Job sees God, actually talks with him, repents (Jesus of course never needed to repent of or pay for sins, though he as our sin-bearer suffered under the weight of our load on our behalf. If this fits Clowney's box, then Job would be a type and foreshadowing of Christ, though I've never heard or read him being understood as such. Maybe I need to read more. Am I all wet here?

INKBLOTS, Crispin's Day Meeting 10/25/2010

INKBLOTS 10/25/2010 (my dearest wife’s birthday—what am I doing hanging out with the guys at Inkblots, you ask? Why not out for a nice dinner with my beloved? She’s at Bible Study Fellowship tonight) 

I opened reading my friend John Ford’s intriguing poem The Cloak, an imaginative versified tale of Paul in prison longing for his scrolls and cloak. The men sat very still through a number of lines and stanzas of poetry, John having drawn us in, big time, with his pen. “Well, I liked it,” said the first Blot to break the silence. That broke the floodgate. At first one Blot was troubled by Paul’s wining (as he termed it), but as he listened he felt better and better about his method. Same Blot wished that the jailor’s father, original owner of the cloak after Christ, had been truly converted—a worthy longing, perhaps created by an author who understands the superior literary power of longing over satisfaction. Complete satisfaction in a plot most easily trivializes, or can. Another Blot commented on some of the rhyming seeming to be forced, and that the poem might be improved by tightening, making it a bit shorter (and unfortunately it is a post-poetry world so less ability to following). The key criticism was that they wished you had not revealed the origin of the cloak until a bit later.  I think I agree with this one. Clever take on it.

Dave Killian has a rewrite of an episode in his futuristic political thriller based on a Bond(age) criticism—he led off with a rather snide remark, I thought. My comment was that the doctor scene needed a point of view that connected us to the situation, a point of view that would keep this episode from being so abrupt, without relevant context to tie it to the rest of the story. I’m trying to remember just exactly what my criticism of this episode had been last time. Cliché intentional, bare white bulb, white lab coats—careful not to overdo the explicit cover of cliché description. John felt it was improved over the last time when the experiment with the rats was so abrupt, needed some history, context to avoid  a disconnect. The trouble as I see it too much point of view shifting, too many heads we’re going inside of. There are already two parallel plots, so a need to seriously avoid going into minor characters’ heads. This is a vast tale, and we may be not actually offering helpful criticism because we can’t see the big picture well enough, as well as you see it. We’re looking at the city map, and you’re looking at a world map, maybe a galactic map. Trouble is, he named this glue character, soon to be bumped off, he named the guy Stan Bond! Is this a death threat? Yikes. I suggested that Dave drap back and force himself to write a maximum of 3,000 words telling the entire story, maybe try 1,500 words, but keep it concise, rapid pace. I think this will force Dave to discover what is essential and what is not, where the critical moments in the plot lie, where he wants the climax of the story to be and what to do with it, accomplish with the whole story.

John offered me a solution to a problem on my Knox novel. How to get Knox in the bottle dungeon at St. Andrews Castle. He wouldn’t voluntarily hide in it to save his skin; that would be out of character with Knox at this point in his life (by grace alone). John is global. He figures out the big pictures and often comes up with some amazing solutions. I probably better not divulge his idea, but it was a good one, and I have every intention of working it in. He harangued away on why I didn’t listen to his advice on Hostage Lands.

John is going to read the first chapter of his novel. Retired Detroit police officer who moves to rural Oregon, somewhat of a bigot, loves peace and quiet. Son and daughter in high school… but he was 30 years on Detroit police department. Do these numbers work. Daughter pregnant, dating an African-American football star, can’t or won’t tell her dad because of his racial bigotry. Abortion dilemma ensues. Don’t need “Just to name a few.” You’ve already listed plenty. Make the description of Bee and the ducklings told from your protagonist’s observation of her; mostly you do but recast thinking specifically about sticking with Andy’s point of view. Has to be more of a reason for her to be so fascinated with baby ducks and other baby animals. How about having Andy’s two kids be his brother’s who died and Andy’s wife has never been able to have children, so the baby animal thing makes sense now.  Have Andy leave the force before retirement, partner killed, gang war, urban crime.  Every description must have work to do; it may be creating setting and atmosphere but it better have more to do than that. Strunk and White make their way from the grave into Inkblots—again. John’s comment after we ate him for after-supper snack. “I’m not discouraged. I’m just not going to write anything every again.” He was joking… I think—and hope. Barney Fife for the cop?

I read from my childrens book, versified Job I wrote in 2003 and its been sitting in my Word file. Reformation Heritage Books wrote me today saying they want to see Job’s Hard Job (working title) with a view to publishing it as picture book. Simonetta Carr asked me today if I’d read and endorse her forthcoming picture book with RHB. It took about 15 minutes to read and is about 30 pages as I see it with illustrations on each page. We’ll see what happens. It’s heavy themes, but full of supernatural encounters, a panoply of animals, all things that fascinate children--and the rest of us. We’ll see.

Bond speaking at ACM Symposium Friday--Homeschool enrichment opportunity

It's not too late to register for the ACM Symposium this Friday, October 15, 2010 in Tacoma, WA. This event is open to everyone and would be a great enrichment to homeschool curriculum for families in the area (students pay only $7.00 for this all-day and evening event: http://acmusicians.org/2010churchmusicsymposium.php). It is not exclusively for musicians!

I will be giving instruction on Church history (The Doxological Genius of Isaac Watts) and on understanding poetry and writing it, examining closely the poetic conventions, biblical allusions, and literary and theological mastery evident in several Psalm-like hymns. There will be addresses and a panel discussion on different worship "styles," how we got where we are, and where the church needs to go in its music and poetry to offer to God worthy sung worship in Spirit and in truth. The symposium is open to all Christians who care about these things.

Debuting at the the symposium will be several new hymns for the Modern Reformation, including three of my own. You will get to hear the music and sing the text under the skillful leadership of the regional Director of ACM, and composer, Ron Bechtel. And you will get to take these resources back to your home and church. To top it all off, there will be excellent live illustrations of worship music, both vocal and instrumental, for your edification and consideration. Register at http://acmusicians.org/2010churchmusicsymposium.php 

Here are samples of seminar titles:

• The Doxological Genius of Isaac Watts (Douglas Bond, Author and Teacher)
• How to Hear a Hymn Tune (John Wykoff, Composer)
• The Imaginative Watts (Douglas Bond)
• How to Write a Hymn Tune (John Wykoff) 

Church Leaders Roundtable: “Let’s Talk about Worship Music”

• Why Our Church Has Adopted Popular Music in Worship
• Why Our Church Has Retained Classical Music in Worship
• Moderated Discussion by Ron Bechtel and John Wykoff

REGISTER on-line at http://acmusicians.org/2010churchmusicsymposium.php 

Join us!

Douglas Bond
www.bondbooks.net

THE BETRAYAL translated in Turkish

This is exciting to me. I received word today from Rev. Fikret Böcek that they are at work preparing a Turkish translation of THE BETRAYAL. They are in communication and negotiation with P&R Publishing. Here is the opening paragraph of chapter one:

Fransa’nın kuzeyinde, Noyon-le-Sainte’de, savaş cümbüşünün yaşandığı kasabada, yaşlı bir adam küçük bir erkek çocuğunun elini sıkıca tutmuş bütün savaşları sona erdirecek olan bu savaş üzerine derin derin düşünüyordu. Kazananın ya da kaybedenin olmadığı bu üç buçuk yıldır süren kanlı mücadele, savaşı bitirmeye yönelik bir savaştan ziyade hiç bitmeyecek bir savaş gibi gözüküyordu. Durmak bilmeyen yaylım ateşine, ilerleyen piyadelere ve siperlere rağmen izah edilemez bir şekilde katedral, şehir meydanı, Rönesans kütüphanesi ve çeşitli ortaçağ binaları savaşın bir başka devrini bekliyor gibi hala ayaktaydılar. Buna rağmen yaşlı adam için daha da mühim olan, evinin Grain Place ‘in hala ayakta durmasıydı. Tıpkı evi gibi müziği ve kitapları da hala onunlaydı.