THE SHACK, A FILM, MADE NEXT DOOR.

They are making the movie right here in lower mainland B.C., and I have been just metres away from some of the filming this week. This may be a good film, if it keeps to the script. John Fusco, best known for writing 1988's Young Guns, wrote its screenplay adaptation from the book by the same name by first-time author Paul Young which sold 22 million copies worldwide. Of course many in the evangelical world took issue with the 2007 best-selling book, The Shack, in the first place, castigating it and its Canadian author Paul Young for parodying God and the Trinity, perhaps even depreciating these entities.

SAM WORTHINGTON

I treated the read years ago as the novel that it was. You would throw out much of C.S. Lewis' fiction if you took the same reactionary stance against his material.  Young was not teaching theology, but telling a story, the account of a man's pain at the loss of a daughter as a result of a kidnapping and murder by a serial killer. Sam Worthington plays the lead role of Mackenzie "Mack" Allen Phillips who is plunged into a deep emotional abyss that embraces fury at God. Four years after the horror, he receives a letter from God called Papa. 

And of course this representation in the book set people off, because portrayed Papa as a woman, a black female who will be portrayed by Octavia Spencer, who has already won an Oscar for her role in the "The Help." Radha Mitchell is in the role of Phillips' wife and Amelie Eve is their missing daughter. I saw her in the canoe scene as it was being shot last night. The Shack and Papa's cabin tucked into the woods are all on site and the filming went on for the four days that we were close by holidaying in a cottage. Very fun.

Paul Young himself says that he is excited about the movie because he has been given the rare opportunity to invest his creative input into the filmmaking process. We will see how much his voice is heard.  Young calls the book a metaphor for “the house you build out of your own pain.” 

Will non-believers be confused, led astray from God’s true persona? Might viewers who never think about God, feel compelled to seek to know him outside the context of the novel? I will look forward to the movie. I won't fashion my theology, or my concept of God based upon its expressions for deity. I may however, learn to meditate more keenly on some aspects of the character of God as expressed by the three persons whom readers may discern as the Trinitarian God image. I may  be encouraged about the compassion of God for his human creatures when they suffer. 

George Sand and the Hotel Named After the Author

A NEW LEARNING
In the city of Loches in the Loire Valley, Christine and I stayed at the George Sand Hotel, the guest house that carries her name. Yes, George Sand was a woman. She was born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin and she became the most famous female writer of 19th century France. She authored novels, stories, plays, essays and memoirs. She was the epitome of French romantic idealism and in her literature she questioned sexual identity and gender destinies in fiction. She demanded for women the daily freedom of life that men took for granted. She wrote "The world will know and understand me someday. But if that day does not arrive, it does not greatly matter. I shall have opened the way for other women."

As brilliant a writer as she was recognized to be, she was prominent as much for her lifestyle and personality. The time in which she lived, with its restrictions and conventions, drew notoriety to her way of life. Aurore was married to a baron, scandalously left him, taking her two children to live on her own. She became friends with many artists, writers, and musicians like Eugène Delacroix and Franz Liszt and had romantic relationships with others, most notably Frédéric Chopin. She was loud, lewd and shocking. She was anything but the typical Parisian lady of the 1800’s. Her protest of treatment of womankind was manifest in her dress, that is no dress. She wore men’s clothing, suits, pants (long before that was acceptable), ties and a top hat. She smoked cigars. She became iconic because of her fame as a writer.

And Christine and I stayed in a charming hotel named after her, an aged old building, with a tiny entrance off a seamy street, with rooms, on three levels to which you climbed with luggage round and round the tightest circular staircase with head bumping low spots in the ceiling. And of course, our room, because we chose to pay less, was up with the pigeons or whatever else requires less oxygen. It looked like the attic with the structural support beams serving as obstacles en route to our beds each night. Ours is the tiny gable window in the roof. It did have a great view over a waterfall and the sound of running water 24/7 and it had a fine restaurant with good food. Then we learned that Paris has a George Sand Hotel with an elegant environment and beautiful furnishings which would have set us back a few Euros. Oh yes, on the outskirts of the city there is another less elaborate one with the same name, Hotel George Sand, Courbevoie, France; and another at 26 rue des Mathurins

The pleasant French proprietors knew nothing about George Sand.

At Hofstra University in 1976 Friends of George Sand founded the George Sand Association as a literary society, the purpose of which is to encourage and foster research and scholarship on George Sand.

Sand's "Story of My Life" is available from Amazon

HOW MANY WORDS HAVE I WRITTEN?

A NEW LEARNING
How many words have passed from my fingers and through my mouth? I pondered that today.

When I began as a full time pastor in 1969 it was in the town of Smiths Falls, Ontario. Calvary Bible Church was the name of the congregation to which I was called. Perhaps 75 people attended church services on Sunday. It was customary for churches of some reasonable size and particularly churches with an evangelical and or fundamentalist theology to hold both morning and evening Sunday church services. The paid pastor was expected to preach at both of these public services. Wednesday evening was customarily viewed as Prayer Meeting Night. A loyal core of 8-12 people attended this gathering at which the pastor was once again expected to deliver a prepared study before the group prayed. During the five years that I pastored in Smiths Falls I also wrote a column in a weekly local newspaper called 'the Record News' which reached well beyond our town. Personal computers had not yet appeared to become the office necessities they are now. I wrote every sermon and article in long hand or typed them using a typewriter. Each sermon might be six pages typewritten single-spaced resulting in a word total 5000 words. In one year I processed 480,000 words in 96 sermons, 100,000 words in 48 devotional studies and another 52,000 words in 52 newspaper articles. I followed this same preparatory practice in my second church in Peterborough, Ontario where beginning in 1974 I served for seven years. During those seven years I began a Master’s degree program in Toronto, seventy-five miles away and this program took me five years to complete, and approximately 45 term papers and 475,000 words. I began writing monthly magazine articles at this time so throw in another 24,000 words annually. On to Toronto in 1982, specifically Scarborough and a church at which I pastored for ten years with the same commitment to two Sunday sermons and a mid-week message. Here the advent of a personal computer, primitive as they were, modified some of the tedium of handwritten material. Then the big move to the West and ten years serving a church in Cloverdale, British Columbia. During this time, our leadership team made a decision to operate with only a morning service. My spoken output was not minimized since we were a large enough congregation to require two morning services and that meant preaching twice. This was also a season during which I enrolled and completed a six year part-time doctoral program which may have required 210,000 words plus a 400 page thesis of 140,000 words. I also wrote the manuscripts for three books, one of them a children’s novel which may yet be published and these may be estimated at 100,000 words. Following the pastoral career I served for six years as a church denominational president during which time I was responsible for many articles, reports, booklets and research documents which I have to ballpark at 8 million words.

Perhaps thirty million words have flowed from my fingers but I have probably underestimated because I have not included all of my journal writing through the years, or the 500 words per blog entry here. 30,000,000 words written and seventy percent of them preached. That is the equivalent of 60,000 pages or 150 John Grisham size novels. That’s a substantial output.