Judging my book by its cover

After two summers of obsessive, consuming work, Nicole and I finished revising my book last night. It may still be a few weeks until it's publicly available--my copy editor is waiting with a list of missing and misplaced s's to correct, and I'll want to go carefully through the first printed proof before launching--but the book is essentially ready now.

I'm biased, of course, but I think it's really beautiful.

Which is why I'm so glad I commissioned Nick Stephens, an artist whose work I've admired, to create the cover: 

I love the way he's blended the two simple images of the Jordan river and the dove with the geometric texture of the background.

I hope my book has achieved something similar: to tell an important story simply, but with a texture based in underlying patterns that give meaning to the most mundane of moments--a bird swooping down over the water, a man breaking bread with his friends.

The Five Books of Jesus Excerpt: Story of a Vineyard

            The next day is the Sabbath, and Jesus is invited to preach in the congregation of a village that stands at the base of the mountain, built on the ruins of what was once an important city. He takes the scroll gently in his hands, opens it slowly, and reads:

I will sing to my Beloved a song of his vineyard. My Love had a vineyard on a fertile hill.

He plowed the land and cleared it, and planted good vines;

he built a tower and a winepress for the harvest that would come.

But when he gathered the grapes, they weren’t sweet but sour.

Though he’d tended the vines well, they bore wild fruit.

Judge, men of Israel, between my Love and his vineyard!

What more could the Keeper of the Vineyard have done?

            “I knew a man once,” says Jesus after he rolls up the scroll and sits down, “who tended a fig tree for his father. For three years, the father waited to taste the tree’s fruit, but for three years it produced nothing. ‘Why are we still waiting?’ said the father of the man I knew, ‘The soil is good: if this tree gives us nothing, why don’t we cut it down?’ But the man asked his father for one more year. ‘Let me care for it a little longer,’ he said. ‘If it bears fruit, we’ll rejoice together. If not, we’ll cut it down.’”

            Jesus stops there and closes his eyes. It’s silent in the assembly for a moment.

            “What happened to the tree?” says someone from the back. 

            Jesus opens his eyes. “I don’t know,” he says. “Before the year was up, some of the father’s servants killed his son.”

The Five Books of Jesus Excerpt: The Parable of the Talents

            At the end of the story of grain, Martha starts bringing plates with bread and lentils to the gathered men. She looks to Mary for help, but her sister is too busy listening to Jesus’ next story to notice.

            This one is about a talented merchant who’s already made more money than an ordinary man can earn in five lifetimes. One day, with very little warning, the merchant is called away to a far country and doesn’t know when he’ll be able to come back. He calls three of his most devoted servants together and entrusts them with most of his wealth: the first servant is given twice his own weight in silver, the second his weight in silver, and the third half his weight in silver. He gives them use of his name and house in his absence, and he tells them to remember him and to prepare for his return.

             The first and second servants immediately go to work, investing in this and that, trading on their master’s behalf here and there. As time passes, they throw themselves into their labors with a growing abandon—after all, each new contract is another chance to hear people speak their absent master’s name. Some of their ventures fail, and it devastates them. Most succeed, and the value and scale of their operations grow.

            Though the third servant has been no less devoted to the master, he’s more cautious than the other two. He worries that if he invests in a certain kind of good, its price may fall before he can sell it. He worries that if he buys a farm, there won’t be enough rain, and that if he buys a fishing boat, it might sink in a storm. He doesn’t want to disappoint his master, or for men to speak ill of his master on his account, so he stops speaking of, or acting for, his master at all. Before long, he begins to worry that thieves might come for the money—so one night, when he’s sure no one is watching, he buries it deep in the ground.

            Having buried the treasure, he returns to his life’s routine struggles. He cleans the master’s house, though it’s used so little these days there’s not much to worry about. He cooks meals, though often only for himself since the master, and usually also his fellow-servants, are gone. Still, the rhythms comfort him. Gradually, they surpass his memory of devotion and he stops thinking of his master’s eventual return. It proves more enticing just to survive than to wait, and his memory begins to blur until it seems as if at any moment he may forget the man he once waited for.

            Trees the first servant planted mature; grapes the second servant trampled develop into old wine. Then one spring, while the breeze pours color into the waiting blossoms, their master returns.

            Only the truly faithful, says Jesus, will ever be able to understand how the first two servants felt when they again saw their master’s face. Only the truly faithful will understand how their hearts beat as they ran to greet him, how right the tears of long-delayed reunion felt on their cheeks.

            And only the truly faithful will be ready for the question their master asked: what have you done in my name?

            The first two show him their ledgers, explain how they’ve each doubled what they were given, and now it’s their master who cries tears of joy. “Well done, my servants!” he says, and then he tells them of his own incredible success, beyond anything they could have imagined. The three of them laugh together, and the master says, “I left you with a few things; I’ve returned with many things. Then you were my servants; be rulers now in the house of your lord!”

            In the next room, the third servant waits. The voice he once knew so well now sounds rough and weathered to him. When the master comes looking for him, his face seems like a stranger’s.

            What about you? says the master. What have you done in my name?

            I knew you were strict, says the third servant. I knew you reap rewards of work that wasn’t your own, and I was afraid you’d expect more from me than I can give. So I buried the silver in the ground. I’ll go dig it up for you now and return it: to tell the truth, it will be a great relief to have it out of my hands.

            “Well said,” says the master, “your hands are worthless! If you felt I was too strict, why did you accept the silver when I left? If you knew I reap the rewards of work that wasn’t my own, why didn’t you take the money to lenders at a bank for interest?”

            The servant doesn’t answer. He’s forgotten the devotion that once made him afraid to disappoint his master.

            And in his silence, the master can tell his servant’s devotion is gone. “I don’t want to reap the rewards of others’ work,” says the master, “but I thought you were my own. If you no longer are, leave the silver and take your freedom. You no longer belong to my house.”

            So the servant leaves a free man, released from the ties that once brought him great joy. That very night, he walks out of the master’s house into the darkness, and he never comes back.

The Five Books of Jesus Excerpt: First Missions of the Apostles

            Only two pairs of apostles go straight to new towns: at Thomas’s suggestion, the other four pairs start in towns where Jesus has already been. Their plan is this: go find people who embraced Jesus’ teachings, ask them if they have relatives in other towns, and preach over kinship lines so they can spend more time teaching and less time looking for people to teach.

            But things don’t always go according to plan.

            Matthew and Thomas make a stop at a roadside village not far from Capernaum where Jesus was received well on his last visit, but find themselves greeted with suspicion.  Old friends of Thomas’s have been here in the meantime: friends who followed Jesus, then left him. Memory is a strange thing, thinks Thomas: the people in this village have talked with Jesus, but the words they claim to have heard from his mouth sound more like the words his detractors would have left. How could they have forgotten the teachings that so recently moved them? Though their eyes remember, it’s as if their ears never really heard Jesus at all.

            Judas and Simon travel farther before the rocky hillsides cut at their feet through sandals that have worn thin as they’ve walked with their Master. Luckily, they too are near a village that had gladly listened to Jesus just a few months ago. They can still remember the dance the villagers held the night before they left, still remember the toasts to new teachings, the promises people made to change.

            But no one is celebrating in the village on the day Judas and Simon return. The mood is somber, and the people walk around half-slumped down as they labor in the heat. Judas and Simon try to start conversations, but no one seems interested. Finally a tired-looking woman asks them, “What use are your teachings? John is dead, and your Master has abandoned us.” And that’s when Judas and Simon begin to understand what happened, begin to see how hopelessness has hardened into resentment here. They try to plead with people, try to revive their crushed young faith again—but it’s hard, thankless work and they decide before long to move on.

            Peter and Andrew come to the village Jesus’ brothers tried to take him home from, and everyone’s happy to see them again. They’re immediately invited back to the wine house, but there’s space today to serve real wine and they’re offered cup after cup after cup as aging men tell them how their farms are doing, and young men tell them about the thorny paths they’re taking in love. Peter and Andrew listen politely, then try to teach—but whenever the brothers stop talking the village men bring up the same things: farms and girls, girls and farms. And it’s clear that though they’ve nodded and made polite sounds, they haven’t been listening to the brothers at all. And though it seems each of the men invites Peter and Andrew to stay in his home that night, the brothers announce they have to move on. So late? say the men. “You remember how our Master worked,” says Peter. And then they leave and Andrew shudders at the way men can fail to realize what they have forgotten. 

            Thomas and Matthew, Judas and Simon, Peter and Andrew—each pair will go on to find people who are looking for truth. They’ll find places where they can do miracles and have their teachings understood, which is perhaps the greatest miracle of all. But they’ll also remember these first villages and know that no progress is immune to time. That if people stop searching for truth, they often lose even the truth they once had.

*

            But Philip and Nathanael will have to learn those lessons from the others, because Thomas’s system works better for them than they could have imagined. At the farming village where they stop, even people who missed Jesus when he came can still recite the story of his teachings and give the names of the villagers he healed. The old women who cook for Philip and Nathanael have more questions to ask, and the old men listen with them to the apostles’ answers. When the apostles ask who’d be ready to follow Jesus if he needed them, it seems the whole town is prepared to give up crops and take only livestock, pitching tents like the children of Israel as they followed Moses and Joshua. And before Philip and Nathanael can ask about relatives in other towns, the villagers ask them to go and see their family members here and there, say they’ve sent word in advance that disciples of Jesus will be coming, and offer to send a young kinsman or two with them to witness that what they have to say is true.

            How many people will hear about Jesus through each person in this village, Philip wonders. Thirty? Sixty? A hundred?

The Five Books of Jesus Excerpt: The Woman with the Issue of Blood

            A girl is dying, but there’s a crowd to be reckoned with. Into the streets Jesus’ opponents pour to shout abuse, into the streets Jesus’ supporters stream to shout encouragement. Young men join the throng hoping things turn ugly, the way Roman soldiers who miss the adrenaline of the Coliseum sometimes bet on fights between stray dogs. Old men pour into the street to ask themselves what happened, how the spell of quiet that once hung over their lakeside town has been broken. Young girls slip out of their homes to see if Jesus can rescue the council chief’s daughter; their mothers follow them into the fray, hoping to find them and bring them home again. Thieves join the crowd looking for loose money; drunkards join the crowd in the hopes a celebration erupts; the crowd grows tight around Jesus until his apostles start to worry about how his ribs will fare in the press.

             There’s a woman in the crowd who’s been bleeding since the dying girl was born. She doesn’t want to be here—for twelve years she’s been unclean from her constant menstruation and so she’s not used to being around people other than doctors at all, let alone a whole town at once. She knows she’s polluting everyone she touches, but she can’t keep from touching them as she pushes and shoves her way forward. This is not what she imagined. She didn’t even want to touch him, didn’t need to look at him: if she could just reach the hem of his robe, she’d told herself, it would be enough. Because she believes he can heal her. Though she’s believed in doctors before and saints before until it seemed all the wealth, hope, and energy were drained out of her bleeding body forever, the first time she heard a story about him, she knew she had to come. And she knows now that although she’s exhausted, she needs to make it just a few more steps, just reach her arm out a few inches farther, and it will all be worthwhile. She’ll be healed, and no one will ever have to know what sort of woman they touched. Just a few more steps, just a little longer reach, and twelve years of pain will melt and this pounding in her temples will stop and she can go home and maybe finally feel at home in her own skin.

            She falls, strangers’ knees battering her as she lands on her own, but she can see it right ahead, and just another half inch, so she throws herself forward with everything she has left. Maybe she’ll be trampled to death now, in the middle of a faraway town’s road, but she can feel the threads against her fingers and she knows that at least she’ll die clean: she can tell at once she isn’t bleeding from the inside anymore.

            “Stop!” says Jesus, and his voice is so firm that the hecklers stop shouting abuse, the young men stop egging them on. Mothers stop calling out their daughters’ names, old men stop shaking their heads, even thieves let the coins they’ve just lifted fall to the ground in their surprise. The feet around the woman don’t come down on her back or shoulders, the shins around her don’t slam into her head.

            “Who touched me?” Jesus says, as she pulls herself up, as she whispers a prayer thanking God for life and health. His disciples laugh.

            “Look around you!” they say. “Who here hasn’t touched you?”

            “No, someone touched me,” Jesus says. “I felt some of my virtue go out.”

            That’s when the woman starts to shake. When her relief turns to fear. Has she polluted him after all? Has the long impurity of her body somehow wounded this saint?

            “Who touched me?” Jesus says, and she starts to cry.

            Now everyone is watching her and so she has to tell the whole story: who she is, why she shouldn’t have been here with them, why she wanted so badly to touch him and how she risked their well-being to do it. No one seems to know how to look at her. “But I’m healed now,” she says through her tears, “I’m sorry I touched you all, but now I’m clean.”

            “Don’t worry,” says Jesus. “Your faith healed you. It’s all right.”

            But in Jairus’s house, it is not all right. In Jairus’s house, a girl whose face is pale as death when she sleeps has stopped taking in fresh breaths.

The Five Books of Jesus: Preview

In October 2010, my bishop and one of his counselors pulled me out of Sunday school and told me they'd felt inspired to ask me to prepare a fifth Sunday lesson about the life of Christ.

Teaching and speaking come easily to me, and so I usually only feel intimidated by a church assignment if it involves paperwork. But I was a little intimidated by that assignment, because I knew the bishopric felt I had something specific to contribute and I felt an obligation to figure out what that something specific was.

As I prepared the lesson, I realized I couldn't possibly cover the life of Christ meaningfully in an hour. So after corresponding with the bishopric, I decided to focus instead on how to study the gospels more fully using our imaginative power as we read. 

The handout I prepared for that lesson included four steps to richer reading:

Try to imagine the story from the participants’ perspective. 
Example: Matt. 12: 46-50 [what did this look like to his family?]

Rediscover the surprise.
Example: Luke 4: 16-21 [who does that?]

Don’t read too fast—learn to feel the questions before you rush after the answer. 
Example: Mark 10: 26, 26-30 [who then shall be saved?]

It’s OK to wonder. 
Example: Luke 2: 50-51 [did Luke interview Mary?]

My handout also included a sort of sample "topical guide" that grouped passages by emotional dynamic rather than by doctrine. Like this:

Times when Jesus frightened people:
Luke 2: 41-45, 48-49 [lost in the temple]; Mark 10: 23-26 [Jesus shocks the apostles]; Matt. 8: 32-34 [locals ask Jesus to leave]; Matt. 14: 23-26 [mistaken for a ghost]; Mark 5: 30-33 [issue of blood], Mark 11: 15-18 [cleansing the temple]

Things Jesus said or did which people didn’t get at the time:
Luke 2: 50-51 [Father’s business?], John 12: 14-16 [disciples saw prophecy later], Mark 9: 30-32 [When Jesus talks predicts his death, the disciples are afraid to ask questions] Luke 24: 12 [Peter sees the empty burial linens and wonders]

Times when people got a glimpse into Jesus’ loneliness: 
Maybes: Luke 9: 57-58 [foxes], John 6: 67 [will ye also go away?] More clear: Matt. 26: 37-40 [three fall asleep], Mark 15: 34 and Ps. 22 [what Jesus starts to quote from the cross]

Times when Jesus made people around him look deeply into themselves: 
Mark 10: 26-30 [Peter wonders if he’s good enough], John 8: 2-9 [casting the first stone], Luke 24: 30-32 [road to Emmaus]

The handout suggested you could make countless lists like these, including times when the crowds around Jesus were overwhelming, times when Jesus made people happy, times when people surprised Jesus, times when Jesus walked out of verbal or physical traps, times when Jesus got unusually upset or stern, times Jesus talked with women.

At the end of the lesson, I suggested that, in addition to generating more usable insights, one benefit of building a more detailed human picture of the gospels would be that you'd have an easier time telling compelling stories about Jesus to your children. I shared how my daughter loved the story of Jesus and John kicking in their mothers' bellies, and told about how deeply she seemed to connect even at age five to Jesus' desire not to be alone on the Mount of Olives.

That fifth Sunday lesson, as I recall, went quite well. I had, I thought, fulfilled my assignment honorably.

Only--even after the lesson, the assignment kept lingering with me.

Usually, when I get an idea for a story or a novel, I tell my wife right away. More often than not, telling her is enough to relieve my initial fascination with the idea and I no longer feel the obligation to actually write the story down, which saves me a lot of work.

But when I decided I wanted to extend my imaginative engagement with the gospels into a novel-length retelling, I didn't dare risk losing steam by letting anyone know. So I wrote the opening sequences slowly, carefully, and in secret, and only showed them to her once I knew I was hooked on the project.

I spent most of last summer creating the first draft of the novel. I am not ashamed to admit that I cried at the end. I am a bit ashamed to admit that I almost cried again when I started the revision process and realized how much more work I had left to do.

Through the fall and winter, I decided to let the manuscript sit. This summer, I promised myself to finish the revision. I plan to release the book in August.

I'm 64% of the way through the text now. Last week, I decided to pick up the pace so I can meet my end of August goal, and I haven't blogged since.

But I feel sort of like I owe all of you readers something, so I've decided to post a short excerpt once or twice a week until the revision is done. I'll post the opening sequence simultaneously with this post, and be back next week with another scene that can stand fairly well on its own.

Hope you enjoy them.