Item: 1 copy of The Message, by Eugene Peterson (Part II)

Thinking more about the experience of reading The Message and being distracted by its style, being disappointed by its treatment of the great riffs of the Bible, I actually often have a similar experience reading many Christian writers.  Namely, for every good point I find there are many more that are awkwardly presented or obviously not thought through.

Interestingly, most of the writers that I don't feel this way about are Catholic.  I could theorize that this is because a person brought up in the Catholic church is likely to be familiar with liturgy and to have some kind of ingrained sense of rhythm and the sound of language that a Protestant (like me) doesn't have.  Although I think there must be more to it than that.  I often find in Catholic writers a kind of rigor, an expectation of the reader that I respond to.

Take, for example, these 2 openings as a comparison and contrast.  Take, first, from the evangelical mold, the opening sentences to Chuck Colson's book Loving God:

It was a glorious Easter Sunday, the spring sun sparkling and warm, the air fresh and sweet.  Too nice a day to spend in prison, but that's where I was bound.

As opposed to this, which starts off Thomas Merton's autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain:

On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world.  Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born.

These represent, it seems to me, not only 2 different ways of using language but 2 different conceptions the writers have about the world and about themselves.  The first makes some minimal sketches toward setting the scene, but it seems obvious that the really important fact is that it was Easter Sunday.  In the second, on the other hand, every detail seems loaded with significance:  I have a sense that the date is important, the war is important, the mountains are important.  There are so many levels working in this passage that are lacking in the first, which dwells on nothing but the point.  I write more like the first, I believe, but I think more like the second.