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4.5
I've been meaning to read this book for the better part of a decade. My most recent listen of Pullman's The Book Of Dust: La Belle Sauvage nudged me to finally move this title from my wish list into my cart.My copy arrived this afternoon and I began reading it as soon as I opened the package. That was about 4 hours ago, and now that I'm finished I have to say, I have some serious feelings to process.Like Pullman, I was raised in the modern Christian faith, and I, too, was a well-behaved little Christian child until I started noticing holes in the explanations that adults had for why the Church can be so very, very, un-Christian. My break from religion, in the end, was as much about self preservation as it was about not believing in God. I'm still wrestling with the emotional fallout more than half a lifetime later.Even still, there is no denying the presence and importance of the Biblical Canon in my life. There are so many retellings of the Gospels, beginning with the Officially Licensed® versions set down by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Jesus Christ Superstar, The Life of Brian, The Passion of the Christ, Lamb, The Greatest Story Ever Told, even the Nativity plays put on by Sunday Schools all over Christendom every year offer a different retelling of the life of Jesus, the man, and Christ, the Messiah. To say that the story is etched into the very skeleton of western culture is putting it mildly.Pullman's interpretation, however, doesn't just shed new light on the story, it points the spotlight toward the storyteller, or at least to the spot where the storyteller once sat, because that's where the real mystery lies.We've all been told this story over and over and over until we can recite it by rote like Linus explaining to Charlie Brown what Christmas is really all about, but the story of who decided what parts of that narrative were important, and WHY, is just as, if not MORE, important than the story itself.Pullman revitalizes the timeworn foundational lore of the Christian faith both by humanizing the storyteller (both flatteringly and not) and by directing our attention to the elephantine presence of the Church in the room. It left me feeling both more charitable toward and more critical of the story of Jesus Christ at the same time.I don't remember the last time that I sat down and read 300 pages in the space of a few hours, but this little book wouldn't let me be done with it until I'd finished it, and even now I can tell that the two of us still have unfinished business.Also, as a former English teacher, I'm assigning you some homework: don't skip the Afterword. It's pivotal.
