Christian Identity Book Reviews on Creativity, Struggle, and Calling
Christian Identity Book Reviews shape LeRoy Lawson’s reflections on three books that explore creativity, struggle, self-understanding, and Christian identity. From Charles Schulz’s Peanuts to John Elder Robison’s story of Asperger’s syndrome and Arron Chambers’s Bible study on identity in Christ, the article considers what it means to be extraordinary rather than merely “normal.”
- Charles Schulz’s life and work reveal how personal struggle shaped the world of Peanuts.
- John Elder Robison’s memoir offers a hopeful and honest look at life with Asperger’s syndrome.
- Arron Chambers’s book points Christians toward their identity and potential in Christ.
By LeRoy Lawson
Today’s preacher has to be able to do much more than talk. He is not unlike an orchestra conductor creating beautiful sermonic music, pointing now to the lighting technicians, waving at the sound man, calling in the computer operator, relying on the prep work of the graphics personnel and creative artists, and weaving in TV and movie clips to present a harmonious worship experience that inspires the congregation and, it is hoped, pleases God.
It is not now as it was in days of yore. We had then, instead, to rely on words: uttered, quoted, organized, explained, impassioned words.
But we were not entirely without visual aids.
We had Peanuts. Was the topic depression? Lucy the psychiatrist rushed to our rescue, her sage counsel worth every penny of her five-cent fee. Was it the arts, especially music, we would summon? We could turn to Schroeder; his piano delivered Beethoven as never before heard. If the sermon dealt with human aspirations, with hope, with dream fulfillment, Snoopy, the world-famous golfer, skier, ice skater, pilot—and just about everything else—exemplified the ultimate achiever. And if you needed help with your theology and assistance in wrestling with life’s ambiguities, there was always Good Ol’ Charlie Brown.
We had other comic strips besides Peanuts—I grieved when Calvin and Hobbes’s creator Bill Watterson announced his retirement in 1995—but Charles Schulz, the best of the best, was nearly indispensable. He kept at his task for 50 years and illuminated my sermons for most of that time.
Always a Challenge
As David Michaelis makes so clear in this meticulous biography, Schulz and Peanuts (Harper, 2007), however, even though Sparky (his lifelong nickname) enjoyed unprecedented success in his field, life was always a challenge for the shy, introverted, socially awkward, perpetually brooding artist.
Charlie Brown’s sense of failure, his personal knowledge of life’s unfairness, his befuddled management of his no-win baseball team, his disappointments in love—these (and much, much more) are drawn directly from the creator’s experience. So are the antics and sufferings of Schroeder, Lucy, Peppermint Patty, Pigpen, and Schulz’s whole gang of adults in children’s skins.
Michaelis uses an old preacher’s trick: he illustrates his prose with Peanuts cartoons, enlivening the biographical detail by Schulz’s drawings (which I read with my magnifying glass). Sometimes he tells me more than I want to know, especially of Schulz’s early life—but then, it was his early life that gave birth to the little people.
Michaelis’s Schulz is a flawed man, a mother’s boy who never fully cut the apron strings, a spoiled child whose father indulged his every whim and then became his adult son’s best friend, a loner at home only at his drawing board, a believer who embraced his Church of God faith almost fanatically and then drifted with the years toward humanism. In short, a complex man-child whose imbalance gave us what a better-adjusted man probably could not have: Peanuts.
Shy, Scared, and Brilliant
John Elder Robison’s Look Me in the Eye (Crown, 2007) is an easy read that’s not easy to read. Afflicted with Asperger’s syndrome (a form of autism), Robison tells his own story from his early days as the troubled child of an abusively alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother to his current life as husband, father, and successful businessman.
He writes well, which makes the book an easy read. He has suffered deeply, which makes it not so easy to read, especially if you have autism in the family, as mine does.
This is not a textbook on the syndrome. For more information, Robison recommends you check out OASIS (the Online Asperger Syndrome Information and Support site at www.udel.edu/bkirby/asperger/) and The OASIS Guide to Asperger Syndrome (Crown, 2001). Turn there for the technical aspects of the condition. Turn here to learn how one deeply confused boy struggled to function socially with a brain not wired like “normal” ones. The young Robison was more at home with machines than with humans. Other people stigmatized him as rude, arrogant, anti-social, and retarded—when he was in fact shy, scared, and brilliant.
He finally began to find acceptance when he was “discovered” by the rock music world. “Ampie,” they called him; he could resurrect their dead amplifiers, explode their guitars, and invent other special effects for the likes of KISS and Pink Floyd. Eventually he wormed his way into polite society by carefully studying how normal people act—and by not expecting us to act logically.
Here’s how he puts it: “In the past, when people criticized me for asking unexpected questions, I felt ashamed. Now I realize that normal people are acting in a superficial and often false manner. So rather than let them make me feel bad, I express my annoyance. It’s my way of trying to strike a blow for logic and rationality.” So who’s the normal one here?
It’s a hopeful book. He believes “considerable rewiring took place in my own brain in my thirties and even later.” He can now write about his feelings and his “greater insight into [his] emotional life has allowed [him] to express it, both verbally and on paper.” Sadly, though, with increased normality has come decreased aptitude: “I look at circuits I designed twenty years ago and it’s as if someone else did them.” At what price do we become “normal”?
Tapping into Potential
Self-identity, such huge issues for Schulz and Robison, is the subject of Arron Chambers’s little book Remember Who You Are (Standard Publishing, 2007). Unable to fit in with their peers, both men sought solace elsewhere (Schulz at the drawing board, Robinson in his mechanical and electronic world). Chambers, who includes heavy doses of autobiographical material in this guided Bible study, believes most Christians have not fully tapped into their potential, either.
In 13 chapters he spells out our identity in Christ: imperfect though we are, we are chosen for righteousness (that is, we can live right), freedom, love, even saintliness. We are nothing less than children of God. When you add up all the things the Scriptures assert about us, we look very much, Chambers says, like “God’s masterpiece.”
Even all this doesn’t make us exactly normal, though. We are built to be, as we learned from a different perspective with Schulz and Robison, extraordinary.
LeRoy Lawson is international consultant with Christian Missionary Fellowship International and a contributing editor to CHRISTIAN STANDARD. His column appears monthly.
