December 31, 2009 Heart Fare

I awoke reciting John 15 which I am striving to memorize. I helps, I've found, to repeat the passage I'm working on by saying it in the morning before I rise and in the evening before I fall asleep. Then, I write it out, actually my thumbs punch it into my Blackberry, and I double check to be sure my jots and tittles are correct. Once I have it down, I add another verse.  In a world full of Barnes & Nobles, Borders and Bookbinders, it may be surprising to some younger folk that a short time ago, book banning was fairly commonplace. Over the years books have been banned when the powers that be determined a particular book promoted thinking in contradiction to the best interests of society. In the early 50's Ray Bradbury wrote a book on the subject titled 'Farenheit 451', "the temperature at which book paper burns". Interestingly, his book itself was banned from certain libraries, deemed too controversial. Set in a futuristic oppressive American society, it is the story of Guy Montag, a fireman, whose job  rather than putting fires out, is setting fires to destroy books. He describes his job: "Well, it's a job just like any other. Good work with lots of variety. Monday, we burn Miller; Tuesday, Tolstoy; Wednesday, Walt Whitman; Friday, Faulkner; and Saturday and Sunday, Schopenhauer and Sartre. We burn them to ashes and then burn the ashes. That's our official motto". But Guy's curiosity soon has him wondering at the contents of some of the great works he is destroying and he begins to sneak them home to read until his wife informs on him and he's forced to flee. As the movie ends, Guy joins a group of renegade intellectuals (“the Book People”). They are a part of a nationwide network of book lovers who have memorized many great works of literature and philosophy. Guy is given the assignment og memorizing the Book of Ecclesiastes. The movie made from this book in the sixties left quite an impression on me, especially the final scene of a young boy sitting at the knee of an old man, learning Tolstoy's 'War and Peace'. A seemingly daunting task, I was left asking myself, what if there were no books? What if there were no Bibles? If you knew at some future date, all bibles would be confiscated and destroyed, would that make it more precious? Many of our brethren, are oppressed in just such a way but does it spur us on to commit passages and chapters, line and verse, to memory? Did you know that the Bible was named among objects banned from the 2008 Olympic village in Beijing. What is so threatening about the Bible? What indeed? Freedom? Hope? Courage? "Your word have I hidden in my heart, that I might not sin against you." Psalm 119:11