BitterSweetLife

Beautiful, Rigorous Essays on Finding God Despite Chaos

Given that the books on my shelves, and therefore the books that show up on the Master Book List, have been subjected to background checks and their IDs checked at the door, I don't frequently get blindsided by great new authors.

I'm not saying that great new authors aren't out there, just that I usually hear about them long before I read their books. That's why Dale Allison's The Luminous Dusk came as a surprise--like a triple-shot Americano when you were just expecting coffee.

The world in which we live draws us away from God, and we must fight to regain the raw elements needed to encounter him: silence (internal and external), a willingness to reflect, a love for The Book, a love for reading, an instinct to push our imaginations toward the beautiful unseen.

My copy is so marked up with notes that I hardly know where to start this review. (And this being a blog, I can say that out loud. That's the beauty of blogging. You can be uncompromisingly, casually honest, about books anyway, and even include annoyingly long parenthetical notes which would not fly if you were being paid--at a per-word rate--for succinct clarity. You can also delay your explanation of a book's content until the third or fourth paragraph if you want, which is a real faux pas for a "review.")

How about Allison's voice? I'd label him a scholar par excellence--with a very strong imagination. These two qualities are combined far less frequently than we would all like, and Allison simultaneously rocks two boats: the dry academic barge and the wildly creative skiff. They can be built into one vessel and still float, he suggests.

Allison weaves historical, literary and anecdotal evidence into his theology as if he can't help himself, and he does it brilliantly. Consider:

In the dark film The Third Man, Orson Welles's evil character looks from atop a giant Ferris wheel at the human specks below and comments that from his perspective they are small and many and accordingly worthless, so killing them would be no crime. Massive urbanization tends to breed analogous sentiments, which is perhaps one reason why murder rates are so high in the cities: there people are less valued. We need only call to mind Jack the Ripper's East End London. (13)

Ultimately, Allison's thesis seeps into the reader and becomes undeniable: The world in which we live draws us away from God, and we must fight to regain the raw elements needed to encounter him: silence (internal and external), a willingness to reflect, a love for The Book, a love for reading, an instinct to push our imaginations toward the beautiful unseen. That's the gist of the expertly-sketched theology in The Luminous Dusk. But Allison's book does much more than suggest we're living in a fledgling dystopia. He works to instill a love for what we lack. There's a sadness to his writing at times that may kindle a corresponding sorrow--and "kindle" is an appropriate word because there's a sorrow that leads to repentance, and repentance leads to spiritual life, a regaining of things lost.

The Luminous Dusk is a demanding book, but not necessarily a difficult read. Don't expect to scan it quickly. Dale Allison's chapters work as stand-alone essays as well as successive chapters in his story. There are a handful of chapters that don't share the depth and brilliance of the others, which is the only thing that keeps Dusk from the magisterial A+ level.

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