PART 5 – EXPLORING THE EMOTIONS
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Chapter 25 - RECOVERING THE ROMANCE
Even Bible College students love romantic novels!
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In the 1970’s my wife and I were studying at Northumbria Bible College in Berwick-on-Tweed. Among other responsibilities, we volunteered to catalogue the college library, which at the time was stacked higgledy-piggledy on shelves around the students’ common room. As we started organising and cataloguing the books, we came across quite a lot of fiction, including a number of Mills and Boon romantic novels.
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We asked the College Principle what we should do with them, and were told to bundle them up and leave them out for collection by the bin men. However we soon noticed that as quickly as we dumped them by the rubbish bins, they were being retrieved. A little detective work confirmed they were making their way back to the girls’ dormitories!
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Mills and Boone apart, a dry selection of theology text books and church history is hardly going to provide a rounded diet. We need to feed the creative, intuitive, emotional side of our brain as well as the factual, analytical side.
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There are books of all sizes, shapes and genres to provide emotional stimulus and feed our creative instincts:
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Detective novels or action stories to provide excitement and suspense
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Humour to make us laugh
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Science fiction, for a taste of the weird and wonderful
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Short stories with a twist in the tale for shock and surprise
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Ghost stories to make our hair stand on end
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And of course there’s the romantic novel!
Sorry, but romantic novels are not my cup of tea! Seriously though, we are all attracted by different styles and genres of literature, and enjoy different kinds of emotional content. Personally I enjoy sci-fi novels. I grew up on a diet of H.G.Wells, Arthur C.Clarke, Isaac Asimov and John Wyndham. For me, the plot line is probably more important than the characterisation, but I do find John Wyndham’s characters are much better portrayed, and are much easier to empathise with than, say, Isaac Asimov’s. Asimov generally has more empathy with robots than people!
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What kind of literature do you enjoy? Or if you are a film buff, what kind of films do you prefer? Fast fire action?... suspense?... romance?
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So what about the Bible? I previously quoted Ben Whitnall of the Bible Society, who wrote:
​So every EastEnders storyline comes from the Bible, apparently… It’s easy to see why: the Bible is bursting with human stories that ​ will be around as long as people are – and it’s got to be one of the most honest, insightful, hard-hitting and brilliantly constructed collection of books about what Rowan Williams calls ‘the really important debates in the public arena [which] are about what it means to be human’.
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Those “honest, insightful, hard-hitting and brilliantly constructed” stories of the Bible were written or told by many different human authors during a time-span of some 2,000 years, and include many different types of literary genre: pithy proverbs, the poetry of the Psalms, stories of kings and power-struggles between prophets and politicians, love stories (like Isaac and Rebecca, Ruth and Boaz), epic hero stories (Gideon and Sampson) crime and consequences (Naboth’s vineyard, David’s adultery) and if you want sci-fi and fantasy, there are the apocalyptic visions of Daniel and Revelation.
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When you are reading your favourite type of literature, or watching your favourite kind of film, I’m sure you do so in anticipation of being emotionally involved. Maybe you have a box of paper hankies handy, or something to hide behind if the action gets too scary. (I remember watching the early Dr Who episodes from behind the sofa!) But we tend to respond much more intellectually when we are reading the Bible. We really do need to recover the romance, the suspense, the joy, the tears, and let the stories touch our hearts as well as our heads.
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Not so long ago my wife and I watched “The Railway Man”, adapted from the autobiography of the same name by Eric Lomax. Lomax served as a signals officer in World War II, and was captured when the Japanese conquered Singapore. Lomax worked with other POWs to build a secret radio receiver, which was discovered by the prison authorities, and he was subsequently singled out for intense interrogation and torture which left him traumatised and psychologically damaged. However, he survived, and sometime after the end of the war discovered that one of his Japanese captors who was involved in his interrogation and torture was also still alive.
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Lomax’s initial response was to hunt the man down and take revenge, but discovered that he was seeking to make amends for his own part in the war by speaking out against militarism and seeking to promote peace. After an extensive period of correspondence, during which they were able to share their stories and reach an understanding of each other’s experiences, they arranged to meet. Lomax was able to forgive his former interrogator Takashi Nagase, and the two remained friends for the rest of their lives, working together to promote peace and forgiveness between Japan and the Allies.
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The reconciliation scene between Eric Lomax and Takashi Nagase is intensely moving and deeply emotional – more so because we have been exposed to the horrific torture that Lomax suffered as a Japanese POW, and we can understand what it must have cost Lomax to forgive this man who had been so involved in his suffering. But the act of reconciliation is also a healing experience, for both Eric Lomax and for Takashi Nagase.
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Questions for consideration and discussion
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How much does this story remind you of the Joseph story?
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Both Eric Lomax and Takashi Nagase would have been damaged by their experiences during the war. How would the act of reconciliation have enabled each of them to deal with past hurts?
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In the same way, both Joseph and his brothers would be mentally/emotionally scarred by their past experiences and the act of betrayal. What kind of healing do you think they still need?
As we come to the reconciliation scene between Joseph and his brothers in the next episode of the story, bear in mind that this climactic resolution is also intensely emotional and deeply moving. Try to understand it and experience it with your heart, as well as your mind.
