Easter: to judge by the shops, it’s all about hot–cross buns, fluffy bunnies and chocolate eggs.

Jolly pagan stuff, huh? Especially those bunnies. Symbolic of an ancient fertility rite and the revivification of the earth at springtime, they just reek of goddess worship. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Christian or not—one thing we’re agreed on: the bunny is an iconic pagan image.

About this time last year, I started to become excessively suspicious about this academic collectivism. In researching threshold covenants, it’s not possible to pass over the ultimate type: the Passover itself. That means returning to the original word—Pesach—and finding out what it means.

Now, scholars aren’t entirely sure about pesach. They think it means to leap, to spring, to hop, to pass over.

God leaping, springing or hopping isn’t an image that fits immediately and comfortably into my brainspace and I can see why the more dignified ‘pass over’ is the verb of choice.

During the conflict in Syria, refugees have been pouring into Wadi al–Nasara, the Valley of the Christians.

In the middle of my prayers for this nation in crisis, the word ‘nasara’ struck me as a very unusual name. It doesn’t look anything like the western word Christian. So what sense did it have for the Arabs?

Now Christians have been called by many names over the last two millennia. It’s a bit trendy to be a Christ–follower these days, rather than a Christian. A couple of decades ago, Jesus–freak was by no means a derogatory term.

The names change, even while the Lord remains the same. Even back in the first century, there was no standard terminology. Luke, for instance, uses seven different names in the Book of Acts:

1. Saints
2. Believers
3. Disciples
4. Brethren
5. Followers of the Way
6. Those being saved
7. Christians

Still, I’ve got to admit I pricked up my ears at Nasara. In the book I’ve been working on most recently, God’s Panoply, the Hebrew word ’nasa takes prominent place. As soon as I heard of Wadi al–Nasara, I wondered whether there was any connection between the two words.

As it turns out, nasara is an Arabic word. It’s old. So old it’s used in the Quran, the Islamic holy book. Subsequent commentary on the passage which refers to Christians as nasara is exceedingly interesting. The expected word for Christians should be Masihiyyun (followers of the Messiah) but it’s not.

Rather, nasara is used 18 times in the Quran. By contrast, Christian is only used 3 times in the New Testament.

One evening in church a little while back, I got distracted while singing one of the choruses. My eyes happened to light on the final words of an unfamiliar hymn on the opposite page: And heav’n’s peace and perfect justice kissed a guilty world in love.

Hmm, I mused. The ‘suspicion’ switch turned on in my head.

If I’m not mistaken, I thought, those lyrics are a reference to Psalm 85:10. I immediately began to wonder about the age of the hymn. There was nothing helpful on the page except the composer’s name, William Rees, along with two verses:

Here is love, vast as the ocean,

Loving-kindness as the flood,

When the Prince of Life, our Ransom,

Shed for us His precious blood.

Who His love will not remember?

Who can cease to sing His praise?

He can never be forgotten,

Throughout heav’n’s eternal days.

On the mount of crucifixion,

Fountains opened deep and wide;

Through the floodgates of God’s mercy

Flowed a vast and gracious tide.

Grace and love, like mighty rivers,

Poured incessant from above,

And heav’n’s peace and perfect justice

Kissed a guilty world in love.

It looked old. But not that old. It lacked a telltale thee or thou. Still those apostrophes were hopeful signs.

My brother–in–law is a king.

True.

It happened this way: he was involved in aid work in the Philippines. Some villagers asked him to write to the government on their behalf. They wanted the land taken from them back. Privately he thought their chances were nil but he gave it his best shot anyway.

To his surprise the government agreed. The villagers were so delighted they decided to make him their king. My sister travelled with him for the ceremony and asked what it meant to become a ‘datu’. ‘Our datu is our king,’ she was told. ‘He can go to Buckingham Palace and eat cucumber sandwiches with the Queen of England.’ My brother–in–law has not tested the earnest conviction of his loyal subjects on this score, possibly put off by Wikipedia’s insistence a ‘datu’ is merely a petty tribal chief.

My garden has never been the same since the drought of three years ago. The flowers wilted and the rose bushes died and, although we’ve had a flood of rain since, I’ve never got around to replanting them.

One surprising survivor is a cluster of storm lilies that comes up every time there’s a sunshower. A soft blend of translucent cream and lilac, they are—unfortunately—rarely there more than a day. They epitomise to me the wonder of life in all its transience, fragility and beauty.

I have a serious addiction to wonder. It’s probably the reason I’ve never outgrown that child-like asking of, ‘Why?’ Sooner or later, that is the question which leads to a moment of spellbound awe. CS Lewis admitted to the pursuit of joy; for me, it’s wonder.

It was Martin Luther who said, ‘If you truly understood a grain of wheat, you would die of wonder.’

When my dad was diagnosed with cancer, he was keen to investigate both conventional and alternative medicine. As a consequence, he sent me off on his behalf to a course in ‘German New Medicine’.

The brainchild of oncologist, Dr Geerd Hamer, it looks upon cancer as a ‘disease of the soul’—and thus not only physical in nature but also psychological and spiritual.

The physical aspect looks back at a moment of trauma, usually a year or two in the past. The psychological component is about the words the person speaks over themselves at that moment of trauma. And the spiritual component of it looks at why those particular words were chosen and at long–term issues of forgiveness.

Ever since I did the course, I’ve got phonecalls from various people who know I attended, asking what the handbook suggests were the words that could initiate a particular disease. I’ve yet to have anyone disagree with what I’ve uncovered; in fact, mostly a dozen lightbulbs have gone on all at once for anyone who has asked.

Words.

According to Geerd Hamer, who looked at over 40 000 patients to formulate his theory, the words we speak over ourselves at a moment of trauma have immense power.

There is nothing new in the idea that words have power. In the first chapter of Genesis, God creates the heavens and the earth by the power of the spoken word.

I’ve always liked the writing of Os Guinness. He never shies away from the difficult questions. In Unspeakable he tackles the question of how a good God can permit atrocities to continue throughout history.

Towards the very end of the book, he relates the story of Philip Hallie. A Jewish boy from Chicago, he grew up in a world of arbitrary cruelty. After the Second World War, he left the army and studied philosophy, eventually to pursue a lifelong analysis of the nature of the Holocaust.

You are what you read.

Hallie’s major work was highly acclaimed but inevitably it drew him deeper into depression and violent, restless anger. After a frightening confrontation with his family one night, he went out in order to try to walk off his black mood. Arriving at his office, he sat down in despair. He realised he had become the very thing he had read about for so long: the face of cruelty was not only a Nazi doctor cutting off a Jewish boy’s toe or ear without anaesthesia, it was his own.

As he sat there, appalled, his eyes lighted on a bookshelf devoted to the French Resistance. Recalling that those stories of heroism always made him feel better, he went to the shelf and there discovered a small book he could not remember reading. He quickly realised why.

At lunchtime yesterday, I got out my ‘solar eclipse’ glasses to check out the transit of Venus. The weather was perfect for observation and my boss, lured by the winter sunshine and the simplicity of the glasses (he’d already tried the pinhole technique without success), decided he’d try to photograph the event for posterity.

He just wasn’t sure he’d be around for the next transit in 105 years. It took considerable ingenuity to rig up a suitable system, using only cardboard off-cuts, but his efforts were worth it. One of his photos is featured.

All of this recent focus on the planet Venus has a bit of extra fascination for me. I’ve been collecting names for the ‘morning star’ recently. This is because I’m in the middle of writing up some teaching material for my latest fantasy novel, Daystar.

Yes, there’s quite a few by that name at the moment but I’ve been working on this one decades, so it’s hard to change. Daystar is an archaic term, which is actually disputed in meaning: some places say it refers to Venus and some say it’s another name for the sun.

One thing’s for sure: in a transit of Venus across the face of the sun, you’re definitely observing the ‘daystar’, whatever it originally was.

It’s been a real treat for have an excuse (as if I needed one, being a name ferret) to look up more names meaning the morning star.

I was an avid reader throughout my childhood. I had such an instinctive respect for books no one had to tell me not to crease the corner of a page or bend the spine. I was shocked the first time I saw someone turn down a page just to mark where they were up to. It was like mutilating a baby.

Likewise, no one had to tell me that, once a book was begun, it had to be finished. I sensed the unwritten contract between myself and the writer: the commitment to get to the end, no matter what.

Had you asked me back then if I’d ever broken this self–imposed rule, I’d have said ‘no’. However, as an adult, I’ve been surprised to remember books I started and put aside. It wasn’t that I was bored. They were great books. No, it was almost an instinct for self–preservation. There was one particular book (which I eventually read as an adult) that I got out of the school library and started at least five times—never getting beyond the third page.

Even now, with all the self–understanding I have, I can look at those three pages in Alan Garner’s Elidor and wonder what I discerned in them to make me shut the book and take it back. And then to try again—and think twice about having done so.

How did I know the rest of the story would destroy my hope in what life offers?

I’m a firm believer in a happy ending. Not necessarily within the story itself but it must hold out the promise that all will eventually be well. By ‘happy ending’, I’m not talking about a Pollyanna sweetness–and–light finale. Far from it. My all–time favourite movie is the seriously underrated Colossus: The Forbin Project which certainly doesn’t finish on an upbeat note. The world has just been taken over by a giant supercomputer which, in order to enforce its benign tyranny, kills anyone who stands between it and world peace. Yet the final scene, as Forbin vows never to yield leaves no doubt the fall of Colossus was inevitable in the face of an indomitable human spirit.

Back when I was at school, algebra was taught as a symbolic language. Over the years, the emphasis changed and, by the time I left mathematics teaching, it was being introduced through arithmetic patterns. Somehow I got the best of both worlds: I was equally at home with algebra as a language or as a system of recognising numerical relationships.

These two ways of thinking about the nature of equations could not be more different but I was fortunate in being able to move from one system to the other without missing a beat. Despite the disdain of modern mathematics educators for symbolic language, I’m deeply grateful I was brought up with it. Because the day came when I realised that, once you are fluent in one symbolic language, you have the essential grammar of them all.

Dream symbols operate according to the same rules of language as algebra; literary symbols often do too, especially when those symbols are ‘invented’ names within a ‘made-up’ plot.

In Discovered or Invented?, I looked at the question which perplexes some very eminent mathematicians: Is mathematics a construction of the human mind or does it exist somewhere ‘out there’, just waiting to be found?

In Discovered or Imagined?, I looked at a similar question in relation to fiction: Do storytellers make up their ‘secondary worlds’ or do the stories exist somewhere ‘out there’, just waiting to be told?

On an even deeper level: Are the names we think we ‘make up’ for characters simply a random conglomeration of suitable syllables or are they already ‘out there’, just waiting to be exposed?

Recently I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about whom I’m writing for. Is it me? Well, of course it is, at least in the first instance. I’m very much of CS Lewis’ philosophy when it comes to writing: I write the sort of things I would have wanted to read or know as a kid or younger adult.

However, there’s an aspect of my writing that is not me. At the end of the day I want to communicate to the widest possible audience. So I make sacrifices to achieve that goal.

Lately, as I’ve struggled to communicate the concept of ‘show, don’t tell’ to many writers who reject the idea, I’ve looked more deeply at the way Scripture writers told their stories. I’ve tried to see how they responded to the taste of their age and the target audience of the day.

So because today is the Thursday before Easter, I’d like to take a specific look at the story of Jesus in front of Annas and Caiaphas as told one of my heroes: a man who used numerical literary technique so exquisitely he raised it to an artform, an author who fused number and word design in ways that bubble with humour. But he also faced a complex problem that I’m glad I don’t: he wrote in Greek to communicate a Hebrew understanding of the world. Writing to Gentiles in their own language, he nonetheless wanted to convey to the Jews of the time the message that Jesus really is the Messiah.

John, the son of Zebedee, was clearly presented with a unique challenge.  How he responded is quite surprising: to me, it’s clear he selected his information so that the story of Jesus’ trial was told with specific reference to doors. 

Yes, doors.

Possibly you’ve never noticed them. So I’m going to point them out. In fact, John was so focussed on doors and words related to them that he occasionally offered us some really awkward constructions. Check out the words in bold: Simon Peter was following Jesus, and so was another disciple. Now that disciple was known to the high priest, and entered with Jesus into the court of the high priest, but Peter was standing at the door outside. So the other disciple, who was known to the high priest, went out and spoke to the doorkeeper, and brought Peter in. (John 18:15-16)

It would be so much simpler if we had a name instead of ‘the other disciple, who was known to the high priest’. Many commentators believe the ‘other disciple’ was John himself and this is his rather inelegant attempt at humility. However, I don’t believe that needs to be the case at all. The disciple could have been anyone, male or female, close or distant. In my view, John simply didn’t want to mix his metaphors by mentioning a disciple whose name was not about a doorway.

A zillion years ago, back when I was in Grade 10, my history teacher gave my class an assignment on ‘totalitarianism’. I’d just started it when I happened to encounter the husband of a friend of my mum’s. He was from Poland, he’d been in a Nazi concentration camp during the Second World War and he was, so he feared, unable to return home because he’d be executed by the Soviet secret police. His hatred of both Germans and Russians was immense.

He asked about my homework. I told him and asked: ‘Would you say that it’s better to be without law than to endure a system like Stalinist Russia?’

Intense grey eyes suddenly bored into me. His answer was one I’ve never forgotten: ‘Any system of law, no matter how brutal, repressive or tyrannical, is better than none. When I was in the concentration camp, nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to the barbarity of the time between the Nazis leaving and the Russians arriving. Any system of law is better than anarchy.’

As I’ve recalled this thought over the years, I’ve realised it contains the essence of a truth Christians have largely forgotten.

Law is an aspect of God’s grace.

According to Vishal Mangalwadi, until the eighteenth century, Christians took this as self-evident. The gift of the Ten Commandments freed mankind from anarchy and lawlessness. Yet human nature tends to inveterate law-breaking and so we desire mercy, not strict justice.

By the nineteenth century, mercy was seen to embody God’s grace but justice fell under a cloud. Into the twentieth century, theology separated law from grace—and so Christian colleges dropped their law departments or, if they retained them, the colleges themselves became increasingly secularised.

Mangalwadi comments that believers in America are currently appalled that every ‘Christian’ president has appointed mostly atheists as Supreme Court judges. But he also comments there’s no one else to choose. Without law students at Christian campuses, there’s a lack of faith-professing lawyers.

Now you may wonder what this has to do with writing. Quite a lot.