While the words were still in the king’s mouth, a voice came from heaven: ‘O King Nebuchadnezzar, to you it is declared: The kingdom has departed from you! You shall be driven away from human society, and your dwelling shall be with the animals of the field. You shall be made to eat grass like oxen, and seven times shall pass over you, until you have learned that the Most High has sovereignty over the kingdom of mortals and gives it to whom he will.’ Immediately the sentence was fulfilled against Nebuchadnezzar. He was driven away from human society, ate grass like oxen, and his body was bathed with the dew of heaven, until his hair grew as long as eagles’ feathers and his nails became like birds’ claws. (Daniel 4.31–33 NRSV)

The king goes animal before us.

If he had died out there—nails curled double, licking dew from the grass—we might have understood that bad things happen to powerful people, especially when their power has been turned against our people. And turned the page.

Yet the writer wants more than this from us. For us.

In his hands, Nebuchadnezzar recovers and speaks almost like an Israelite sage about truth that undergirds the life of even those who live out our days in the shadows cast by large events.

When that period was over, I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted my eyes to heaven, and my reason returned to me. I blessed the Most High, and praised and honored the one who lives forever. For his sovereignty is an everlasting sovereignty, and his kingdom endures from generation to generation. All the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, and he does what he wills with the host of heaven and the inhabitants of the earth. There is no one who can stay his hand or say to him, “What are you doing?” At that time my reason returned to me; and my majesty and splendor were restored to me for the glory of my kingdom. My counselors and my lords sought me out, I was reestablished over my kingdom, and still more greatness was added to me. Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and extol and honor the King of heaven, for all his works are truth, and his ways are justice; and he is able to bring low those who walk in pride.’ (Daniel 4.34–37 NRSV)

The capacity to bring down the arrogant lies near to the core of the biblical portrayal of YHWH. This divine penchant for assertive demotion of the proud is no afterthought, no marginal anecdote at the edge of a far grander narrative.

The book of Daniel places it among the praiseworthy features of Israel’s God. Nebuchadnezzar, having suffered the force of YHWH’s vigorous stewardship of reality, mentions it in his virtual hymn, even if the pagan king cannot bring himself to be more particular about the identify of Daniel’s dream-revealing deity than the terms ‘Most High’ and ‘King of Heaven’ allow.

Tinpot dictators and imperial despots learn this truth, eventually. But so do little tyrants in the alleys, homes, and marketplaces where we smaller people live.

Indeed, so do we, when the preternatural seductiveness of arrogance eventually claims our wandering hearts. To be as fortunate as Nebuchadnezzar, who survived his own hubris and its judgement long enough to name the thing and recognize its divine Adversary, is a blessing for all recovering self-deifiers who get that far. The discerning reader recognizes a little bit of the Nebuchadnezzar in himself and, so, mines the wisdom in the story. When he does, he sings his praise in an accent that sounds faintly, momentarily, Babylonian.

Wisdom is a progressive ordering of one’s life. It is cumulative. The more one learns, the more one can learn. In the context of that blending of wisdom and apocalyptic traditions that occurs in the book of Daniel, a key criterion for Daniel’s reception of divine revelation when failure would have meant death was to have become wise prior to the crisis.

This, at least, is a plausible reading of the the text’s rhythms. The summary that follows and Daniel’s prayer with it come just after the man’s back has been to the wall. No heaven-sent insight into the king’s unspoken dream would have meant death for Nebuchadnezzar’s apparent battalions of counselors.

Then the mystery was revealed to Daniel in a vision of the night, and Daniel blessed the God of heaven. Daniel said: ‘Blessed be the name of God from age to age, for wisdom and power are his. He changes times and seasons, deposes kings and sets up kings; he gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to those who have understanding. He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what is in the darkness, and light dwells with him. To you, O God of my ancestors, I give thanks and praise, for you have given me wisdom and power, and have now revealed to me what we asked of you, for you have revealed to us what the king ordered.’ (Daniel 2.19–23 NRSV)

It is possible that we are to understand the italicized words to suggest that, if anyone shows evidence of wisdom or knowledge, it is God who has given these virtues to him. That is, the wise are wise because God has given wisdom to them. Yet this rather obvious affirmation seems not to plumb the text’s depths.

Not only does it fail to qualify as the most natural reading of the expression, ‘he gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to those who have understanding.’ It also neglects the potency of the word translated ‘and … now’ (Aramaic וכען) within the context of the unfolding narrative about Daniel’s life in the Babylonian court.

A different reading overcomes these difficulties. We are probably meant to understand that God adds to the wisdom and the knowledge of those who have already acquired these things. Daniel then looks back upon the process by which God has given him wisdom and power, recognizing in the relief of the crisis’ resolution that God has now gone beyond all that and revealed ‘what we asked of you’.

If this is what the author has placed before us, then it aligns well both with the process-oriented texture of biblical wisdom and the crisis-oriented rhetoric of Jesus. In the case of biblical wisdom, each step towards wisdom moves one further down the path of which deep understanding is the destination. Conversely, each step in the direction of foolishness makes one less penetrable to wisdom’s voice and closer to arriving at hopeless folly.

Jesus would in time employ a figure we have come to call ‘the parable of the sower’. In a context with uncanny parallels to Daniel’s situation, where truth is a precious commodity that is hidden and revealed in a moment where everything matters, we read:

Then the disciples came and asked him, ‘Why do you speak to them in parables?’ He answered, ‘To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.’ (Matthew 13.10–12 NRSV)

In all cases, the surest way to become very wise is to become a little wise. Learning is not a posture of arrival. Wisdom has little or nothing to do with finish lines. The ‘learned person’ knows better than any observer how little he or she has truly brought under mastery. Intellectual snobbery is not, in fact, a feature of the intellectual. It is rather the ugly vice of a fool with a report card.

Wisdom merits energetic pursuit precisely because it is on the way to more wisdom, that is to say, on the way to ever deeper engagement with reality.

In Daniel’s case, the way to becoming useful by supernatural means in the crisis was to become useful by natural means in the ordinary. Daniel considered both experiences to be God-given. Both were matters of wisdom.

]]> http://canterbridge.org/2012/04/06/wise-and-wiser-ii-daniel/feed/ 3 David Baer http://canterbridge.org/2012/04/05/wise-and-wiser-daniel/ http://canterbridge.org/2012/04/05/wise-and-wiser-daniel/#comments Thu, 05 Apr 2012 14:43:05 +0000 David Baer http://canterbridge.org/?p=4442 ]]> It is not as though Daniel and his friends in the biblical book that bears his name lack credentials. The book’s introductory narrative places them among the cream of the Israelite exiles.

Then (the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar) commanded Ashpenaz, his chief eunuch, to bring some of the people of Israel, both of the royal family and of the nobility, youths without blemish, of good appearance and skillful in all wisdom, endowed with knowledge, understanding learning, and competent to stand in the king’s palace … (Daniel 1.3–4 ESV)

These men come from good stock and have made the most of the opportunities that good circumstance affords. They are scholar-athletes who have not apologized for the exertions required to discover wisdom and cultivate knowledge. Our populist ideology might fault them for having ‘pursued learning’. The text, by contrast, considers this to be evidence of their honorable nature. They are socially poised. Put these guys in any situation and they’ll know how to handle themselves.

Their shoes are shined.

Indeed they were chosen because their innate promise augured even better things. Their already formidable intellect and emotional intelligence was to be honed still further.

They were to be taught the literature and language of the Chaldeans. The king assigned them a daily portion of the royal rations of food and wine. They were to be educated for three years, so that at the end of that time they could be stationed in the king’s court. (Daniel 1.4-5 ESV)

You don’t grow a bloke like this up over night.

And yet the book of Daniel is rigorously insistent that it is God who gives wisdom. Daniel, in his moments of center-stage testing, deflects the honor that rebounds back upon his penetrating insight. He claims it is all of God, almost as though he has done nothing, as though channeling heaven’s mysteries is as passive an activity as a lightning rod conducting to the ground the crackling charge of an August thunderbolt.

Biblical wisdom often stewards this dialectic between the active self-discipline of wise people and the all-or-nothing attribution of wisdom to God alone. This equilibrium is one of spiritual maturity’s late-blossoming trees.

The two poles of dialectic tension come together near the end of the book’s first chapter:

To these four young men God gave knowledge and skill in every aspect of literature and wisdom; Daniel also had insight into all visions and dreams … In every matter of wisdom and understanding concerning which the king inquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters in his whole kingdom. (Daniel 1.17, 20 NRSV)

It seems that God honored the diligence of these candidates for imperial favor, filling up the receptacle formed by the merger of innate ability, diligent study, and fervent prayer, and then piling more on top. The divine gifting seems not to demean the process by which ‘every aspect of literature and wisdom’ is necessarily brought under a person’s mastery. One can imagine a scenario by which divine revelation might fall upon a man or a woman independent of this demanding course of study. But this text can not.

Still, the dialectic demands that we penetrate deeper into its own enigma. For Daniel appears almost to refuse the notion that he holds any advantage over any other human being upon whom God might choose to bring special revelation. After doing the impossible—revealing in the face of the king’s absurd requirement not only the interpretation of the monarch’s dreaming but the very content of the dream itself—Daniel insists that anyone could have done it.

But as for me, this mystery has not been revealed to me because of any wisdom that I have more than any other living being, but in order that the interpretation may be known to the king and that you may understand the thoughts of your mind. (Daniel 2.30 NRSV)

Daniel is not above leveraging his success by persuading the king to elevate his three Judahite friends to positions of prominence. Yet his rhetoric is fiercely self-denying. No special wisdom of his has enlightened the pagan king; only the gracious intervention of the ‘god of heaven’, an ostensibly landless deity to whom landless Jewish exiles seem to enjoy privileged access, can accomplish that feat.

So what is it? Are Daniel and his friends Babylon’s most high-achieving honor students? Or are Daniel and company ordinary Joes whom God has chosen as instruments of his revelation?

The dialectic carefully nurtured by the text suggests that the answer must be some variant of ‘both’.

Learning, effort, and disciplined process are honored rather than despised. Yet these things are not credited with effecting God’s revelation on their own.

There is a further nuance in this richly textured story. It comes in the form of Daniel’s praise to the ‘God of heaven’ who has answered his friends’ fervent prayers to rescue them from the reckless sentence that Nebuchadnezzar has pronounced upon his stable of counselors.

This celestial deity, Daniel exults,  ’gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to those who have understanding‘.

But this is a mystery for another time.

No reading undercuts the true nature of the text more easily than this facile understanding of heroism as a thing that simply had to be.

Real human beings never experience heroism as predetermined, an indelible script written into their days. After the glorious deed, the heroic figure is often more surprised than anyone that he turned out to be … well … a hero.

Daniel and his famous friends—Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah were their given names, though not the names upon which glory would fall—did not live in promising times.

In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it.And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with some of the vessels of the house of God. And he brought them to the land of Shinar, to the house of his god, and placed the vessels in the treasury of his god. (Daniel 1:1–2 ESV)

Judah was not merely in decline. The nation lay shattered and decapitated.

YHWH himself, it seemed and would have been loudly proclaimed by some, had turned against his people. The stark detail of the text is unforgiving in this regard: YHWH gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into (Nebuchadnezzer’s) hand.

The time for heroism had passed when some of Judah’s sons lay torn by Babylonian spears, others having fled ignobly for their lives.

Now was the time for exiles, for meek accommodation to the oppressor’s rules. It is a time for laying low, for keeping one’s head down, for guarding one’s principles behind silence, whispers, and averted glances.

Daniel and his company of eventual heroes were selected for special training because of their brains and their legs, not their hearts. Indeed, they were given their famous Babylonian names—Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego—precisely so that their hearts would finish dying. Men without chests would be groomed as Babylonians. The nation’s unremembered carcass would eventually disappear from history’s roadside, picked clean by vultures, washed away by winter’s rains, pressed deep into Babylonian soil by the trudging march of uncounted feet.

It was not a propitious moment for heroes. The times never favor heroes in the making. Such people are anomalies, surprising first themselves and then onlookers like us.

The four men could scarcely have imagined that we would one day venerate their names, that we would speak them softly over our newborn sons.

We know their moment was coming. They did not.

Heroes never do. The future of an eventual hero is always still unwritten when he whispers to his friends, surprising even himself,

What if we don’t eat Nebuchadnezzar’s meat?

Meetings of farmers—men and women who work the land seldom sentimentalize it—are not hotbeds of speculation. Men and women of the soil are sensible folk with down-to-earth concerns and an eye on the bottom line.

You don’t debate the land. The land is what it is, a given.

Whoever works his land will have plenty of bread, but he who follows worthless pursuits lacks sense. (Proverbs 12:11 ESV)

Biblical wisdom, too, represents an existential terra firma. It is not given to flights of fancy, ruminations about the unseen, esoterica wrapped up in shiny paper. The wisdom tradition finds it hard to respect speculators. They are, at best, a distraction. At worst, they are fools.

The certainty, then, that working the land hard will fill pantries and stomachs is not an odd thing for this most sure-footed of biblical books. It is just how things are. The caveat ‘most of the time’ need not be spoken, for it is understood. The land, after all, is from time to time swept by hot winds or picked bare by locusts. But not every year. When it happens, you deal with it. While it’s not happening—most of the time—you work the land.

Against this oddly welcoming firmness of thought, the proverb contrasts the one who pursues vanities. More prosaically in the translation before us, he follows worthless pursuits. The sense of rapid motion, of chasing, of pursuit is not accidental. It lies at the core of the life described, one that has no time for predictability, no stomach for the ordinary. This man runs after something he cannot even describe. Like a woman who darts out into the street to chase a leaf on a windy day, this kind of fool has no sense.

A lust for novelty, an impatience with the given stuff of ordinary life, these things are quiet symptoms of folly. We call it ‘romantic’ to make it pretty, we ascribe it to ‘free spirits’ so that we might not judge them and so be judged.

We treat such folly lightly and call it good.

More serious folk get back to the land, which needs weeding, a touch of the hoe, an unremarkable Thursday or Friday more of sweat and sun before the storm breaks, for winter will be here before you know it.

When Jesus had stepped out on land, there met him a man from the city who had demons. For a long time he had worn no clothes, and he had not lived in a house but among the tombs. When he saw Jesus, he cried out and fell down before him and said with a loud voice, ‘What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me.’ For he had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. (For many a time it had seized him. He was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the desert.) (Luke 8:27–29 ESV)

Yet the deepest terror of the moment lurks neither in the sight nor in the sound of it. Rather, it comes to us in the single word with which this poor man responds to Jesus’ probing question:

Jesus then asked him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Legion,’ for many demons had entered him. (Luke 8:30 ESV)

The real thing about evil, the thing that makes us shudder upon close contact or the memory of it, is its complete absence of mercy. Evil is entirely without pity. It stomps on its victims after they have already been beaten unconscious. It circles the block to spit on the widow at the scene of her son’s murder. Evil pounds its victim long after he has failed to respond. It exults in the violence it can inflict, far beyond the point where its frenzy serves even its own dire purpose. Long after it has stolen a young woman’s sanity from her and her from her family, it prods her to babble crazily against those who love her when there is no longer any point to it.

Evil never has its fill.

Jesus and the biblical tradition find personal language the best, most diagnostic, the truest way to talk about Evil. For Jesus, ‘he’ and ‘they’ are Evil’s best descriptors. The Lord speaks without blush of demons and of their malignant father.

Here Jesus meets a man who ‘had demons’. His madness was more a presenting symptom than a root cause. The man’s name must shock but should not entirely surprise us. ‘Legion’, he names himself, the text explaining ‘for he had many demons’.

Demons gang up. It is their nature both to overwhelm their hapless victims and opportunistically to seize upon the slightest vulnerability. The disproportion of this company of demons inhabiting a single man already rendered distant and untouchable by their presence is completely like Evil. There is no surprise here, only an uncommonly revealing portrait of how Evil behaves whenever it can.

Having lost all light, having abandoned the proportions and contours that correspond to all that is created and all that is good, demons mob whom they can when they make their rare, undisguised appearance in Scripture. And in life.

Evil’s grasping protagonists let go only when forced to do so. Jesus banishes them here with a word. The result, immortalized in the gospel’s cannily taciturn description of the liberated man, is a human being ‘clothed and in his right mind’.

He is Legion no more. He is just one man, sitting at the feet of Jesus to learn more of the power that had freed him from the grip of many. Though we do not learn it here, he has a name, given to him by a father and a mother who could never have imagined the cruelty that would one day set upon their little child. In time, people will again know him by it. His freshened clothing may brush against those whom he will learn again to embrace. Perhaps one day he will find it hard to remember the tombs to which a legion that had taken him over drove him, the site where they unmade him, the place in which they exercised their potent, relentless cowardice until Truth came back.

Death always boasts its inevitability. Stripped of its loud theatrics, death is not half as fearsome. But it prefers that secret not get out.

When we read and sing the psalms, we rehearse the testimony of men and women—as real as us, just from long ago—who themselves were overwhelmed by death’s absolute claim, only to watch in surprise as YHWH reversed matters in an instant.

Blessed be the Lord, who daily bears us up; God is our salvation.

Sela. Our God is a God of salvation, and to GOD, the Lord, belongs escape from death (Psalms 68:19–20 NRSV)

One might be permitted a retrospective chill, looking back on death’s apparent moment, for how close we came to being sucked into it. To have escaped from death, no matter how convincingly or how long ago, is to have done so just barely. By the skin of one’s teeth.

Death is a braggart, but no less sinister a foe for its need to exaggerate.

Whether one’s own brush with death came via a sudden externality, the acid tongue of one who once loved us, a return from addiction’s steep slope, or that broken depression that claims every thought as its own, it is good to pause and remember  how close it all came.

Good grief, I almost died. Good grief, we nearly lost ourselves completely.

Then having paused—and shuddered at how things might have been—we sing:

Our God is a God of salvation, and to GOD, the Lord, belongs escape from death. (Psalms 68:20 NRSV)

As he approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow; and with her was a large crowd from the town. When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, ‘Do not weep.’ (Luke 7:12–13 NRSV)

The narrative’s description of the unnamed woman, bereft now of a son and perhaps of her last reliable companion and provider, leaves her alone in a crowd. The details are both sparse and stark. The dead man had been her only son. Her husband had preceded their son in death.

It is not a stretch to imagine that the crowd that accompanies her and her son’s body out of the town’s gate will, in a short while, go home and forget. She has no such luxury.

Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, ‘Young man, I say to you, rise!’ The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying, ‘A great prophet has risen among us!’ and ‘God has looked favorably on his people! This word about him spread throughout Judea and all the surrounding country. (Luke 7:14–17 NRSV)

The moment stands in the gospel tradition as one of Jesus’ great miracles. The close narrative registers that it grew Jesus’ fame disproportionately. In the gospel of Luke it immediately precedes John the Baptist’s query from prison and stands as one part of the evidence that Jesus does in fact fulfill the prophet Isaiah’s large promises, leaving no need to ‘wait for another’.

Yet it is probably significant that, amid all this momentousness, the tradition remembers a lonely woman who had more to lose by her son’s death than any of the crowds, and more to gain by Jesus’ reversal of her loss.

Glory was rising. Crowds feared and saw the strong sweep of God’s hand. Amid it all, Jesus quietly gave a young man—life’s warmth only now returning to his body—back to his mother.

The nascent people of Israel fear not only the traditionally lethal prospect of seeing YHWH. They also express mortal fear of hearing him. The people’s terror of sensory contact with YHWH leads to their counter-proposal that Moses serve as mediator between the Liberator of Sinai and the only half-grateful beneficiaries of his salvation.

So now why should we die? For this great fire will consume us; if we hear the voice of the LORD our God any longer, we shall die. For who is there of all flesh that has heard the voice of the living God speaking out of fire, as we have, and remained alive? Go near, you yourself, and hear all that the LORD our God will say. Then tell us everything that the LORD our God tells you, and we will listen and do it. (Deuteronomy 5:25–27 NRSV)

Whether the Hebrews’ plea to remain safely remote from YHWH reflects a proper appraisal of YHWH’s dangerous holiness or abject cowardice is a matter that evokes sustained conversation in the history of interpretation. Some see it as a rejection of the intimate relationship that YHWH here puts on offer. Indeed, a certain current of interpretation sees priesthood and legal codes as compromises that flow—lovingly but lamentably—from what is understood to be Israel’s refusal of unmediated interaction with their Lord.

It’s a little surprising, then, that YHWH’s response to Moses’ communication of his people’s distaste for proximity elicits from YHWH at least a half-commendation.

The LORD heard your words when you spoke to me, and the LORD said to me: ‘I have heard the words of this people, which they have spoken to you; they are right in all that they have spoken.’ (Deuteronomy 5:28 NRSV)

Israel’s adventure with YHWH—here and often—takes the shape of a compromise. They need and occasionally want YHWH to be near. Or nearer. Just as often, they consider that his presence is not worth the risk.

Deuteronomy’s odd narrative allows a poignant glimpse of YHWH’s heart, if one might speak in this way.

If only they had such a mind as this, to fear me and to keep all my commandments always, so that it might go well with them and with their children forever! Go say to them, ‘Return to your tents.’ (Deuteronomy 5:29–30 NRSV)

It is not only Israel, as things turn out, who longs for something different than what they can presently have. One can almost detect YHWH’s yearning to bless Israel more than Israel itself will allow.

So does the text both inaugurate binding covenant … and wish for more.

Entertaining, in spades. Light, not for a minute.

Howatch stewards a strong novelist’s capacity to construct her characters, wielding this craft in combination with an uncanny sense for the intersection of those realities we abbreviate as ‘spiritual’ and ‘psychological’ that reside in and around her protagonists’ lives.

Set in the environment of the Church of England, with a London healing center called St. Benet’s as its principal scene, Howatch’s book narrates this first entry in the author’s ‘St. Benedict’s Trilogy’ from the perspectives of four of its 1990s-era principals. Alice Fletcher, bereft of her late aunt’s heavy, guiding hand, lost in a quiet storm of self-deprecation, turns out along the way to have understood what a pair of skilled priests could not. In the mix, she finds the love she always imagined only the fine and the pretty could ever know. Lewis, curmudgeonly, shaped and misshapen by Old Things, wise beyond words yet crippled by his inability to engage women on level ground, ends up alone and yet deeply loved by those who know ‘putting up with’ and loving not to be antagonists. Rosalind, for whom the reader arrives at sympathy only after taking the measure of her wounds, simply fades away from Nicholas, the husband to whom she was never truly married.

This leaves us to Nicholas, Howatch’s perennial limping hero, psychic priest, a man so gifted that it is almost inevitable that his spiritual insight should wreck him. He loses Rosalind–whom he never truly possessed–and finds himself in the novel’s final pages brought near to ‘dear little Alice’ in the love that no one suspected could ever be.

Along the way, Howatch deploys an unsettling vision into the things that go wrong in the heart of a man or woman gifted and summoned to serve others via an extraordinary calling. Nicholas, the book’s ‘wonder worker’, knows almost more than any human being should. Ninety-nine times of a hundred, he manages to exercise this special knowledge in a way that heals and elevates the broken human beings who flow to St. Benet’s in the hope of finding a mercy that understands and, sometimes, restores.

Yet it is the one of a hundred that undoes this man, as it takes apart the life and integrity of so many like him.

Howatch would, perhaps, deny any didactic intention in producing such novels. Her intention, she demurs, is the purpose of any novelist: to entertain.

Yet authorial caveats notwithstanding, there is far more here than entertainment, though this abounds.

There are powers and principalities, truth in bed with lies, extraordinary perception in the eyes of men and women who are, in moments, half-blind. There are ordinary, foot-dragging human beings capable of extraordinary, private heroics. And the reverse.

This book fulfills its author’s stated purpose and then races on toward auxiliary usefulness. At the risk of suggesting a readership narrower than the one that might profitably take up and read The Wonder Worker, this reviewer hastens to suggest that pastoral groups of all kinds, seminary classes, those who counsel broken souls and encounter the risk inherent in such intimacy, might find this novel—for this is what it purports to be—a window into things both entertaining, qualifying, earnest, and mysterious.