Book Launch 1 - Three Men on a Pilgrimage

Today, I’m going to be helping with a book launch at my church: a member of one of the Sunday morning congregations has written a novel, and a friend of one of the ministers has penned an apologetics text. As the Chair of the Fundraising Group, I’ve been asked to interview the two authors and have conversations with them about their books. Having never done anything like this before, I’m rather nervous, but decided that as preparation is no doubt the key, reviewing the books would help me focus my thoughts and formulate some interesting questions. Here goes, then!

The first of the two books is Three Men on a Pilgrimage: A Comical Progress by Thomas Jones, and is the story of three men, simply known as J., G., and B., who decide to go on a short pilgrimage-come-walking-holiday to Canterbury, after the former becomes convinced of his own sinfulness. After reading a pamphlet given to him by two suited-and-booted door-knocking Christians, J. decides he’s guilty of avarice (it’s a vey good job his parents didn’t buy him that toy castle!), as well as gluttony, lust (since the age of thirteen), jealously and wrath (especially when low on sleep). Hence, he suggests to G. and B. that they need to do something good for their souls, and so they decide to walk to Canterbury Cathedral via numerous pubs and accompanied by G.’s dog, Monty. What follows is a series of comical encounters with an assortment of weird and wonderful characters that raise various questions about Christian faith.

As such, the author addresses, through the use of these short tales, a range of issues from the necessity of suffering and the nature of hell, to the problems with atheism born of ignorance and the irrationality of the universe. Jones is the son of a Methodist minister who studied creative writing at the University of Wales in Lampeter, and in the Acknowledgements section, he suggests that a lot of the ideas for the topics covered, and indeed the arguments offered, came about through engaging in philosophical and theological debates down the pub as a student. This comes through in the book, which has a chatty and relaxed style while making some serious points along the way. I therefore found myself being made both to think and laugh as I worked my way through the book, as well as being pulled up short a couple of times.

To give you a flavour of the story, along the way the three men and their dog encounter what looks like evidence of a dinosaur on the loose in a quiet village (is there something in people’s varied experiences of God?), a man who claims to love chicken stew but always removes all the contents before drinking the residue (there’s only so much content you can remove from Christianity before you’re left with nothing), a crowd who are furiously angry about people who sleep with their feet touching the headboards (a parody of some attitudes towards homosexuality in the church), a surprisingly theological young supermarket worker who gets besieged by old people looking for discounts (and who recognises that begging for more blessings and being a fair-weather friend is what he does to God), and a manic on a mobility scooter (on how science may have removed the need for hell), which brought back some fond memories of my own exploits on such machines…

Some memorable recurring characters also appear from time to time, such as a mysterious millionaire who gives out large sums of free money to people. One of them is an elderly woman called Elsa who in return takes part in a weekly ‘reverse lottery’, trying to guess the numbers that led to her ‘winning’ fifty million pounds (as a way of exploring the relationship between justification and sanctification). Another is a homeless chap who uses the money to buy himself an ever-increasingly large house, and who gets defensive when asked why he doesn’t give some of the money to the struggling homeless shelter he once depended upon. We’re told the man, that nobody’s ever seen properly, has a big house in Canterbury … and it seems God crops up in various guises throughout the book.

Without wanting to spoil the end of the story, when the three finally make it to Canterbury Cathedral, they find they’ve no money to get into the building (don’t get me started on having to pay to go into a church!) or even to get the train home, and find themselves needing to accept charity from a Big Issue seller they’d refused to give change to only a short while earlier. It’s then they realise that there’s something familiar about all these people they keep encountering, and how much they still have to learn about the grace of God.

The new atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are very effectively parodied along the way as well, respectively as Dick Dorkins, who doesn’t believe in atoms yet is blissfully ignorant of what he’s dismissing, and Kit Kitchens, a blind man who doesn’t believe in clouds as he’s never seen them. I think these will make good sermon illustrations, and I may well pinch them at some point!

There are forty chapters altogether and so plenty of material to get stuck into, but two particular episodes in the book that stuck in my mind for very different reasons are that of J. finding three hundred pounds in a pub toilet, and the three men encountering a woman who’s been beaten by her husband but refuses to leave him. In the first story, J. finds the cash and having not spotted anyone else in the pub, determines immediately to hand it over to the landlord. When the owner of the cash returns to the toilets, he instead hands him the money back to them, again without hesitation. So far, so good; however, when he finds himself boasting to G. and B. about what a good person he is, J. realises he may need to add pride to his list of sins after all! It’s a very good illustration of how morality is a complicated business, and how muddled our motivations can be.

By contrast, the story of the woman who decides to go back to her violent husband and love him until he changes made me angry. While I can see that God’s love is such that he does stick with us even though he reject him, often violently, time and again, we should no more encourage someone to stay in an abusive relationship in the hope the violent partner will change than assume, as J., G. and B. do, that women (or indeed men) in that situation aren’t capable of exercising agency. It’s rare I find myself wanting to say ‘check your privilege’, but this story brought out the need to be very careful in how far we seek to push analogies, and to think through the pastoral implications of what we’re saying. It was the one really problematic passage in an otherwise very well-written and thought-provoking novel.

Overall, I very much enjoyed and recommend Three Men on a Pilgrimage, and am looking forward to reading it again at a more leisurely pace.