Confessions of a Recovering Snob

It's not as though I never read fiction. People who come to this blog know of my frequent re-reading of The Chronicles of Narnia. Or my love of Ellis Peter's Brother Cadfael mysteries. Or my fondness for the Sherlock Holmes stories and the fact that I actually read Nicholas Sparks' A Bend in the Road last year. (I thought it was mediocre, at best.)

Some thirty years ago, after graduating from college, working in a factory and searching for my career, I decided to dig into novels, something I'd never really done before. In my typically obsessive fashion, rather than hopscotching over books that looked interesting to me, I dug into the bodies of work of several authors, including Hermann Hesse and Kurt Vonnegut.

But I have to confess that most of my reading over the years has been of non-fiction. I've read hundreds and hundreds of books of history, theology, Biblical scholarship, and current affairs. Part of the reason I love non-fiction is that I'm afflicted with what my family calls, "The Cliff Claven Gene."

Like the Cheers mail carrier, I like facts and figures. (Unlike him, I hope, all my facts and figures are true.) When I was a kid, I spent nights before falling off to sleep and Saturday mornings reading from the Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedias that lined my headboard. Instead of reading Treasure Island, I read about World War Two and politicians.

As I grew into my teens, the world still living in the afterglow of the Camelot mythology created by Jackie Kennedy and popularized by Theodore White, I adopted JFK's favorite poem, I Have a Rendezvous with Death, as my favorite poem and told my friends who were reading novels that like the late president, I felt that life was too short for me to spend time reading fiction. It was only later that I realized the guy had a death fetish and that there's more truth in the average novel than you're likely to find in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.' s A Thousand Days. (At least the average novel engages in less myth-making than either Schlesinger's or Sorenson's books about the Kennedy Administration did.)

Today, I'm beginning to realize how much I've missed through the years by not reading more fiction.

I'm realizing something else, too: This failure is part of a deeper character deficiency in me. In short, I'm something of a snob. And, I've discovered I probably am for a reason, a pathetic one.

Last night, my wife, son, a boyhood friend of his, and I met some good friends for ice cream. The conversation turned to movies and TV shows. I said something about the old Seinfeld sitcom and one of my friends quickly informed me that I was incorrect. I explained that I'd based my erroneous assertion on something I'd read about the show. "But," I admitted, "I've never seen Seinfeld."

Our friends could hardly believe it and my wife smiled knowingly--yes, truly and authentically so--and said, "Oh, he wears that like a badge of honor."

I laughed. But I knew she'd gotten me. Consider my snobbery: "I don't read fiction. No time." "I've never seen Seinfeld or Friends, like the rest of you pedestrian mortals." Blah, blah, blah, blah. What an insufferable, party-pooping snob!

It's a wonder my family and friends haven't tarred and feathered me many times over. But, like true family and friends, they accept me as I am and by that acceptance, incite me to want to be better than I am. (And I'm not deliberately paraphrasing Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets, which I have seen. They really do have this effect on me.)

As I considered this fact about myself last night, I asked, "Why? Why do I act like such a snob?"

Here's the pathetic answer, one that shames me: To be noticed. To set myself apart from the crowd.

Why would a man who knows that he's been loved, accepted, forgiven, and granted new life by God feel the need to be noticed, to set himself apart as the busy intellectual who disdains the things that others love?

The only answer I can give is that the old Mark resides within me the way Smeagol kept living in, tormenting, and obstructing Gollum in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. (Which I'm only now listening to on CD. I've never read it.)

The Bible says that as long as we live on this earth, our old selves will battle for supremacy over the new people God is making of the followers of Jesus.

This morning, I padded down the stairs and told my wife, "I'm sorry that I'm such a snob. I've asked God to help me to be a better person in the future."

She looked at me, smiling, and said, "I don't think you're very different from the rest of us, Mark." I felt pretty good. I had, so to speak, named my demon and asked God to cast it out.

But several hours later, my wife gave me something else to consider about my character. "Stop worrying so much about what I think," she told me. I feel another evening of introspection coming on.

[Mark Roberts, one of the best blogging pastors around, has linked to this post. Thanks, Mark!]