Marie Antoinette

I started a book called The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette. It is fiction but the author is a historian so she used her knowledge of Marie Antoinette's life, and then added some of her own details to pull it all together. The story begins when she is 13 and her last entry is written in jail when awaiting her execution. She is born into royalty in Austria. At that age men come to assess her ability to be married. To their disagreement she tells them she hopes she and her husband can be equal, but they think she will be fine anyway because she is already beautiful. Marie develops feelings for Eric, a servant, who tells her he likes her too. But when she turns 15 she is sent to France to be married to the prince. Louis the fourteenth is shy, awkward and doesn't want to be king. People urge Marie to become pregnant but Louis turns his back to her in bed. A couple years later, Louis unwillingly has a surgery and then they have a child. At the birth of the baby everyone not hopes, but assumes that it will be a boy. To their great dissapointment it is a girl so she needs to have another child. Marie begins an affair with a heroic, charismatic, beautiful, Swedish man. They are completely in love with eachother. Throughout the story, the peasants suffering is alluded to, and so is their anger. The palace gates are knocked down and mud is thrown at royal carriages passing by. Marie's second baby is crippled. Her third is a perfect boy and her last girl is dying. Her lack of morality is shown by the absence of writing on her children. It is clear she loves Axel more than any one of them. She is greedy and angry when the king has to take one of her jewels because there is so much debt.
I don't hate her, but I feel detached from her, as if I am willing myself not to feel  because I know her life is ill-fated.

Currently

I started on page 87 of The Shack and I finished the book, which left me at 248. 167 pages in total.
It was difficult for me to narrow down the best sentences to only 3, because there were so many.
1. (page 198) "It is true that relationships are a whole lot messier than rules, but rules will never give you answers to the deep questuions of the heart and they will never love you. "
2. (120) "Sin is its own punishment , devouring you from the inside."
3. (122) "Though chains be of gold, they are chains all the same."

I like number 2 the best becuase it isn't the way we look at religion. We think God punishes us for our sin, but He doesn't want us to sin so we won't be punished.

Thats what I take from The Shack.

"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

     This post will focus on one particular chapter of The Shack. Mack (the protagonist) meets a beautiful woman named Sophia, a personification of God's wisdom. Mack has lived a life judging almost everyone. He wants justice for the people who sell their children into war or slavery. He wants justice for the men who murder innocent victims. He wants them to go to Hell, so Sophia tells him he must see how it feels for God to send some of his children to Hell, so Mack must pick three of his kids to go to Hell.  After a minute of screaming that he wont do it, or cant, he asks to go instead. He cries and begs to go in their place. She says, "Now you sound like Jesus. You have judged well." "But I havent judged them," he replies. "You have judged them worthy of love, even if it cost you everything."
     Sofia tells Mack that humans' faults result from the brokeness of their souls. Then he blames God for the broken souls. He blames God for the tradgedy in the world, his father who brutally beat him and his mother, and the twisted man who killed his 6 year old daughter. Mack wonders if God creates the bad so he can create good, because if his daughter had not died, he would not be with God right now. But God says, "Just because I work incredible good out of unspeakable tradgedies does not mean I orhestrate the tradgedies [...] Grace doesn't depend on suffering to exist, but where there is suffering you will find grace in many facets and colors. So, yes, God doesn't create the evil, but can't he still prevent it? But we demanded our independence and now we destroy the world with it. "So why doesnt He do something about it?" "He already has- He chose the cross where mercy triumphs over justice because of love. Would you prefer he'd Chosen justice for everyone?" Sophia asks. "No, I don't," Mack replies, "Not for me or my children."
Judgement is not about destruction, but about setting things right.

The Shack: A Philosophy on Gender

**Note: This is not particularly what The Shack is about, and it does come across as a little rude to males, but I do not mean to be a feminist.

The Shack is mind bending, and changes the way one would look at the world, but then it is also popular, and it has a popular subject. So I'm not sure if it is classified as lit or pop fiction, therefore I am reading 150 pages just to be safe. I say it is mindbending, though, because it portrays God as a black woman.  Most people percieve God as a white male, as did I, and so this, sad to say, shocked me. I wondered why Young chose to present Him this way. I thought it was an attempt to raise the african american race or the female gender, a direction I did not expect the book to take. But then the character of God says this: "I am neither male nor female[...] For me to appear to you as a woman  [...] is to help you keep from falling so easily back into your religious conditioning." This stuck out because it felt like it was meant for me, my visions being so narrow.  And so why does God seem to claim the male gender in the Bible by using the word "father"? Young's answer ="Both [genders] are needed- but an emphasis on fathering is necessary because of the enormity of its absence."
Just because this has the same subject, I'll throw this comment in the mix : When the protagonist says to Jesus, "I've always wondered why men have been in charge [...] males seeem to be the cause of so much of the pain in the world." Jesus answers, "Women turned from us [God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit] to another relationship, while men turned to themselves and the ground." The truth in this statement if deafening. Men are straight-forward, they want what makes them happy, and they have less emotion, where women strive so hard to be loved, adored, talked about and admired.

We are broken in our own ways.

Friday

Personality test
The test did a pretty good job at describing me. There was one part that I didn't think worked well but then there was another detail that shocked me because of it's accuracy. It didn't discuss my flaws, but I think the test was just trying to suck-up to me. Those things always do.


This is my first post, so I'm just testing this website out. I'm currently reading The Shack by WM. Paul Young. It's about a man whose daughter was murdered, and he consequently distances himself from God. Then, he gets a chance to experience God, and that is what I will be telling you about.