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I’m in England right now, photographing ancient New Testament manuscripts housed at various colleges of Cambridge University. The name ‘Cambridge’ evokes respect, wonder, even a certain awe. It’s a conglomerate of 31 colleges, spreading out from the 13th century on, and sprawling out from the center of town (which is, technically, Great St Mary’s Church, across from King’s College). (One of the most recent, Darwin College, is shaped like Noah’s ark to mock the biblical story of the flood and creation. But Trinity College, where Isaac Newton taught, allows no Trinitarians into its halls; I understand that one has to be an atheist, or at least an agnostic to be a part of that college, whose focus is mostly on mathematics and the sciences.) The street names change every block—a most irritating feature for those of us who are already directionally challenged. (When I was living here during one of my sabbaticals, when walking home from the grocery store one day I got so lost that the milk soured by the time I got home!) But the street names also have a certain logic for they are often named after the most prominent institute on that street. Thus, King’s Parade is named after King’s College; Queens’ Lane after Queens’ College, etc.

Well, after a terribly busy week shooting manuscripts, we decided to take a break on Saturday and visit the Orchard in Grantchester, just a couple miles from Cambridge. The Orchard is on a spot that has been frequented by Cambridge students and alumni for over seven hundred years. But in the early twentieth century, it took on a new significance. A shack was bought by an entrepreneurial litterateur (Rupert Brooke, poet) who shared it with his colleages. Seven friends would come here frequently to talk about life, love, logic, and literature. Famous friends, too: Forster and Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maynard Keynes (economist), and Augustus John (artist).

These were not your normal pillars of the community. They were wild, creative, energetic, passionate, troubled, deeply feeling individuals. Wittgenstein, the brilliant logician-philosopher, came from a family full of musicians and artists, and full of inner turmoil. Three of his four brothers had committed suicide. Virginia Woolf, the novelist, was in many ways a free spirit—freedom that bore deep and passionate literary fruit. She later committed suicide because of the challenges of facing depression. Bertrand Russell, a genius in math, logic, and philosophy, and a social activist whose views anticipated the great social revolutions of the 60s, fit in well with this group. Augustus John lived with two wives and ten naked children who ran wild in the woods near Cambridge. And the list goes on. But my point is simple: these were creative geniuses, social odd-balls, comrades in countercultural values. But they weren’t just that; they also changed the world in which we live. They changed the way we think and talk about life, love, logic, and literature.

So here we were, sitting at a table having tea and crumpets at the world-famous Orchard, thinking about the great thinkers who had gone before. And we wrestled with the thread that seemed to bind them all together: they were not normal. They were troubled souls, in deep turmoil, social outcasts to some degree, yet with such innate qualities that society could not ignore them. In the end, society embraced their views and their lifestyles and those of others like them in other orchards in other parts of the world.

It got me to thinking: First, did these people really make a contribution? I could not deny it. They offered the world a great deal, and certainly got people to think. In one way or another, the world is a richer place because of the Bertrand Russells, the Ludwig Wittgensteins, the Virginia Woolfs. Second, if this is the case, then where is God in all this? Why does he allow the most troubled often to be the ones who marshal change, who serve as beacons for society when their own lives are in shambles? Is he some sort of cosmic sadist who gets joy out of using the least normal, the most disturbed, the least Christian to bring about progress in the world? Or should I instead say that this isn’t the case—that these people have made no contribution, that their lives as unbelievers renders them worthy of our judgment or pity or both, but nothing more? In other worlds, how do I reconcile my belief in an all-knowing, all-good, all-holy God with a world that seems tailor-made for the destruction of brilliant and passionate thinkers, using them up all too often as they curse God in their dying gasp of air? What I’m saying is that I want these thinkers, these world-changers to go on challenging the status quo, getting the rest of us to grapple with our views and worldviews. And I want God to get the glory for it. Am I worshiping the wrong God? He just doesn’t seem to be involved in the wrecked lives of geniuses. Is he the God of the mediocre? Can Christianity produce world-shakers who are not so full of inner turmoil that their lives, and not just their words or art or music, also glorify God? Or is it a prerequisite for greatness that one just has to be a little nuts, a little imbalanced, a bit of a misfit—and an antagonist of the Almighty?

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