Little Brother Is Watching You

Your birth order explains a lot about you.

The Birth Order Book: Why You Are the Way You Are, by Kevin Leman (Revell, 1985, 192 pp.; $10.95). Reviewed by David Neff.

Kevin Leman has a good-natured intolerance of first-born and only children: perfectionistic, on-schedule, and color-coordinated. “These Pharisees are going to eat me alive!” he says.

But a last-born like Leman can handle it. As the baby in his family he learned to be cute and to get by on charm.

Leman learned to understand people in terms of their position in their families early in his training as a psychologist. Attending a party of University of Arizona psychology grad students and faculty, he noticed one person who seemed remarkably normal. He decided to take classes from Oscar Christensen, a follower of Alfred Adler, and learned about the birth-order factor.

As Leman explains it, when every child comes into the world, he or she looks up and develops in relation to the persons on the next rung up the family ladder. First-born and only children have only their parents to observe. So they turn into little adults: often responsible and hard-working, but commonly perfectionistic and discouraged. “My first-born sister would iron the davenport if she were given the chance,” he says.

The children born next either try to copy their older siblings (and usually fail to do as well), or they choose a different and perhaps opposite course. Thus a first-born scholastic whiz can have a little brother headed for the Olympics. By the time the last child arrives, the parents are worn out—or at least more relaxed. The older children can’t figure out why the kid gets away with murder, but he does—with charm, humor, and spontaneity. The baby of the family may have a hard time learning self-discipline and can be headed for disaster.

These birth-order characteristics can carry over into adult life and cause problems as well as create strengths. “Marry out of your birth order,” Leman advises.

The Birth Order Book does not provide complete information about birth-order theory. You can find that material in the books cited in Leman’s footnotes. But the book does provide an entertaining and enlightening tour of family life and offers down-to-earth tips on making your birth order work for you.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY TALKS TO KEVIN LEMAN

Astrology, personality types, the classical temperaments, and now birth order—why do we insist on classifying people?

In our condominium, impersonal America, we look for handles. We jump on things like birth order as the be-all and explain-all.

It certainly isn’t an explain-all for me. But as a therapist, my goal is to get behind your eyes and see how you see life. The best way I can do that is to look at your family and at the relationships you had with your siblings. Whatever your family was, you are. And when you marry someone, you marry her family, his family.

Classifying people can either help me deal with people individually and understand them better: or it can result in stereotyping and lumping people with others of their race, birth order, or hair color.

I use birth order as a way to highlight a person’s individuality. I want them to understand their situation. First-borns do share lots of characteristics. So do middles; so do babies. My goal is to get people to make their birth order work for them

As I make sweeping generalizations about first-borns, middle children, and babies, you have to realize that when I am behind the closed door, I do some psychological guessing, and if I’m wrong, I go in a different direction. My goal isn’t to make generalizations, my goal is to get people to understand themselves.

Can the influences of birth order be overcome?

They can be overcome to an extent—you can take the edge off. And that is what’s important to a perfectionistic first-born. Realize that structure is a part of your life. Don’t apologize for it.

Realize how special and unique you are, and don’t do yourself or your God a disservice by constantly comparing yourself to other people.

I’m concerned about Christians who have a high-jump bar that they clear once in a while, but as soon as they clear it, they jack it up a little higher. They never get to a point where they can accept themselves.

Who is the person in the family most likely to adopt the conservative religious values of his church community?

The first-born, absolutely. The most traditional one, the one who carries the traditional values forward in life, is your first-born child.

What will the steadily declining birth rate do to the character of our nation?

A greater proportion of first-borns and only children will make us a society of flaw-pickers, yuppies, and achievers.

Can most church pastors who do a fair amount of counseling use birth-order after reading a book or two?

Absolutely. I have tried to train pastors in a seminar called “Counseling Families When You Don’t Have Much Time.” This is an economical way to get behind the eyes of someone in the church and understand their family and their plight in life.

Charting The Territory Of Evil

The Book of Sorrows by Walter Wangerin, Jr. (Harper, 1985, 339 pp.; $15.95). Reviewed by Eugene H. Peterson, pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church (Bel Air, Maryland) and author of Earth and Altar (IVP).

A bad story disguises and supresses the realities of our lives, providing a temporary escape from our ordinariness. A good story immerses us in everyday realities, showing connections, developing comprehensions. An excellent story plunges us into dimensions of our lives we commonly overlook, pulling us into a larger world limned in mysteries.

The Book of Sorrows is an excellent story. It is a comic story, a tragic story, a lively story, a gripping story. But the overlooked dimension that it pulls us into is the abyss of evil, and that does not make for a happy story.

For every hundred writers who set out to work on the problem of evil, explaining and trying to solve it, one or two dare to explore the actual territory. Walter Wangerin, Jr., has traveled this baneful country, and The Book of Sorrows is his journal. He approaches evil as a mystery to be explored, not as a problem to be explained, and we end up knowing less than ever but realizing more, realizing the repulsive texture of what is so close to us, and is yet so alien.

Bestiary

“Tell it slant” was Emily Dickinson’s counsel for slipping truth past the barriers that people build to protect themselves from dealing with anything that requires the risk of faith and the rigor of sacrifice. Wangerin’s “slant” is the bestiary: talking animals. His story involves us in a world of animals that talk—a rooster with a coop of hens, a mournful dog, a wonderful weasel. In this zoo, we begin to see the ordering energies of worship and prayer, realize gradually but certainly the presence and operations of the evil that is so much denied in our American culture, and discern the penumbra of a pastor and congregation.

The conjunction of the two elements, animals and talk, which never occurs in our experience, provokes recognitions of what is always present but is commonly overlooked in our experience. The animals are enough like humans, talking as they do, to let us see ourselves in them, but are also enough unlike us, being the animals they are, to let us see our unremembered creatureliness, the parts of our lives and of reality that we are too frightened to face or too bored to notice.

The talking animals give the story a childlike quality. But it is not the childlikeness of the nursery. It is the elemental childlikeness commended by Jesus. It gives images to our early perceptions and old memories of innocence and evil, of courage and compassion—the basic stuff of our lives of which we were dimly aware in our first years, when we were tucked into bed, sung from the disappointments of the day into sleep, and protected from the night.

Wangerin demonstrates a mastery of language. He has created a style of speech for his animals that is just right. They talk the way animals would talk if animals could talk. These are not talking people disguised as animals; these are animals talking, language spoken in a kind of elemental (but not elementary) purity, without the accustomed overlay of convention and gossip. Sentences have sharp edges, not yet blunted by centuries of chatter. Words are used to say, not propagandize or sell. We are close to the roots of language in these animals, not in their grunts and growls, but in directness and simplicity, letting them speak their own meanings and not just using their words as tin-can containers for carrying information. Children sometimes surprise us with this kind of language, courtly in a way that strikes us as comic, but what we hear is a sense of dignity, words used with reverence, exactly.

Chauntecleer Rooster, the animal at the center of the story’s action, prays order into the chaos of the day with his canonical crows, crowing Lauds in the morning and Compline at night, framing the other hours of prayer between. He fights for his animals, cares for them, provides for them. There is a blazing exuberance, a fierce goodness in him.

Out Of The Depths

All this is on the earth’s surface. In the depths is Wyrm, a huge, serpentine evil. An obsession with Wyrm deflects the rooster from the care of his creatures. Increasingly disconsolate in his inability to make all things well, restless within the limits of his responsibilities, he eventually succumbs to the temptation to effect a final solution—by his own solitary effort to finish Wyrm, the enormous, subterranean malignity. Returning from his prideful venture, Chauntecleer brings a yet more odious form of evil into the world of his animals.

This spiritual leader of the animals does what American spiritual leaders typically do: he reduces his understanding of evil to something that is manageable as “wrong,” and then with jaunty hubris sets out to finish it off for good, shortcutting God. The unintended consequence is the reintroduction of evil in unguessed ways.

An Excerpt

Ferric Coyote

“He’s scared. His cheeks go back to his ears when he’s scared, and his eyes narrow into two pitiful darts crossing at his snout, and the snout itself seems to sharpen. Ferric! Fear turns him into one long, taut nerve, an arrow fixed mid-flight, or a bowstring which, if it’s only touched, would hum at a high pitch: eeeeeeee!

Ferric has frozen this way often in his lifetime, since life itself is for him a dangerous proposition. The Coyote is cursed with senses too keen for a fainting heart. His ears are dishes; they hear everything. His paws are raw, and his bones are hollow tubes and his skin tympanic; they feel everything, magnified. His eyes are perpetually frighted; they see every twitch in nature, and any twitch may be malicious, for no twitch that he knows doth love him. Well; none but Rachel. She loves him. But she is inexplicable.

All his life poor Ferric has fallen into freezes. But lately the dangers have multiplied tenfold, and he’s begun to ache with hiding. Because of Rachel, whom he loves in return, but who has no fears whatsoever—none. Poor Ferric: he yelps, and he hides for two.

From The Book of Sorrows, copyright © 1985 by Walter Wangerin, Jr.

We Americans are not a people who spend much thought or prayer on the subject of evil, and we are unpracticed in dealing with it. From the cradle, Americans are trained to attack whatever is wrong with the world as a definable problem, to gather the energy and assemble the tools to make a good job of it, and to finish it off. It is unthinkable that there is some intractable thing, immune to our immense good will and technological prowess. We are used to solving problems. And we are good at it.

The fury of our activity in this field obscures our naïveté in evil. A nation of moralizers, we blow the whistle on the faults and infractions of our fellows with the flair of a referee. We are much exercised in dealing with sin; for sin is something that can be named and about which something can be done. Sins are wrongs that can be traced to their source in a person, confronted, rebuked, and, if there is willingness in the sinner, repented of and forgiven. Even when the word sin is secularized into ignorance or sickness, the same conditions apply, for it can still be dealt with—helped by education, healed through therapy. Something direct can be done. But evil is something else: malefic, immense, impersonal, beyond management, escaping comprehension. A mystery.

But it is not the greatest mystery. The mysteries of goodness and redemption exceed it, but they can be entered only when the evil is faced. These mysteries become visible in actions possible for simple creatures: the mournful Mundo Cani Dog’s self-sacrificing death, the enigmatic Dun Cow’s unscheduled visitations, Chauntecleer Rooster’s canonical crows, the beautiful Pertelote Hen’s forgiveness, loyal John Wesley Weasel’s derring-do. These actions, insignificant in isolation, together and faithfully practiced weave an intricate web that contains and restrains evil.

Theological Fiction

Wangerin’s earlier bestiary, The Book of the Dun Cow (1978), began the story that is completed here. At the time of its publiction there was confusion about the genre: a children’s book? science fiction? allegory? There should be confusion no longer.

This is theological fiction for mature readers, theological in the way that Faulkner and Melville are theological: grappling with the conditions of life that force us to face the facts of God and redemption; making the obvious luminous: that everyone counts, that everything counts, every creature mysteriously beautiful, breathtakingly important—and funny; showing that evil breaks through the crust of our routines and tries to destroy the meaning, the fun, and the beauty.

C. S. Lewis held that it is only when the imagination is kept alive by feeding it heroic legends, myths, and sagas that it is possible to prepare the spirit to receive Christian truth in a technocratic, liberal, and automated age. We are in the thick of a salvation drama of cosmic proportions, but none of the newspapers reports it, and thus we overlook the obvious. Our battles make Oregon Beach and Iwo Jima look like neighborhood dog fights. In our homes, workplaces, and churches, we are surrounded by courageous and comic creatures. And we yawn in their faces.

And then this storyteller walks into the room and begins to spin his story of a rooster and a coop of hens, and we awake. Like any good storyteller, Wangerin doesn’t make things up. He tells us what is happening in and around and among us. He pulls us into awareness and, we hope, into repentance, hope, and love, preparing our spirits “to receive Christian truth.”

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