The DaVinci Code hits the screens soon and I'm looking forward to it. In enjoyed the book when it came out. True, as the critics say, it doesn't have the sort of character development or other literary merits you see in the great writers, but that's not a problem here.

As a big fan of authors like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and Leigh Brackett I have never worried about that sort of thing excessively. A fun story, well-told has its own virtues, and Dan Brown delivers on that score. He's not the researcher, or the master of intricate plots that Umberto Eco (Foucault's Pendulium is my favorite conspiracy novel) but he's *much* more readable! He's also a clever author with puzzles and gimmicks galore to delight the mind.

As a pastor the question I keep getting is, "Is it true?" I'm not sure it's a question I want to answer.

My encounter with the book has been threefold. I read it and liked it a great deal. Then I re-read it, doing a little research into every historical detail I questioned. That reading wasn't nearly so fun. Brown seems to use fringe authors exclusively in his historical ressearch, and doesn't seem to have read any of the source documents he refers to.

(Phooey on him! What sort of thriller writer fails to be conversant in 3rd century Gnostic scriptures?)

My third response was to say, "lighten up" to myself. Once I'd done that I found that there are some interesting themes in the book that make worth-while discussion for anyone interested in faith and spirituality.

Here's my short list of questions to take away from the book:

1. What is the history of women and the feminine side of spirituality in the early church? How and why did that change? How can it be recovered?

2. What were all these alternative scriptures the book refers to? What do they say?

A wonderful research tool for these can be found on-line at www.earlychristianwritings.com and there are some excellent books out. I especially recommend anything by Bart Ehrman (who is doing interviews left and right these days. Who'd have thunk Early Christianity and Gnostic studies could get you on TV?)

3. How do we deal with the dark side of the Christian Church in history and in the modern world?

4. How do we re-connect with Jesus the human being? The Church has (in theory at least) affirmed both the "fully human" and the "God with us" aspects of Jesus. In practice, most people aren't very good with paradox and Jesus the human is often ignored in favor of the divine Jesus. How do we find a healthy tension?

5. Why do we love conspiracy theories so much?

There are more, but these are a good start.

The novel is a quest for the holy grail, and I hope it ignites personal spiritual quests in it's readers. I find the novel's conclusions hokey, but that's been the problem with grail quests ever since Chretian deTroyes first wrote his back in the 12th century. When you're questing for the ultimate in holiness and truth, anything the author can come up with will be anti-climactic.

Ultimately you can't just read what someone else thinks the grail is. You have to go out and search for it yourself.

Happy questing!