Discussion Introduction
Week 1: “A Thousand a Day”
Week 2: “The Old Desperate”
Week 3: “Jack Waits”
Week 4: “The 101″

Welcome to Week 5—“The Fiery Siringo”—In which we witness a showdown.

“And so it came down to a farmhouse. As it so often does.”

Siringo and Becket have a complicated relationship.  They are simultaneously archenemies and closely-tied traveling companions.

1) In what other stories is there an antagonist who reminds you of Siringo? A protagonist who reminds you of Becket? Archenemies with similar dynamics?

After exposing Becket’s lack of attention to detail when they encountered the boy (whose father had promised to take him to the ocean) in Ingersoll, Siringo chides, “Well, heavens, Becket! No wonder your medicine’s all dried up.”—p.166

And then in the following paragraph, Becket proceeds to describe in great detail the plants, homes, and people he encounters in the town.

2) What do you think Enger was trying to achieve with the juxtaposition of Siringo’s comment and Becket’s astute observations?

“That’s the failure of most people,” he declared. “They don’t want the bad news. Everything’s got to be good news! So they’ll subscribe to the Proverbs, which feel nice and hopeful, and ignore Ecclesiastes, where old Sol is wiser than ever and has finally figured out what all those instructions of his are actually worth.” Siringo—p.166

“All the same,” I ventured, “since we haven’t a choice but can only make the best of things as given, I would rather live among people who try to uphold the Proverbs.” Becket—P. 177

3)  What do you make of Siringo’s take on Ecclesiastes? Do you think it’s accurate?

4)  How do these two viewpoints set up an important dichotomy between Siringo and Becket? Do you see similarities between the two men?

“Most men are hero and devil. All men.”—p.190

5)   Where do you see both hero and devil in Siringo, Becket, Glendon, and Hood? Can you think of a believable story in which this principle isn’t accurate?

“Twenty people are enough to make a legend.”—p.210

6)  Where in the book does the presence (or absence) of a crowd become relevant? What other factors contribute to making a legend?

Bonus question:

Where did the title “So Brave, Young, and Handsome” come from?

One Minute Review: The Great Gatsby from Thomas McKenzie on Vimeo.

“It’s going to be epic,” the youth pastor said, raising his eyebrows, which were thin and trimmed and raised.

“Really?” Jellybean asked interrogatively.

“Fo’ sho’ bro,” he said, grinning sideways and scrunching up his eyes beneath a wide-brimmed hat featuring a baseball logo of a baseball team called the Yankees.

Jellybean nodded, thinking about what the experience might be like. Would there be dragons? Would there be maidens saved and heroes made? Would people escape fire and doom and hellish fear to be released into light and love and hope and happiness? He imagined himself in an epic, with long hair and a glorious but slimming beard. A battle-axe-shaped sword in one hand a sword in the other. A shield and a bow and mighty feathered arrows from the slings of Mount Fountain, a lucky emerald amulet of burnished gypsy, and a dream the size of seven hairy kingdoms.

“I am the epic,” Jellybean said, accidentally out loud.

“Totally,” the youth pastor said. “I feel you.”

Jellybean re-noticed he was not in an incredible epic but in a room with a huge number of posters featuring men in skinny jeans and expensive euro-lady-punk haircuts.

“Why will it be epic?” Jellybean asked, eagerly like.

“Cause we’re gonna have pizza!”

Here follows week 4 of our discussion of Leif Enger’s So Brave, Young, and Handsome.

A cowboy doesn’t ask for much, that’s my observation. A flashy ride, pretty girl, momentary glory – for a day or two, I’m glad to say, Hood Roberts had them all.” – p. 145

Not a bad recap of “The 101”—equal parts legend, tragedy, comedy, and tall tale, sprinkled with a dash of romance.

I thought my question might be a dangerous one – who doesn’t dread what God might be up to in our pivotal moments?” – p. 109

1) What have the pivotal moments been in the story thus far? How have the characters changed as a result?

Now comes the distressing part of the story, and not just because Charlie Siringo shows up. As Glendon said later, Charlie had to show up – it was necessary for Charlie, for Glendon himself, and even, finally, for me, that Siringo wash into the Hundred and One on the edge of the coming deluge. . . No, the distress was all Hood’s.” – p. 126

2) How was Siringo’s arrival on the scene “necessary” for Siringo himself? For Glendon? For Monte?

3) Given that Siringo was pursuing Glendon, why was the distress “all Hood’s”?

4) How is Darlys DeFoe pivotal in the story?

My wife got so she couldn’t see me anymore,” said an old man in a corner. “She could see everyone else. Just not me. . . It’s the truth. I walked into the house one day saying Darling it’s me, and she couldn’t hear nor see me. If I touched her she’d see me again, but pretty soon, out I’d fade.” – p. 137

5) The quiet, exposing confession of Siringo seems out of step with his character. What do you make of that?

6) Why do you think Monte stays with Siringo?

Bonus Question: What’s the history of the real “101 Ranch”? What aspects of the story seem to be true to life? Where in the life cycle of the actual 101 Ranch does the story take place?

I certainly would.

He may have died long before I was born, but his books came to me like letters from a kind and witty and child-hearted godfather. Narnia companioned my childhood. Cair Paravel became a home within my thought that I roamed in imagination. The Pevensies were comrades in my play and challenged me to bravery. Talking stars and valorous mice and dryads peopled my dreams. When my siblings and I rigged up the oak tree in our front yard and called it a ship, it was the Dawn Treader I considered myself to be sailing. And it was Aslan’s country I desired to find.

Ah, Aslan. Bold and beautiful, never tame. Who can fathom the power of a story in which Christ bounds in, unfettered by the usual assumptions and in a form so wondrous and wild? I loved Aslan. And even as a little girl, I knew it was God I was learning to love through him.

When I grew up and began to wrestle with the reality of that God, again Lewis (and the old picture of Aslan) came to my rescue. I have read letters that Lewis wrote to his actual godson, and the kindly, bracing advice, the take-yourself-lightly tone and the urge to throw one’s whole self into the loving of God were familiar to me. I had already encountered that eminently insightful voice in Lewis’s spiritual and apologetic works. Like the kindly godfather he was, he walked me through doubt, assuaged my frustration; his words pulled me back from the brink of disbelief. And the stories that came from that vivid imagination of his taught me to hope that every longing of my heart would one day find its home.

So yes, if Lewis were anywhere on earth, I’d trek my way to him, shake his hand, and say the thanks that’s been years in the making. I can’t wait to do it in heaven. But I can make a down payment on that thanks right now. And I simply have to tell all of you about this rather momentous opportunity. I know this is a place where C.S. Lewis is greatly loved, so… perhaps you’d like to join me?

C.S. Lewis is about to get a memorial in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey. This is immensely exciting. I’ve written about Westminster before, and the impact its many heroes had upon my heart. For Lewis to be honored there is to add him to that great company, to affirm his works of creation, imagination, and instruction as something heroic. It means that thousands of people will encounter him when they visit, remember his works, or maybe discover them (and Aslan) for the first time. But it’s a project that needs support. You can visit the website to read this invitation:

On 22nd November 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of C.S. Lewis’s death, Westminster Abbey will be unveiling a memorial stone to Lewis in Poets’ Corner. A two-day conference and a thanksgiving service will be part of the memorial project. The Dean of Westminster has kindly given his permission for this memorial, but the Abbey itself does not finance such projects, and so we invite your support. If you have valued Lewis’s writings and personal example and would like to contribute, please give generously. The total cost will be about £20,000. A list of donors’ names will be deposited among the papers of the Oxford Lewis Society in the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

I intend to accept the invitation and I decided to share it with you. I thought a few of you might feel about Lewis as I do. Perhaps you’d love to be part of honoring his legacy, affirming his influence upon the spiritual imaginations of countless people.  After all, he taught us to live our own stories awfully well.

So, you can visit the official website here: Lewis in Poets Corner.

You can donate to the memorial here.

And just for the fun of it, you can also leave me a comment with some of your favorite Lewisian quotes. I’ll start:

“I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?” - C.S. Lewis in Till We Have Faces

Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey

I remember how it felt to walk through the grocery store
watching others dispose so recklessly
of everything I ached to be.

I remember mothers
(or so-called mothers)
snapping off ugly words
to curly-haired toddlers.

I remember mothers
(or so-called mothers)
sighing in exasperation,
ignoring bundles of angel on earth,
telling them to hush.

I remember seeing from a distance
the wonder of ten little curved fingers,
dimpled knuckles,
wrapped sweetly around a shopping cart handle.

I remember small voices saying,
“Momma, Momma,”
and wondering what unforgivable thing
I had done
to become unworthy of that name.

It has been sixteen years,
but I will never forget Mother’s Day empty-armed,
trying to smile politely,
running to the church bathroom,
weeping the long, hard, labor of grief
behind a locked door.

Because of this, I define motherhood
a little differently than most.

I define motherhood
as the womb of creativity
and breasts of recreativity
made full.

Motherhood is an idea fluttering and kicking,
compassion fluttering and kicking,
music birthed,
books nursed,
social healing held upright on wobble knees until it walks,
wounds of the heart and body dressed and bandaged.

Motherhood is entrance into dark rooms
where fright cries out from sleep,
and motherhood is chasing away the monsters.

Motherhood is the renaming of the rejected,
it is the embrace of the lonely,
it is a Saturday picnic packed for the hungry,
it is the rocking of the forgotten
in the lap of an old, sweet song.

Motherhood is the soft, feminine hand of love
on the cheek of the world’s need.

For children are born and tended
in a million different sorts of ways.

The earth cries out,
and here you are to answer.
You are maternity,
and you are beautiful.

Duende – Making Matthew Perryman Jones’ Land of the Living from SerialBox Presents on Vimeo.

—–   —–   —–

I recently read an article urging Christians to be more countercultural. By countercultural I think the author meant that Christians ought to get arrested more often and sing “in your face” anthems at their parents and/or capitalists. Of course, we know that a protest culture isn’t precisely counter to our culture. It’s as mainstream as a discontented child screaming and grasping in a Toys-R-Us. Still, Christians ought to be more countercultural, and certainly this extends to our artistic and creative offerings.  One way to push back at our culture is through the simple elevation of gratitude.

Christians see gratitude as essential to happiness, but in our Freud and Marx influenced culture, gratitude is the undignified badge of surrender. Dissatisfaction is seen as the way to rally the masses to overthrow corrupt Western power structures and bring in the Utopia. Gratitude (much like a Norman Rockwell painting) is perceived as an obstacle for vital social change.

But it isn’t.

Gratitude frees us from a preoccupation with self and makes us take pleasure in the good gifts of our Creator. Furthermore, it gives shape to our desire to help the oppressed. One could go on, but the point is that gratitude is a necessary element to human happiness, it pleases God, and is underrepresented by our culture.

Let me give you an old-school Dorothy Aldis poem written for children in the 1950s that assumes the pleasure of gratitude. See if the assumptions in this poem don’t strike you with a pang of rightness.

Aldis assumes that the reader treasures the smell of flowers and the smell of cookies, then she suggests that the reader make room in their circle of gratitude for ironing smells.

If I may steal a theme from Chesterton, it is magnificent to look at the world through a telescope but it is also magnificent to look at the world through a microscope. Tolkien tempered his orc battles and giant spider threats with meditations on the Hobbit’s love of good tobacco and food. Lewis tempered his fantastical never ending winter with the domesticity of the Beavers’ tidy house.  Jane Austen novels, The Little House on the Prairie books, Henry and Ribsy, The Moffats, Frog and Toad; all these stories assume the pleasures of gratitude, and the reader gets to enjoy them by proxy.

Thankfully, these books are still widely available, and if you want to provide your children with an emotional affirmation of the statement “be grateful,” then you might think about importing these values from earlier literature. That’s not to say they are totally absent from contemporary writing, but they are mostly absent.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that a poem that zeros in on the appreciation of ironing aromas and the glory of domesticity elevates gratitude. Gratitude is essential for children who will one day build and preserve a society. It is absolutely unessential for those children who wish only to deface society.