St. Boniface House

Some Bible Church feller took issue with the guys at Reformation 21 for their general approval of Led Zeppelin.  You can read his post here if you feel like it.  What is amazing about this is that I thought everyone knew that Zeppelin was a Christian band.  Just listen to the words to “Ramble On” or “The Battle of Evermore” for proof.

Sing now, ye people of the Tower of Anor,
for the Realm of Sauron is ended for ever,
     and the Dark Tower is thrown down.

The opening chapters of The Fellowship always serve to draw me deeply into the story right away.  This time was no exception, and the life portrayed in the Shire seems particularly winsome and wonderful.  I am no friend of “agrarianism” as an ideology, but the quiet country life of the hobbits just seems so appealing.  One thing that grabbed me this time was the fellowship that these folk enjoy with one another as they live and work together.  Sam and the Gaffer can sit and enjoy a pint with Ted Sandyman even though Mr. Sandyman is a bit of a turd (and later proves to be quite a turd).  Why do they fellowship with a sometimes irritating fellow like Ted?  It seems to me that if we were to ask the Old Gaffer why he wouldn’t understand the question.  Who else are we going to drink beer with? He’s our neighbor, our fathers were friends, and so on.  We are trying to build a sense of parish at TCC, but it’s terrifically difficult.  That’s partly because our parishioners farthest to the northwest live about 70 miles from the folk who live southeast of the city, with everyone else spread out in between.  It is hard to “share life together” under those conditions, and thus when we are together, it is usually a church event or a planned get together.  I don’t run into my folk at the market or the pub or while walking down a sidewalk.  This is all a well documented failing of modernity, of course, but the solution is not immediately apparent.  And the result is that because I leave my neighborhood to be with TCC folk, I don’t know my neighbors at all.  (That’s also partly because my Espaňol isn’t so sharp anymore.) De-compartmentalizing life is easier dreamed than done. 

There are a couple of other things from this trip to the Shire that aroused some thoughts, and I’ll write about them later.

Honoring the King

Autumn has come upon the prairie, the tallgrass is turning a beautiful rust color, and the sumac is a startling blood-red this year.  The wind has turned around to the north and Rob’s World of Beers is carrying about 50 different varieties of “Octoberfest”.  All this means it’s time (at our house, anyway) for our annual reading of The Lord of the Rings.   We usually begin around Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday, which in the book is September 22. (I am aware that if one converts the Middle-Earth calendar to ours it ends up being September 12 or something, but I don’t care.  What am I, a nerd?)

This year there are five of us reading it (Elanor will need a couple of years before she can discover where her name came from) so for the sake of peace in the home I went and bought two more copies of the trilogy, in addition to the two we had from last year and the one we picked up at a garage sale last summer.  We also retired the set I bought Kiersten back in 1999, as it is disintegrating before our very eyes.  I feel like the guy who assassinated John Lennon who supposedly had to buy a copy of A Catcher in the Rye anytime he came across it in a bookstore.  Somehow, though, I think this is different.

 Anyway, the point is that I thought I might try to put down in writing some of my thoughts as I travel with the company through the Old Forest and across the Downs and down the Loudwater and over the Mark and to Orodruin.  I don’t expect it will amount to much, and what you’ll get (if anything) will probably tend more toward a description of my experience as I’m reading than it will to actual exegetical insight into the stories, but if you love Middle-Earth like we do, you might find something to think about.  Every year the story is better, every year I see something new that I’ve never noticed before, and every year I grow in my hope and sincere belief that the “real world” is much more like Tolkien’s Middle-Earth than the dull and sterile machine that we have had forced down our throats for almost 400 years now.