"Stay" by Catherine Ryan Hyde

It’s the late spring of 1969. Fourteen-year-old Lucas Painter has taken to running in the woods near his small town. His running is something of an escape; his parents fight constantly. His older brother Roy is in the army in Vietnam, where the war is at its height. Lucas’s best friend Connor Barnes has a similar problem with his own parents, except they never fight. They never seem to talk to each other. 

One morning, while running in the woods, Lucas gets lost and discovers a cabin, a cabin seemingly guarded by two very large and threatening-looking dogs. He runs, the dogs give chase, and it’s a while before the frightened teen realizes that the dogs aren’t chasing him but actually running with him. The run with the dogs becomes a daily thing, until the day he finds them pacing the cabin porch and refusing to leave. Lucas looks in the window and sees an older woman in her bed, not moving. When his yelling doesn’t rouse her, he races home to call the police.

 

The woman is Zoe Dinsmore, a figure no one in town wants to talk about. She was involved in a tragedy years before Lucas was born, and the tragedy led to alcohol and drugs. She’s just tried to kill herself again. Lucas, on the advice of Zoe’s estranged daughter, tells Zoe he won’t take in her dogs if she tries again. 

 

Catherine Ryan Hyde

Zoe and Lucas become friends. When Connor begins to talk of suicide, Lucas introduces him to Zoe. And when Roy returns from Vietnam, addicted and seriously injured, Lucas manages another introduction. And somehow, all of these hurting people, grope toward helping each other.

 

Stay by Catherine Ryan Hyde is their story, told by Lucas looking back to that summer, the summer when everything changed. It’s a coming-of-age novel, and it’s also something more, a story of brokenness healing itself.

 

Hyde is the author of some 34 works of fiction, including novels for both adults and young people, children’s stories, and short story collections. She’s also written four non-fiction works. The best known of her novels is Pay It Forward, which was made into a movie and helped Hyde create the Pay It Forward Foundation, which she chairs. She’s a speaker, loves horseback riding, and in 2016 took a trekking vacation in the lower ranges of the Himalayas. Her next novel, Anton, is due to be published in December.

 

Stay is a moving, often heartbreaking story, a story of a boy growing up in a tumultuous time who has to decide what’s important in his life.

And then the palms

After Mark 1:1-11

First the colt, and then

the cloaks placed on it

as a saddle. And then 

the palms, leafy branches

cut from trees, strewn

in front of the colt

he rides along the way,

And then the singing,

the psalms of praise

carried by the wind,

a synchronized shout

of worship, the people

thinking he is 

the messiah,

the promised one,

the earthly messiah

come to deliver them

from earthly oppressors,

to bring them into freedom,

the exodus from pharaoh.

Shouts and noise rise

together, a misunderstanding 

of what he was about.

The colt knew.

The colt knew enough

to serve its purpose.

Photograph by Augustine Wong via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads

One hundred years ago this month, an unknown writer published her first mystery novel. The manuscript had been rejected by half a dozen publishers, until one saw its promise. The book was The Mysterious Affair at Styles. The writer was Agatha Christie, and her story was the debut of the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. The rest, as they say, is mystery history. J. Kingston Pierce at CrimeReads talks about Christie’s efforts to get published, her “masterful” ability to misdirect the reader, and shows the covers of the editions that were published for decades after. 

The Critic is a relatively new literary magazine published in the U.K. It has a conservative bent and looks at literature, UK politics, and culture in general. A recent article by Alexander Adams, “Marxist Magic Realism,” discusses how a country, the former Soviet Union, embraced political correctness so intensely that it descended into a kind of madness. 

 

In August, I posted about Walter Duranty, the New York Times reporter in the 1920s and 1930s who won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the famine in the Ukraine; a personal friend of Stalin, he claimed there was no famine. Either he accepted Stalin’s statement or he lied or both. Rod Dreher at The American Conservative had some words this week about “Walter Duranty’s newspaper.” A columnist, Bret Stephens, took on the 1619 Project as “a thesis in search of evidence,” and all heck broke loose. Perhaps the article in The Critic noted above should be read with this one. 

 

More Good Reads

 

Poetry

 

An Interview with A.M. Juster – Trinity House Review.

 

A Poem on Kangaroos: ‘With Spring in Their Step’ – David Watt at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Britain is the country which made and Ireland has lost the old Northern Irish poet called Derek Mahon – John Cooper at Britain is no country for old men.

 

Life and Culture

 

C.S. Lewis, “Transposition”, and the philosophy of mind – Sean Walsh at The Critic.

 

The Evaporation of Empathy – Chris Martin at Terms of Service.

 

Discovering Columbus: Heroes and history in an ideological age – Robert Royal at Claremont Review of Books. 

 

Faith

 

Pro-Life Evangelicals for Abortion? – Samuel Sey at Slow to Write.

 

The Christian Blesses in the Midst of the Curse – Michael Kelley at Forward Progress.

 

British Stuff

 

The Stones of Lewis, Portals in Time – Hugh Raffles at New York Review of Books.

 

Churchill’s Summer of Destiny – John Rossi at The Russell Kirk Center.

 

The Elephant’s Graveyard: Oxford, Where Ideas Go to Die – Fergus Butler-Gallie at The Fence.

 

American Stuff

 

Echoes of the Reconstruction Era October 2020 – Patrick Young at Emerging Civil War.

 

History

 

1,200-year-old pagan temple to Thor and Odin unearthed in Norway – Tom Metcalfe at LiveScience.

 

Writing and Literature

 

Revealed: Soviet spies targeted George Orwell during Spanish civil war – Harriet Sherwood at The Guardian.

 

How Edward Hopper’s Stony Blonde Became a Noir Icon – Stephanie Kane at CrimeReads.

 

Reading Emily Dickinson with Job – Laura Cerbus at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

May It Be – Voces8 (Enya/Lord of the Rings)

Painting: Woman Reading a Book, oil on canvas by Yumeji Takehisa (1919). 

And then the cloaks

After Mark 1:1-11

First the colt, found

where they were told

it would be found. Then

the questions, as they

were told they would

be questioned. And 

then the delivery 

of the unridden colt

to its new master,

And then the cloaks.

They placed their cloaks

on the colt, a makeshift

saddle, a saddle 

of honor, a saddle

of worship.

Photograph by Sheri Hooley via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"River Rocks" by Steve Kittner

Josh Baker and his best friend Eddie are 14, and they’ve grown up together in the Kanawha River Valley of West Virginia. There is nothing they love better, well, almost nothing, than to fish. A close second might be camping out in the woods.  

It is by fishing one day that the boys discover an old-fashioned milk can, with a sealed lid. It’s sealed pretty strongly, but it eventually gives way before two determined boys. And inside the can they find a sketch made on old animal skin, accompanied by writing with some of the letters missing or faded. 

 

What they can make out are the words “Southern Jewel.” They have a friend working at the library who agrees to help with some of the research; Josh has something of a crush on the “older woman” (she’s 17). Slowly but surely they begin to unravel what the map is about – a train robbery from more than a century earlier, rumors of Confederate gold, and the deaths of five railroad employees. The boys soon realize they’re on the verge of one of the greatest dreams for any kid – a hunt for long-forgotten treasure.

 

The problem is, several other people are just as interested. And someone is going to let nothing stand his way, including two young teenaged boys. 

Steve Kittner

River Rocks: A West Virginia Adventure Novel by Steve Kittner is the story of Josh, Eddie, their friends, and their enemies, all on the hunt for gold from the old Confederacy. The story is aimed at the middle grades, but it’s a fun read for almost any age from 10 and up. It’s not only a mystery and suspense story; it’s also a coming-of-age story that strikes similar chords for any of us who were once teenagers. Which is all of us.

 

Kittner was born and raised along the Elk River in West Virginia, and the story reflects a number of his own growing-up experiences in the river valley and forests of the area. River Rocks is the first in a series, the others being What Lies in the Hills, What Lies in the Sea, and What Lies the Keys. He’s also written several stories for young children. He and his family live in Florida.

 

For those of us who grew up with woods nearby, a river (no matter how large or small), and the imagination to invent stories and mysteries almost out of whole cloth, River Rocks is an entertaining tale with a touch of childhood nostalgia. And it has a nail-biting, cliffhanger of an ending.

"John Knox, Scotland's Reformer" by William Taylor

I have to confess to a certain amount of ignorance about the Scottish Reformation. I’m more than familiar with the English Reformation, and how it was tied up in European politics and the line of succession in the House of Tudor. And I’ve read about what came after, with the translation of the King James Version of the Bible and, a little later, the Westminster Confession.  

But as for what happened in Scotland, what I knew was through the lens of Mary Queen of Scots. I knew one name – John Knox (1514-1572). But what I knew about John Knox was limited to a few scenes in the 1971 movie “Mary Queen of Scots,” starring Vanessa Redgrave, Glenda Jackson, Patrick McGoohan, Timothy Dalton, Nigel Davenport, Trevor Howard, and Ian Holm. The character of John Knox, played by the Scottish actor Robert James (1924-2004), was limited to a few scenes where he would harangue Mary as she rose by with her retinue.

 

Robert James as John Knox

That’s how the movie portrayed it. But it didn’t actually happen that way.

 

Knox was a minister and theologian who played a critical role in the Scottish reformation. He was the founder of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland and renowned for his sermons and speaking ability. Because Scotland’s queen regent (Mary of Guise) and her daughter Mary Queen of Scots were Catholic, Knox often found himself at odds with the ruling authorities. 

 

At one point, he was taken prisoner by the French; when Henry VIII’s daughter Mary became queen of England, Knox, who had been a royal chaplain to her brother, Edward, was forced to flee the country and live in exile. (Mary had a number of his contemporaries and fellow reformers, like Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, burned at the stake.) His choice of exile was Geneva, where John Calvin was living and preaching. When Mary died and her sister became Elizabeth I of England, Knox returned.

 

The Protestant Reformation in Scotland became a political revolution, ousting Mary of Guise. It was then that Knox criticized Scotland’s Mary for continuing to practice the Catholic faith, but he did so from the church pulpit. Eventually, Mary Queen of Scots sought refuge in England and the protection of her cousin Elizabeth. Knox was known and lauded for his sermons, but very few have survived. 

 

William Taylor

In the last decade, a renewed interest in Knox has led to both a few new biographies and reprints of older works. GLH Publishing has reprinted John Knox, Scotland’s Reformer by William Mackergo Taylor, first published in 1885. It’s a 19^th century biography, but it is still very readable and provides a succinct account of Knox’s life and work as a reformer. What Taylor makes clear is that Knox is one of the most influential figures in Scottish history, helping to shape the country and its faith in the tumultuous 16^th century.

 

But he didn’t sit by the roadside, waiting for Mary Queen of Scots to ride by so he could tell her she was a wanton heretic. The movie is highly entertaining; Taylor’s 1885 biography is more factual.

Top illustration: John Knox.

Did "Dancing Prophet" Become Prophetic?

In 2012, I had a conversation with my publisher about the future novels planned in the Dancing Priest series. Dancing Priest had been published in late 2011, and the publication of A Light Shining was imminent. I walked him through what I saw as the main subjects and themes of several additional books (another six, if I remember correctly, which eventually became another three). 

The fourth book was to focus on the conflict between Michael Kent-Hughes and the Church of England hierarchy, which would eventually lead to a reformation. The catalyst would be a child sexual abuse scandal, happening over decades and facilitated (as in, covered up) by the church. The inspiration for this was the scandal in the Roman Catholic Church; what I did was to transfer the Catholic scandal to the Church of England. Or so I thought.

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest. 

 

Photograph by Cajeo Zhang via Unsplash. Used with permission.