They Shall Run and Not Be Weary

All about the hills the hosts of Mordor raged. The Captains of the West were foundering in a gathering sea. The sun gleamed red, and under the wings of the Nazgûl the shadows of death fell dark upon the earth. Aragorn stood beneath his banner, silent and stern, as one lost in thought of things long past or far away; but his eyes gleamed like stars that shine the brighter as the night deepens. Upon the hill-top stood Gandalf, and he was white and cold and no shadow fell on him. The onslaught of Mordor broke like a wave on the beleaguered hills, voices roaring like a tide amid the wreck and crash of arms.

This passage is a from a book I'm reading---actually re-reading for the first time in forty years, when I was a sophomore in high school. This passage is the start of a chapter I just read. I'm sure the source is easily recognizable.*

I started reading the story about six weeks ago, as part of the reading I do on Sundays, and before retiring for the evening. It's a lengthly tale, so it has taken a while to make my way through the three volumes. I didn't want to rush it, as the writing is very good. It was written by a man who saw his share of real-life war.

I confess I haven't read a great many books from this genre of contemporary literature---but I have read some of the classics from it.

My late father, however, was a great connoisseur of this type of fiction. He devoured the paperbacks. He had stacks of magazines of the short stories. In the old days you would have found him to be a regular at the tiny mom-and-pop used book store in Fort Collins, next to the Sinclair station that used to be on Drake, which specialized in the trade of these books. He once considered starting that kind of book store himself, but it wasn't his path. At the end of his life he wrote and self-published several books from a tale that he had been forming for years.

For most of my life, my father and I saw eye-to-eye on political and worldly matters. As a child, and as I grew up, I adopted his values and viewpoints without reservation.  This accord between us lasted throughout most of my adult life as well. In the last decade of his life, however, we had come to diverge sharply in how we saw politics and world events, for many of the same reasons that have taken me away from fellowship with friends. For a while he was bewildered by what had become of me. Yet there was never true estrangement, and in the last year of his life, even before he went into his final decline, all of that divide between us was healed. IF you've been in the same place yourself, you can know what kind of peace that now gives me.

He was a believing Christian throughout his life, to his last conscious moments. That too made things much easier in the end. He always said his favorite book of the Old Testament was Isaiah. Four years ago I spoke at his memorial, at the church he and my mother attended at the end of his life. I went through an encapsulation of the entire Gospel of John, which was his favorite Gospel, and which is perfectly in line with his character, if you knew him.

It was not easy to give a short eulogy that summed up all of John, at least not one that does it justice, but for this occasion the Spirit helped me. At the every end of the talk I read aloud the last two verses from the very last chapter of John. I had not paid much attention to this last scrap of writing from all the canonical Gospels until I was preparing that memorial talk. It's not one of the passages from the Bible that gets quoted very often. When I read it, it struck me as one of the most compelling bits of writing from all of Scripture.

*Edit. I think the passages directly following this one are even more stirring. I am fascinated by the command that the central character here gives to the men around him, at the moment of truth in the battle. The author was famously a devout Catholic Christian. That has meaning here. I can't help but compare it to the last line in this famous poem written by an English Protestant.