Syllabus for Distance Learning - Day 2
March 17, 2020

    Today is St. Patrick's Day.  We all need an extra dose of luck right now, yes.  We also have a chance here – a chance, if we will take it – to participate in, to partake of, and to practice grace.  Grace shares many of the same elements as luck, but one key difference is this: we have the ability to choose to be agents of grace.  That is, we can choose the make ourselves the kind of people who bring more grace into the world, and who actually do so.  My St. Patrick's Day prayer for all of us is that we make this choice.  Now is the time to start.

    One way to learn to channel grace is through stories, stories that show us what grace looks like when it is at work in the world, stories that put flesh and bone on grace, together with laughter and solemnity – stories, in other words, that make grace incarnate for us, that bring grace to life.

    Each of the three works of fiction on my "Top 12 from the Last Ten Years" list of books does precisely this.  Perhaps all good works of fiction do.  But in any case, these three books do it particularly well.  It also occurs to me now that all three of these books show people channelling grace in especially hard times: the first two are both World War II novels, set against the backdrop Nazi occupation, while the third invites us into the hard-scrabble – but somehow rich – life of a family living off the land in the Florida panhandle in the late 19th century.  

 
   The Guernsy Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (2008):

   This little gem of a book is told through a series of letters, from which unfold the story of how a small group of people on the tiny island of Guernsey used books to keep themselves sane and connected to one another – and staged their own form of resistance – during the Nazi occupation of the British Channel Islands during World War II.  The book is laugh-out-loud funny at times, and  the love story that emerges from it will charm you right back into believing that we humans might just have what it takes to pull through to the daylight on the other side of the darkness.

   Side note:  The book has been made into a movie, but the book is so magical, I would start there (and perhaps forget the movie entirely).  I am due for a re-read of this one.

    All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (2014):  

   And speaking of darkness and re-reads: I am long overdue for a re-read of this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, whose protagonist is a blind French girl, almost a teenager at the time of the Nazi invasion of France.  Marie-Laure has been raised by her father, a master locksmith, who is tasked by a French museum during the war with safeguarding a large, famous diamond from its collection, or perhaps one of several replicas of the diamond which were produced to throw the Nazis off its trail.  As the Nazi occupation begins, Marie-Laure and her father flee (with the diamond) to the coast, to stay with her great uncle, whose housemaid assists with Marie-Laure's care following her father's arrest.  But before his arrest, her father hides and locks the diamond in a miniature model of the coastal town where they have relocated, which serves as both a tactile map for Marie-Laure to learn her new surroundings and a minature vault for the diamond.

    Marie-Laure's story intertwines with that of a young German boy whose childhood fascination with radio technology eventually brings him into contact with Marie-Laure, when he is stationed as a German soldier in the same coastal French town that has become her home with her uncle.  Although he triangulates her whereabouts from her uncle's radio broadcasts of music he recognizes from childhood, the boy-turned-soldier-turned-young man does not report their location.  Then, when he seeks out the source of the broadcasts after an Allied bombing of the town, he finds himself face-to-face with a powerful German scientist who has tracked the famous diamond to this location and who is likely to kill Marie-Laure for it.  In a courageous act of treason against his own country, he kills the German scientist and helps Marie-Laure escape the final throes of the Nazi occupation.

    The story is rich in symbolism, and in the hands of a less deft and generous writer, would have invited parody.  But Anthony Doerr somehow manages to steer his book away from this fate, while still unequivocally illuminating something profound about our human condition: that the forces that keep us alive are often, perhaps always, those we cannot see, but can only hear, feel, and intuit.

    The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1938):

    To follow a year in the steps of the young Jody Baxter, his parents' only surviving child following the death of six infants before him, is to re-enter the world just before modern technology changed the face of the American backwoods forever.  Out on their remote homestead, Jody's parents must teach him what it takes to survive in a harsh but beautiful world, where deer and bear hunts,  as well as the planting and harvesting of corn and cow peas, are a matter of basic survival.  But they are also a matter of wonder for Jody, and connection with nature and with his father, whom he adores.  Jody comes of age in a year when their region experiences a major flood, making their precarious subsistance living even more so. Along the way, Jody befriends an orphan deer fawn, who becomes his sole childhood companion, until Jody is forced to kill the creature as a matter of both mercy and maturity.

    The book is a sobering reminder that we are a mere few generations removed from the marvels and terrors of life before we started using fossil fuels to propel ourselves through life, with effects both good and ill.  The book is worth re-examining to understand both what we have gained and what we have lost in our fossil-fuel driven techno-society.  It is worth asking what we ought to recover, preserve, and carry forward from an era that we have all but completely forgotten. 

   And, for what it's worth, in my humble opinion, Jody's father, Penny Baxter, deserves a place among the great characters of literature, so generous, humble, and courageous a soul is he.  Would that we all had a parent or guardian or mentor so worthy of emulation as Penny Baxter.