"Under a Flaming Sky", by Daniel James Brown -- a book review of sorts

I have driven by the sign for almost my entire life.  "Hinckley Fire Museum," it reads.

We stop for gas and a bite to eat on our way up to the resort and retreat areas of the North Shore.  Again, I see the sign.  But I don't go into the museum.  After all, Hinckley is a small town.  What kind of a museum could it be?

One of my college classmates was from Hinckley.  He talked about the Fire Museum some.  He talked about the fire a little too, but it didn't make much of an impression on me.  So every year we see the sign and we don't go into the museum.

This year, though, I was reading the book "Under a Flaming Sky" for my church's book club.  I wasn't at the meeting where we chose it, so I don't know the reasoning.  But I decided to bring the book along on vacation and read it while we were away.

I ended up finishing it on the drive home, as we were driving past Hinckley again.

"Under a Flaming Sky" is a harrowing book.  Brown sets the scene for the tragedy, describing life in the booming little town of Hinckley, describing the weather conditions and the logging practices of the day and the lives of several of the families whose lives would be irretrievably changed on the day.  He describes in detail the harrowing journeys of the two trains that left Hinckley that afternoon:  the northbound to Duluth, and the Southbound train bound for Pine City.  The northbound train with its bedraggled passengers stopped in Sandstone and in Partridge, and those aboard urged the townspeople to flee, but almost no one got on the train.  They just didn't believe that the fire would come there, even with witnesses attesting to its power.  The Southbound train left later and did not fare as well; even so, there were people on that train who survived the fire because of the dangerous journey it made.

One of those families included the author's great-grandmother, grandfather and his two sisters.  Brown's great-grandfather died in the fire; his great-grandmother Marie never got over it.  This book is, in part, borne out of Brown's desire to understand as much as he could about his own family, his own history, forged in the fire.

Logging practices and fire-fighting practices have changed, at least in part because of the Hinckley fire, and others like it.   While some fires are necessary and are a part of the natural order for the forest, so much of what was happening at the time had to do with a lethal combination of weather and carelessness.  I suppose there is some comfort in that, although I can't erase the thought of all of the children who were lost, who could not escape.   And it haunts me to think that, even after Hinckley and Peshtigo and Sandstone and a few other places, it still took several years to convince the logging interests that it was in their best interests to find safer logging practices.

So after reading the book, I am preparing a sermon for this Sunday.  This Sunday's readings contain difficult pronouncements by Jesus of division rather than peace,  the fire that he longs to bring to the earth, the 'signs of the times' that it seems that no one is heeding.  This Sunday's readings contain warnings by Jeremiah about false prophets and their dreams, lists of bedraggled patriarchs and prophets who live by faith in a world that mostly doesn't listen to them.  This Sunday's readings are all about suffering and struggle and division, and it appears that there is very little good news, just as there is very little good news in the book about the flaming sky.

I'm thinking about the sign that I never pay attention to as I drive past Hinckley.  What will make me stop and listen now?  I'm thinking about the people in Sandstone who would not take the train to safety, even with all of the voices urging them, the clouds of witnesses.  I'm thinking about how we can tell the false prophets from the true ones.  I'm thinking that it isn't easy, never hast been easy, to tell.  But one thing I can think about:  false prophets will tell me what I want to hear, whatever that is.  A true prophet will tell the truth, even if it's difficult to bear.

In his time, the people thought the prophet Jeremiah was a traitor.  But he loved Jerusalem as much as everyone else.  It's just that he saw the signs:  the signs of judgment, the signs of destruction.  He saw that the people were on a collision course with their own greed and idolatry.

I've always thought about the clouds of witnesses in Hebrews as those inspiring people from our past who trusted God and lived grace-filled lives. "Keep going," they are saying.  "Keep running." But now I have added another image:  the people on the train from Hinckley.  They are witnesses too, prophets of a sort, telling me that the life of a disciple of Jesus is hard, and fraught with danger.

Just A List...

...of books I've read. I haven't had time to report. Let me know if any of them picque your interest, and you want to know more.

11. The Girl who Fell From the Sky, Heidi Durrow
12. On Christian Liberty, Martin Luther (re-read for a short essay I wrote recently; the essay may be published!)
13. Preaching from Memory to Hope, by Thomas Long (He's awfully hard on Marcus Borg, but I like the idea of movement, and how hope is integral to good preaching).
14. The Book Thief, Marcus Zusack (May book club book)
15. Instructions, by Neil Gaiman (counter-intuitive life instructions for graduates and others)
16. Healthy Congregations: A Systems Approach, by Peter Steinke (I posted a little about this here.)
17. Jesus Freak, by Sara Miles. (The first book I read on my "nook".)
18. Leaving Yesterday, Kathryn Cushman. (June book club, religious fiction)
19. The Underneath, Kathi Appelt

Not so impressive, actually, if you consider that it is June 30, and I'm not to 20 yet! I have two or three books I'm working on right now. But I've been distracted, and reading magazine articles and essays rather than books right now. I've been having fun re-reading Little House in the Big Woods right now (looking at the old, original illustrations by Helen Sewell.)

So -- any book here you want to know more about? Let me know.

How I'm Doing, Reading-Wise

First, I finished Nineteen Minutes. (7) This was our February book club offering. It's one of Jodi Picoult's many novels, and it offers a fictional account of a school shooting. In the novel, the boy who becomes the shooter is bullied terribly. He hear his point of view, as well as the point of view of a young woman who had been his only friend, and both parents. When I first started reading, I was immediately skeptical, because it wasn't that long ago that the book Columbine came out, and I read excepts. The excerpts revealed that the two boys had not been bullied; this was not the cause of Columbine. But there is such a thing as bullying in schools, and despite my skepticism, I was still drawn into Picoult's story. Now, I see that the book Columbine is out in paperback. I picked it up off of the shelf a couple of times....

(8) I read our March book club book, Olive Kittridge, while on vacation. We are discussing "Olive" tomorrow night at my book club meeting, so I'll save comments for afterwards.

(9) I read The Help on vacation as well. This is a civil-rights story of a young woman who wants to be a writer, and two african-american maids ("the Help") who tell their stories about what it's like to work for white families, raise their babies, be a part of their lives, but also to be treated like 2nd class citizens. I had conflicting feelings about this one; in part, I thought it was well-written, and there are things it made me think about in my own life, about what stories I might need to tell, and about who has encouraged me. But I also was aware of the fact that, at least in part, it was a white woman telling the stories of black women, and I wondered about that. I want to know how this book is received in the African American community as well. More on this later.

(10) Transforming Congregational Culture, by Anthony Robinson. Lots to think about regarding how to lead a congregation -- will post more with quotes soon...

I've got more than a few books on the "interested" list right now. So many people have told me I "have to" read Walter Bruggemann's "The Prophetic Imagination" that I guess I really have to! Our April book club book is "The Book Thief." I have many books that I am pining after, but I don't want to clutter up the house any more than it is already cluttered, so I am pining after a "Nook" as well.

Book #34

A Confession: I'm in the middle of a number of books right now, but the book that I have finished is our church's September Book Club book: Boundary Waters, the 2nd in a mystery series by Minnesota author William Kent Krueger.

Perhaps it seems an odd choice for a church book club: it's a pretty violent (although not gorey) mystery set in Northern Minnesota; the Lutherans and the Catholics are mentioned, in a quiet way, of course; the most genuine spirituality comes from the Ojibwe characters in the book, from Wendell Two-Knives down to his nephew, Louis.

I found that, other than a couple of minor quarrels (a character named Marais Grand, give me a break), I really liked this book. I figured out the mystery slightly before it was revealed; I liked getting to know the complex characters and found the underlying themes of family, belonging and loyalty to be thought-provoking. I'd go back to the Boundary Waters again, to learn more about Cork O'Connor (the protagonist), his family, and his community.

Our church book club spent an extended period of time tonight discussing the spirituality of story-telling, how telling stories is an act of faith, and how the boy Louis' story at the end of the novel pulls everything together and makes meaning. We wondered about our own family stories, and about our extended family stories, and about our faith family stories, and how it has been that there are so few story tellers among us any more.

There's a mystery for you: Where are the story tellers these days?