Westerns 2: Questions (Gabrielle)
August 30, 2005 by Gabrielle
(I read this after I wrote it and it didn’t really come out how I wanted. I wonder if it is more honest than what I had in mind. “Questions.” “I don’t have answers.”) Last night I rewatched The Last Samurai and I finished the last Louis L’Amour book about the Sacketts I have in the house (the horror, the horror). I closed the book and thought about honor. Why do I like the Sacketts? Because they are honorable men in a day with no honor. They are men who live honestly outside the law. I then asked myself why I like The Last Samurai so very much. Because it is about a man pursuing honor when it will cost him all he has, I answered myself. Hmm, I said, Maybe these two things are connected. Honor. To many of us it is just a word. It is a throwback to a time when things were simpler. Or at least when things were more violent. It is easy to see honor when everyone lives by the sword or the gun. We’ve violence in our day, but not violence nice people are involved in. The violence is contained to *those* people and *those* places. We have a different need for honor than the samurai or the gunslinger. I don’t think I could put it into words without making it sound truly boring. Honor is something I would like someone to see in me, but what does honor look like in my life? What must I pursue to pursue honor? A Sackett would never shoot a man in the back unless he was provoked. Okay, I won’t shoot a man in the back unless it was a matter of self-defense. That doesn’t make me honorable. A samurai was wholly devoted to his liege lord. If his lord asked for his death a samurai would gladly take his own life. Okay, if God ever asked me to kill myself I would. That doesn’t make me honorable. There is more to honor that just the trappings. But what does honor look like for me? Anything I can think just sound boring. In the old West and in the old Japan honor was a matter of life or death. Death feels so very distant to us here in America. And ours deaths will probably be very impersonal. A car accident, a bee sting, old age, disease. These are some of the deaths we have to look forward to. Where is the honor in those deaths? What does honor look like for us? A samurai wanted above all things to be loyal to his lord and to have a good death. What does a good death look like for a Christian? I have all these questions and very few answers that don’t sound pat and dull. Or maybe I’m looking for the wrong thing. Am I looking for something exciting? Do I think any values I hold to in the life I lead will look boring and plain? What do I want? What answers am I looking for? Do I know the answers and I just don’t want to say them because they sound blase? What does honor look like for me?
Honor is choosing to do what is right, regardless of consequences.
That can be exciting or boring, depending on your circumstances. Normally, my guess is that you’d actually prefer the boring ones.
I think of honor as being true to the code you live by. For a Christian, that code is spelled out in Scripture. One of the reasons I like the Sacketts is that their code is much closer to the Biblical standard than many
other fictional “heroes”.
My favorite among David’s mighty men is Benaiah. Whether he fought lionlike foes or stepped off the edge of a pit to kill a lion on a
snowy day, he was a strong, skilled
self assured man. He was also loyal to his king.
I think you could put a Stetson hat on Benaiah, strap a sixgun around his waist & put a Bible in his saddlebag (Benaiah was a priest), and you’d have preacher
Ben whom Sackett would welcome to
his campfire with respect & a sense of camaraderie.
They both speak the same language. The language of truth, courage loyalty, honor . . . of sticking it out for the right, no matter how tough it gets.
You don’t need a showdown at high noon to have honor. If you are an honorable person, you have your honor 24/7. Like courage, though, honor stands out most vividly in a crisis.