How to start a prayer...
Sam and Frodo and a story that continues to teach us what needs to be taught.
My mother’s strength was not the stuff of movies. She was not responding to a hard life by hardening her heart, and in the two-hour following screen time, learning redemption by acts of grace. The hero’s journey, the drowning becoming baptism. All glorious and good, that’s certain. But rarely the stuff of every day’s gift of a raked life. My mother practiced grace, and when she could, she even exuded it and taught it. And when she couldn’t, she retreated into her beliefs, her narrow self. We all do—we all must. It is our perfect imperfection, our narcissism writ large upon a world full of others just and nothing like us.
We are bowing before the storm that comes in its many forms. Our dark clouds, some of our own imagining, our own creation, and some of the world’s, appear to be gathering right now flecked with mysterious balloons, random violence in the name of some obscene incoherence, and lies seasoned in authoritarian grift and grease of warnings of what will happen if we don’t….and if we do…
But if we are to meet this storm and ride it through, we’ll probably need to do so without distractions. And so much is distraction. How do you pray through the noise? How do you start that prayer?
When I first read Lord of the Rings, I wasn’t sure what I was reading. I wasn’t captivated as a kid reading it. I did so because friends of mine were reading it, but it didn’t grab me the same way it did them. I was probably too dim, too slow, and just didn’t get it. I read the books again as an adult, before the movies came out in the early 2000’s. My dimness left me, and I was moved.
When my daughter reached high school, I shared the stories with her mostly through the films. But it wasn’t until she was in the midst of her own travails that the story gripped her–and it did. She continues to write, journal and talk about Frodo, Sam, Gollum and Bilbo, and she finds comfort in their struggle–in their story. I gave her a copy of the first book, and it is now dog-eared, marked with pen scribblings and marginalia. She cares about it.
The hero’s journey and its ubiquity in story is well documented and Tolkein’s magnum opus certainly bears all the proper marks. I taught the formula for years in my English classes from Beowulf onward, and of course, the anti-hero stories, Hamlet, Frankenstein, even Gatsby. But it’s less the hero’s trajectory, than the story within the story. As Sam tells it:
Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something….That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.” —J.R.R. Tolkein
How to account for the fight for a patch of green ground, some peace and some loved ones to share it with? Isn’t that all and total? Isn’t it fair to ask that everyone be given the chance? So many of us now turned away from any divine intervention, looking to ourselves and perhaps, each other, to obtain…what? It appears that we are unsure what our patch of green ground is.
Maybe that’s Tolkein’s point. The Hobbits don’t become keenly aware of what they’re fighting for until they have to fight for it, and even then it is only a small few who understand the sacrifice so that others can have their patch of peace. That story, the one or the few fighting for the many, is, perhaps even more ubiquitous than the hero’s journey itself. It takes losing something in order to see how important what we’ve lost is to us. And whether we seek to get back what we’ve lost, or start anew with fresh eyes, and a hand extended in friendship, forgiveness and faith, the fight to do that remains the constant.
In her later years, mom would frequently say that she wasn’t afraid to die – that she knew where she was going, to Whom she was going. As much as I admired her faith, it was always unnerving to hear her say it. It was too much for me, and it felt like a kind of surrender that I wasn’t sure was of the right quality. But in her last days, unconscious, and even alone because of the absurdity and the lies we were told, she fought. She worked at breathing and she didn’t want to let go, though there was little hope at that point that she would recover her own breath and ability…
We are creatures that want to embrace what is good in this world. We want it for ourselves, our families and our friends. “...there’s something good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.”
Why? Why, oh Lord, why? Must we fight? Must we sacrifice? Lord, oh – the fight!?
“…Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer. That you are here—that life exists and identity, That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” –Walt Whitman
Then, yes – the fight. Oh! The fight, indeed. And a prayer to start it.