Reading Lord of the Rings Makes Me a Better Christian

Something resonates deep within my soul every time a crack open the majestic book by J.R.R. Tolkien. It calls to me like the mysterious music of the Ainur that still lingers on the waves of the sea. I feel that it summons me to a higher life - a life of quality, excellence and grandeur, where friends share lives using the High Speech of Tolkien, or sacred scriptures, and within every twig or fallen leaf is the pulsing power of the Holy Spirit that transfigures dross and quickens the dead.

I’m convinced that if any of us were to live in Middle Earth, we would walk around wide-eyed and flabbergasted for a couple of years, and then we would become inoculated towards its mystery and grandeur. I say that because I believe our sojourn through this world is charged with the same kind of majesty and mystique as the Fellowship’s journey and epic confrontations with the powers that threaten it.

I have found Tolkien’s story to be so moving because of its ability to open my eyes to this sort of reality in our own world. I've started from the beginning of this story I’ve read several times, but have jumped forward and read "The Passing of the Grey Company" twice already. I long to be Halbarad, who carries with him a humility and simplicity of the Ranger, but the regal presence of one who holds the weight and splendor of the Númenóreans. What kind of character walks with this grand heritage on his shoulders and yet looks at one of the Hobbits and says, "A little people but of Great worth are the Shire-folk. Little do they know of our long labour for the safe-keeping of their borders. Yet, I grudge it not." There's a lot behind that statement.

Ash Wednesday 2009

Lent: the last Christian season to be colonized by Hallmark and other trinket-making industries. It hasn’t happened yet, but I’m sure it will. It’s only a matter of time. First, they took Christmas from us. Then they took Easter with that ridiculous bunny and those disgusting Cadbury eggs. Then they moved on to snag All Hallows Eve. Next they started chipping away out our saints, like St. Patrick and St. Valentine.

But the season of Lent is difficult terrain for our capitalistic society to colonize into a profit-making season. After all, “tis the season to be… fasting” is hardly a motto that could stir the masses into a buying frenzy.

But it is for these very reasons that Lent just might be all the more significant for Christians to practice in our modern culture. There is something about it that cuts across some of the most powerful currents in our society. If for nothing else, it reminds us that we as a church are shaped by disciplines and practices that are utterly foreign to our dominant culture. Read full article

On Writing

Dylan Thomas on Poetry
These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't.

Thomas Merton on Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas' integrity as a poet makes me very ashamed of the verse I have been writing. We who say we love God: why are we not as anxious to be perfect in our art as we pretend we want to be in our service of God? If we do ot try to be perfect in what we write, perhaps it is because we are not writing for God after all. In any case it is depressing that those who serve God and love Him sometimes write so badly, when those who do not believe in Him take pains to write so well. I am not talking about grammar and syntax, but about having something to say and saying it in sentences that are not half dead. Saint Paul and Saint Ignatius Martyr did not bother about grammar but they certainly knew how to write.

The fact that your subject may be very important in itself does not necessarily mean that what you have written about is important. A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book, even though it may be about the love of God. There are many who think that because they have written about God, they have written good books. Then men pick up these books and say: if the ones who say they believe in God cannot find anything than this to say about it, their religion cannot be worth much.

A Proclamation about the Proclamation

By Frederick Buechner

When the preacher climbs up into the pulpit, switches on the lectern light and spreads out his note cards like a poker hand, maybe even the vacationing sophomore who is there only because somebody has dragged him there pricks up his ears for a second or two along with the rest of them because they believe that the man who is standing up there… has something that they do not have or at least not the same way he has it because he is a professional. He professes and stand for in public what they with varying degrees of conviction or the lack of it subscribe to mainly in private…All of this deepens the silence with which they sit there waiting for him to work a miracle, and the miracle they are waiting for is that he will not just say that God is present, because they have heard it said before and it has made no great and lasting difference to them, will not just speak the word of joy, hope, comedy, because they have heard it spoken before too and have spoken it among themselves, but that he will somehow make it real to them. They wait for him to make God real to them through the sacrament of words as God is supposed to become real in the sacrament of bread and wine, and there is no place where the preacher is more aware of his own nakedness and helplessness than here in the pulpit as he listens to the silence of their waiting. Poor, bare, forked animal in his [suit] with his heart in his mouth if not yet his foot. What can he say? What word can he speak with power enough to empower them, waiting there?

Excerpt from Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, (p. 39-40).

Some Christians Want Stimulus from the Government's Package

I recently received an email calling for Christians to be scandalized and outraged. Not wanting to pass up an opportunity like that, I read on to find out that Former Speaker Newt Gingrich “feels that if Christian activists would have enough courage and holy anger to e-mail and call their representatives and senators.” Over what? Well, the current administration’s stimulus package has a section prohibiting the uses of its funds. One of the prohibitions is that the money cannot not go to building or renovating buildings that are used mainly for religious or sectarian purposes. The actual wording in question is:

No funds awarded under this section may be used for - (C) modernization, renovation, or repair of facilities (i) used for sectarian instruction, religious worship, or a school or department of divinity; or (ii) in which a substantial portion of the functions of the facilities are subsumed in a religious mission; or construction of new facilities.

It is important to note that nothing is keeping Christians from doing their own funding. We can still send a fat check Duke Divinity School in order to renovate their chapel. And we can even still meet in the buildings being renovated, as this very email notes that in the 2001 Good News Club vs. Milford Central School Supreme Court decision, the court ruled that restricting religious speech within the context of public shared-use facilities (or schools) is unconstitutional. This paragraph simply says that the money cannot go towards chapels and buildings used by seminaries and bible colleges, or building “in which a substantial portion of the functions of the facilities are subsumed in a religious mission.”

And yet some Christians see this as "discriminatory," "theft," and "corruption of the highest order." Another portion of the email says,

Christians have not expressed enough outrage focused on the concept that people of faith are being taken advantage of by the stimulus bill during a time of crisis. They are being stolen from them when they are down and out and looking in good faith to the government for help. Instead of the stimulus we need, the liberals are getting the pork that they want -- for themselves, their families, and their friends. They are pickpockets and thieves preying on the down and out.

There seems to be a great irony that some of the Christians who speak vehemently against any sort of “handout” are now shamelessly offended when they don’t get a piece of the pie. I am befuddled as to why they would want to be stimulated by the government’s package. I understand that, given its size, it is very tempting, but the church has no need of the government’s aid. Sure, we’ll take what they want to give us, but we do not need it.

Furthermore, some believe this to be a slow move of edging the Christian voice out of the public square. But part of the Christian story is that we do not force our voice to be heard, nor do we shove our presence into people’s homes or even the public square. Even if there was any validity to this alarmist claim, it still does not change anything for the Church, because it is not our custom to force our presence anywhere. Christ can only be invited.