Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament… There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires. The only cure for sagging or fainting faith is Communion. Though always Itself, perfect and complete and inviolate, the Blessed Sacrament does not operate completely and once for all in any of us. Like the act of Faith it must be continuous and grow by exercise. Frequency is of the highest effect. Seven times a week is more nourishing than seven times at intervals. Also I can recommend this as an exercise (alas! only too easy to find opportunity for): make your communion in circumstances that affront your taste. Choose a snuffling or gabbling priest or a proud and vulgar friar; and a church full of the usual bourgeois crowd, ill-behaved children – from those who yell to those products of Catholic schools who the moment the tabernacle is opened sit back and yawn – open necked and dirty youths, women in trousers and often with hair both unkempt and uncovered. Go to communion with them (and pray for them). It will be just the same (or better than that) as a mass said beautifully by a visibly holy man, and shared by a few devout and decorous people. It could not be worse than the mess of the feeding of the Five Thousand – after which our Lord propounded the feeding that was to come.1 Listers, as you may have guessed by this point, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was not only a magnificent writer but also a devout Catholic. This influence shines through his works, although not in the direct way often employed by other writers. He simply sought to tell great stories, stories that his readers would enjoy. For him, a great story is one that does not require conscious suspension of disbelief; instead, it is the responsibility of the author to guide the reader into the story smoothly. In particular, it is essential that the rules governing the secondary world that the author subcreates2 are believable and consistent. For Tolkien, this meant that his subcreated world must be consistent with the Truth. Naturally, various physical details differ from our familiar world, but the underlying philosophy is very much the same. As such, his work can provide unique insights into some of the mysteries of faith, a few examples of which I present here. Note that Tolkien does not achieve these insights through the use of allegory, which he professed to ‘cordially dislike’.3 Rather than parallelling Biblical stories, Tolkien tells new stories that are rooted in Christian principles and thus naturally develop many of the same concepts. In this list, I will briefly introduce a few of these ideas and leave the reader to explore both the further detail that can be enjoyed and the numerous other images that Tolkien has given us.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Jun 2013 07:39:18 +0000
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