Of Gollum and Grace

I am a huge fan of The Lord of the Rings (TLOTR). I was obsessed with it, reading it through a dozen times between sixth grade and senior year of high school. After I came into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ that senior year, I read TLOTR one more time. I still enjoyed it, but the obsession to plunge again and again into Tolkien’s incredibly realized Middle Earth  ceased. Since then, I have read it once more, to my son Michael; to my delight, he also loved it.

By the time I read it to Michael, I had come to know the Bible much better.  I then discovered how frequently TLOTR alludes to Catholic and Christian imagery, at one point directly quoting from the New Testament (Jn 14:1 “Let not your hearts be troubled”, from the elf-queen Galadriel to the worn-out members of the Fellowship of the Ring). As Tolkien was a devout Catholic, this should not have surprised me.

What had drawn me to TLOTR as early as sixth grade was its sense of “something more”. It was not just the magical powers of Gandalf, the elves, or even the Enemy, Sauron: it was the allusions to Powers that mysteriously guided Middle Earth’s destiny; the certainty that a plan was being worked out; that things happened for reasons that the wisest characters, such as Gandalf, intuited without fully understanding; the assurance that Good would triumph over Evil, even if individual characters failed in their tasks, because some destiny was being worked out.

When I came to know Jesus, I found that what TLOTR depicted “dimly, as in a mirror”, I had come to experience “face to face” (1 Cor 13:12): the providence and plan of God for my life. Tolkien, of course, knew the Lord; so while writing his masterpiece primarily as a really good story, he couldn’t help but thread it through with the “something more” he knew from experience. But having found that life in the Lord was the something more I had longed for, the power of its dim, though marvelous, reflection, in TLOTR lost its compulsion for me.

I continue to love TLOTR; I was delighted with the movie version; I’ll happily discuss TLOTR at length with anyone. But TLOTR has ceased to be The Gospel for me: the “something more”; a way to escape from a life that seemed frustratingly ordinary, although my whole being told me life shouldn’t be so. To my wonder and delight, I found – as all of those who come to know Jesus find – that life in Him is a thousand times the adventure, the epic battle between good and evil, the summons to fellowship, heroism, and hope, that TLOTR depicts. No literary masterpiece, of course – however well-written – compares to the Masterpiece the Lord is writing with our lives.

Yet TLOTR has profound lessons in it. It took many readings to discover one of the profoundest. Before that, I had always been disappointed at the climax of the book. Frodo stands at the Crack of Doom, holding the Ring and looking down at the Fire, knowing that the one purpose of his and Sam’s arduous journey has been to throw the Ring into the Fire and so destroy it. He is too weak, too controlled by the Ring, to do so. Instead, he puts on the Ring and claims it for his own – alerting Sauron to his presence in the heart of Sauron’s realm and risking the downfall of Middle Earth. The Ring is destroyed, nevertheless: but only because Gollum bites it off of Frodo’s finger, and in his dance of ecstasy, tumbles to his death in the Fire.

My reaction had always been: “How anticlimactic. Frodo fails when he’s most needed. Tolkien should have had Frodo summon up his last ounce of moral strength, sweat through the struggle, and nobly toss the Ring to its destruction! To have the Ring destroyed by an accident – by the tortured creature who lost his battle against evil and caved into his desire for the wholly evil Ring: it doesn’t make sense!”

My 10th time through or so I realized that Gollum’s destruction of the Ring was the point of the trilogy. It is foreshadowed and prepared for from the beginning: when Bilbo has the chance to kill Gollum (in The Hobbit) but does not. Frodo complains about this to Gandalf (pardon any errors – I’m quoting from memory): “It’s a pity that Bilbo didn’t kill Gollum when he had the chance!” Gandalf responds, “Pity? Yes, Pity, and Mercy, not to kill without need. Yet my heart forebodes me that Gollum has some crucial part to play in this before the saga ends.”

In the course of TLOTR, virtually every principle character encounters Gollum, has the chance to kill him, and out of Pity and Mercy, decides not to: Aragorn, Gandalf, Legolas, Faramir, Sam, and Frodo. (Even Sauron’s servants – after torturing him for news of the Ring’s whereabouts – let him go free.) So the destruction of the Ring ultimately rests, not on Frodo’s or anyone else’s flawless character or strength of will, but on the repeated acts of mercy shown Gollum.

What a marvelous parable! Frodo lacks the strength to carry out his mission: yet it is accomplished nevertheless, a fruit of not only his own act of mercy, but of the mercy of many others. So with the Body of Christ: I owe my salvation and growth in the Lord to the words, deeds, and prayers of so many others on earth and in heaven. To be sure, my own words, deeds, and prayers matter, yet they are enveloped and carried along in the current of love and grace flowing among the members of the Body.

I can see in my own life times when I could have fallen into grievous sin with tragic results. I wish I could say that it was my virtue that saved me – but it was not. Instead, seeming chance or coincidence, last-minute situational changes, saved me from potentially disastrous choices. Looking back, I can only say, “Oh, the mercies of the Lord! I stood on the precipice, and Your hand held me back.” The Lord took note of previous occasions when I had chosen for him; of the prayers of saints on Earth and in Heaven, and spared me.

A further lesson from Gollum’s destruction of the Ring: how good it is to know that the Lord, in His mercy, doesn’t depend on my strength of character to accomplish His will through me! How wonderful that, in our many moments of weakness and sin (to quote the Twelfth Promise of Alcoholics Anonymous), “We. . . discover that God is doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves”! What a relief that when we can’t do the right thing, God assures us, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9). How secure I can be, knowing that when my resolve fails; when I have no strength to fulfill the mission, I discover that God is carrying me.

In the classic He Leadeth Me, Fr. Walter Ciszek tells of how he was held by the Soviets in solitary confinement for five years (later spending 15 years in a hard labor camp in Siberia). He had responded to a call from the Lord to go to the Soviet Union to evangelize, in the late 1930’s. During his solitary confinement, he underwent long interrogations and sleep deprivation at seemingly random intervals. His prayers were geared toward effectively answering the Soviets’ baseless charges and not caving in to their demands that he “admit” to being a Vatican spy.

Fr. Ciszek experiences a crisis of faith years into his confinement, when, worn down by the uncertainty, interrogations, and loneliness, he breaks down and signs whatever allegations the Soviets have made against him. Immediately afterward, he feels abandoned by God: “I asked You for strength and wisdom, and You withheld it!” He goes through a brief period of despair. He has been broken.

Then Fr. Ciszek realizes that throughout his ordeal, he has covertly been relying on his own strength and holiness: that God had to allow him to fail miserably so that he might cast all of his trust on Him. Out of his failure, amazingly, he comes to a boundless confidence in God’s providence: he no longer “gears himself up” for the interrogations, but goes in with serenity, knowing that God will supply the words needed, if God so chooses. At one point, he is led off to what he believes will be his execution, experiencing inexplicable peace in the midst of it (it turns out he gets transferred to the hard labor camp). He has come to know that apart from God he can do nothing (cf. Jn 15:5), but that “with God, nothing [is] impossible” (Lk 1:37).

Tolkien no doubt experienced such grace in his own life, powerfully enough that he made it a central theme of his masterpiece. The God who so worked in his life continues to work in ours. “Praise be to God for His inexpressible gift!”(2 Cor 9:15)

 

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About admin

I am a Catholic clinical psychologist with a solo practice in Omaha, NE. In the Franciscan seminary, I completed about 2/3rd of an M.Div./MA in Scripture. In my 3rd year of temporary vows, I discerned a call to the married life. My lovely wife Mary and I have a son, Michael, as well as a number of children preceding us to Heaven through miscarriages. We are delighted to be in the Omaha archdiocese and love the Heartland.
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