Learning from Tolkien’s Faith
“But anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. ”
In High School, a friend recommended I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. I couldn’t put it down. Tolkien was my first foray into fantasy literature, and I was hooked. As a sixteen-year-old, I appreciated the sweeping themes of good and evil, hope and despair, power and injustice. While I didn’t experience religious faith explicitly described, I could feel religious themes jumping off the page. As a teen, I wasn’t privy to Tolkien’s life story.
Devin Brown’s The Christian World of The Hobbit reminds us of Tolkien’s deep and abiding faith. “In 1953, looking back on his life at the age of sixty-one, Tolkien wrote to a friend about how deeply grateful he was for having been brought up in the Christian faith. ‘A faith,’ Tolkien concludes, ‘that has nourished me and taught me all the little that I know.” Tolkien’s father died when he was a teenager. His mother converted to the Roman Catholic faith, and he became close with a supportive priest. For the rest of his life, Tolkien’s faith influenced his life choices, education, friendships, teaching, and his popular writing.
The greatest aspect of Tolkien’s spiritual writing was its unending hope. Tolkien spent his life reading, talking about, and living his faith to the point that it became synonymous with his very being. Tolkien’s faith moved through his mind and into his words, spoken and written. Robert Murray, a colleague at Oxford University, described Tolkien’s faith as having “positive compatibility with the order of Grace.” In The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, the character Gollum exemplifies Tolkien’s vast description of the most lost a being could be yet still has hope through unending grace.
Whether you have read Tolkien or even like his works, his example is worth emulating. Our faith is not just one aspect of who we are but is embedded in our very being. Through the movement of the Holy Spirit and our personal commitment, we too can become one with the faith we hold. In prayer today, ask God to provide ways of allowing the Spirit to move in and through you, so you and God feel as one. Being at one with God is the way to experience the joy described in the Bible.
