The Shadow

Last week I had the privilege of viewing part one of Peter Jackson’s version of The Hobbit. Among so many other things, Jackson’s works capture on screen one of the characteristics of Tolkien’s work that I find so appealing: they are epic. In scope of timeline, breadth of detail, and depth of meaning, the Tolkien/Jackson fusion is epic. Epic works have, in the short-attention-span theater of our present media climate, become almost antiquated. The reductionistic assumptions of contemporary intellectual and artistic endeavors look askance at attempts to paint the world with anything but pointilistic strokes. Today’s commentators speak of overarching metanarratives the way historians refer to the naming of “The War to End All Wars.”

I have been influenced by this reductionistic tendency. I gained sharper awareness of this when I watched Ian McKellan’s Gandalf the Grey sit at table with Saruman, Elrond, and Galadriel. As he tried to convince them that a greater darkness then the Pale Orc loomed over Middle Earth, I felt my soul shudder under a foreshadow of world-consuming evil. And then it occurred to me that I may have been lured into something just a bit over-the-top. A nameless necromancer who seeks to take over the world? Melodramatic, said my inner postmodern critic--or at very least maybe a bit too much.

Perhaps--until yesterday, when a man shot his mother and drove to a local elementary school in order to murder unsuspecting teachers and young children.

The social, emotional, and legal contours of Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, and Columbine remain too fuzzy to define well. Perhaps they will become clearer in the future, but as far as I am presently concerned, they are beyond speculation. What has become clear to me again is the shadow whose reaches extend farther than we are aware until we look up from our reduced microcosms. Tolkien had his inkling finger on something inescapable: evil has epic proportions.

The fact that we cannot discern clearly the emotional and social roots of the behavior of those like Adam Lanza, and the fact that the scene at Sandy Hook bears an appalling resemblance to the news from northern Mali or the Lord’s Resistance Army, bear witness to the fact that the depths of evil are beyond our comprehension. They give the lie to trends of contemporary voices who would prefer to treat evil as only so much lint which may be easily cleaned out of our own navels, if we would just examine them long enough. The terrifying hiddenness of these atrocities choke us up with the possibilities that my neighborhood may be cultivating future shootings, that my family systems may be empowering the next shooter, and that I may tomorrow find myself to be, if not perpetrator, then victim.

We mourn not just the loss of life and innocence, but we shiver under the cold Shadow from which the Balrog emerged and whose presence heralds the work of a Necromancer.

But—and I write all of the above only as preamble to this—we do not mourn as those who have no hope. When, according to Matthew’s account, King Herod of Judea slaughtered the children of Bethlehem, he did so in order to extinguish hope. Yet Hope persisted, growing in the person of Jesus, until his innocence was finally slaughtered by unjust execution three decades later. By then, however, Hope could not be quenched. Jesus Christ rose from the dead to reveal that despair cannot conquer Hope, that the Shadow cannot grasp the Light no matter how far its reach, and that death does not get the final word over Life. The only question that remains, to those of us who reduce life and death to disjointed icons in a shattered world, is: Do I believe in the epic Life of Christ?

To say Yes is not to oversimplify the massive challenges before us. The tragedies of Sandy Hook, Oklahoma City, Martin Luther King, Matthew Shepard, and Malala Yousufzai--just to name a few--will not brook glib platitudes designed to administer opiate for our souls. Christ is not palliative care for a society on hospice. To say Yes to Hope, Yes to Resurrection, Yes to Christ’s unquenchable Life means penetrating pain like smoke jumpers into the fire. Saying Yes means venturing into the mazes of society to slay dreadful minotaurs. Saying Yes means choosing to enter the Shadow of Mordor armed only with Hope that Gandalf the Grey will indeed return as Gandalf the White—in time to save us from the armies of darkness. Saying Yes means volunteering to suffer our own executions for the sake of those who did not choose theirs, because we know that someone greater than our own lives is at work here.

We cannot escape the epic character of evil. We can, however, embrace the epic Good which has been offered to us.

~ emrys