As I’ve started reading The Lord of the Rings to my kids, I am reminded that the faithful life can at times be a wandering life.
Our family hit a major literary / developmental milestone recently. We have started reading Lord of the Rings to our kids as part of our bedtime routine.
This is the most important thing I’ve done so far as a father.
And it’s been great. The kids are loving and haven’t been too scared. We are not terribly far along — Frodo, Sam, and Pippin just made it to Buckleberry Ferry. Lindsey was comparing the book’s facing to the film’s pacing and she said something to the effect of, “It’s like a not-too-treacherous walk that leads to a farmer’s house for dinner.”
Verily. It is delicious and slow. Much needed for our all-too-fast life.
It’s been at least a decade since I last read Lord of the Rings. I did not know how significant or timely it was that we jumped into it in September. Which is just an admission that I did recall that Bilbo and Frodo shared the same birthday and that their birthdays both fell on September 22. The autumnal equinox typically falls on either the 22nd or 23rd of September. This year, September 22 marked the first day of fall.
I was also struck by the way Tolkien connects autumn to adventuring and wandering. Two quotes from the early chapters…
[Frodo] found himself wondering at times, especially in the autumn, about the wild lands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams.
…and:
When autumn came, he knew that part at least of his heart would think more kindly of journeying, as it always did at that season. He had indeed privately made up his mind to leave on his fiftieth birthday: Bilbo’s one hundred and twenty-eighth. It seemed somehow the proper day day on which to set out and follow him.
I find this notion entirely correct. Morally, emotionally, spiritually, and otherwise. It resonates and satisfies. There is something about the turn to autumn that moves the heart to move the feet. There’s an equinox of the heart as well as the sky.
Tolkien’s treatment of Frodo’s setting out has an Abrahamic quality to it. Gandalf gave very little instruction about where Frodo ought to go, both in the near-term and in the long-term. But Frodo obeyed in faith. “And he went out, not knowing where he was going” (Hebrews 11:8).
Gandalf’s oft-quoted maxim that “All who wander are not lost” certainly comes to mind. That line has been misapplied in platitudinous proportions to bumper stickers on the back of Toyota 4Runners, as if wandering in the woods for the sake of wandering in the woods is what Gandalf meant.
He was talking to Frodo about Strider—Aragorn. The king. So wandering has an inherit gravity to it. Some sort of telos, even if the directions are fuzzy. I am very much preaching to myself when I say that the faithful life is at times a wandering life. Our hearts will pass through seasons of change. The pilgrimage is hard. Yet hope is found in having a “firmly fixed” heart, as the Coverdale Psalter rends Psalm 57:7.
I plan to write more on this later—the appropriateness of wandering in autumn, and the significance of the places to which we wander. To prove the point, I am writing this from Steamboat Spring, and our family has two more trips planned between now and the end of October. The road goes ever on and on.
