Members of the Primate’s Theological Commission celebrate their last meeting together. (L-R, from back) Archbishop Fred Hiltz, Bishop Linda Nicholls, the Rev. Jamie Howison, Bishop Benjamin Arreak, the Rev. Paul Jennings, Dr. Walter Deller, the Rev. Dr. Lisa Wang, the Rev. Dr. Joanne Mercer, and Bishop Stephen Andrews. Not present: the Rev. Dr. Trudy Lebans, Dr. Robert Moore, The Rev. Dr. Gary Thorne, and Madeleine Urion.

I don’t much like meetings and I am not a big fan of committee work. I do, however, love the theological enterprise.

So when then-Primate Michael Peers invited me to accept an appointment to the Primate’s Theological Commission in 2003, I didn’t hesitate.

In the weeks before the commission’s first meeting, however, two things began to register.

First, while many of the commission’s 12 members were actively engaged in the academic world, my theological work was parish-based, expressed primarily in preaching and occasional writing. Yes, I read all the time, but would that be enough?

Second, it dawned on me that I had signed on for meetings—seven years of semi-annual meetings.

In the week prior to our first gathering, I visited a friend and theological mentor, Robert Farrar Capon. During his ministry in the Episcopal Church, Robert had certainly done his share of committee work, and while he was entirely sympathetic to my qualms, he suggested I might inject into this particular group a reminder that theology is, among other things, “a joyful lark.”

“Theology is a serious discipline,” he added, “so serious we can’t afford to let ourselves become too serious about it.”

His words made a strange kind of sense.

A few days later, I arrived at St. Michael’s House in Oakville, Ont., feeling nervous and excited, carrying a commitment to really en-joy this work.

And what did I discover? That everyone sitting at the table basically shared my nervous excitement and intuitively sensed our work could be joyful, fun, and invigorating. Who knew?

Now, our seven-year term completed, I am delighted to say we never really lost sight of our shared ground, even in the midst of some tough deliberations that produced The St. Michael Report and The Galilee Report. There were moments when we strained—really strained—to hear each other, and when the seriousness of the theological task did press us into close corners.

Yet we discovered our task was never insurmountable, this challenge of doing theological reflection together.

In our recent round of closing sessions, we considered why this had been the case and agreed that, in rooting our work in the eucharist, daily prayer, and Bible study, a solid foundation had been set.

We also shared meals, coffee and tea, walks, fresh air breaks, and late-night social times. How could one sit defensively in a theological corner when you had heard someone tell a great story or share a significant piece of life?

Many of those pieces of life were transformational, even poignant.

Over seven years, three of us struggled with major health concerns, including cancer, and one became a first-time mother. A book was published, a doctorate awarded; jobs and ministries ended or began. One member was ordained priest, another as bishop. Two people left; two others joined us midstream.

And for whatever wondrous combination of reasons—and certainly by the grace of God—this particular group was characterized by a willingness to truly listen, right from the beginning. Marked by a spirit of respect and trust, it was oh-so-natural that we quickly came to befriend one another.

This doesn’t mean our differences weren’t real or our perspectives not passionately held.

But, in our friendship in Christ, we had a small taste of what it means to be together, participants in the Body of Christ, and from that place to “do” theology in community.

For all that we responded to the church’s invitation to produce various official reports and statements, perhaps the most substantial thing we can offer is our experience of life together, in the midst of our differences, passionate in our enjoyment of this faith, bound together as members of one Body—not a bad thing to offer to a church often deeply aware of its divisions.

But it is not just the prospect of travel that has placed pilgrimage on my mind. On July 3, 2008, the Canadian violinist Oliver Schroer succumbed to leukemia. Schroer was in his early 50s, and had enjoyed a successful career as a solo artist, crossing folk and roots with various other musical influences, and gaining a loyal following in Canada and well beyond. His battle with leukemia was fairly short; it was less than 18 months from diagnosis to death, but even during that time he continued to record (Hymns and Hers, a project he described as “an album of hymns and introspective ensemble pieces”) and to play concerts. The final concert of his life took place on June 5, 2008, less than a month before his death.

It is not Hymns and Hers that is relevant here, but rather the 2006 Camino album, a beautifully packaged audio journal of the 1000-kilometre pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago that the musician made in 2004. Accompanied by his wife and two friends, Schroer packed along his violin and portable recording equipment, and created atmospheric and evocative improvised pieces in churches and on roadsides along the walk. One of the friends on the pilgrimage was the photographer Peter Coffman, and his work is presented in the 28-page CD booklet, offering visual illumination to the recordings.

Pilgrimage seems to be somewhat in fashion in our day, and a quick online search will turn up dozens of books written about the Camino experience. Among them are books by New Age hero Shirley MacLaine (The Camino: A Journey of the Spirit), as well as a brand-new one by Mennonite theologian Arthur Paul Boers entitled The Way is Made by Walking: A Pilgrimage Along the Camino de Santiago. I have read two Camino books:  Joyce Rupp’s Walk in a Relaxed Manner: Life Lessons from the Camino, which is a mature and solidly liberal catholic reflection on the experience, and Fumbling: A Journey of Love, Adventure, and Renewal on the Camino de Santiago, a much less seasoned work by the young writer  Kerry Egan, in which she explores issues ranging from her father’s death to her romance with her travelling companion to her struggles to believe in God. Between these two works, I came to think that I had at least some appreciation of the diversity and complexity of the pilgrim quest, yet it was not until I heard Schroer’s work that I came to understand the deep appeal of such a journey.

I actually wonder if the title of Boers’s book, The Way is Made by Walking, wouldn’t have been a better title for the Camino album. That title is so similar to the sentiments of St. Augustine when he said, “it is solved by walking,” catches wonderfully the heart of Schroer’s project, and in a very real sense anticipates how he faced his own death.

In an interview with Toronto Star reporter Diane Flacks, Schroer spoke of death as being the “waterfall we’re all facing.”  “We’re all dying, you know,” he remarked, and then in response to a question about what he expected of death, he said this:

“At the moment we pass through that portal, things rearrange themselves so thoroughly [that] it cannot make any sense to us now. I have the feeling that, at the moment that I slip across, it will make ultimate sense. And I’m not going to look back.”

This strikes me as being less the stuff of the soft New Age mysticism that would characterize someone like Shirley MacLaine, and more akin to what the medievals would have called “a good death.” With time to prepare to die-with time to put one’s life in perspective and one’s soul in order-death can be faced with calm confidence.

I can only speculate here-and I suppose such speculation might be either naive or irresponsible-but if one has listened carefully to Camino, it is not hard to imagine that the long walk had something to do with Schroer being able to die well. And actually, you have to more than just listen to this album: you must hear it, savour it, pour over the photographs, and dwell on the gently poetic liner notes. It is not an album for background listening, nor is it particularly one that can be listened to in any way other than something like prayerful solitude. I have sat out on my screened porch on a summer night and heard it. I have walked through the woods while it played on my little MP3 player. I have prayed with it while sitting in the garden at St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota. Each time, I find myself walking with that little company along a dusty pilgrim’s road, and each time I’m a little richer for it.

To return briefly to my travel plans, I suspect that part of what might happen in this trip is that I’ll find my appetite whetted for a return visit, and one that will be built around walking St. Cuthbert’s Way or spending time exploring life in a place like Taizé, or maybe even out on the long road that is the Camino. Maybe I’ll be made a little more deeply aware of how it is that “the way is made by walking,” or at least be recalled to the truth that our lives should not be seen not as static or settled things but rather as a way. If I can trust that insight-if I can trust the promise of the One who named himself as the Way (and the Truth and the Life), then like the Canadian violinist whose theological work was executed in the doing of his music more than by anything he actually said or wrote, an enacted theology and a good death lie on my horizon as well.

The message alerted me to the fact that within the church, strong voices of caution are raised and high levels of suspicion aroused whenever an author works with the worlds of fantasy and myth. This is particularly the case when the stories involve the use of magic, and even more so when there is even a hint of so-called “good magic.” This, needless to say, is the issue at stake for many who are critical of the Harry Potter books. In the context of The Lord of the Rings, the issue is more or less personified in the figure of Gandalf, the good and noble wizard who wields his craft in defense of those who would battle the evil one. Even without a Gandalf-style character, however, the very presence of a figure of evil in a book is enough to keep some Christians at bay.

I responded to the e-mail by saying that I was clearly in the for camp, and that I view The Lord of the Rings as a deeply Christian work, from the imagination and hand of a deeply Christian writer. For me, that has always been, if not self-evident, then at least fairly assumed. I first read the books when I was 14, having twice read through the C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia and being quite ready to take on something a bit more substantial. Tolkien, I was told, was a Christian and had been a close friend and colleague of Lewis. The Lord of the Rings, I was informed, is a tale of the struggle between good and evil, and it was against this background that I began that first reading. I have to admit that at the time I wondered where the Aslan/Christ figure was, and why there was no explicit mention of God or “the King across the Sea,” but Tolkien's portrayal of the great drama in the battle between good and evil was, at least at the time, enough for me to mark the book as Christian.

It was only much later, as I worked through a more focused reading of Tolkien's works, that I came to realize that to many Christians of this generation his project is not self-evident … and in that e-mail message I was reminded that for some it is not self-evidently or obviously a good, or even acceptable, project.

What I argued that night in my lecture, and what I repeat here, is that Tolkien's project is not only “good,” but that it actually matters to the church. It matters not just in terms of what he deals with (and the themes of the Great Tradition are there), but also in how he deals with them. In a post-modern and increasingly secular and post-Christian world, the average person under the age of 30 might have little idea as to who David or Paul or even Jesus is, but he or she will almost surely know Frodo and Gandalf.

The church may find here a way to speak to those born of this secular and post-Christian age. More importantly, we need Tolkien's imaginative language of poetic myth for our own sake. In a society that so often flattens and dulls the imaginations of its members, trading in the dangerous hopefulness of the people of God for the banality of a consumption-driven culture, we need Tolkien and his kind. We need this rich, imaginative and frankly counter-cultural way of doing theology.

J.R.R. Tolkien is in many respects an unlikely literary hero for our times. A staunch Roman Catholic (sometimes narrowly so, calling Lewis's Anglican church “a pathetic and shadowy medley of half-remembered traditions and mutilated beliefs,”) and life-long academic, he lived a rather unremarkable domestic life in an Oxford suburb. He was a careful and exacting scholar, who as professor of Anglo-Saxon defended the view that the study of English should culminate in Chaucer, Shakespeare and his like being far too modern. Scrupulously attentive to detail, he rewrote his core works many times, in the end offering a relatively small canon for publication. For all that he was the creator (or “sub-creator,” as he preferred to see it) of an extraordinary world, his own way of being in the ordinary world was plain and decidedly hobbit-like. He once wrote:

“I am in fact a hobbit in all but size. I like gardens, trees, and unmechanical farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field), I have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much.”

“I am in fact a hobbit in all but size. I like gardens, trees, and unmechanical farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field), I have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much.”

Yet in his great works of fantasy, he uproots his hobbits (and with them both his readers and his own self) and takes them far afield in search, not of mere adventure, but of truth.

It is this business of the search for truth that lies at the heart of Tolkien's project. A search for truth, mind you, as it is to be carried out through the making of myth.

More than anything else, Tolkien understood himself to be creating a mythology for England . “I was from early days grieved,” he wrote to Milton Waldman at the Collins publishing house, “…grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands.”

In other words, he saw great myths in so many other cultures, but nothing distinctly English. The Arthurian stories were close; they were sufficiently English, but not quite the stuff of myth. The Arthurian world was too much the “real” world, and far too tied up with the Christian faith. “Myths and fairy-story must,” he explained to Waldman, “reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‘real' world.”

And so it was, that in 1917 at the age of 25, Tolkien began what was to be his life's work, the creation of a myth for England. The Book of Lost Tales was the working title for the cycle of stories that would, after countless rewrites (and a final editing by Tolkien's son, Christopher), be published posthumously as The Silmarillion.

But why myth? We tend, in our contemporary North American church context, to be conditioned to think of myth as the (perhaps failed) attempts of non-Christian peoples to make sense of the world. This most often leaves us in some variation of two basic positions vis a vis myth. On the one hand, pagan myths are read as interesting examples of those attempts of non-Christian cultures to make sense of the world; attempts that may, at one extreme, be seen as deceptions. On the other hand, there is a school of thought that wants to see all myths as having equal validity as expressions of truth; a school that at its extreme end wants to see, in the words of novelist Michael O'Brien, “the stories of the Christian Faith (as being) merely our version of universal ‘myths.'”

For Tolkien, neither of the two basic positions is adequate to address the true nature of myth. Myths, he claimed, are to truth what language is to objects or ideas. Myths are an attempt to describe truth – inventions which attempt to articulate, however partially, truth. Much unlike the materialist and rational modes of speech so common in our day, myth is nuanced, open and elastic in its way of speaking. As layer after layer of story is added, myth raises as many questions as it answers, but so be it. A belief in progress and the Cartesian modes of knowledge born of the Enlightenment landed Tolkien's Europe in the hell of two world wars; why not prefer the imaginative imprecision of myth?

In his essay “Myth Became Fact,” C.S. Lewis makes the rather stunning assertion that the story of Christ is actually a true or factual myth. “The heart of Christianity,” he writes, “is a myth which is also a fact… (that) happens – at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences.” This is a position in which he was deeply influenced by Tolkien, for whom the “Christian myth” was the one under which all myths must be subsumed. Yet there is a level for him at which myth, including his own “myth for England ,” is significant in its own right as a form by which we can best consider truth.

Still, as a Christian, Tolkien found that he could not help but write in a way which echoed the “true myth.” Not, mind you, that his work was at all allegorical, neatly lining up biblical themes and characters with direct parallels in Middle Earth. He found allegory far too stilted and shallow to be of much use in the shaping of imagination and the search for truth. He spoke instead of applicability: “I much prefer history (to allegory), true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers.”

Applicability, he added, “resides in the freedom of the reader… (not) in the purposed domination of the author.” If his readers find in The Lord of the Rings a cipher for understanding something about the evil of the Third Reich, it is not because Sauron is Hitler, but rather because in his portrayal of Sauron Tolkien has managed to say something true about evil.

But again, as an even cursory reading will show, The Lord of the Rings contains no prayer, no explicit talk of God, and no worship. There is the cosmology set out in The Silmarillion – with its creation story, monotheistic deity (Iluvatar), principalities and angelic powers (the Valar and Maiar, including “fallen angels” Morgoth and Sauron), and the Children of the One (both humans and elves) – but this is all part of the background myth, and so will be unfamiliar to more casual readers and movie viewers.

Yet even without a working knowledge of the background myth, it is not hard to see how The Lord of the Rings works with the grand themes of Fall, Mortality and what Tolkien calls “The Machine” or “Magic,” representative of the desire of the creature to manipulate creation for power. These themes, undeniably theological, course through Middle Earth, just as they course through our own earth. And how could this be otherwise, when a Christian myth-maker tells a story which, by design, is meant to say something truthful and faithful about the shape of the world? And because he seeks to say something truthful and faithful, he will inevitably take us beyond a mere description of the broken mortal state of humanity and into a vision of redemption. Redemption in his myth, as is so true in the Christian myth, is born of that which the Enemy would mistake for weakness, powerlessness and insignificance.

This essay is an edited and condensed version of a longer essay, published in this form with Mr. Howison's permission.