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.

With respect to the author, Pi's question isn't really a child's question. The child's question would be more like, “When I throw this question over the horizon, where will the answer pull me?” When we asked questions as children, we expected to be drawn across new landscapes towards the answer. Just think of that question, “Where do babies come from?” Who could have anticipated the answer to that one? Who understood it? Who could imagine where it would lead us? When we asked questions as children, the questions pulled us, and our changing lives became answers.

Children live in the constant knowledge that they are “on the way.” Where things break down for adults is in our identification of the onset of adulthood as a destination rather than as another landmark in a journey. It is out of this misdirected sense of adulthood as destination that we ask the question that is not the child's question but our own: “How can I stand here, secure and stationary, and reel in answers?”

In Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, a powerful question drags the frail, determined, solitary Santiago from one end of the ocean to the other, almost killing him, before yielding an answer – the transformed Santiago . The relentless question weighs enough—is powerful enough—to bring into being a new self.

The answers to our real questions, the few that we dare hurl over the horizon, will likewise be occasions for movement and transformation. By the time they pull us in, we will be very different people. We will have new words for the hunger at the heart of our lives and for the food that addresses that hunger. We had thought our adulthood was a stable perch from which to demand of the universe its answers. We will have discovered that the universe has instead demanded of us our questions, has pulled us by the insistent threads of those questions across a God-haunted landscape and deeper into our humanity.

A child still has an expansive anticipation that, if there is not grammar or vocabulary enough to make sense of today, there may well be enough tomorrow. If that feeling, that sight, that taste, that direction doesn't have a name, cast your question over the horizons of language and follow where it pulls. There is always another word, calling a changing, growing new self into new being.

We grownups, though, grazing on the cold literal leftovers of modernity, sense the horizons of language closing. We butt against the end of imagination, against the fraying into nothing of the string of new words (and the new worlds that they brought to life by naming) that once seemed endless, against the impossibility that anything new can emerge, against the aching certainty that all the combinations have been tried and found wanting.

Does the ballast of safe familiarity make it all but impossible for our questions to pull us over the horizons into some new possibility? Is the apparent absence of any new reality simply a matter of weighing too much for our questions? Have we settled so firmly in the places where adulthood has set us that we hardly bother any more even to give voice to the questions that haunt us?

Into this sure—if stifling—existence there may come a question or two—an illness, a grief, a crisis in workplace, family, or neighbourhood—an interruption that cracks the shell of numbing sameness that has contained our lives. Or perhaps the question comes as what Walter Brueggemann calls the “testimony to otherwise” – a hint that beyond the smooth sameness is the dramatic topography of wonder, mystery, and surprise. The birth of a grandchild, a few bars of music, the sun at one of its extremes of rising and setting, or a smell or taste or sound from another time, a time of less close and crowded horizons.

Birth, song, light, scent—these are not experiences that can be said to mean any “one-and-only” thing; their meaning comes not because they establish and defend a proposition, but because they push towards us questions that outweigh our stability. Through them we enter another landscape; they draw us in motion across it, they call us to action out of our own newfound or long neglected longing. They invite us across a boundary, through a portal and into a journey. These “testimonies to otherwise” are not certain in the manner of death and taxes, or inevitable in the way of mortgages and markets. Their certainty is in the echo they find where we cannot find it without them, in the hope they stir against the hard shell of the inevitable, in their capacity to awaken what we had forgotten, lost, or laid aside when we allowed our feet to be planted in what passes for reality.

There is a rich and dependable source of such testimonies in the life of the world, and in the life of the church. Deaths and births, memories and hopes, a chance encounter with some strand of the depth of things, a loss, a regret, the powerful pounding of desire in our bodies and our souls – the world often enough, and sometimes insistently – bears witness to otherwise. And, often enough, our tradition adds the name of “holy” to that witness.

The first five books of the Bible—Torah—tell a story of otherwise, of a landscape shot through with the reality of God. Torah – the mother tongue of Jewish faith and imagination, traces the journey from Creation to Exodus by means of four journeys—the shell-shocked journey out of Eden , the improbable journey of Abraham and Sarah out of Haran , the desperate journey of Joseph's kin into Egypt , and the long ambivalent journey out of Egyptian bondage toward a God-promised future of freedom.

Torah comes to an end with the death of Moses and before the Hebrew people cross the Jordan into the land of promise. This mother tongue of faithful imagination comes tellingly to an end before the wandering God-nation arrives at its destination. In Torah, the people of Israel throw the question of freedom over the horizon of the wilderness and allow that question to drag them through the wilderness for 40 years, until they stand at the brink of fulfillment, and, transformed, become—for a moment—the Answer. Torah ends at this point. The crossing of the tribes across the Jordan is another story, a story in which the people of Israel achieve what they think is their heart's desire, to be “a nation like other nations.” It is another story that will tell of the closing in of the horizons until hopeful imagination is all but impossible, and only a marginalized, mad, prophetic few still dare to throw questions over the narrowing boundaries of current arrangements, and still fewer believe there is, beyond that edge, a Question with the strength to pull them out of the rut of the way things are into the dream of the way things might be.

Those who stand on the wilderness side of Jordan are themselves, of course, a marginalized, mad, prophetic few, whose only reason for trusting that Question is that its Answer—their own transformed life—has turned out to be true and evident. As they stand there at the boundary of a dream they didn't even have until God made them restless with it, they bear witness. We tell their story not primarily because of the destination they achieved, but because they tell our story, and because into that telling the Holy One crashes, bringing muted questions into words, hidden by the horizon of history, but weighing enough to tow them towards their heart's desire.

Another One will stand at the edge of this river, sure of the call to faithfulness, though perhaps less than absolutely certain of the details of transformation that faithfulness will work in his life. Bearing witness to the forgotten heart's desire of the people, he will interrogate the universe with the Question that only a marginalized, mad, prophetic few will even understand. In the end, he will allow his Question to outweigh even his human instinct for security, for survival; it will be the ballast that pulls him over the last and most terrifying horizon. So, for Christian people, asking the Question—“Who is God?—the answer is a Person transformed, glorified and lifted beyond even the power of death. And when, in rare moments of courage or clarity, we allow his Question to echo in our lives, it pulls us through strange borderlands into the very presence of God. We now discover two weighty Questions meeting in this one Life: “Who is God?” “What is a human?” And when we shudder at the foot of the cross, or gape at the rolled-back stone, we agree for a moment that these questions, dangerous as they are, are the questions that will draw us towards the answer of our own transformation, the Answer we have seen in the lives of saints and neighbors.

To be towed by a Truth that pulls from beyond the horizon of our knowing, is not, of course, a comfortable thing. To be towed in the direction of our heart's desire, when our sin-bounded heart does not itself know that desire or have a name for it, is at least disorienting—more likely frightening. If in the Bible we expect to find confirmation of what we can know and embrace from within the shortened horizons of business as usual, we must choose either disappointment or deception. Choosing disappointment, we lay the book down and restore our attention to things as they are, to what we will, from that moment, call “the real world”. Choosing deception, we will pretend to read the book, pretend to take it seriously, all the while busy with scissors and paste to bring its expansive holiness into conformity with our sober self-regard. Choosing either, we step prudently aside while the wind of Truth—truth about the world, about God, about our very lives—blows (where it will) through the empty corridors of our all-but-abandoned lives.

Such prudence leaves us the safe dignity of familiar horizons; however, it robs us of a world of possibility and imagination that are the divine testimony against apparent inevitability. The world's necessity is not God's necessity. The inevitability of “things as they are” is swept away by a Spirit that blows where it wills, and things that cannot be—beauty, holiness, healing, peace, justice, communion—spring to life where the imagination of God touches the barren ground of necessity.

To have in our hands a book with such power, to have access to a God-shot landscape that turns out to begin in own back yard, is a rich endowment. To have that gift and not know what to make of it is a correspondingly profound impoverishment. To plunder this mystery for propositions by which we can do battle with those who are, or see, or behave or believe “otherwise” is to strip-mine the biblical landscape for the fool's gold of fundamentalism—a fundamentalism that ignores the fundamental reality that God's freedom, not our fundamentals, sets down the rhythm of Truth. To place its odd or dangerous texts under house arrest on the authority of the current or accepted version of what is “reasonable” is to colonize the biblical landscape under the flag of liberalism—a liberalism that ignores the extravagant liberality by which possibility is founded, not in what we can understand, but in what God chooses. To do either is to refuse the freedom and cost of a life with God, a life illuminated by biblical testimony, a life in which closing horizons break open and inevitability yields to the holiness of God.

Such a refusal is understandable. This freedom of a life with God is neither safe nor sure; it is life with One who is beyond our capacity to manage. It is a life in light of a witness that cannot be reduced to rules or bent to business as usual. It is a life that allows itself to be outweighed by God and God's ways. That life is more than any of us can endure without (at least) occasional retreats to the more stable – though less hopeful – ground that we can define by our power, our wealth, our status, our mastery. But when we call such retreats “biblical” or “realistic,” we are in danger of misunderstanding God's business with us and with creation. Whatever god we cobble together out of our failure of spiritual nerve is not the God of the Bible, but a small god dangerously inflated by our need for a safe perch from which to cast our insubstantial questions.

We know all this. We know that such a lightly certain god cannot either name or address the weighty question of our insistent hunger. A god as the answer to our demand for an answer is not the God who meets our humanity in Jesus. The living God is more like a question that draws us over the frontier of the familiar, accompanies us across the patchwork landscape of discovery, draws us towards the encounter that transforms us, and holds us open to the possibility that we will find our true and full humanity only by asking the Question who asks us into existence. As we struggle to know and love one another, as we probe and wonder at the witness of our ancestors, as we allow our frailty, fear and flaws to be outweighed by grace, will we have desire enough to ask such a Question? Or will we settle for an answer we already know to a question that doesn't matter—for anything, that is, that will relieve us of the uncertain beauty by which we journey home?

Rev. Michael Thompson is principal secretary to Archbishop Michael Peers.

Take Snapper, for instance, a journalist and a magnificent editor I knew in my younger years. I have thought about Snapper recently, since reading his obituary in a newspaper. Snapper thrived on a reputation firmly grounded in every nuance of his nickname. Snap he would, at each and every affront to the impeccable skills and standards he brought to big-league journalism. And he was also a master of the snap decision, a man with a unique and unfailing talent for taking a difficult problem or issue and instantly delivering a verdict that was invariably true and right.

The young people coming to the newspaper at the outset of uncertain careers would see this diminutive, wiry, grey-haired god of the newsroom with his unconquerable self-confidence, match that countenance with the nickname and with the folklore that depicted him as an expert in weaponry and a masterful hunter, and instantly decide he was not a man to be trifled with. That, no doubt, is at least in part what Snapper had in mind. It took years of getting to know Snapper to learn that he was about as kind and gentle a human being as ever strode across a newsroom floor. He tolerated no fools, but then few in his generation did. He snapped like a pit-bull but I never, ever, knew him to bite.

We judge and assess people—how else?—by what they give us to work with. The people we know, work with, love or dislike, are multifaceted entities that divulge themselves to us only to the extent that they wish to. Most people, to varying degrees, have a concept of themselves which is how they wish to be appreciated. Some want to appear arrogant and self-assured, while others thrive in gentleness and forever seen in need of help. Some wish to draw people in while others, like Snapper, prefer them kept at bay. And yet, for all the time we spend with the people we work with and people we know in our social lives, we probably know them very little, unless we are privileged to see them in another context, with families and loves ones, for instance. I once saw a movie in which a character started to theorize on how another character probably behaved when he was alone with his wife. The person this character was speaking to cut him off with the very sage aphorism: “No one—No One—knows how it is between two people who are married.”

All this is by way of offering some caution. Can the movie's aphorism be taken any farther? Can anyone ever really absorb enough of the complexities of another person's character and life to offer the definitive judgment on such fundamental things as motives and purposes? Or it is all guesswork, a matter of perceptions and splendid delusions leading to conclusions that might be astute some times and horrendously off the mark other times? We try the best we can and we must, in that process, ever be aware that we read people in a language unique to our own minds and souls. We can't ever, ever get it all right. There is too much involved that must rely on our own perceptions and our own intuitions and on our own inbred fallacies. We get some stuff right and we get plenty wrong and only the very naive ever hope that one day the world will be a homogenous thing visible to everyone the way they see it.

Like colors. I read a book about colors this summer, and I was fascinated to learn that some people actually profess to hear colors. I don't. But it's amusing to think that one person's green concerto is another person's ballad or that my red rap song is your aria.

It has long been hypothesized that people perceive colors in different ways, and the idea that they have a sound too, open to our imaginations and to our hearts, adds a delightful element to the mystery of how we manage to coexist in several billion subjective worlds. People are like colors. We see them differently. We hear some and not others.

No one is ever fully right or fully wrong in the way they receive things in the world. And no one should ever be so self-assured as to easily inject right or wrong or truth or falsehood in a world with so many subjective variables. My truth is your myth. My vision is your dream.

When I was very young, I remember I had a friend older by two grades who once took pains to assure me that by the time I reached the point in school where he was—I believe Grade 10—there would be very little left that I did not know. I was skeptical then and I remain skeptical now. Snapper, a man who was probably farther along on the journey to knowledge than most, would have made short work of the boy's presumptions.