A Moment of Reflection

I've been reading "The Tolkien Reader" for a book club meeting lately.  I want to turn to this because I hate being so unrelievedly negative, but sometimes you seem paranoid because they are really after you and I think that observation applies to what is going on in the country today.  One of Tolkien's contributions, a lasting, moving and inspiring one, is his essay "On Fairy Stories" which appears in "Tree and Leaf" and in "The Tolkien Reader."  I've been reading it again after some years and Tolkien, like his friend C.S. Lewis was prescient about the direction of modern society.  He makes a comment that I think captures our world with devestating accuracy: "It is indeed an age of 'improved means to deteriorated ends.'"


I think we have to see our world as something of a Fairy Story.  Tolkien saw it that way as did one of his influences G.K. Chesterton.  An important aspect of the Fairy Story is "the Consolation of the Happy Ending" what Tolkien called the Eucatastrophe.  We are in a drama which has its tragic dimensions and we must not lose sight of the goal which is not so much some utopian dream of materialistic excess in this world as the ultimate Joy awaiting us.  We experience it here as "a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief."  It is a vision we are called to communicate to others because they are trapped instead in the confusion of a nightmare.

I'm not sure that sounded much more cheerful.  Kicking back with a glass of plum wine or Horton's raspberry wine and contemplating the beauty of a moment makes one glad not to have surfeit because it would only blunt the appreciation of a world full of wonder and what Chesterton styled as the gratitude we owe to our Creator.