Bent Roads and a Vanishing Light
Bent Roads and a Vanishing Light
J. R. R. Tolkein The Silmarillion
“Mist hangs above hills/ above mist hangs stone face of mountain”*
Bent roads and a vanishing light, diminished world and innocence lost; in the foothills of heaven, no pass, no route, but the dark path that all avoid.
“Make of this, our Paradise , and let us live our backs turned to Death. And He whose face is seen beyond this range, Him we will forget.”
“The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small,” Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra).
But a peopled Paradise is paradise no more, if the gods no longer dwell and evil lives closer than next door. Uninvited Death crashes every party. Empty bottles on the floor. Platitudes and ‘God loves everyone’ from a million unfelt miles away didn’t dead bolt the door, didn’t save the town. There are reasons for unhappiness.
“Crossed sticks lie on earth/ between crossed sticks – pile of ash” *
W. H. Auden, in his poem, “September 1, 1939 ”:
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play …
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
She stood up and spoke with a tremor in her voice, Sunday night. Many difficult years, husband stricken, children back in the Philippines , BUT “God has been faithful –He has been with me through it all. He is good. He brought me here”. The battle to believe –real. The consolation of a near God –real. The dead life, the haunted wood, tossed out. Faith traced in the aching contours of a life examined. Abraham Herschel and his words about Job’s God: “Not an uncle. God is an earthquake.” The shaking that makes us uncomfortable with this world, shaking us onto solid ground.
“And the Dance flows on/ everything flows toward the rim of that shining Cup”*
“When the Christian church collaborates with a pagan culture by covering up death, it seals its own death warrant. For the whole reason for the church’s existence, its whole message, is a “good news” or gospel about a God who became man in order to solve the problem of death and the problem of sin, which is its root…When faith and death thus meet, it is death, not faith, that is changed. “Death, Thou shalt die’ (John Donne). But when death and platitudes meet, it is the platitudes that are changed. That is why platitudes fear to face death: they fear their own death in that encounter.”
Peter Kreeft, Love is Stronger than Death (from which this article is derived)
“$10,000 fine for that antler, sir.” Listen to the warden. Rodents need their calcium chew. Sometimes the Church seems to say, “You can’t take God home with you, that’s against the rules; just take a little nibble now and then and don’t forget your greens.” Aren’t we more than weasels and voles, small things, nasty and nice, eking out an existence in a diminished world? Adopt the role, squeak it out: Death will reveal the farce. The bigger part of us will burst through this sorry mess, - in Him, through Him, because of Him. Must Religion be a tough gnaw only, a divine discard, an antler in a haunted wood and not the rutting male thing of noble bearing, bugling us to follow him as he jousts Death from the path and the undying light dawns through the straight-trunked trees?
We are not good, but we can be changed. He is not an uncle, but He can become Father. Why be weary longer? Why live as if Life isn’t preparation for Death? Respice finem, look to the end. The end of faith is God in all and over all. A godless world is Death.
“Only where we’ve been, a faint and fading glow”*
*”No Footprints”, Bruce Cockburn
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