Concerning Hobbits

Third Sunday after Epiphany
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Over the last week or two I decided to rewatch the trilogy movies of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.”  I’ve watched them countless times, but I find them very enjoyable and they have many connections to Catholicism, since J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote the novels, practiced his Catholic faith devotedly.

    In “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” at the Council of Elrond in Rivendell (an elven oasis) representatives from the major races of beings–dwarves, elves, and men–argue over who will take the One Ring, an evil talisman connected to the evil spirit, Sauron, to Mordor to destroy it by casting it back in the volcanic Mount Doom, thus also destroying Sauron.  As they argue, Frodo, a hobbit, steps up and says that he will take the ring to Mordor, though he does not know the way.  Frodo had brought the ring from his house (since his uncle, Bilbo had found it years ago while on his own quest) to Rivendell.  So he agrees to carry it even farther to its destruction.  Elves were very wise, dwarves were very crafty, and men were very strong.  But it was a hobbit, a small humanoid, who probably stood no more than 4 feet tall, who volunteered to take the ring to its destruction.  Frodo wasn’t the wisest, the craftiest, and certainly not the strongest, but he was the right one for this quest.

    The centurion from our Gospel today was as unlikely for a healing from our Lord as Frodo was to carry the ring to its destruction.  As a soldier, he likely worshiped false gods, and maybe even worshiped the Emperor Tiberius Augustus.  He represented the entire occupying force of Rome in the Promised Land, which had come in 63 BC to make it a client kingdom of Rome, but who took it over around 6 BC as simply a province of Rome.  The centurion did not belong to the Chosen People awaiting a Messiah, and in fact, he was part of the military machine the people expected the Messiah to wipe out.  And yet, Christ says of the centurion that he had not found faith like his in all of Israel.  This centurion was the right one to receive a healing.
    And he was the right one because he believed Christ could heal his servant, even without being present.  No doubt, there were healers that would pop up from time to time in the Promised Land, but they almost always had to be present to heal the suffering person.  The centurion knew that this rabbi from Nazareth was different, and trusted that if He said it would be done, it would be done, just as when the centurion gave orders the soldiers did them.
    The centurion is a great reminder that God often works with the unexpected, perhaps the same message Tolkien tried to convey by choosing a hobbit to carry and destroy the One Ring.  But the common factor that unites the unexpected comes from their reliance on God and not on their own power.  Abraham and Sarah were well past the childbearing age, and yet God made Abraham the father of many nations.  Hannah was barren and put up with ridicule from Penninah, Hannah’s husband’s other wife (apparently the rule on marrying only one wife wasn’t always followed closely), until God granted her request and gave her a son, Samuel.  Ruth, the grandmother of David, was a foreigner, and David was not the son of Jesse that Samuel thought at first glance God would choose as king.  Anne and Joachim were childless until they conceived the Blessed Mother immaculately in Anne’s womb.  Elizabeth and Zechariah were also too old to be though to be able to conceive.  The Blessed Mother was a quiet, young virgin without any real importance from a worldly point of view.  The Apostles, our Lord’s closest followers and the foundations of His Church, did not have the greatest education and the Gospels make clear that, more often than not, they didn’t get what He taught.  All of these people, and more, would never have been expected to do great things for God, or have such a major role in salvation history.  But here we are.
    I could list hundreds of saints whom no one expected to amount to anything, and yet we recall them each year in the canon, or list, of saints.  And that should give us hope.  If a poor friar, working in Detroit without faculties to preach or hear confessions, can be beatified, then we can become a saint.  God can work with us, small as we are, un-spectacular as we are, to accomplish His grand plan of salvation.  We don’t have to be the most powerful, the wisest, or the craftiest.  We simply need to acknowledge our nothingness, and rely on God to carry us through whatever mission He has for us.  Because when we acknowledge our nothingness, that leaves all the room for God and His power.  When we think we are somebody, or have some grand power or prestige, we block God out of our lives and lessen the space that He requires to do truly great things in our lives.

    “Hobbits…are quite content to ignore and be ignored by the world of the big folk….Hobbits must seem of little importance, being neither known as great warriors nor counted among the very wise….In fact, it has been remarked by some that hobbits’ only real passion is for food, a rather unfair observation, as [they] have also developed a keen interest in the brewing of ales and the smoking of pipe weed.”  This is not the likely description of the race to whom the great king of men, King Aragorn of Gondor, would say: “My friends, you bow to no one” because of their role in destroying evil.  Just so, God uses the most unlikely to accomplish His plan of increasing grace and destroying evil, be they young virgin, fisherman, a poor friar, or a man or woman from Genesee County.  May we leave space for God to work great things through us, unexpected as it might be. 

Not Mine

Feast of the Holy Family

    One of the things that we learn from a young age, which is not necessarily good, is the concept of “mine.”  Certainly there is a natural, perhaps genetic, reaction to items that we need to survive.  But anyone who has dealt with a toddler who has learned the word, “mine,” can attest that it quickly goes beyond basic necessities of life like food and drink, and becomes the M.O., the modus operandi, or way of operating, when it comes to just about anything.  And toddlers have a grip strength that seems to defy logic.  Hopefully, the child grows out of this obsession with mine, though some adolescents, and even adults are still fixated on what is mine, such that they sound more like the seagulls in “Finding Nemo,” or like Gollum in “The Lord of the Rings.”
    Contrasted with the idea of mine is the family, as we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family today.  Hannah, the wife of Elkanah, had experienced difficulty in conceiving, and had wept copiously in the temple, such that Eli, the priest, thought she was drunk.  But she, with God’s help, conceived and gave birth to Samuel, and, as promised, she returned Samuel to God after she finished weaning Samuel.  
    This probably does not make sense to us.  We would never give up a child.  But this theme of a child that belongs to God runs through the Old Testament.  Think of Isaac, the son of Abraham.  Or Samson, whose father and mother couldn’t conceive, but who received the blessing of a child as announced by an angel, as long as the parents didn’t drink alcohol or eat unclean foods.  And their son, Samson, could not cut his hair.  In fact, the Mosaic law commanded that every firstborn son had to be presented to the Lord in the Temple and redeemed with a sacrifice, as Mary and Joseph did with Jesus, which we will celebrate at Candlemas, the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord.  So offering one’s child to the Lord was not unknown to the Jewish People before the birth of Christ.
    But even after the birth of Christ, we should offer our families to God.  No, I’m not saying that when you child is misbehaving you can drop him or her off at the church and not have to worry about the child again.  But we should be ready to offer our family spiritually to God each and every day.
    Because, after baptism, before we belong to anyone else, we belong to God.  Yes, naturally we belong to our human family, but the bonds of baptism bind us to God in a way that supersedes our bonds to the human family.  That is how Jesus can say that if we cannot give up father and mother, we cannot truly be His disciple.  Most of the time we don’t have to give up family to follow God, but if our family asked us to do something wrong, our first allegiance should be to God.

    For husbands and wives, that means that your spouse, who is probably the most precious person to you in the world, doesn’t really belong to you.  He or she belongs to God, and your vocation as a spouse is to help your spouse get to heaven, because that’s where God wants him or her to be.  In the Episode III of “Star Wars,” Anakin Skywalker turns to the dark side because he cannot stand the idea of his wife, Padmé, dying, and so the Sith Lord, Emperor Palpatine, tricks Anakin into following him with the promise that Palpatine will help save Padmé’s life.  He forsakes all the good he could do for the opportunity to hold on to his wife.  Ironically (spoiler alert), Anakin himself ends up killing Padmé in his anger towards her for not going along with his conversion to evil.  Certainly, husbands and wives should love each, and sacrifice their own good for the other.  But your spouse belongs to God first and foremost, who allows you to be a good steward in caring for your spouse.  But you do not fully possess him or her.
    For parents, this applies to children, as well.  Your child is yours.  But your child is primarily God’s.  You are called to help the child know God and follow God.  Sometimes children will thank you for this and make this part of your vocation easy.  Sometimes children will not like you making sure that you know about God and about how following Him leads to perfect happiness.  And, to a certain extent, we can’t control how children end up.  But parents are responsible for doing all that they can to help their children grow in the faith through prayer, Bible reading, instruction, and even discipline to help children grow in virtue.  From the second you have your child baptized, you acknowledge that your child is “on-loan” to you from God, and God will want to collect on that loan with interest.  God doesn’t want your child to remain a child in the faith, but to grow to adulthood in his or her relationship with God.  That is the interest God expects on what He entrusts to you.
    So please, by all means, care for your family members: your spouse, your children, your parents, your siblings.  But do so recognizing that they are not primarily yours.  We cannot be toddlers when it comes even to our families and say “mine” all the time.  To paraphrase St. Paul in his first epistle to the Corinthians, you are not your own.  You belong to Christ, and Christ to God the Father.  May we each find ways of offering our family to God each day, and helping them get to our true home in heaven.