A Story for Now

Excerpt from Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien)

Frodo Baggins: “I can’t do this, Sam.”

Sam Gamgee: “I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are.”

“It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?”

“But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.”

“Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”

Frodo: “What were they holding onto, Sam?”

Sam: “That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for.”

———

Commentary on Story for Now

Through the genius of Tolkien we can feel the terror of being thrust into a quest that is more than we bargained for and much more than we think we can bear. As Frodo Baggins reaches a crisis point in his arduous journey to return the Dark Lord’s ring to Mordor, it is only the earnest reminder from his sturdy friend, Samwise Gamgee, that gives him the courage to go on.

We all could use a Samwise Gamgee right now. This global pandemic has plunged everyone into a place we could not have dreamt of a year ago. Then we all had the luxury of imagining our own lives and solitary plans as being meaningful and worthy of our full attention and energy. Now it has become clear that unless we sacrifice our small visions and instead scale the mountain and get high enough on the path to see how all roads meet, we may very well perish. The interconnectedness of all life on this planet has never been made so plain.

None of us asked for this and no one would have said that we wanted it, and yet it may be that this crisis is the greatest opportunity that has been laid before us, if we can grasp what’s at stake. As Joseph Campbell might say at this juncture of the story, will we answer the Call to Adventure?

Frodo Baggins may be a much more developed character than most mythic or fairy tale heroes, but he is still a member of a large class of characters who figure in the world’s treasure trove of stories. For every tale about a prince who must prove himself in order to wear the crown, there is a story about the little guy, the youngest son of a poor man, a nobody who, through sheer kindness and perseverance, wins the day. For every fairytale about a princess there is another about a humble farmer’s daughter, a “clever maid,” who, through her wit and genuine affection for truth and justice is able to resolve the unhappiness and injustices around her.

There is a key difference between the tales of a younger generation of royalty - princes and princesses - versus the tales of common folk rising to become kings and queens. The great interpreter of fairy tales, Marie Louise von Franz, a colleague of C.G. Jung, has suggested that the king is a symbol of the self and the organizing values of the community. When the social system is inherently healthy it needs only a renewal and some minor adjustments in order to go on functioning, i.e. it can be reinvigorated by the death of the old king and the rise of the new prince. But when the system has become too corrupt and is actually detrimental to the future of life – what is called the wasteland in mythology - it is then that new energy and values must be pulled from the margins of society and a completely new guiding principle must emerge to take its place as the new beacon of order.

“If the prince becomes king he is the right person by inheritance, and we could call that renewal within the same dominant … On the other hand, if the fairy tale says that a very anonymous and unexpected person becomes king, then the renewal of the dominant of collective consciousness comes from an angle, both sociological and archetypal, from which it was least expected.”

[Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, Marie Louise von Franz]

Striking examples in recent memory of this “unexpected person” might be the rise of Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, both of whom emerged from the margins of their own societies to become champions of a new order based on a vision of equality for those who had been given no seat at the table.

Less well-known than their male counterparts but no less important to their communities are the heroines of Northern Ireland, Mairead Maguire and Betty Williams, winners of the Nobel Peace prize, who galvanized a blood-soaked nation towards an end to violence after Mairead watched her sister’s three children die in the strife. These two very ordinary women, one Catholic, one Protestant, accomplished what had been impossible for all the royal appointees and their negotiators.

Even more recent are the examples of Greta Thunberg, a latter-day Joan of Arc, whose crusade to save the planet has touched more hearts and lead to more action than the weighty deliberations of international committees and government ministers; or Emma González and David Hogg, teenage survivors of the Parkland school shooting who were so violently flung out of their simple, personal pains and pleasures and forced to become players on the national stage; and, of course, Malala Yousafzai, who, after a savage attack motivated by sexist prejudice, continued her activism until her country passed a law for equal access. All of them, like Frodo, discovered to their dismay that someone had to 'carry the ring' and were willing to take up the task.

What I suggest is that we have all been thrown into that position. We are all Frodos surprised to find that the ring of power has been hidden among our belongings the whole time. The call to adventure has come to our door and we are faced with the task of removing the dark and dangerous thing that we’ve inadvertently inherited. It is no longer safe to ignore its presence or pretend that it’s some harmless object that we can keep in a corner and pass along to the next generation.

In every story the unknown factor is the timing: just when will we come to that final straw that breaks the camel’s back - the last insult or a small injury that pushes things over the edge. In the story of Beauty and the Beast it is the seemingly innocent action of plucking a rose from a bush that results in calamity. In the story of Rapunzel it is a husband helping himself to a small vegetable from a neighbor’s garden to give to a pregnant wife.

In real life it may be ignoring the speed limit once too often; or cheating a little too much on the income tax; or lying about why we were late – again; or not leaving the job that is killing us; or refusing to speak to the neighbor we disagree with; or neglecting to pick up the pen or the paintbrush or the phone; failing to ask the question of a stranger “What ails thee?”

At the macro level it is the cutting down of one more rain forest for a speedy profit; the building of one more fossil fuel factory; the passing of one more onerous tax on the poor; the tolerance for one more ritual involving exotic animals; the killing of one more Black man; the slamming of one more prison door. All those sins of commission and omission which we didn’t think would amount to much now precipitate us into crisis. We are all responsible, we are all to blame, and each of us can be part of the healing.

From the storyteller’s point of view – which is the one I take – it is apparent that we’ve all just been tossed into the biggest adventure that a soul can take. As it happened to Frodo, so it’s happening to us. We say to ourselves “we shouldn’t even be here.” And yet here we are.

The extraordinary thing about this pandemic is that it has made it so clear to all of us that we sink or swim together: each of us alone has to act with individual restraint and accountability - in the wearing of masks and the discipline of social distancing; each of us working in concert with our communities has to come together collectively to fix the structural problems that are global in scope. The outer situation mirrors the inner dynamic and challenges us to heed this urgent call to adventure.

Nor has this come as a complete surprise, for over 50 years ago the great mythologist, Joseph Campbell, after portraying the dynamic of the hero journey across time and cultures, closed his popular book with this sobering conclusion:

“And so, every one of us shares the supreme ordeal —carries the cross of the redeemer— not in the bright moments of our tribe's great victories, but in the silences of our personal despair.”

[The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell]

This is that silence. This is that time of despair. Will you answer The Call?

___

R. D. Armstrong February 10, 2021

Illustration by J.R.R. Tolkien, in the public domain