The Children of God

Alan Lee - Farewell on the edge of Mirkwood

I've just started reading The Silmarillion again, after years of promising myself another revisit. Reading it with eyes that are completely different than the ones that last absorbed Tolkien's great and beautiful opus, has so far proved incredibly rewarding.

My mind turned to it earlier, in work, when the dust of a busy day finally settled and my mind became free to wander a little. My thoughts rested on the concept of the Children of Iluvatar, Tolkien's term for the sentient creatures (Ainur, Men and Elves) created by Eru, The One. It struck me as I thought about this that we are all, in a very simple way, the Children of God.

But we are children who have wandered away from our Father. Like the men of Middle Earth we founder in dark mists, even though, in our own world, God Himself came to show us The Way through the gloom. Instead of listening to the call from deep within our hearts, though, most of us fail to follow the lamp that is shone through the darkness and busy ourselves with our own doomed plans of escape.

There are many paths out of the mire that we wade through. But we have only been shown one which is sure and real: the one set by Christ. Without that path there is no guide on earth that can be relied upon. Many receive glimpses of ways out, but they are incomplete ones which, though beautiful and rich in wisdom, are not true ways out of darkness but are, more often than not, corpse candles that plunge those who follow their hypnotic pulses to the very heart of doom.

Whatever we believe about the way we or others choose out of the forest of life it is imperative, above all, to realise that we are all lost pilgrims searching the same bleak lands. If we believe that the path we follow is the true way home, we must not use that as a means for segregation and haughtiness but as a means of guiding and helping others, like Rangers guarding the borders of the Shire.

This guidance may not necessarily mean resorting to overt attempts to convert others to our way by force or coercion (a sure sign that, like Saruman, we have left the path of goodness), but to assist them in whatever ways possible to get them back to the light beyond the shadow.