A glass filled with clean light...

Perhaps our sorrow will make us like Frodo

Agnessa Edvardovna Lindeman

I'm reading back through The Lord of the Rings again and enjoying it with the same immersed, delighted hunger that I did on my first reading almost twenty years ago. It’s been a long time since I’ve revisited this story. Somehow, I haven’t yet been ready. I think that writing about it in my undergraduate dissertation meant I had a hard time ‘enjoying’ it for awhile (to use Lewis’s term for immersive imagination or experience) without the impulse to ‘contemplate’ it (scrutinise, analyse). Now it’s been long enough, and perhaps I’ve been gentled enough to know that I don’t need to have anything important to say about it, so I can return to it as the wondrous story it is. Just as story.

Thus, I was reading the passage yesterday where Frodo wakes in Elrond’s house after his ordeal of being stabbed on Weathertop, pursued by Black Riders, and nearly claimed by the wraith world at the Ford of Bruinen. He finds Gandalf watching him, and Tolkien allows us to see Frodo through Gandalf’s eyes. The hobbit looks ‘as it were’, transparent, a description that gestures to his recent danger of becoming transparent like a wraith. One feels that descriptor, transparency, as a threat.

But then, unexpectedly, Gandalf pivots and begins to muse that though he cannot see Frodo’s end, he does not believe it will be evil, and perhaps Frodo’s transparency will become a beautiful thing:

He may become like a glass filled with a clean light for eyes to see that can.

And my eyes burned with tears.

In that subtle shift from Frodo’s ordeal as something that threatens to destroy him, to something that renders him tested and clear, his soul filled with crystalline light, I see all the promises of God’s healing love at work among us in a suffering world.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to bear Christ in the midst of a world that feels somehow even more chaotic and violent than usual. What does it mean to be saved and healed by him when we linger and ache, here in the darkened realm of the still-broken world? In some ways, I’m asking the questions I’ve always asked, but asking them now as I wonder what will happen to my children in this volatile world, as I realise how much fear I still, oh Lord, still bear.

But reading that passage, I began to wonder if perhaps the medicine of Christ’s great love at work in me (and Frodo needed all the art and skill of Elrond to heal him) means that though grief and doubt and loss are still mine to bear as I wait for the renewal of the world, my own ordeal, my own suffering (and that of my children) will not ultimately unravel us, but rather gradually leave us with hearts swept clean of anything but hope, but love. I think it will take awhile. It takes a long while for love to be perfected, for us to be so healed by God’s love that our fear is really cast away.

But in this passage I return again, again, to the astonishing recollection of God in his love, who takes what evil meant to be our destruction (pain, loneliness, loss), and makes it the place of his arrival. The man of sorrows, bearing our pain so that no sorrow may ever end the story again. Where we grieve, he arrives to heal. Where we ache, he bears our load. Where we cry aloud, he answers. So that our need becomes the very ground of our renewal. And the clear light of his love shines through the glass of our lives.

Eventually.

For those who can see.

I know people like that.

I want to become a soul like that.