Vicarage Notes: A Hobbit Style Birthday

In which I honour Shire tradition by giving a way a few of my favourite things...

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

-from The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien

A Long-awaited Party, Ingrid Edelfeldt

My excellent friends,

There are, my friends, many things about hobbits both to emulate and admire (elves too, but that’s another conversation). Their gardening skills, their contented revel in quotidian glories, their feasting, and… their birthday traditions. Hobbits, you see, have the habit of giving gifts on their birthdays as well as receiving. This, I think, is a fundamentally joyous way of marking the day of one’s entry upon the world. It calls to mind the fact that any one person is dependent upon a host of others for breath, for joy, for companionship and flourishing in this difficult thing called life. It’s a means to celebrate, not just my birth, but the goodness that came before me, the goodness I hope I’m creating, the kindness I’ve received and the story it’s crafting in my life and the larger epic of the world. (Something I think Tolkien was very interested in celebrating too.)

So, in good hobbit style, welcome to my birthday giveaways! Though I’ve only reached a paltry forty years (compared to Bilbo’s eleventy-one), I’m giving away three things that bring me great delight. I’m listing them below, but read carefully: each one has a different entry requirement! Winners announced next week.

1. A £50 gift certificate to the website of the artist Jay Johnstone (shipping is included in each price listing). He takes his inspiration from Tolkien’s work, creating intricate illustrations in medieval and Byzantine styles. I’m fascinated. I particularly love his hobbit series, his image of Gandalf on ‘the first light of the fifth day’, the illumination with Goldberry and Bombadil, and his depiction of ‘The Days of the King’. Aren’t they wondrous? Entry for this one is simple: if you’re subscribed to my Substack (you are if you’ve received this letter), you’re entered.

2. My five (for the moment) favourite novels. What’s better to give than a stack of one’s favourite books? I’ll send a stack of five great stories I’ve recently loved (even if I’ve read them before): Piranesi, Lila, Remembering, Middlemarch, and These Small Things. To enter for this one, leave a comment below with your own five favourite novels.

3. The last giveaway, a Monk Manual 90-day Planner, will be hosted specifically for my Instagram followers, so if you want to take part in that one, be sure you follow me over at @sarahwanders.

I’m writing this in the window of one of my dearest old Oxford cafes. The coffee is just downright some of the best in Oxford (and at forty, I’m finally ready to admit that I’ve become a coffee snob). The atmosphere is a bit funkier than my native taste, some might call it edgy. I’m older than most of the people who serve me and sit around me (when did that happen?) and I’m aware that many of the things I love and believe would be anathema to them. But I like to sit here and get to know them in my quiet anonymity, hear what’s passionately discussed, pray for them as I may. There’s a great deal of brokenness and dysfunction walking abroad. So much confusion, so much need. And honestly, I don’t always know the right way to reach out, to give, to heal. But I can sit compassionately in its midst and make my own small presence a place where God’s Spirit radiates from a pair of human eyes in all his patience and kindness.

The older I get, the more I watch the world and pray. I am only ever more deeply aware of the flawed and fragile nature of human life in this world; the goodness we intend, the many ways we struggle and stumble, the need we bear for a grace beyond our articulation. But if there is one thing I can say after all these years of trying to walk in faith with a God I hunger ever more deeply to actually see with my weary eyes, it’s that he is here. Here amidst our reaching and our grief, our loving and our lack. God has been present to me beyond any calculation I could have made of earning. Even amidst my darkest and most exhausted years, I can look back and understand that the 2+2 of my often struggle and hope didn’t make 4, it made a sustaining grace that transforms and upholds my life.

So I sit here and pray for that grace to invade this space, to invade whatever darkness lurks in me, to suffuse the church and vicarage where Thomas and I live, to reach from these words into your own hearts, my readers, my friends. Hobbit style, I wish to give you a little of the goodness I have known from the maker of stars and singer of souls to life. That’s the gift I really want to give here in every word I write. The beauty I see, the words I seek, the arc of the sky, the shimmer of stars, Tolkien pictures and great novels, every bit of it is just one more glimmering facet of the Beauty that roams this world with healing in His hands and grace in His ever-giving heart. May that Beauty find you richly today.

With love,

Sarah

PS – My next post will be our first BBT feature (Books, Beauty, Theology). Keep an eye out and I hope you enjoy the new format. I’ll aim to send a regular round of newsletters, BBTs, and longer essays. Thank you, friends, for reading and walking with me here.

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