The modern day is cold and swift and made of mechanism, number turning number….

To Eomer, nephew of Theoden, Aragorn declared a reminder apt to us in the modern day (as Tolkien is wont to be): “The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day!”

The modern day is cold and swift and made of mechanism, number turning number, lever pushing lever, men acting on calculus and petty prejudice, stumbling in vice. (So have seemed many days, to those who lived in them.) In such an age, we easily forget the momentousness of what we live among, that we walk and breathe and speak amidst things which have weight known to history and to legend. Well we benefit to understand our world, if only for a time, through a mythic lens.

Not merely Chesterton’s mooreeffoC is this, though related and that willingness to see the familiar from a new angle is component to it, even subsidiary. When we see the world, we should see for a second that we stand on the earth of six thousand years, the earth where blood has spilt, the earth of our fathers. This green earth has many legends false about it and many legends true. It has a majesty scientific and a majesty narrative, literary, figurative, instinctive. The second majesty I point towards now, remembering the first as the other side of the coin: this world’s many parts have weight to them, weight of story and history.

We ought to look at ourselves, on occasion, as actors in a concatenated cavalcade of stories. We are part of our stories; we are part of each others’ stories; we are part of our family’s story, our church’s, and our people’s. In each story we play a role. More, we are actors, people choosing where we stand in a struggle begun in the Garden, the hard-fought sanctification of the universe, the glorification of God by all recalcitrance and all the more by obedience.

Aragorn points out to Eomer that the green earth below him, though mundane by its normality, was a thing of great legends, a character in many a story, the setting for every other. So too we can look at the earth and see in its the mythic weight of its narratives; we can look at the trees and see Yggasdril, Laurelin, Fangorn; we can look at each other and see walking images of God, potentials for greatness- and that which could be great, when it falls short, is a grave tragedy, not a nothingness.

This mythic sight does not need to be always; indeed, it should not be, for other sights of the world are also true, with their own place and use. But it is healthy for our souls to see the weight of narrative, of history, of significance which attaches to even our mundanities, to those parts of life which have been with man since Adam. Even sin is cosmic treason; every righteousness is an act of fealty to the King of kings. When we see with such eyes, we find grounds for great vigor, for love of wisdom, for honoring God.

God bless.