“These Hobbits Will Sit on the Edge of Ruin and Discuss the Pleasures of the Table.”
A sob sticks in my throat. Images raging on Instagram fill my mind. Winds roar and fires blaze in Los Angeles. Flames flare up on the Getty museum, burning down Moonshadows in Malibu. I took a girl there once. Scorched memories. Seeing the smoke and the ruins reminds me of Mordor and darkness, of Hobbits and hope, of Merry and Pippin enjoying Long-Bottom leaf and the smoke of a pipe at the ruin of Isengard.
When my first marriage burned to the ground I cried with
friends. I turned Spotify up loud while singing along with Third Day; ”There’s
a light at the end of the tunnel”. Psalmodies of passion, lament and praise
kept me going. The Creator has set it up so that these crack open your heart
and infuse hope. The act of singing is an act of defiance. Eating and drinking
too.
If you’ve never sung from a place of heart-ache and
desperate loss take a lesson from Hobbit Sam Gamgee. Believing the quest to be at an end, he
sings, “above all shadows rides the Sun, and Stars for ever dwell: I will not
say the Day is done, nor bid the Stars farewell.” When dark pervades, I cry to
God in hope. Somehow singing grounds me. As do friends, bread and good ale. Hence
the attitude of the Hobbit. May we have the same!
