Chapter 5: Books Can Stir You to ACTION
Becoming a Heroine in Your Own Story
I used to think that [adventures] were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them. . . . But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually—their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN, THE TWO TOWERS
I WAS SEVENTEEN, and it was actually, in the words of so many mystery novels, “a dark and stormy night.” Oh, I felt the drama of it with all my teenage intensity. I was wrestling for the first time with real pain, with the reality of circumstances I hated and could not change. In many ways, the world I knew was coming to pieces around me. After a terrifying two months of anxiety, I had been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. I felt that my mind was broken; I could not control the images or thoughts that intruded upon my consciousness. In the same time period, I watched our church experience a painful and bitter split that made me question the whole concept of Christian integrity. And my family decided to move across the country and away from the starlight and mountains we all so deeply loved. I felt a sense of bitter vulnerability as the things I considered immovable—a controllable mind, a beloved home, my lifelong faith—revealed themselves as frail and faulty. I had the comeuppance we all must face, the smack of my heart against the fallenness of the world as I discovered that what I best loved could be harmed, broken, lost.
My reaction was outrage—a grieved sense of betrayal, compounded by the drama and shifting identity of my teenage years. I was hopeless on that stormy night, and my faith felt very frail as I reached for my current book, The Fellowship of the Ring. It was distraction I was after, but ah, it was a challenge I found as I was swept into a story about dark lords; evil powers intent on destruction; and the good elves, the wise wizards, the small but courageous hobbits who give the whole of themselves to fight for beauty and health and kindness. I stumbled across Frodo’s grieved wish that such things “need not have happened in my time” and nearly wept in agreement. But I was also gripped and almost mercilessly challenged by Gandalf’s gentle rebuke that such wishes are not in our gift; rather, “all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
The words seemed to be aimed directly at me, confronting my undisciplined bitterness so that I felt myself begin to wonder, What must I do with the time given to me? In that moment, with Gandalf’s challenge ringing in my imagination, I encountered the reality that a girl who reads is a girl who understands that she has a part to play in the drama of the world. A woman who reads is a woman who knows she must act: in courage, in creativity, in kindness, and often in defiance of the darkness around her. She understands that life itself is a story and that she has the power to shape her corner of the drama. She has learned, with Frodo, that reluctant but faithful hero, that the heroes in the best stories are simply the ones who “had lots of chances . . . of turning back” but didn’t. To know yourself as an agent in the story of the world, one able to bring light and goodness in the midst of suffering, is a profoundly empowering knowledge, one that I believe comes to every woman who reads.
My teenage encounter with The Lord of the Rings was a turning point in my idea of myself and my faith because that story helped me to perceive the epic narrative of Scripture, the real divine drama by which my own life was defined. It helped me to contextualize my suffering within a larger story, to realize that bitterness was something I must fight, that hopelessness was something I had to resist. I remember wishing one day that real life were more like The Lord of the Rings, that I had a clear part to play. But even as the thought crossed my mind, I began to realize that if Tolkien created Middle-earth and God created Tolkien, then God’s story must be far better, far more epic even than the great and beautiful dramas of Middle-earth. That fantasy novel paradoxically helped me to reengage with Scripture, to see it for the divine drama it is, one with a beauty beyond even the elves’ imagining, and a call to the brave beyond even Aragorn’s echoing challenge. Tolkien’s story helped me to recognize Scripture as my story, the one in whose decisive battles I was caught, the narrative that drew me into the conflict, requiring me to decide what part I would play: heroine, coward, lover, or villain.
I count my adult embrace of faith from the day I finished The Lord of the Rings on a humid summer morning, in the drafty garage-apartment that was now my room after the dreaded cross-country move. I sat with Tolkien’s book open on one side, my Bible on the other, and on the pages of both, words that brought me to a crisis of decision. In The Fellowship of the Ring, I had read about Frodo’s choice to accept a great burden and enter the battle:
A great dread fell on him, as if he was awaiting the pronouncement of some doom that he had long foreseen and vainly hoped might after all never be spoken. An overwhelming longing to rest and remain at peace by Bilbo’s side in Rivendell filled all his heart. At last with an effort he spoke, and wondered to hear his own words, as if some other will was using his small voice.
“I will take the Ring,” he said, “though I do not know the way.”
And in my Bible, I read this:
This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him.
DEUTERONOMY 30:19-20
The choice was clear. I simply said yes—to believing in God’s goodness despite pain, to acting creatively and lovingly even in discouragement, to fighting for light in the midst of whatever darkness I found myself. Of course, I felt instantly opposed by the forces of darkness when, the moment my stumbling prayer was complete, a roach (an orc-like thing, if ever I saw one) dropped from the ceiling onto my shoulder so that I began my part in the great story with a wild dance and a hearty dose of humor, quite the regular feature in God’s storytelling, I have discovered. And yet, from that moment, however hysterical, I knew that I was all in, that I would work and suffer and act in courage in my imperfect but heartfelt way. In that choice, I also realized that heroism begins with a challenge and a choice—to fight the dragon, to pay the debt, to tell the truth, to act rightly when the cost is high. Will I act in accordance with what I know to be true, regardless of the cost? When a character, when a girl with a book in her hand and a burning in her heart, answers yes, a heroine comes into being.
But what does it mean to be a heroine in the modern world? This is one of the questions that great books have helped me to answer, particularly because we live in a culture that is a little suspicious of heroism. After a century of war and cynicism, as faith falls away and relativism grows, we are increasingly shaped by the postmodern idea that our lives and personal choices have little meaning beyond what brings us ease or happiness. Even if we believe in the larger story of Scripture, we’re still a little afraid of the idea of heroes because the ones we have trusted have so often failed. And of course, we don’t want to be extreme. We don’t want to place impossibly idealistic burdens on the shoulders of frail, sinful human beings, which is precisely what all of us are. We are often caught between the desire to become something more than we are when we glimpse a heroic life and the knowledge that we are flawed and confused about what this means for our own lives.
Heroes and saints: surely these are the exceptional (or fictional) few who somehow stumbled into extraordinary acts of love or sacrifice.
But I think this is a misunderstanding of heroism, one corrected by the reading of great stories. You can’t read Tolkien or C. S. Lewis or George Eliot or Chaim Potok and come to the conclusion that heroism is something like a rare gift or special talent, something rooted in the extreme effort of a single human being. When you read those authors, you quickly come to see that heroes and heroines are formed by the narratives they believe. Frodo didn’t become a hero by gritting his hobbit teeth and pumping his small muscles; rather, he glimpsed the greater story of which his small, faithful actions were part. He understood that his life was caught up in a narrative much larger than his cozy one in the Shire, one in which real goodness and evil battled for domination of the world he loved.
Heroism isn’t about taking your own life in your hands; it’s about being taken hold of by something much bigger and more beautiful than yourself, by a story that draws you into its larger drama and empowers you to act in hope.
I think it’s fascinating to realize how many of the characters in Tolkien’s drama begin by listening to a story. Aragorn is told that he is a king meant to restore his people from the time he was a small child. Gandalf tells Frodo the whole history of the evil ring before he ever asks him to take it, and Sam hears the whole thing while he is eavesdropping. Éowyn is driven by her love and her longing for the nobility of her ancestors whose stories she has heard from childhood. And even Merry and Pippin, those comical hobbits, make good on their vow to follow Frodo in all his danger by first telling him that “we know most of what Gandalf has told you. We know a good deal about the Ring. We are horribly afraid—but we are coming with you.”
Heroic action begins with an identity rooted in story, the understanding that our small choices are part of the battle for light or darkness, goodness or evil. I think this is exactly the kind of identity Paul is calling new believers to take on when he calls them saints and “holy ones,” when he tells them the story of redemption and reminds them that in the new heavens and the new earth, when the end of the battle has come and every tear has been wiped away, they are destined to be kings and queens in God’s renewed cosmos.
And this is the same identity that comes to a woman who is immersed in the great stories of literature and Scripture. In those dramas she begins to understand that she has been given what Rowan Williams calls “the burden and the freedom of a sort of authorship,”[1] the understanding that life is a story, and that she, bookish girl that she is, has the power to act, and act for the good. When she comes to that knowledge, the page turns and a marvelous new chapter begins.