Hope of Pandemic Proportions

A question during Lent: What are we to make of the suffering in the world (sometimes our lives) that has achieved, well, pandemic proportions?

In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo’s faithful companion Sam Gamgee is surprised to find his mentor and friend Gandalf—the sage embodiment of the little group’s hope—showing up. He stares with an open mouth, caught between bewilderment and joy, and says, “Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself.” And then, this question: “Is everything sad going to come untrue?”

Is everything sad going to come untrue?

“We know that the whole creation,” says Paul the apostle, “has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves groan inwardly.”

He says poetically what we all know viscerally, what we feel in our gut: That the world isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. That things go wrong. That, as N. T. Wright puts it, the world needs to be put to rights. That sometimes, as seventeenth-century writer John Bunyan put it, our prayers “have more groans than words.”

You don’t have to be a mother to glimpse what Paul gets at when he uses the imagery not only of labor pains, but also the hope-filled  throes of delivery.

While we have been adopted into God’s loving family, to use another metaphor from the New Testament, the whole creation hasn’t caught up yet.

But Tolkien not only saw the sadness in his epic tale—he saw  the promise: “A great shadow has departed,” said Gandalf in response to Sam’s yearning question, “and then he laughed and the sound was like music, or water in a parched land.”

What is sad is becoming untrue. So we wait. And we look ahead with a hope that, if we truly can glimpse it, achieves biblical proportions.

(image by Lina Trochez via Unsplash)