Lord of the Rings should get the Oscar for Best Documentary given its accurate portrayal of our spiritual geography. The film was a sequence of non-stop physical battles, which pretty much mirrors the interior life of Christians: non-stop tiring battles to follow Christ rather than self. (Btw, according to our old Dominican priest, the ring might symbolize comfort which he said Americans crave/worship.)
It seems to me that the most difficult tension in the spiritual life is realizing our weakness without falling into the sin of despair, or, contrarily, missing our weakness and falling into the sin of presumption. And what to do with weakness? Merely realizing it exists is not enough, Newman wrote, saying that self-denial is the test of religious earnestness and quoting St. James in saying that faith without works is dead.
Transformation is hard. NRO's Derbyshire mentions an English novelist who described one of her characters' attempt at self-transformation as 'walking south on a north-bound ship'. Socrates asked the disturbing question,
"When they huddle together in groups - in the theater, in court, in the camps - and express their displeasure or approval with tremendous noise, with clapping and shouting, and everything resounds with disapproval and applause - how do you think the young person will feel then? What an extraordinary education he will have had to receive in order to put up resistance and not be carried along with the current whatever it happens to be going. Ought we not to say: If he really liberates himself and thrives in healthy growth - that is owing to divine providence and is pure gift?"Yet we are moral free agents as the Faith tells us. Newman wrote in one of his sermons:
Consider our present condition, as shown us in Scripture. Christ has not changed this, though He has died; it is as it was from the beginning, - I mean our actual state as men. We have Adam's nature in the same sense as if redemption had not come to the world. It has come to the world, but the world is not changed thereby as a whole, - that change is not a work done and over in Christ. We are changed one by one; the race of man is what ie ever was, guilty;- what it was before Christ came; with the same evil passions , the same slavish will. When this is borne in mind, how important the Jewish law becomes to us Christians! important in itself, over and above all references contained in it to that Gospel which it introduced. To this day it fulfils its orginal purpose of impressing upon man his great guilt and feebleness. Those legal sacrifices and purifications which are now all done away, are still evidence to us of a fact which the Gospel has not annulled, - our corruption. Let no one lightly pass over the Book of Leviticus, and say it only contains the ceremonial of a national law...Newman writes that of even the smallest act of obedience, a curbing of the temper, an exhibition of patience - "such a one evinces more true faith than could be shown by the most fluent religious conversation, the most intimate knowledge of Scripture doctrine, or the most remarkable agitation and change of religious sentiments."
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