Combining the tragic and comic in search of the redemptive.

A Fool’s Hope

In a scene from the Lord of the Rings, on the eve before the Witch King of Angmar descends with tides of armies and bloodlust to destroy Middle Earth,  the halfling Pippen asks Gandalf, the Great White Wizard, a question – 

Is there any hope?

After naming endless armies of foes – Orcs, Trolls, Black Uruks, Werewolves, Nazgûl, Ungoliant, and Balrogs- the Wizard pauses to take a puff of the Shire’s legendary Longbottom Leaf before replying,

There never was much hope. 
Just a fool's hope, as I have been told. 

As a writer with more than three decades of journalistic experience, surrounded by legions of terrifying enemies both imagined and real — poisoned planet, divided nation, seizing senate leader, Orange Jesus on red alert, and the President of the United States teetering on the edge of the White House lawn during the last days doesn’t inspire much hope.

I prefer to tell stories from an even stranger kingdom lived in the everyday moment — the veins of an infant’s hand, the doctor saying cancer free, learning empathy through a season of suffering, the underlying current of the redemptive born in the union of comic and tragic.

The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins describes his fascination this way —

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.

It also serves as a purpose statement for me as writer and highly skeptical believer. Through slice-of-life stories, I explore the freshness deep down things in a strange kingdom and even stranger king. Continuing to shed the Christian fundamentalism of my childhood, haunted by the horrid face evangelicals now paint, I remain drawn by Jesus, an odd king who makes himself nothing., seeding a kingdom through the rule of love, inviting others to follow him in a fool’s hope.

With the launch of my blog, I have reached a lifelong dream — following an award-winning career telling the stories of others, I privileged to write some of my own. If my writing resonates with you, please subscribe, share, and like. They tell me that ‘s how marketing works, something I have consistently sucked at, I appreciate you lending me your hand