The Gospel of Sam Gamgee
Under a Carolina blue sky in late February, I cannot hear whispers of spring on a warm southern breeze due to the monkeys in my mind. For as long as I remember, in my battles with mental illness, hordes of screeching monkeys show up with a striking new plan to force me to believe a terrible lie, a reality I find increasingly insufferable.
This morning with yellow daffodils popping up to replace low gray clouds, I grab my phone and read a notification —
RFK Jr. to address first measles death — and my monkeys, like any other recent winter morning, renew a shrill chatter about how deep the shit is getting.
On a perfect day to clean the greenhouse, I fall into another bout with despair.
During the last five years, in chronological order, my wife and I experienced the death of my mom, a global pandemic, our nation’s rapid divide, suicides of five more friends, political madness, religious abdication, and within our family — our son’s battle with cancer, the loss of our son-in-law to addiction, and our daughter’s desperate ongoing journey to feel safe.
As the temperature measures 70 in February, I can’t drag myself away from a chill dread.
In the first stanza of his poem, The Second Coming, Yeats says it best of the age we live —
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
To employ another literary allusion, I feel like Pippin on a balcony overlooking the fires of Mount Doom in JRR Tolkien’s fantasy epic, The Lord of the Rings.
Surrounded by legions of orcs, werewolves, Olog-Hai, ogres, wargs, balrogs, giant spiders, Mumakils, and trolls, a palpable darkness descending on Middle-earth, the small frightened hobbit asks the great wizard Gandalf the same question on my mind —
Is there any hope?
Under the eye of power, two halflings slip into Mordor undetected.
In our post-pandemic, reality-show politics led by the Orange Jesus immune from crime, a billionaire with a too-short T-shirt and very large chainsaw, lockstep sycophants with insulated souls, far-right talk shows and podcasters, it’s smart to ask ourselves, standing on the left, center, or right —
What could possibly go wrong?
At the same time, when listless graying liberals promise to tax the rich, it makes you think twice, once again, about politics which rule through lies, manipulation, and greed.
It strikes me most peculiar how any citizen of the United States imagines hope of any political movement leading us into opposing us v. them camps of disdain.
In shadows thrown by the fires of Mount Doom, after speaking of a fool’s hope, Gandalf winks to Pippin in a way that suggests all hope is not lost.
For our own terrifying time, Tolkien asks us to imagine a different kind of fool’s hope, one which begins with two hobbits slipping undetected under Sauron’s flaming eye of Power, on the way to destroy The One Ring while the Dark Lord focuses elsewhere.
Small acts of kindness make a great difference.
Coming in from a warm February sun, I swipe through phone notifications -
Crisis coming for national parks
Bird flu continues to mutate through species
Trump and Zelensky Whitehouse meeting devolves into a shouting match
I put down my phone when I hear the flapping of Wizard-of-Oz-like wings, hordes of monkeys in my mind taking flight.
In a panic, I feel them land surreally softly around me while their leader, Our Deep Below Fuhrer Amygdala cooly reasons with me.
Take a moment, won’t you, she whispers, to calculate the odds against you making any kind of difference against such a mass of power.
In moments of despair, it’s easy for me to see how many of us come to believe in giving up the cause for good.
Against such long odds, there’s nothing I can do leads to only one choice — resign or join in.
As Saruman, leader of Wizards sent to Middle-earth, joins Sauron, two hobbits inconspicuously work their way up Mount Doom, bearing the burden of The One Ring and the only hope left for Middle-earth.
For even Lady Galadriel, unsurpassed among the elves in beauty, knowledge, and magic, the idea seems a bit of a puzzle —
Why the halfling? she asks Gandalf, who wisely replies —
Carry one another.
At the heart of Tolkien’s work is the Gospel of Samwise Gamgee, Frodo’s gardener and best friend. As a small servant, Sam takes serious his pledge to take care of Frodo and do whatever is necessary to assure his success. Second fiddle, he understands in the grand scheme of things, is what he plays best.
Tolkien paints a portrait of Samwise from the poem of Hebrews 2, which points to a radically different kind of king —
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
With that same mindset, Samwise, by serving in small ways ends up the story’s greatest hero. In one of the most striking scenes, Samwise carries Frodo, sucked soulless by bearing The One Ring, up a mountain to the fires of doom. I can’t carry the ring, Sam says to Frodo, but I can carry you.
A goodness deep down things.
A small halfling in perilous times, Samwise rises in the humble and grateful knowledge that he’s not going to be the one who figures out a happy ending.
He’s simply a hobbit serving up small acts of mercy, grace, and justice, a strange and lovely service in a new kingdom come.
Against long odds and all evidence, Sam stubbornly believes in the fool’s hope of a goodness down deep things, one that’s worth fighting for, no matter how small or big you see yourself to be.
The temptation to go it alone.
I was 8 during the Bay of Pigs, the world staring over the precipice of nuclear crisis. Half a century plus, this age seems far more dangerous.
Like Frodo, we are tempted to rue the day such suffering came.
We are tempted to lose ourselves in isolation, depression, denial, exhaustion, rage.
We anxiously wait out chaos alone to see how things may go —retreating in despair, complacency, dogma, resignation, often at once, bearing the suffering alone.
Broom and hammer in hand.
The Gospel of Samwise shows us a better way forward during perilous times.
Together, we follow a fool’s hope in the power of love, self giving of the one for the other, a chain of citizenship in an altogether different and strange kingdom.
On a bright blue morning, a warm surprise in an icy winter, I walk out into a beautiful day with the hope of taming my monkeys’ growing and growling rage.
Leaving my phone inside, stepping out, broom and hammer in hand, I work to prepare our greenhouse for trays of plant seedlings, which will blossom over summer in such lovely colors.