Frodo, Avatar Blues, and Micro-Christmases
The Monday Mystery Part 3: The Nativity
“And the word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14)
Welcome to the third entry of Mystery Mondays. Each week I will write a reflection on a mystery (i.e. an episode in the life of Jesus or Mary) from the Rosary. My hope for this series is to provide fuel and inspiration for your own meditations. When you finish reading the reflection, I encourage you to do a ‘test run’ of the mystery by praying a decade of the Rosary (i.e. one Our Father, ten Hail Marys, and one Glory Be) while meditating on the mystery.
If you’re the type of person who plays Christmas carols in June, you and I may never understand each other. That doesn’t mean we can’t get along provided basic restraint and decency are observed in music selection on long road trips; 1.3 strikes and you’re out! It does mean that you have an added incentive to pray the Rosary. If you’re praying a set of five mysteries every day according to the suggested weekly cycle, then you have a built in excuse to think and pray about Christmas twice a week. If you apply yourself to meditating on the mystery, you can experience a kind of micro-Christmas during the three or so minutes you spend meditating.
Even for the rest of us who aren’t super-fans of the holiday atmosphere, the birth of Jesus is a subject we shouldn’t reserve to one month of the year. My perspective on Christmas radically changed a few years ago. On a visit home for Christmas Eve, our pastor went down with COVID, leaving the parish scrambling to find a replacement. A newly ordained priest ended up driving over an hour to save the day. In spite of the late notice, he preached one of the best Christmas sermons I’ve ever heard. One idea he gave that’s stuck with me was this: God is not less real than we are, he is more real. We are to God what Hamlet is to Shakespeare, or what Frodo and Sam are to JRR Tolkien.
What would it be like if JRR Tolkien entered Middle Earth as a hobbit and had a conversation with Frodo? Take a moment to try and imagine this, or if you’re not familiar with the Lord of the Rings, pick your favorite story. In that moment Frodo would find himself speaking with the man who created him. As Tolkien revealed who he is, Frodo would quickly realize his radical dependence on him. Frodo didn’t have to exist, nor did Middle Earth. He’d realize that everything about himself and the world he lives in is that way because Tolkien decided it would be that way. As far as Frodo and Middle Earth are concerned, Tolkien quite literally has all the answers, because it’s his creation. The priest explained that at the birth of Jesus, humanity had just such an encounter with its creator.
Initially this thought exercise didn’t have the impact the priest probably hoped it would. I felt uneasy and deflated on Frodo’s behalf. I could think of a variety of reasons this revelation might be disappointing and discouraging for him. If I were Frodo, I might think to myself “Wow, it turns out I’m nothing but a figment of some random British guy’s imagination-and so is this unspeakably beautiful world that I live in. Furthermore, my imaginary existence has no higher purpose than for the amusement of people who do enjoy real existence. And while Tolkien seems like a gentleman, it’s unsettling to think that all my choices are predetermined by the whims of someone other than myself.”
What might we say to encourage Frodo, beset as he is by existential angst? A word of comfort I might offer would be that he’s not the only one disappointed to learn that he doesn’t really exist. It’s surprisingly common for people to become so enthralled with a fictional world that they wish they could visit it. JK Rowling claims that she’s received many letters from young children wondering how they can apply to the fictional boarding school Hogwarts. George Orwell observed the same practice in his fascinating commentary on British children’s and young adult serials. While this is understandable for children, what struck me was seeing this in grown adults. When the movie Avatar came out, a strange phenomenon swept through the mega hit’s fan community called ‘Avatar Blues.’ People actually became depressed because they realized that they’d never be able to find a place as beautiful as Avatar’s fictional planet Pandora.
At the end of the day, Frodo and depressed Avatar fans are facing the same fear: that the answers to the big questions might not yield encouraging results. That in the end, nothing might really matter, and nothing might be worth caring about. The beauty and happiness we long for might turn out to be an unattainable illusion, as fake as the images on a TV screen. If that’s the case, why should I embrace reality as it is? It seems easy to imagine a ‘better’ reality. And if there is a better reality, why stick with this one? Why not escape into fantasy and distraction? Christianity itself is accused of being an escapist fantasy. Religion, as Karl Marx put it, is the opiate of the masses, keeping us pacified and impotent to make real change.
But this couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, in my opinion, religion is the only way it would make sense to unconditionally embrace reality. Even Marxist theory apes religious faith, clumsily substituting faith in God for faith in the pseudo historical idea of the dialectic. If God weren’t real, I think Buddha would be the best person for these Avatar fans to talk to. He might say something like “The sadness you feel when you realize that Pandora is a mirage reveals that you’ve been ensnared by cravings and desires grounded in delusions. Your desire for a higher beauty is a chase after the horizon. You will be continually dissatisfied until you let go of your desires and accept reality the way it is.” Again, to my mind, that’s objectively the most true and rational response to suffering in a world without God. But thanks be to God, there is a God! Whereas Buddhism says that our desires lead only to illusions and disappointment, the Gospel reveals that our desires point us to God, the fulfillment of all desires.
This, as many have pointed out, forms the basis for what I think is the most underrated argument for God’s existence: the argument from desire. The idea is this: we would not get hungry if there were no such thing as food. We would not get thirsty if there were no such thing as water. Along the same lines, we would not desire God if there was no such thing as God.
Admittedly, this is not an airtight argument. A skeptic might reply, “that sounds nice, but things don’t exist just because we want them to. Pandora isn’t real, no matter how badly Avatar fans want it to be.” What I would say to that is that while Pandora isn’t real, it stirs up a longing for something that is real: beauty. While individual manifestations of beauty (e.g. Pandora) may or may not exist, these manifestations wouldn’t whet our appetite if there weren’t an underlying reality to what we were longing for.
And the beauty of the Nativity is that it reveals the fact that God has chosen to unite his reality with ours. Unlike Frodo, who could never meet or speak with Tolkien, God has entered into our reality, and by his life death and resurrection, he allows us to enter into his. Unlike Frodo, who is essentially a puppet for Tolkien, God has created us in his image, giving us an intellect and will of our own. These in turn allow us to freely cooperate in the great story he has written for our lives. And at the end of this story, we are promised that God will bring about a New Heaven and a New Earth. The New Earth in particular is shrouded in mystery, but, to paraphrase Catholic speaker Tim Staples, the New Earth will be to our world what an oak tree is an acorn. We don’t know what the new world will look like, but Pandora won’t have anything on it.
As you do your test run of this mystery, I encourage you to picture yourself next to the manger alongside Mary and Joseph. You’ve sung about Jesus sleeping in heavenly peace thousands of times. Now watch him do it. Spend time taking in the fact that you are gazing upon God himself, come to Earth as an infant, but soon to be the one who will conquer death and lead us into paradise. And let heaven and nature sing.