But of course it's not just about a Mountain

Follow-up to: Brother, Have You Seen the Mountain?

In his last great address, one of the greatest mountaineers of our age said, “I don't blame anyone for not believing my history. If I had not experienced what I have, I could not have believed it myself.”

There are two mistakes that can be made about the testimony of the mountaineers. The first, that can be made be believers, is that men are fools for not believing. If Joseph Smith, a man that I regard as a prophet of God, could admit that he could have only believed his account by being an eyewitness of it, then can we expect any better of the rest of God's children? Those of us that have believed on the mountaineers' words can easily forget that, until we make the journey, there is nothing but their word that can inform us that there are, indeed, mountains, and not all of us are agreed on whether a man fits the criteria of an ideal witness. Some have not yet even decided that criteria for themselves, or even thought upon the matter. This is a difficult world, and some are too troubled by Destruction to concern themselves with such matters. When it is hard enough to live from day to day, not all feel it reasonable to be bothered about mountains.

But those that do not believe can similarly make the mistake of calling “fool” he who does believe. When a man is respectable, when in all other respects he appears sane and rational, is it mad to believe this account as well as every other that he gives? When he says “I have seen it,” he is a madman, a liar, or a genuine witness. If we judge him sane, if we judge him to be no deceiver, then we have but one option remaining to us, and we must take it or else reject the matter entirely out of hand. And if I have, after believing on their words, seen the Mountain itself, then to reject the matter is to lie to myself, which lie would be the most unforgivable one of all. I may not have walked its slope nor reached its peak as others have, but if I have seen it then still I know that it is there, and the words are etched as deeply in my mind as they are in the Mountain, which say THE MOUNTAIN OF THE LORD. HOLINESS TO THE LORD.

Not who you think it is

"He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not." Isaiah 53:3

When I think of The Lord of the Rings and notice a Christ figure, who do I imagine?

Not Gandalf, who can come to mind so easily because of his fall at Moria and his transition from Gandalf the Gray to Gandalf the White.

Not Frodo, who sacrifices so much in order to dispose of the One Ring, which is Sin in this view.

The One Ring is sin, yes, but of the many characters who so imperfectly represent Christ there is another that comes more prominently to mind: Gollum.

Certainly "there is no beauty that we should desire him," but it goes a little past that. When it comes down to it, Frodo cannot do the deed. He stands at the edge of the Crack of Doom, having traveled so far to rid himself (and the world) of sin, but at the last he cannot do it. There are sins of ours that we are disgusted by, but there are yet others that are, ah, precious to us. Pet sins, so to say. When I am angry, for example, it is not rare for me to like that feeling, to have to step outside of myself and give a reminder that yes, it may feel good to be angry at someone, but it still isn't right.

We don't have to worry much about sins that we don't like. The ones that we're warned of all of the time are the sins that we enjoy, and because we enjoy them it is so hard for us to get rid of them. And sometimes even if we hate that particular sin it is still difficult to be rid of it. I am sure that many recovering addicts will agree with me on this. Ultimately we cannot get rid of everything on our own.

Luckily for us, and for Middle-Earth, Gollum-Jesus is available. Yes, it is painful for Frodo-Everyman when his finger is bitten off, but is this pain not infinitely less than the alternative that would have come? Frodo has lost the Ring through the action of his intercessor, that painful benefactor that led him to this place to start with, and he can return to his home at last.

As a final note, Frodo could not have stood at Mount Doom without traveling through Mordor (with eagles or without them, still would have had to cross the territory). Without the Atonement of Christ we cannot be rid of sin, but even with it we cannot only say "Jesus is awesome" and then sit on the couch. As C. S. Lewis says we cannot call ourselves Christians if we fail to take "the slightest slightest notice of what he [Jesus] says," and what He says is "Come, follow me" and "Come unto me." If He has traveled through Mordor and stands at Mount Doom, then, we cannot stand at the Shire and think ourselves about to dispose of the One Ring forever.

But I feel alright

This is my blog. You are looking at it right now. I welcome you to it.

This is my little corner of the internet where I write blog posts and then put them up for you, the reader to see. It is going to shift as I shift, swerve as I swerve, and I don't know where it will be in ten years.

I don't know where it will be in ten days. But I do know what it's for. It's for me to talk to you, or at least to write things that you will read and maybe even respond to, in a process that I will refer to as talking to each other despite that not actually happening. It makes me feel as if there's something more personal going on, you understand. Maybe it'll just be my thoughts as I think them. Maybe I'll talk about what's going on in my life. Like I said, I'm not sure.

Right now I'm serving a two-year mission as a missionary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This is why, for example, the Web Directory page only has religious links right now. When I am back to civilian life I will no doubt have a separate page for other links, but at present I have been called to be a missionary, a servant of the Lord and a representative of Jesus Christ, and when I became a missionary, I put away civilian things.

Mostly. God didn't call me to be Elder Somebody Else. He called me to be me, and so I'm not going to talk to you like another might. Tomorrow there's going to be a post that talks a bit about Jesus. It does so through the lens of Tolkien. Yesterday there was a story about a mountain, and in a couple of days I'll talk about the main thing that I want for you to get from it.

This is me, and this is my blog, and this is the way that I get things done. Jah bless.

Fiction: Brother, Have You See the Mountain?

Into the city Luz, a city of the plain, there came a traveler- a wild man, an holy man (a "mountain man," said he of himself, and his hearers scoffed at the word). Into their city he came, past the dukes playing chess at their great oaken tables, and the princes singing of olden wars from half-forgotten times, past the walls and pillars inscribed with the word DESTRUCTION in awful black ink.