There's Nothing New Under the Sun - But Did You Love?

It's kind of exhausting, the world we live in, where society is all about attention seeking and everyone narcissistically trying to 'be different". No one wants to look like everyone else but in turn looks like everyone they surround themselves with. In the age of social media everyone feels like they have to one up someone else because everyone else is living a better, happier, more exciting life. Everyone wants to become famous because that means they've made it, all eyes are looking on them.

Like I mentioned in a previous post I'm reading a biography about J.R.R Tolkien. In a short passage
it talks about how a man who has so impacted the world of literature and the imaginations of generations who lead what seems to be a simple boring life:

And after this you might say, nothing else really happened. Tolkien came back to Oxford, was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of English Language and Literature, went to live in a conventional Oxford suburb where he spent the first part of his retirement, moved to a nondescript seaside resort, came back to Oxford after his wife died, and himself died a peaceful death at the age of eighty-one. it was the ordinary unremarkable life led by countless other scholars; a life of academic brilliance, certainly, but only in a very narrow professional field that is really of little interest to laymen. And that would be that - apart from the strange fact that during these years when 'nothing happened' he wrote two books which have become world best-sellers, books that have captured the imagination and influenced the thinking of several million readers. It is a strange paradox, the fact that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are the work of an obscure Oxford Professor whose specialization was the West Midland dialect of Middle English, and who lived an ordinary suburban life bringing up his children and tending his garden.

The following paragraph bears a great question:

Or is it? Is not the opposite precisely true? Should we not wonder instead at the fact that a mind of such brilliance and imagination should be happy to be contained in the petty routine of academic and domestic life; that man whose soul longed for the sound of the waves breaking against the Cornish coast should be content to talk to old ladies in the lounge of a hotel at a middle-class watering-place; that a poet in whom joy leapt up at the sight and smell of logs crackling in the grate of a country inn should be willing to sit in front of his own hearth warmed by an electric fire with simulated glowing coal? What do we make of that?

In the end, when death is on our doorstep, it's not about how we look or the things we've accumulated. It's about how we lived, how we spent our time. This man loved his wife beyond measure. In his first quest story and the center of The Silmarillion the two main lovers, Beren and Luthien, are in fact Tolkien and his wife, Edith. The story was inspired by a time the took a walk in some woods and he recalls, "Her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes bright, and she could sing - and dance." In a letter Tolkien wrote to his son 50 years after Edith's death he said, "She was (and knew she was) my Luthien."

I think the most powerful thing is not that Tolkien made his wife into a key character, not that he had Luthien written on her gravestone, not that she was Luthien, but that she KNEW she was his Luthien. Who cares what you look like, or what you have, or if you stand out. There's nothing new under the sun. This is coming from a guy with dreads and a beard (those aren't new, they've just been made trendy). How have you loved? Do the people in your life know they are loved?



Updated:
Watch Bishop Barron's video on The Great Divorce:
Bishop Barron on C.S. Lewis' "The Great Divorce"
In C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce the narrator sees a great procession with a woman being praised and honored at the front. He thinks to himself that this must be Mary, the Mother of God, the Queen of Heaven. His guide tells him no, that Sarah Smith. She was a woman on earth of no great stature. She was an ordinary woman. She ran a boarding house. The people she met became part of her family and she even cared for animals. Yet, as Bishop Barron says, "In the eyes of heaven she's honored to the nth degree."