With all the work I am doing with the friars here in Australia, and with the men’s retreat I gave over the weekend, I have not been able to do much blogging, but I thought I would begin again with some reflections that I made during the retreat. The theme was “The Return of the Church Militant,” which of course is a play on Tolkien’s The Return of the King.

Fourteen men attended the retreat over the weekend. Unfortunately, we Yanks were not aware that there were national elections across Australia on Saturday, for which voting is mandatory by law, so the men had to work around their voting obligation to attend the retreat. All in all, it was very successful.

During the retreat, I mentioned something Chesterton had once written about, namely, that all of us are “kings in disguise.” The idea is that all of us have a kingly destiny through Baptism; however, we are fallen from that dignity and are fighting to recover it. I would seem that Tolkien may have been influenced by this notion in his development of Aragorn’s character. On Saturday night I gave a little talk on Tolkien and developed the following ideas. We then sat down and watched the extended version of Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King.

Strider’s Secret

In The Lord of the Rings, Middle Earth finds itself in a time of great need. The shadow of Mordor lengthens. The elves are leaving Middle Earth for the Western Shores, and men have become weak and leaderless. Aragorn is one of the Dúnedain, a man of the West from the Northern Kingdom and the lost heir to the throne of Gondor. Few know his true identity, though. He is a ragged and grim wanderer, more a vagabond than a king, as far as the eye could discern. Continue reading →