Welcome to the Imagination Redeemed podcast.
I'm Sarah Howell, one of your hosts.
Earlier this fall, the Anselm Society had the privilege of
gathering for our fall retreat. Part of this retreat was focused
on extended workshops, a time to be filled, to grow in knowledge
or craft, and to connect our vocations to the life of God.
What you are about to hear is one of our speakers from that
morning, Amy Bakley. Amy considers what a feast
signifies during troubled times. We are excited to share this
incredible talk with you all today.
And if you want access to the other 5 1/2 hours of content
from that morning, consider becoming a monthly partner at
any level and we will send you the complete video recordings as
a thank you. Check the show notes for the
link or just go to anselmsociety.org/fall Giving.
We hope you enjoy this talk from Amy Bakley.
Thanks for listening and thanks for helping make this work
possible. Welcome to the Imagination
Redeemed podcast where we follow the great stories further up and
further in In Pursuit of the Life of Christ.
Good morning. I think we're going to go ahead
and get started. This is making room for Kairos
in an age of efficiency. 3 feasts from the Lord of the
Rings and our practice of fellowship.
If I may ask you to exercise your imaginations for a moment,
it is the end of September and you are far from home.
The arms of the apple trees are laden with a rich red cheeked
bounty. The smell of wood smoke lends A
savory earthy note to each of your outdoor meals and these
green and golden days seem the perfect time to go searching for
mushrooms. But these are not days of
leisure for you. No, you are tasked with a burden
compact enough to carry in your pocket and yet too great to
comprehend. In these mellowing days of
autumn, you are being pursued by agents of a dark Lord who is
amassing an army to take over the world.
And the further you go, the more you understand what the failure
of your mission will mean. So naturally, when you are
rescued by a mysterious yet jovial personage in the forest,
you and your friends choose to spend the night in his home one
night. Why not 2?
Your hosts are captivating and the fair is hearty.
Never mind for a minute that there are snuffling black
writers hot on your trail, or that you took 17 years to leave
Bag End after Bilbo's Ring came into your keeping. 17 years
during which the Dark Lord might have had time to make a wee bit
of progress. This talk could be said to stem
in part from my reaction as a 17 year old when I read The Lord of
the Rings and wondered at the stops that Frodo and company
made. Two nights in Tom Bombitil's
house weren't so much. One can believe a character on a
life or death errand deserves a little break now and then.
But I did pause when, a few chapters later, I came across
the sentence. The hobbits had been nearly two
months in the House of Elrond. Later still, after the
Fellowship emerged from Lof Laurian, I read along as Sam
looked up at the moon and wondered why it was in the wrong
place. Surely they had only been about
three nights in Lof Laurian, he guessed aloud.
Perhaps we stepped outside of time, Frodo suggests.
But Aragorn sets them both straight.
The old moon passed, and a new moon waxed and waned in the
world outside while we tarried there.
And so it was. They dwelt in the land of
Lurian, eating and drinking and resting for a full month.
Meanwhile, I was fully in the grip of that marvelous
phenomenon of readers, that second hand anxiety that strikes
when a stubborn protagonist decides to go into an abandoned
house on her own or a Hobbit decides to have one more meal on
the road to Mordor. Pausing to feast is not a
regular rhythm in our culture. Thanksgiving Day is perhaps the
closest thing we have to a widely observed feasting
practice. Aside from this holiday, the
dinner party is probably one of our most recognizable forms of
feasting. We host them or hear of them as
a backdrop for business deals or networking.
If you are a part of certain circles in New York City these
days, invitations to certain dinner parties or private
restaurants act as social currency.
Meanwhile, articles about hosting gatherings talk about
the pressure that many feel to make things perfect, or the
dreaded tension of strained conversations that might take
place, or simply the lack of time to prepare such events.
We have jobs to do, and it often seems difficult to make room for
spreading A festal board without some kind of benefit, social,
financial or otherwise, to motivate us.
We are in the middle of the action, and we have precious
little time and energy to waste. The Fellowship of The Lord of
the Rings knows something about what it means to be in the
middle of the action, and yet they stop along the way.
I'd like to draw your attention to three of these stops today,
one in the House of Tom Bombadil, one in Elrond's house
in Rivendell, and one in La Florian, because I believe they
have something significant to say about how we might approach
the concept of time as we live our lives.
I believe that they powerfully suggest to us a different way of
living in time. The ancient Greeks, as you may
already know, had more than one concept of time.
Two of these were called Kronos and Kairos, and both are used to
refer to time in the original Koine Greek New Testament.
Kronos time is time in its practical, measurable, ordinary
form, seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, etcetera.
Kairos time is the time that refers to the ripe or fitting
moment, as when Jesus says the time has come, at last the
Kingdom of God has arrived, you must change your hearts and
minds and believe the good news. Kairos time is thus also said to
be a sort of transcendent time, the moments in which God brings
situations to their fulfillment, where eternity intersects with
Kronos. We have a sense of both Kronos
and Kairos in our English term time, our single English term
time, we say what time Is it referring to Kronos or it's time
we picked those flowers referring to Kairos?
To the modern person pressed to live time according to the
ticking of hands and the scheduling of online calendars,
Kronos may seem like the main kind of time.
Kronos runs in one long straight line, and the modern person's
encounters with the eternal, if he perceives them, breakthrough
here and there, perhaps one when he is 16 and again when he is 23
and 40, etcetera. The Kairos moments seem to be
more or less unrelated, isolated events in our world.
Rightness, ripeness, maturity and eternity are not the main
measures by which we view the development of time.
Children don't graduate from college when they become men or
women. They graduate, on average four
years after matriculation. We don't ask our coworkers to
bring the project back when it seems to be in its most
excellent form. We ask for it by close of
business. On Friday, the CEO of a tech
company wrote this summer that artificial intelligence is
poised to make the world better by driving faster scientific
progress and increased productivity.
Perhaps nothing is quite as significant as the fact that we
can use advanced AI to do faster AI research.
If we can do a decade's worth of research in a year or a month,
then the rate of progress will obviously be quite different.
The rate of technological progress will keep accelerating,
he forecasts. This is Altman from Open AI, by
the way. And it will continue to be the
case that people are capable of adapting to almost anything.
There will be very hard parts, like whole classes of jobs going
away, but on the other hand, the world would be getting so much
richer so quickly that we'll be able to seriously entertain new
policy ideas we never could before.
Faster, quicker, more production, acceleration.
These are words that reflect a certain philosophy driving the
tech sector, to be sure, but they are also a mirror of our
awareness of mortality of Kronos time ever running out.
This CEO himself has invested millions of dollars in a biotech
startup that is trying to develop drugs to extend the
human lifespan, and he has reportedly joined a waiting list
to preserve his brain after death by uploading it to the
cloud. In a world of progress run by
mortals, we adhere to Kronos as our main reality, and thus often
our only priority. But this is not the only way,
and certainly not even the most accurate way to understand time
and eternity. Christians believe that we live
in a world where history curves around the divine, breaking in
of eternity into time, the incarnation.
This poses a bit of a problem if we want to view time only as a
line that keeps going and going, of days that we must continually
seize in order to have meaning beyond our life spans.
Here's what I mean. In his book How to Inhabit Time,
James KA Smith walks the reader through Kierkegaard's
philosophical fragments. In Philosophical Fragments,
Kierkegaard wonders whether a person alive during the 1st
century, during Jesus's ministry was closer to Jesus simply
because he was there at the same chronos time.
Am I not more removed from Jesus since I live in the 21st
century, so many centuries after he walked this earth?
Isn't that 1st century citizen less distant from him simply for
having breathed at the same time?
No, he is not, is what Kierkegaard concludes.
Because of that first century man or woman saw Jesus and did
not know him for who he was, did not believe that he was the
Incarnate God, then there is no confrontation with the eternal
on his part, as Smith puts it. Even if that man did happen to
glance up as Jesus strode by, Smith continues, historical
proximity is not the same as an encounter with the God who
arrives in history. God calls us to follow him and
makes our first hand encounter of Him available no matter what
age we live in. In Smith's words, God is as near
to the 21st century disciple as to the medieval St., and the
medieval peasant is as near to God as the 1st century apostle.
If this is true, then our Kairos moments of experiencing the
fullness of time are not pieces of eternity such that you
encounter this piece at 16 and that piece at 23 and that piece
at 40. They are encounters with the
same thing, the same plane, the same fabric as it were
encounters with eternity and the one whose nature defines
eternity. This brings us back to the three
on the Way Feast of the Fellowship.
I believe these feasts are occurrences of Kairos time for
the hobbits and the other members of the Fellowship.
For the purposes of this talk, by the way, I am counting the
full stay in each of these three places as a multiple day feast.
Each feast has a different focal point.
I would argue that the feast in Bombadil's house focuses on the
past primarily through story, that the feast in Rivendell
focuses on the present largely through song, and the feast in
Lathlorian focuses on the future, especially with the
giving of objects. And if I had more time, I would
spell out the details. But the commonality between them
all is that they are all Kairos moments.
What marks a Kairos moment? You might remember a time when
it seemed like you were getting a foretaste of eternity.
Let's look at 5 hallmarks of Kairos demonstrated in these
three feasts, the way Kairos affects the people as they
experience it, and see if they resonate.
The first is a sense of timelessness.
In Bombadil's house, the text tells us whether the morning or
evening of one day or of many days have passed.
Frodo could not tell. He did not feel either hungry or
tired, only filled with wonder. The stars shone through the
window, and the silence of the heavens seem to be round him.
Later that day, after listening to Tom, the hobbits find that
under the spell of Tom's words, they may have missed one meal or
many. This is a big deal for hobbits,
as you know, but when the food was before them, it seemed at
least a week since they had eaten in Elrond's house.
Bilbo tells Fredo. I can't count days in Rivendell,
and as the Fellowship makes their way under the golden
malorn trees of Lofleurian, we are told Frodo felt that he was
in a timeless land that did not fade or change or fall into
forgetfulness when he had gone and passed again into the outer
world. Still, Frodo, the wanderer from
the Shire, would walk there upon the grass among Eleanor and
Nifidel in fair Lofleurian. Lorian, if you remember from the
passage I quoted earlier, is where Sam loses passage, loses
track of the passage of time altogether.
Kronos time still flows, but they are caught up in something
that eclipses the movement of the sun.
That sense of timelessness is a mark of the best feasts I have
personally known, those gatherings when all the children
are elated that their bedtimes have slipped unheated into the
late night hours because conversation, laughter and
sometimes healing tears have filled up the souls of those in
attendance. Cairo satisfies us with its
fullness. The second is the experience of
refreshment and rest. Frodo is so rejuvenated at
Bombadil's house that after his first night stay, he wishes to
linger when it rains all day the next day.
He is glad in his heart and blesses the kindly weather
because it delays them from departing.
In Rivendell he wakes as a Hobbit, renewed.
He found that he no longer felt in need of rest or sleep, but
had a mind for food and drink, and probably for singing and
storytelling afterwards. The Lord of Lofleurian,
Kelaborn, extends an invitation to the fellowship with this
particular end in mind, saying You are worn with sorrow and
much toil. Even if your quest did not
concern us closely, you should have refuge in this city until
you were healed and refreshed. Now you shall rest, and we shall
not speak of your further Rd. for a while.
And so they rest. It isn't a complete healing,
remember that Frodo's wound will trouble him for all his days on
this side of the sea. But the restoration that the
Fellowship experiences is still a mark of sojourn in Kairos
time. There's a little aside.
I don't think I'm going to be able to get to this, but it's
wonderful to track. See if you can do this next time
that you read The Lord of the Rings.
The many times that the hobbits or members of the Fellowship are
confronted with the sound of running water as they're going
through their journey, it comes to light in a lot of different
places, but especially during these feasts of the Fellowship.
I think it Harkins to back to the Silmarillion, to Ulmo, who
is the valor in charge of water, I believe.
And he's associated with the sound of water.
And I think one of the loveliest passages from the Silmarillion
is that says, and it is said by the Eldar, that in water there
lives yet the echo of the music of the inor more than in any
substance else that is in this earth.
And many of the children of a Lou Vatar hearken still unsated
to the voices of the sea. And yet no, not for what they
listen. So in the sound of running water
there is this beckoning to eternity.
And we can talk about that and Zane Zuked and the inconsolable
longing. If you would like to come up
afterwards. We'll see.
But thirdly, on to our third feature.
We see reorientation happening within the minds of our
travelers. I love that Grace mentioned
Sojourner Truth saying what time of night is it?
Because reorientation is when we figure out when we are, when we
are where we are. In these feasts in The Lord of
the Rings, our travelers understand that they are part of
a larger story, and they understand where they are in the
larger story. Tom tells the Hobbit's
remarkable stories that began at the Old Forest and course back,
and then further back to the kings of ancient kingdoms, and
further back still, into strange regions beyond their memory and
beyond their waking thought. Into times when the world was
wider and the seas flowed straight to the western shore.
And still on and back Tom went singing out into ancient
Starlight when only the elf sires were awake.
Later, as they listen to Goldberry songs, they perceive
greater expanses, the sky and pools and waters in their minds,
which seem to have a similar effect as when Job considers the
cosmic work of God. The Council of Elrond brings the
danger of the Ring and the plight of the surrounding lands
to the forefront of the Fellowships attention so that
they know what role they must each play in the journey to
come. In Loflaurian, as Frodo looks
into Galladriol's mirror, he sees swift scenes that he in
some way knows to be parts of a great history in which he has
become involved. In Kairos we see more clearly
what we miss as we go through our daily routines.
We see where our lives fit in the great tale of creation,
fall, redemption and restoration, and we have a sense
that our faithfulness matters more than we think. 4th There
seems to be something in the nature of Cairo's time that
gives its participants a desire to create.
Around the table at Bombadil's house, the hobbits find
themselves drawn into the musical language of the place,
the narrator observes. They became suddenly aware that
they were singing merrily, as if it was easier and more natural
than talking. In the Great Hall in Rivendell,
Frodo finds Bilbo intent upon making up a song, and in Loft
Laurie and Frodo himself begins to put something of his sorrow
into halting words. His thought took shape in a song
that seemed fair to him, yet when he tried to repeat it to
Sam, only snatches remained, faded as a handful of withered
leaves. In this way, Cairo's time itself
seems to be generative, which is Makoto Fujimura's term for a
contribution that over time recognizes, produces, or
catalyzes more beauty, goodness and flourishing.
We might recall Hannah and Mary's songs from scripture
which are born of their separate encounters with the Almighty.
It seems that being in the presence of the Eternal Creator
sets a resonant sub creative desire ringing in our own souls.
Lastly, and this 5th aspect is mainly shown in Frodo, the three
feasts show us that entering Cairo's time puts us in closer
connection with other times and places.
In Bombadil's house, Frodo dreams about Gandalf being
rescued from a tower by an eagle, an event that actually
takes place about 9 days prior. When he nods off while listening
to Elvis songs in Rivendell, Frodo seems to be swept along by
their power almost. It seems that the words took
shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had
never yet imagined opened up before him, and the firelit hall
became like a golden mist above seas of foam that sighed upon
the margins of the world. Then he falls asleep, and there
he wandered long into a dream of music that turned into running
water, and then suddenly into a voice.
It seemed to be the voice of Bilbo chanting verses.
Later, in Lathlorean, Frodo sees an image in Galladriol's mirror
that looks very much like Gandalf, although surely this
could not be as Gandalf fell in Moria.
A figure clothed not in Gray, but in white, A white that's
shone faintly, faintly in the desk, and in its hand there was
a white staff. He has no explanation for the
image, but the vision is clear. Kairos, by its very nature,
allows us a glimpse outside of Kronos time.
And we find, as Kierkegaard reflected regarding the
contemporaries of Christ, that some events are more closely
related and intertwined in the work of eternity than clocks and
calendars would have us believe. The whys of Middle Earth know
the importance of Kairos time. Bombadil, Elrond and Keliborne
and Galadriel counsel their guests to leave when certain
circumstances have ripened and the time is meet.
Not, as my husband noted, on such and such a date at 6:00 PM.
They are living with an awareness of Kairos even though
urgent matters in Kronos time press upon them.
All the feasts they host in their troubled age may be one of
the most important things we witness in reading The Lord of
the Rings today. As creatures who are made to
live in Kronos time, we do not control Kairos.
We cannot force the situation to rightness the way we force
forsythia or Tulip bulbs to flower in winter.
We cannot dictate when eternity should break in and bring its
timeless refreshment and reorientation and creativity and
connection to other points and Saints in history.
But feasting is one of the few active ways that we can make
room for Kairos, through which we can invite eternity in and
ask our Eternal King to do his work.
I think of the feasts I've had the honor of attending,
Thanksgiving meals, dinners with friends, birthday gatherings,
retreats or conferences where relationships were deepened and
priceless memories were made. If the hosts hadn't taken the
initiative to host them. If the Anselm Society staff
hadn't planned this weekend for months and months.
If our churches shuttered themselves on Sunday, none of
those gifts would have come into being.
Imagine such a feast with me then, patterned after both the
three feasts we have been discussing and the example of
our God who prepares a table before us even in the presence
of our enemies. We begin with preparation.
The guests of our feast are given the opportunity to feel
clean and rested and dignified again, like our own master who
Stoops to wash his disciples feet.
Bombadil cries. Come now, my merry friends, and
Tom will refresh you. You shall clean grimy hands and
wash your weary faces, cast off your muddy cloaks and comb out
your tangles Before the evening meal at Rivendell, Frodo finds
laid, ready, clean garments of green cloth that fit him
excellently. Our table is laden with good
food, something more than bare rations.
The very definition of a feast is that it is more than
necessary, which reminds me of Wendell Berry in his poem The
Mad Farmer's Manifesto, about making more tracks than
necessary. Not excess for the sake of
excess, but a joyful expression of abundance that sets this
occasion apart from the usual. At Bombadil's table the hobbits
partake of yellow cream and honeycomb and white bread and
butter, milk, cheese and green herbs and ripe berries.
It was a long and merry meal, we are told.
Though the hobbits ate as only famished hobbits can eat, there
was no lack. The drink in their drinking
bowls seem to be clear cold water, yet it went to their
hearts like wine and set free their voices.
This is simple, but plenteous and pleasant, fair, and is
redolent of the wine. At the wedding of Cana, which
was also good and abundant. Our imagined merrymaking is held
to mark some notable occasion. Whether is it is momentous, as
when Gandalf says at Rivendell. Soon there will be feasting and
merrymaking to celebrate the victory at the Ford of
Brewingen, and you will all be there in places of honor, or
more along the lines of ordinary miracles, as when Goldberry says
the rain has ended and new waters are running downhill
under the stars. Let us now laugh and be glad
Kelleborne and Galadriel hold their parting feast to build to
bid their last farewell, and in their words to the fellowship to
speed you with blessings from our land.
The feast prescribed in the Old Testament mark the provision,
redemption and rescue of God's people.
So we celebrate and find occasion for celebration.
And so our imagined feast is also a place for reminding
ourselves of what is old and enduring and good truths that we
already know but need to hear again, so that we meet them as
the Church meets the folds of the liturgical calendar with a
newness that is yet steeped in history year after year.
In such a feast, conversations weave between members of
multiple generations for, as Smith suggests, and how to
inhabit time. If you want to transcend time,
build friendships across generations.
Though you can't stand outside your season, you can hear from
those who've lived through such seasons.
Friendship, in this respect, is akin to time travel.
One gets the sense that when the hobbits ask Tombadil, Tom
Bombadil, excuse me, all sorts of questions on their first
night, or when Frodo watches Elrond, Gloerfendel and Gandalf
seated together. That courage woven by wisdom and
respect between the old and the young and the very, very old is
not a cloth easily torn. And of the elements of our
feasting, perhaps most arresting of all is the art that we have
to offer each other. That is more than the knowledge
or skills that we can pass on. Stories and songs and dance and
visual art invite us into the reality of a wider story,
whether in Middle Earth or on present day earth.
Come, be still and listen. The sharing of art reminds us
that we still have hearts that can be broken, tears that can be
shed, and nobility hidden in our neighbors.
Still, At a feast like this, it is a gift to realize that there
is more goodness in the world than you had thought.
We raise our glasses to our lips and find the bright nourishment
of hope flowing into our souls. When Frodo and Sam and all the
rest of the Fellowship find themselves in Italian after the
War of the Ring, and they are rested and washed and clad, a
minstrel of Gondor begins singing the tale of Frodo of the
9 Fingers and the Ring of Doom. And all the hosts laughed and
wept, and in the midst of their merriment, in tears, the clear
voice of the minstrel rose like silver and gold.
And all men were hushed. And he sang to them now in the
elven tongue, now in the speech of the West, until their hearts,
wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was
like swords, and they passed and thought out to regions where
pain and delight flow together, and tears are the very whine of
blessedness. We still live in Kronos time.
It is right that we should be mindful of Kronos and even
embrace it, because this is the time in which we are given to
work out our salvation with fear and trembling, and the work that
each one of us has been given to do.
The fellowship had their road to travel as the apostles had
theirs, and we have ours, but it is in Cairo's time that we are
strengthened to do our work. Remember Lucy Pevensey burying
her head in Aslan's mane and lifting her face, no longer
afraid. Remember the example of Christ
at the last, at the Last Supper, with his friends, making ready
for what was to come. We are giving Kairos stops to
remember who we are and who walks with us, especially when
the days are dark and the progress is hard.
Sometimes those stops do not last as long as we'd like, but
what is important is that we accept their welcome.
When Samwise Gangi draws near to the end of his time in L'athe
Lurie and he confesses. I've often wanted to see a bit
of magic, like what it tells of an old tales, but I've never
heard of a land better than this.
It's like being at home and on a holiday at the same time.
If you understand me, I don't want to leave.
All the same, I'm beginning to feel that if we've got to go on,
then we'd best get it over. He has been made ready.
Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good
works, not neglecting to meet together, but encouraging one
another. And all the more as you see the
day drawing near. The book of Hebrews urges us,
and so, even if it should prove hard, to gently rise and softly
call good night and joy be to you all as the song, the parting
glass ruse. Let us raise our cups, look to
Him who is head of both our body and our table, and make room for
the Kairos feast. Thank you for the honor of your
time. The Imagination Redeemed podcast
is a production of the Anselm Society.
It's easy to see this world as disenchanted and to give up hope
that there's more. But you were made to see the
world with the eyes of heaven and to live a bountiful life
that participates in the life of God, like in the great stories.
To help make the show possible, go to anselmsociety.org/podcast
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celebration, and ancient wisdom and go out renewed, bringing
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Learn more at anselmsociety.org and join us next time as we
pursue a renaissance of the Christian imagination together.