Reflections

Today we celebrate one of the most momentous days in all of salvation history--the Annunciation! Although it is the middle of Lent, we all can rejoice knowing that God has come to dwell with us in Jesus, and Mary our mother cooperated with grace in a way that changes everything. In today’s Gospel from Luke we hear that the angel Gabriel came to Mary in Nazareth and said, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus.” Mary’s reply after her understandable questioning becomes known as her fiat: “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your word.” It is truly a marvelous day.  

It is also the day that marks the defeat of Sauron the Deceiver in Middle Earth by the final destruction of the Ring of Power in The Lord of the Rings. Before you click away hastily or offendedly, bear with me for a moment. 

J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the epic The Lord of the Rings, was deeply Catholic. He once stated that his works had an “expressly Catholic worldview.” His mythical world is filled with Catholic visions of beauty, meaning, and virtue. And relevant for the feast of the Annunciation, Tolkien says that one of the major themes of The Lord of the Rings is the “ennoblement or sanctification of the humble.”

In The Lord of the Rings, hobbits are small and generally unimportant in the context of world events. They are not considered adventurous or courageous. They are so unimportant and unknown in Middle Earth that in distant lands, people of other races are often shocked to find that hobbits even exist outside of their own version of fairy tales.  

Yet the initial “yeses” of four hobbits shapes the entirety of the story and makes the defeat of evil in their world possible. When it becomes clear that the evil ring of power must be destroyed, there is great dissension on how that should happen. The diminutive Frodo stands up amidst the contentious crowd: “I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way.” His friend and servant Sam runs headlong to accompany  Frodo on his quest. Their friends Merry and Pippin rush to join as well. The hobbits’ later decisions and character development all hinge on those first “fiats,” though they, like Mary, had no idea what was to come. Tolkien’s thought on “hobbit-virtue” and the hand of a sort of Providence at work was shaped by Tolkien’s reading of the Annunciation and God’s preferential treatment of the humble throughout salvation history. 

When encountered by the angel Gabriel, Mary is a young woman in Nazareth, a small town in Galilee, on the fringes of the Roman Empire, nowhere of importance by the world’s reckoning. God’s choice of Mary among all women would have seemed in the world’s wisdom to be foolish. But the world’s wisdom does not factor in God’s reasoning. Instead, the angel Gabriel declares that Mary has found favor with God and exalts her above all other women. Mary says “yes” to God before knowing the joys or sorrows to come in her vocation as the mother of her Lord. She rejoices in God her Savior and trusts that she will be given the grace she needs to sustain her. She knows that God has “cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly.” To borrow from Tolkien once more, in the events of the Annunciation God sanctifies and ennobles the humble, making a young woman Queen of Heaven and of Earth as God comes to be with us in Jesus.

So on this celebration of the Annunciation, let a bit of “hobbit spirituality” inform your own: 

• Have confidence that God will make good on his promises.
• Offer your service to God, such as it is.
• Know that good will defeat evil in the long run of history.
• Say yes to the “quest” of where God calls you, though you do not know the way. 

We can do this because the One who took flesh and dwelt among us, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life will come again. One day, all that has gone wrong will be made right. May the celebration of the Annunciation today remind us of the start of that final victory. 

Hope Zelmer

Quotations from Tolkien’s letters from The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter. 10th impression. Boston: Mariner Books, 2000.

Above: The Annunciation by Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi), c. 1485, from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.