Stop Me Before I Choose Again

A soldier, a monk and a Hobbit

Now that I have written about my morning reading habit, I have to stick with it. So you are stuck with it. Thank you for being there reading and commenting so that I might know the shape of my own ideas. Otherwise Anne has to hear this and you can imagine how wearing that can be.

First reading¹: Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

“In South Carolina they’d treated him like a beast, and he’d survived. He’d grown bigger, stronger, older, better. But having returned to the world he’d grown up in, he had no idea how to sit in a room with his mother, or what to say to this sixteen-year-old girl, no idea how to get through a few days in his life until he shipped to Louisiana for Advanced Infantry Training, until he got back where people would tell him what to do.”

Second reading: Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

I found once more something of the joy there is in being nothing and in depending on Our Lady for everything. This is the key to the simplest and easiest way of the interior life: to have no greatness or holiness or distinction that one can claim as one’s own but to rely entirely on her love and her protection-- knowing that she will obtain for us,, at the right moment grace to do the good thing that God wills us to do. From then on the whole spiritual life becomes nothing else but a question of looking to her in confidence and faithfully receiving everything that comes to us through her without clinging to it or keeping it as our own, and without reflecting on ourselves.

Third reading: J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

I have been so taken up with the thoughts of leaving Bag End, and of saying farewell, that I have never even considered the direction, said Frodo. ‘For where am I to go? And by what shall I steer? What is to be my quest? Bilbo went to find a treasure, there and back again; but I go to lose one, and not return, as far as I can see.’

‘But you cannot see very far, said Gandalf. Neither can I. It may be your task to find the Cracks of Doom; but that quest may be for others: I do not know. At any rate you are not ready for that long road yet?

No indeed!’ said Frodo. ‘But in the meantime what course am

I to take?’

“Towards danger, but not too rashly, nor too straight.”

Have at it with these quotations and stop reading if you’d like to simply enjoy those passages or your Sunday on the beach.

Here’s how they combined for me this rainy morning.

Rain drove me indoors. I had no choice!

All three men want someone to tell them what to do.

The young soldier in Tree of Smoke, James Houston, has just finished basic training. He is seventeen, home for a few days before the Army moves him along toward Vietnam. The Army has made him capable of everything except sitting in a room with his mother, or his mother’s truck with his girlfriend. He finds that the choices of ordinary life make him physically ill. They overwhelm him and he just wants to be back where life is orderly and he knows what to do. Where there are no choices.

Merton wrote this as a Trappist monk in Kentucky. He had already chosen the most constrained life on offer: vows of obedience, a bell for every hour, an abbot to tell him what to do. It didn’t take. He frets in his journal over whether he should be a hermit instead, or quit writing books.² So he hands the steering to Mary³. All he has to do is listen to Our Lady and his restlessness goes away. (Not for long!)

Then there’s Frodo. He has inherited a ring he now knows must be destroyed, and he asks the wizard the soldier’s question: By what shall I steer? Gandalf, who could issue orders if anyone could, declines. Neither can I. What he offers instead neither the Army nor Our Lady provides: advice on how to choose. Not too rashly, nor too straight.

I’m suspicious, or I have been, of connections I see across my morning reading. But I’m starting to think that the artificial search for a through-line in very different texts causes meaning to rise up out of each individual text.⁴ I hadn’t read Fellowship of the Ring for twenty years, and the movies have taken up residence in my mind. So I might have sped past this moment. The hunt for a through-line slowed me down, and the soldier and the monk told me where to look.

Two lines I would have skated past now hook together. Frodo says Bilbo went to find a treasure, but he goes to lose one. Merton wants to receive everything without clinging to it. The monk prays for an open hand. The hobbit has to carry one across Middle-earth.

The soldier is the odd man out. He came home bigger, stronger, older, better. He can close his fist tight, but he can’t get through an afternoon. Training gave him everything but the ability to choose. (I think it kinda trains choosing out of you, no?) Frodo gets the choosing first and has to find the strength on the road. (Gandalf says it “you are not ready for that long road yet.” Thanks Gandalf!)

It’s a very human thing to long for peace from choices. What Frodo is about to step into is one choice after another, all of them with very high stakes (Towards danger!), and for which he recognizes he has no capacity. Yet! It is a moment of extraordinary courage which I hadn’t felt in my bones until this morning and for which I have Denis Johnson and Thomas Merton to thank.

1. Now that I’ve typed that I’m a little nervous. I didn’t go to Mass today.

2. I can say with a non-colloquial and slightly surprising umph Thank God he didn’t.

3. Who doesn’t need to borrow her mother’s pickup truck.

4. Or, John, it’s possible that you pick texts that have connections that are obvious to others but that you treat as a revelation when you read them. Maybe, but at least it doesn’t cause me to talk to myself.