The Two Towers: Not a Review
I have seen it, though given my bent of mind in these intercalary days, I perhaps would have done better to have waited. Nevertheless it is done, and I do not intend to regale you with a review of the film. There are other, better venues to learn of its accuracy (or lack thereof), its beauty, and some of its stunning imagery.
Instead, I wish to reflect on something that touched and indicted me--the likeness of my house to that of Theoden in Thrall. Many glamours blind me to the duties that I owe family and friends. I occupy the throne but I do nothing. I simply fill a place, and in filling it without action, allow others to fill the place instead. This is the plight of Theoden, and of many of us who attempt to run households, raise children, encourage spouses, support friends. We live in thrall. We are in thrall to our sinful nature, which like Theoden enthralled, disfigures us and paralyzes us, we whisper and our minds cannot follow a thread of a thought. The merest breath from someone who advises, but is not perhaps worthy of the position, and we obey. No, we are not like this always, but too often the sceptre is wrenched from our grasp by a lack of focus. We have forgotten that God is the ruler, and His is the Kingship. We occupy a usurped throne and listen to the enemy of goodness as he directs us in ways that will not raise up our family and friends, but which will, too often crush them. Our unkind words, our subversive actions, our self-serving thoughts and deeds. We are indeed enchanted, and there is no Gandalf to walk in and open our eyes. Or rather, that One came some two-thousand years ago, and until our eyes are firmly fixed on him, the scales will cling to them and we will live in our blindness. Jesus Christ, yesterday, today, and forever. He is the only cure for the mind-sickness that comes from living too close to the world. He is the only release from the prison bars we have taken upon ourselves. As the young woman (whose name I never could make out) says in the film, when asked what she fears, "A cage that we have lived so long with that we cease to see the bars that hold us in." Our patterns of sinfulness are just such.
I suspect there are a great many Theodens out there. But one of the great messages of the film is that the glamour cannot hold against a greater power and that greater power stands in wait for us to fix our eyes upon Him. He alone is our salvation, our armor, our shield, and our strength. He alone is the fortress that stands against the surging tides of this time and all times because he stands outside of time and over all time as its Lord. Turning our gaze upon Him will help to clear the vapors from our mind, help to break the spell that lulls us insensibly into death and danger. Jesus Christ, King and Lord, Who was and is and is to come, is our release from prison. He alone makes straight what has been set wrong. We need not wait any longer, but we can embrace Him in love and in joy.
