say things like the "border is closed." I don't want to worry him, but you can't stifle anxiety or completely soothe it. His older siblings have tried telling him that kids aren't as likely to get really sick (which has led to unhelpful conversations about which one of us might get the most sick.)
Last night I decided on another tactic for dealing with his anxiety. We started watching The Lord of the Rings together. This is not necessarily an obvious choice as it is quite scary, but sometimes you make a judgment call. I am not a exactly a super fan of the Lord of the Rings. I read the books in college. Doug and I read the books to each other while driving across the US when we were first married. I watched the movies in theaters when they came out, but I am not a Stephen Colbert level fan.
But we did name Samuel after Samwise Gamgee.
I think he is a really astonishing character and quite an example of courage.
Samwise has no desire to partake in adventures. He doesn't want to leave the Shire or the comforts of his life there.
What drives him to accompany Frodo on this perilous journey with the ring is friendship and fidelity.
I have treasured these stories so much because they reminded me of why I wanted to become a Mennonite. The world's redemption does not depend
on the brave exploits of armies or wizards. It depends on two little hobbits shaped by a strange set of commitment: a love of simplicity, and home, and each other, shaped by a disdain of power that is exercised over other people. Because of these qualities it is only Hobbits who are able to bear the ring on its perilous journey to Mt Doom to be destroyed. All the other creatures of Middle Earth would be tempted to use the ring.
Hobbits are unlikely heroes and Samwise is an unlikely hobbit to be a hero.
But he has great lines.
And it is because of one of his speeches that I decided that perhaps the best way to help confront Sam's anxiousness is by watching an epic adventure together. Here is Sam encouraging Frodo to keep going:
“I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”
We want our kids to be safe, but the world is not safe and so sometimes we all need to be reminded to brave.
This is why we will also being doing church together. The Bible is a book filled with people trying their best to be brave and hopeful: itinerating with Jesus, trying to walk on water, heading towards tombs guarded by soldiers, resisting imperial edicts, singing in prisons, offering strangers the last bread and oil, protecting bitter mother in laws, facing fiery furnaces.
It isn't a safe book filled with little moral tidbits.
In Scripture as Karl Barth writes:
We are offered the magnificent, productive, hopeful life of a grain of seed, a new beginning, out of which all things shall be made new. One cannot learn or imitate this life of the divine seed in the new world. One can only let it live, grow, and ripen within him. One can only believe — can only hold the ground whither he has been led.
While we read our newspapers and our twitter feeds and see all the reasons there are for fear, may we also be telling ourselves stories familiar and old that remind us that we can be brave.
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