A Wind in the Distance
But even as the gate fell, and the Orcs about it yelled, preparing to charge, a murmur arose behind them, like a wind in the distance, and it grew to a clamour of many voices crying strange news in the dawn. The Orcs upon the Rock, hearing the rumour of dismay, wavered and looked back. (The Two Towers, Helm’s Deep) - The Wind in the Wilderness
We are in the season of eucatastrophe and evangelium now. Most battles probably have a moment when the tide has turned, but there is still fighting and cleaning up and counselling to be done. Liturgically, this season is like that; and indeed the past two millenia are like that. The liturgy is a recapitulation and re-presentation of this truth.
Basically, the Church tries to get us to live within the whole story all the time, to go beyond a merely linear conception of time. To follow the liturgy is to develop a capacity for synchronicity, the closest we get, this side of eternity, to an experience of living beyond time.
....The mind boggles at this, which is why the Church in all sorts of ways lets us see that, if we stay imprisoned in our merely experiential notions, we’ll miss the point, because we’ll reduce God to our story instead of growing into his.
In different seasons we focus on different parts of the whole, but this is not in a dichotomous way, to the exclusion of the whole or the other parts.
Indeed, what is true of the best way to live is also true of the best way to read or think. The idea of the hermeneutic circle is in part a way to recognize that the study of the parts needs to include some recognition of the whole of which it is the parts. The failure to understand this is one reason why many of our modern debates are so sterile and unproductive, and why our social experiments are so often catastrophic in their consequences.
The recognition of the whole in its relation to the parts used to be called wisdom. Cardinal Newman writes of the goal of a true education:
That only is true enlargement of mind which is the power of viewing many things at once as one whole, of referring them severally to their true place in the universal system, of understanding their respective values, and determining their mutual dependence. … Possessed of this real illumination, the mind never views any part of the extended subject-matter of Knowledge without recollecting that it is but a part, or without the associations which spring from this recollection. It makes every thing in some sort lead to every thing else; it would communicate the image of the whole to every separate portion, till that whole becomes in imagination like a spirit, every where pervading and penetrating its component parts, and giving them one definite meaning.
He is talking about academic education here, but a similar process is at work in a good life as such, even a good society.
The primary eucatastrophe, which has just been re-presented liturgically in the weeks from Palm Sunday to Divine Mercy Sunday coming up, is the turning point of human history -- everything else precedes or follows it, and is thus incorporated into it. Literarily, this is also what a eucatastrophe was to Tolkien as a literary element - it's the moment into which all the preceding is folded and from which all the following proceeds.
It is interesting to me to reflect that since Tolkien eschewed specific talk of religion in his literary works -- probably because including doctrine and practice in fiction inevitably layers them with a bit of quotidion, relativizing dust, and this was something he wanted to avoid in a work that was trying to avoid quotidian except as a counterpoise to the grander things - he embedded doctrinal concepts in the very literary forms he used. I believe he did this at least partly consciously, judging from his written reflections on his work, and it is a very interesting way to do it. Not least, because as he points out himself, he is humbly emulating our Maker in this, in a reflected and subsidiary way. The liturgy does this too, though in a much more primary form.
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