A Star Above the Ash

In The Return of the King, the final volume of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Samwise Gamgee lies exhausted in Mordor. The land is choked with ash. The air reeks of sulfur. Every horizon promises only ruin. He has no map for what lies ahead, no guarantee they will survive the next mile. By any reasonable measure, their mission is hopeless.

Then Sam looks up. Through a gap in the poisoned clouds above the mountains, he catches sight of a single white star. Tolkien writes that "the beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him." In that moment, Sam understands something profound: "In the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."

That is what faith does. It does not remove us from Mordor. It does not clear the ash from the sky or shorten the road ahead. But it lifts our eyes long enough to see that the darkness, however vast it feels, has a ceiling — and above that ceiling, the light of the Almighty has been shining the whole time.

Tolkien, a devout Catholic, knew exactly what he was writing. He knew that faith is not the absence of shadow. It is the stubborn conviction that no shadow reaches all the way up. Whatever your Mordor looks like this morning, look up. The star is still there.