Enchanted by the Good Spell

Written by Jordan Dobbins, English Faculty

At last Aragorn stirred. ‘Gandalf!’ he said. ‘Beyond all hope you return to us in our need! What veil was over my sight? Gandalf!’

We are all under the influence of a spell. No one is free from the power of enchantment; as C.S. Lewis reminds us in The Silver Chair, “the more enchanted you get, the more certain you feel that you are not enchanted at all.” There are spells, or stories, all around us. So much of who we are, and how we see the world, is informed by the spells we place ourselves under.

The hopelessness of cold materialism no longer has the pull it once did, but in the wings wait scores of false hopes, spells that lead to despair and, as a good friend once said to a troubled prince, threaten to “draw you into madness” and tempt you “to the dreadful summit of the cliff/That beetles o’er his base into the sea.”

As a Christian school, we hold to the goodness and truth of the Gospel of Christ’s death and resurrection. The word Gospel is an Old English rendering of the Greek evangelion: combining god, meaning good, and spel, meaning story. This Good Spell is distinctive because it has real hope at its heart.

The Tolkien Retreat, which saw sixteen students arrive among the forest glades of Leonard Lake Reserve this past February, sought to answer a simple question: How might we encourage students to put themselves under spells that lead souls to the Real, not the false, and ultimately point them to the Saving Spell of Christ?

First, we removed ourselves, for a time, from this busy and content-saturated world where it is difficult to really notice what narratives have charmed us and taken root in our hearts. Then, we removed technology, and any way of telling time whatsoever (other than the sun’s position in the sky). Having retreated, we let the deeply Christian imaginative world of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings weave its way, over seven days, into the communal thoughts of a small fellowship in an undisturbed wood north of San Francisco.

Each day began with a full breakfast and morning worship; every evening ended with singing the beautiful Victorian hymn “Abide with Me.” Most of each day was spent reading the trilogy like Samwise Gamgee, who “[loved] tales of that sort” and “listened because [he] couldn’t help [himself ].” We entered Tolkien’s sub-created world, in all its richness, and in doing so began to see how his secondary world might harbour “a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium [Gospel] in the real world.”

The richness of what we experienced together was shown to be something deep-rooted and lasting on the final night, where there was over an hour and a half of storytelling, poetry readings, and musical performances. Reading great literature in peace stirs the soul and out flows the imaginative creations of created beings.

So much of Tolkien’s grand story of Middle Earth is concerned with hope, especially hope in the face of apparent hopelessness. The art that the students shared that evening responded to this with expressions of their own rekindled hope. It seems fitting to end with a brief glimpse of the goodness we experienced over that week in the form of a poem, penned by one of our students, Hannah Schweiger, and performed that very evening before our final feast:

“I often dream of it” - Faramir

I often dream of it
coming in a great dark wave I often dream of it
darkness unescapable

yet my heart says nay
for darkness cannot endure not while you are here
and grief cannot kill joy

I often dream of it
coming in a stream of light
I often dream of it
the sun’s unveiling and ending night