Unthinkable Wings

Mysteriously tired, having had difficulty sleeping - and then, once I achieved it, over-sleeping. This is not ideal, as I'm going camping with the Cubs over the weekend, and starting with a sleep-debt is, to say the least, sub-optimal.

However, last night I did listen to the first half of the Big Finish audio "The Council of Nicea" (written by Caroline Symcox), which I think is very nearly my favourite Doctor Who thing ever, because - as you will have guessed - anything which combines theology, devious plotting, and Five - is guaranteed to get my vote.

( Spoilers, I suppose )

I'm in the middle of reading Why Go To Church?: the drama of the Eucharist, by Timothy Radcliffe, OP, which is extremely good (it is also Rowan Williams' Lent book this year). It is about the Eucharist, in the sense that it is about how the Eucharist is about everything else - the total gift God makes of himself, which calls us to let go of our wills to power and dominance and to draw lines of separation between holy and unholy, for God in his Incarnation and death transforms everything.

This wasn't, however, supposed to be Another Theological Post. Fr Radcliffe, you see, has a great enthusiasm for finding apt analogies in literature, and just a few pages after a comment on Gollum - following a reference to Eckhart - as an image of how the urge to cling to things and to love them so much we can't let go is deadly ("My precious!"), I came across this discussion of the mysterious passage in the Gospels where the disciples fail to recognise Christ on the Emmaus road.

"In the BBC documentary, The Passion, broadcast during Holy Week 2008, the disciples failed to recognise the risen Jesus because he was played by an actor whom they had not seen before. When their eyes are opened, the original actor takes over again. This makes Jesus sound rather like Beorn in The Lord of the Rings, who sometimes looks like a bear and sometimes like a human, a 'skin changer'. This is typical of the rather clumsy literalistic reading of the scriptures to which we modern people are inclined, failing to spot the subtlety and nuance of the evangelists, who were highly sophisticated writers. The point is not that Jesus looked different: they had never really seen who he was. It was more like Strider, who had always been Aragorn, the awaited king, only the eyes of the hobbits had been closed, so that they had only seen a rough, hard wanderer."

There is a footnote, which made me giggle helplessly: "The reason that Aragorn has a star is that Tolkien frequently served Mass at Blackfriars at the altar of St Dominic, who also has a star on his forehead. Aragorn is really a Dominican!"