It was my children who told me about Tolkien, and said I should read The Lord of the Rings. I had thought it was a book for boys, and was pleasantly surprised to find wonderful feisty heroines in it. But it’s also very melancholic, and you are led to long for something beyond it: the ending is quite unsatisfying, and you’re left with a great hunger for heaven.
The Franciscans use it a lot with young people in Italy. And I was in America, talking to some poor young men on a Greyhound bus; it meant something to all of them. It made one of them question his work, sent another to walk the Appalachian mountains, and prompted a meeting with a girl on the internet.
It’s a very powerful book. I don’t think the films are very good.
G. K. Chesterton is a wonderful writer. The Everlasting Man conÂverted C. S. Lewis. Chesterton’s story of how he came to Christianity himself, Orthodoxy, is brilliant: witty, paradoxical, and it makes you see reality in a totally new way.
The stories that changed my life and faith are the ones which give me a shock of the otherness and reality of the world beyond the self.
“I’d like to be locked in a church with no one. I love empty churches: they are full of presence.” Well then, Mrs. Milbank there ought to an abundance of “presence” these days as the churches are so empty, particularly the C of E. I think many of us can relate to your sense of being locked in a church with no one. Hello, anyone home?
Hey, I, too, like to spend prayer time in an empty church. Of course, it’s not really empty. More often than not, like Mrs. Milbank, I feel a strong sense of the presence both of the Lord and the prayers of those who have worshiped there for years before.
All in all, I thought it a good interview (even though it read more like a series of thoughts).
Jim Elliott <>< Florida