The Fiat of Frodo
It is at Bag End during the catechism lesson Gandalf gives Frodo about the Ring and its terrible power that the hobbit’s vocation is revealed to him, which at first he resists with horror and fear. Yet this part of the Great Music, as all parts are, has been seen by God from the beginning, and we can trace back the threads of it through the decades of the lives of Bilbo and Frodo. The very fact that Bilbo adopts his cousin/nephew as his heir, and eventually heir to the Ring, is one moment of grace among many that show even the tragedy of the death of Frodo’s parents has its place in the making of who he is and what he is meant to do. Such threads run through our lives also. We may not understand when tragedies interrupt our lives and lead us off in directions we would not have otherwise traveled, but we have the comfort that God has allowed everything for a reason and ultimately that good will come of it. We must have faith and trust that He loves us far more deeply than we can imagine and wills nothing but what will help us come to Him in His heavenly home.
We all have plans and dreams of what we want to do with our lives, but God has plans too. “We are God’s work of art, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them” (Eph. 2:10). Throughout history, He has given vitally important tasks to those who have already decided the very opposite of what the One has in mind for them. However, when He makes His Will known to them, they completely and immediately comply and change their entire lives, goals and choices for Him. To name just two examples: Mary of Nazareth was not planning on becoming a mother, but instead she becomes mother of God and mother to us all; Saul was passionately intent upon destroying the believers in Jesus, but then he became Paul and was just as fervent to bring more believers to the faith.
Like Mary and Paul will discover, Frodo finds that we do not choose our tasks as much as God chooses us for them. The hobbit is not expecting his life to be turned upside down when he is told the history of the Ring and that this pretty little thing his uncle willed to him is actually reeking of great evil. Frodo most definitely wants the Ring to be destroyed, the danger to be removed, but he does not want to be the one to do it. He longs for adventures, even for a dragon to come by and shake things up a bit, but he wants an adventure in which he can return happy and whole at the end of it. Destroying the Ring is quite a bit outside his comfort level. Like all of us, he knows, or thinks he knows, his limitations. This assuming is very common, but such assumptions may be wrong. God knows us far better than we know ourselves and He does not choose foolishly. He has seen strengths in us that we may not even be aware of, or may not even yet be manifested in us, but will be when the time comes.
Still, it is very frightening to realize that it is sometimes up to us to be that instrument of God’s Will to destroy some evil that has sprung up in our time. When we see a terrible task looming up so great like a wave ready to drown us and know it is our vocation, we may echo in dismay and terror Frodo’s words, “Why was I chosen?” (LotR II:2, 60). Even Jesus in the Agony in the Garden is terrified of His coming trials (Luke 22:42-44), so God perfectly understands when we feel we are not up to what we fear, or in Jesus’ case, know exactly, what is ahead. It is natural for us to resist what appears to be incredibly dangerous or even impossible, and say with Frodo, “I wish it need not have happened in my time.” Gandalf agrees: “So do I . . . and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us” (LotR II:2, 50). In a book chock full of wisdom, this is one of the best and truest insights as to how we should live our lives.
As with Frodo and all those who have the same protest that they are not “made for perilous quests” and have “so little” of the heart, wits and courage needed for such grand and dangerous things (II:2, 60), the truth that “God does not call the equipped; He equips the called” is shown. To give some Biblical examples, Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah and Gideon all wonder about why God has chosen them, protesting that they are not eloquent enough (Moses, Ex. 4:10), too young (Jer. 1:6), unclean (Isa. 6:5), or weak (Gideon, Judg. 6:15). Jonah flees and has to be swallowed by a whale before he accepts his vocation (Jon. 2:1). In the end, even as the hearts of all these children of God quail, they still say in the end: “Here I am, send me” (Isa. 6:9), and “Nevertheless, let your will be done, not mine” (Luke 22:43). They accept they are chosen and submit themselves to that. Frodo does not realize Who chose him, but he is fully aware that he has been, and so is aware, in whatever dim way, there is a Chooser. We have been chosen too, each one of us, and the more we surrender control over ourselves to God, the more wonders He can and will work in our lives as we discover our own unique vocations.
By ourselves we can do nothing; with God we can do everything. As Blessed Pope John XXIII said, “Even if he lays on our shoulders some part of his own cross, he is there to help us bear it with self-sacrifice and with love” (Joyful 96). We can still be broken by our task, but we can be healed also by the same One who gave the burden to us. It is not evil that comes from God’s Hand, but love, even when it is in the form of the Cross, perhaps even especially then. As the great Bishop, spiritual director and Doctor of the Church, St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622) says,
The Everlasting God has in His wisdom foreseen from eternity the cross He now presents to you as a gift from His inmost Heart. This cross He now sends you He has considered with His all-knowing eyes, understood with His divine mind, tested with His wise justice, warmed with His loving arms and weighed with His own Hands, to see that it be not one inch too large and not one ounce too heavy for you. He has blessed it with His Holy Name, anointed it with His grace, perfumed it with His consolation, taken one last glance at you and your courage, and then sent it to you from heaven, a special greeting from God to you, an alms of the all-merciful love of God.
Sometimes we need to pass through the fire to be tested, and there we will find the strength we did not know we had. God knows Frodo has a great store of courage, as all hobbits do in a crisis. He lets the Quest play out as it does so Frodo will discover for himself what he is capable of and what God is capable of through him. It is the same with us. With God’s help, we will not be found wanting. He will not give us a task that beyond us. He knows what our true strength is and will give us enough grace to accomplish it if we cooperate with Him. “Our strength grows out of our weakness,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson wisely noted.
When the Secret Fire, the Holy Spirit, presents Frodo with the fullness of his vocation at the Council of Elrond, the tremendous importance and gift that God has given all of us in our free will is brought again into play. He knows our answer even before we do, but He gives us the freedom to choose that answer. He has such respect for that freedom that He does not force us to do anything even though He knows it would benefit us and others. He suggests, He asks for our free consent to His good Will, but He does not coerce us as does the Ring, which bludgeons Frodo when it can no longer seduce him. God leaves it up to us to say yes or no, though He also will not necessarily give up if we say no.
If we are open to His grace and use our freedom well in agreeing to what He proposes, dying to ourselves and living as His vessel, it a marvel what can be accomplished. “[W]hat you are to say will be given to you when the times comes; because it is not you who will be speaking; the Spirit of your Father will be speaking in you” (Matt. 10:19-20). When the Holy Spirit stirs Frodo’s heart, the hobbit does indeed feel very much like “some other will was using his small voice” (LotR II:2, 263), but it is still his choice to let that Will speak. He could have remained still and said no to the Voice he hears in his heart and soul, but he chooses to say yes instead. This is echoed in the story of Esther who also has to choose between silence and saving her people. As Jim Ware and Kurt Burner observe, “She had been called to play a part in the story, one she could not fulfill by remaining silent” (God in LotR 58). The same words also apply to the Virgin Mary who could have said no at the Annunciation. She is alone when the angel visits her. She knows she could be stoned if she is discovered pregnant. Like Frodo and Esther, she has to choose between self-preservation and God’s Will for her. When Frodo faces his test, he knows remaining silent is not the answer he is meant to give, much as he longs to. They all choose to speak “and if I perish, I perish” (Est. 4:16).
Frodo returns the gift of free will and offers himself back to his Creator, even if he does not truly know to Whom he is saying yes. The choice the Ring-bearer makes at the Council, he makes again and again with every breath and step he takes toward Mordor. Mary says it many times as well, even at the Cross, watching her Son die in agony. Sam says it with every thought and step, as he watches his master’s torment and seeks to ease it anyway he can. The saints and martyrs say it over and over as they are tortured by their Enemy and his fell servants. Surrender is not a one-time event, but an ongoing, continuous one that has to be embraced every moment, every day. Under the coercive pressure of the Ring, Frodo says no several times along the way and at the end, as we all do at times, but he says yes many, many more times and we must also.
Frodo gives his fiat, his ‘Let it be done’ when he says “I will take the Ring,” (LotR II:2, 264) which, as Peter Kreeft notes, are “[t]he sacramental, operative words that set in motion the only power that can conquer Sauron” (“Wartime Wisdom” 39). The Ring-bearer does not falter in his charge, even as his heart fills with fear and despair, and his body and soul endures the torment of the terrible physical and spiritual weight of the Ring. In Making Sense out of Suffering, Kreeft is not speaking of Frodo, but he could very well have been in this quote that shows the parallels between that hobbit and Abraham.
‘O.K., time to go,’ says God to Abraham . . . ‘Time to leave your comfort, security and happiness there in Ur in Chaldea, that civilized and cultured city, out into the wilderness, to a land I shall show you. Out into suffering and insecurity and darkness and blind faith. You will fall flat on your face many times because you will be looking at the darkness I’m sending you into rather than at the light of my face and my words to you. But I will not give up on you, ever.’ (110)
It is not only from Faramir that Frodo has “pity and honour” (LotR IV:5, 666), but from all those at the Council, for Frodo is not being led into a promised land, but into the heart of hell on earth. When the hobbit’s vocation is made clear to everyone, after he has interiorly accepted it, it must have astonished those who witness as it does Frodo himself. They all hear this small, frail, mortal being who has already nearly died at the hands of the Enemy’s most fell servant come forward to say, fearfully but bravely, he once more accepts that he is chosen to be Ring-bearer. Gandalf and others of the Wise recognize in their strength how terribly weak they are in regard to the Ring; Frodo, in his humility and recognition of his weakness, discovers his strength. It is precisely because the Wise are strong that they are not chosen; it is precisely because Frodo is weak that he instead is appointed.
Australian professor Barry Gordon wrote a paper called “Kingship, Priesthood and Prophecy in The Lord of the Rings” in which Frodo is noted to be “the Lamb whose only real strength is his capacity to make an offering of himself” (Kilby, Tolkien and Silmarillion 56). As he, Aragorn and Gandalf respond to their callings, Clyde Kilby notes each “grows in power and grace” (56).
We can all be overwhelmed at times by the tasks God asks us to do. It is with dread but willingly that Frodo embraces his cross. He longs just to stay in Rivendell with Bilbo, but instead says yes to a terrible journey that his heart quails to contemplate. It takes great courage and sacrifice to say yes aloud when we are screaming no inside, to totally surrender ourselves to Someone else, to give up control and say “I am yours; do with me as you will.” Yet it is in this crucible that we discover who we truly are meant to be, the person God has already seen us becoming when we say yes, the person He has loved from all eternity. Though our vocations may seem at times a curse or burden, they are actually signs of great love and trust from God. He thinks so much of us that He gives each of us a specific purpose to fulfill in order to further the Music.The words of Giacomo Cardinal Buffi about choices made in this Age could also apply to the Ring-bearer:
But the Spirit sent by the crucified and risen Christ also empowers the invisible world inside - the minds, hearts and consciences. This is the sanctifying effect.
Therefore, man senses the gift of illumination. It gives him an understanding of the divine truth. Even when it seems difficult and remote, the gift of inspiration moves him to resist temptation, give up old vices, or perform a good deed that taxes his abilities. (The Man 106-107)
Very few of us actually believe we are superheroes destined to save the world, and we should not trust those who think they are. Better to trust those who are like Frodo, who are terrified but then take up and shoulder their cross, not out of any personal quest for glory or vaunting ambition, but in simple obedience and with blood, sweat and tears accomplish what they are asked to do. “I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle,” Blessed Mother Teresa said. “I just wish He didn’t trust me so much.” She walked through decades of darkness, faithfully serving her God, though for His own good purposes, He chose to hide His face from her, so she could be a shining example to others of perseverance amidst the terrible night. Frodo is another who has inspired many to walk through their own dark nights. May we always find such lights on our Road.