The Long Defeat
The Darkness of Winter and the Power of Storied Hope
I doubt the archaeological or manuscript record provides the detail necessary to confirm my theory, but I think Ecclesiastes must have been written in January or February. “Meaningless! Meaningless! Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless”1 seems like a cry made for (if not born of) a Chicagoland winter.
And this particular winter has felt even more incapacitating, with dreadful news out of Minneapolis and the rest of the world compounding with family health emergencies. The list of people and places in need of God’s care recorded in our church’s weekly prayers keeps growing. I’ve often wondered why humans, as mammals, don’t just hibernate through the winter months. Sometimes it feels like God is hibernating, too.
If there’s a motto by which I’ve tried to live my life, it’s G. K. Chesterton’s 1910 words “A thing worth doing is worth doing badly.”2 At first blush, it seems like Chesterton is granting permission to be sloppy. But Chesterton was saying that the really important things in life—the things that give our lives the greatest meaning—are too vital to entrust them only to the savvy or capable. Regardless of our success or our own mediocrity in doing them, we do some things because they are inherently worth doing. They are the right things for us to do. This is the perspective I try to cultivate about my life and my work.
And yet. In January, when it is cold, when the days are only just getting a little brighter, when abuses and injustices proliferate, when the “adults in the room” that I expect to restrain evil are acting like petulant brats, the cry of the Teacher doesn’t sound so foreign coming from my own throat. “Meaningless! Meaningless! Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless!”
Somewhere within me I know this isn’t true, but after the winter celebrations are over, in January it feels true. I’ve often said that if February were more than twenty-eight (or -nine) days, who could endure it? C. S. Lewis knew what he was doing when, to evoke a desperate situation, he described Narnia under the rule of the White Witch as “always winter and never Christmas.”
How do we keep going when it seems like our contributions are futile, our actions unlikely to change the desperate situations around us?
For Christmas, I bought my son and me tickets to the rerelease of The Lord of the Rings extended edition movies in theaters, and for three consecutive nights in January, we braved the arctic chill to watch them. I saw the movies when they were first released a quarter century ago, and it is still astonishing they were made at all. But as much as I admire the movies, there’s one huge change from the books that gnaws at me whenever I think about it: the way that, in the movies, the peoples of Middle-Earth have to be tricked or cajoled into doing the right thing.
This is most seen in The Two Towers, where King Theoden of Rohan, after being released from Saruman’s spell, decides to turtle in Helm’s Deep against Saruman’s coming onslaught, rather than riding out to meet it, or when the Ents decide not to care about the rest of Middle-Earth…until Merry and Pippin trick them into seeing the destruction of Fangorn up close. War is something only worth fighting when it is existential. Let others look to their own lands in the meantime.
The books, while factually similar (the Ents still end up at Isengard and the Rohirrim at Helm’s Deep), present a different picture. War is no more desirable than the movies present it, the prospect of victory no more assured, and yet the posture of the characters is different. Here’s how the book describes Treebeard after the Ents decide (without hobbit trickery) to march to war:
At last [Treebeard] looked up, and Pippin could see a sad look in his eyes, sad but not unhappy. . . . “Of course, it is likely enough, my friends,” he said slowly, “likely enough that we are going to our doom: the last march of the Ents. But if we stayed at home and did nothing, doom would find us anyway, sooner or later. . . . Now at least the last march of the Ents may be worth a song. Aye,” he sighed, “we may help the other peoples before we pass away.”3
There’s a big posture difference between “let others handle their own problems” and “we’ll probably lose, but we’re marching to help them anyway.” Or consider this from Theoden:
The world changes, and all that once was strong now proves unsure. How shall any tower withstand such numbers and such reckless hate?… The end will not be long. But I will not end here, taken like an old badger in a trap…. When dawn comes, I will bid men sound Helm’s horn, and I will ride forth…. Maybe we shall cleave a road, or make such an end that will be worth a song—if any be left to sing of us hereafter.
Theoden, after taking Gandalf’s advice and riding to war, realizes he’s beaten. He’s unlikely to survive the night. Yet instead of hiding in despair, his response is to meet the enemy head-on. Based on the facts available to him, there is no prospect of victory. And he rides out anyway.
This is the posture of the heroes throughout The Lord of the Rings books. Yes, they are likely to perish in this quest. No, they are unlikely to succeed. But they are going to do it anyway. The Lady Galadriel at one point calls her many-ages task of keeping Sauron at bay “[fighting] the long defeat,” a phrase that captures this posture well. The task is difficult, unlikely to result in victory, and undertaken nonetheless.
I return to the earlier question: How do we not collapse in a heap when it seems that our best efforts are unlikely to bring about the change we desire?
I think the answer is hope. And hope is a storied concept. It is not groundless optimism or positive vibes but based on a conviction that our lives are part of an ongoing story that is heading in a coherent direction, and the evidence of this is the stories of those who have come before us (memory).
We can see it in the comments of Treebeard and Theoden. They are not only thinking of their deeds being put into stories and songs. They are remembering the stories and songs that they desire their deeds to imitate. When Theoden later dies in battle, he says, “I go to my fathers. And even in their mighty company I shall not now be ashamed.” His story connects to their stories. And though he dies and doesn’t see the end for which he was fighting come into being, he has fulfilled his trust.
This is even more evident in another passage from The Two Towers. Sam and Frodo are trudging toward Mordor, and as they go, Sam recalls the old stories he used to love, of the heroes having “lots of chances…of turning back, only they didn’t.” He says to Frodo, “I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?”
Frodo responds, “I don’t know. And that’s the way of a real tale…. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don’t know. And you don’t want them to.”
What energizes Sam is the realization that what he and Frodo are doing is continuing a story that began before they were born and will finish after they die. “Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still!'“ Sam says. “It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?”
What keeps Frodo and Sam’s feet moving, one step at a time, toward what they know is a likely impossible task is memory—memory of their favorite tales, of the heroes who inspired them—and hope, hope that they will be faithful for their part of the continuing story.
Hebrews 11, the “hall of fame of faith,” recounts the stories of those who stayed faithful, even when “none of them received what had been promised.”4 The next verse says, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.” I’ve often heard this described as a grandstand full of people cheering us—the living—on as we run our race. But it seems more clear to me that it is we who are the watchers, learning from their example what we need to keep going.
Several years ago I read Preaching as Reminding: Stirring Memory in an Age of Forgetfulness by Jeffrey D. Arthurs. Arthurs’s argument (as I remember it) is that the chief task of the preacher is to be a “remembrancer.” Each week we rehearse the story of Jesus because it’s easy to forget, especially with the white noise that fills our lives. It seems appropriate to me for a church service to be oriented around Jesus’ command to gather, rehearse the story, and share the bread and wine “in remembrance of me.” In so doing, we say, “Christ has died” (memory), “Christ is risen” (current reality), “Christ will come again” (hope).
When I think of Sam’s question—“I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?”—it’s easy to look around and say, “A dystopia.” It’s easier still to think this in January. But in hope, we can recognize that things aren’t as they should be, but we are part of a story that is moving toward an end. We are not trapped in a succession of random happenstances. Faithfulness in this moment—to whatever our appointed task—is a thing worth doing, and thus a thing worth doing badly. It is worth fighting the long defeat.
Hope is among what are known as the “theological virtues,” faith, hope, and love. I think often of these words from Chesterton on the theological virtues:
Charity means pardoning what is unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all…. Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and eclipse…. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.5
The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and eclipse…and Januaries full of turmoil and hurt. Hope (the theological virtue) exists for times such as these. And I pray it will be useful.
Clicking
I reviewed In Defense of Dabbling for The Englewood Review of Books.
Adam Kirsch argues that reading is a vice.
Christianity Today profiles Daniel Nayeri.
Cate Hall on cultivating agency.
January might be the only month in which it is defensible to eat an entire cake off a cake stand, top down, in one sitting. This guide will show you how.
G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World?
All Lord of the Rings quotes are from J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings Illustrated (Harpercollins, 2021, ebook).