Time for Anonymity

No matter what you know, it's who you know
No matter how great you are
You got to know somebody
That knows somebody
Who knows somebody
That is somebody
So run and tell somebody
To finance somebody
So they can pay somebody
To push somebody
You have to trust somebody
You have to trust somebody
So why not trust the Maker
He will help you make it

Convoluted as the route from one to the other might be, the song "Ladder of Success," by Ted Hawkins, came to mind when I finally saw Return of the King last night.

One aspect of The Lord of the Rings' climactic scene, emphasized thereafter, that the movie really highlighted for me was the degree to which everything ultimately came down to two characters and the strength of their friendship. We tend to see our own lives in close-ups, and when the camera is focused on Frodo and Sam struggling up Mt. Doom to dispose of the ring, it is easy to believe that the fate of Middle Earth rests with them. When the camera hovers over the crowd of warriors who have made bait of themselves as a distraction, and one sees Mt. Doom off in the distance, it is quite a bit more strange to think that the real action isn't with the king, or the soldiers, or the company wizard.

A similar sense, although much more profound, followed me from the theater when I saw The Passion of the Christ. From the point of view of our globalized world, it's striking how small in scope were the worldly events involved with Christ's coming, death, and resurrection. There's no mention in the Bible, or elsewhere, that every person in the world looked up at the sky — or something — with knowledge that a major event had just happened in the world. Surely there were a great many people even in Jerusalem who had no idea why the Earth might be shaking.

It may sound self-contradictory, but to expect such an instant global effect is to put abnormal limits on God. God, it ought to be clear, has time. Specifically, He has time to wait for the spark of Christ's coming to compound into broad flames of belief. I can imagine an apostle staggering through the streets after the Passion, or striding through them after the Resurrection, and wondering, "Is it possible that none of these people bustling about with their lives know what has just happened?"

Well, yes. It is possible. Probable. God has time.

He also has scope — defines scope. This divine measure of the extent and breadth of events' importance speaks to our own perspective within the limited reach of our actions. A few months ago, a much older friend of mine suggested that she had only recently realized that not everybody can be Mother Theresa. I took the comment to be an equal reference to the amount of good done and the amount of notoriety received. A parent, for example, cannot abandon his or her children to roam the world doing good, and even those who are free to do so will not likely gain worldly fame for their deeds.

During a period when I believed in a vague sort of fate, I half-jokingly fretted that my role in the world might be to cut off some guy on the highway, snapping the final straw, sending him into a frenzy during which he would kill some random woman, who would say something profound on her deathbed, which would affect her son in such a way that, when he became President of the United States, he would institute some policy that averted war. At my most selfish (in my bachelor days), I outlined a story about a failed musician whose child went on to become famous. The story would have been constructed as an expression of tragedy.

In the Christian view, however, God doesn't create human beings simply to be means to another end. Not one of us is merely a bumper in a cosmic machine of events, there only to reflect the sphere of significance in a meaningful direction. So, we oughtn't fear to accept that hints of reality's purpose may not arise directly out of our actions. It may be that momentousness, according to humanity's conception, touches our lives only at a distance. In the mechanism of society, it may be that any given person's manifest role is only to finance somebody to pay somebody to push somebody so that somebody else might make it.

But to God, we all exist in close-up — where it is easy to believe that what we do affects the fate of the entire world.