This week we read "Many Partings" and "Homeward Bound," our final double chapter. The ending of our text reverses the outward trip. Many Partings mirrors the title "Many Meetings", which tells of the Hobbits arriving in Rivendell, where the Fellowship is formed. In this chapter, the Fellowship is officially dissolved, and the Hobbits head to Rivendell to spend time with Bilbo, before eventually leaving him, too. In Homeward Bound they return to Bree village and have a talk with Butterbur, the innkeeper, at whose tavern they met Strider and accidentally revealed the Ring. He tells them things have changed for the worse since they left. There have been fights and fires, and a few people have died. Robbers and wolves assail the village.
You see, we’re not used to such
troubles; and the Rangers have all gone away,
folk tell me. I don’t
think we’ve rightly understood till now what they did for us.
We know what happened to the Rangers, they answered Aragorn's call to come to Minas Tirith to assist against Mordor. A valiant purpose, but they left those they'd secretly protected suddenly vulnerable.
On the one hand, Bree (and the Shire) has developed what I think the Creative Wizard considers the ideal culture: Farming, drinking, laughing, celebrating. They ignore the outside problems of the world, and those outside problems ignore them.
That's what we're made to think at the start of the book, anyway. But now we see those outside problems were always trying to get in and it was the vigilance of the Rangers who kept them out - Rangers whom the people have never felt warmly toward! This is how Barliman introduces Aragorn to Frodo in the beginning of the text: "He is one of the wandering folk – Rangers we call them. He seldom talks: not but what he can tell a rare tale when he has the mind. He disappears for a month, or a year, and then he pops up again. He was in and out pretty often last spring; but I haven’t seen him about lately. What his right name is I’ve never heard: but he’s known round here as Strider."
He was popping in and out keeping the peace!
We tend to think of a peaceful world as a world without conflict. If there is conflict or injustice anywhere we are not in a peaceful world. But that deprives us from appreciating goodness when we do have it. Perfection is not the only thing worth celebrating. But imperfection necessitiates maintance, and we should appreciate those who maintain our world wh.
If the Rangers are guilty of anything it was keeping their vigilance a secret. They could have spent some of that time sharing their efforts with the locals and offering to train those who wished to join. Instead they are so secretive no one even knows that they leave, except that their lives get worse once they're gone.
We're all guilty of secretly protecting people, in one way or another. But that can make them dependent on us. If we really want to protect whoever or whatever it is, we should empower it to be involved in its own safety. Perhaps the Rangers believed destroying Mordor outweighed protecting Bree, since they were taking the fight to the source. In that case this chapter reminds us that although The Ring has been destroyed, there is still violence and greed and other bads in the world. They still should have included the locals in their watches.
We've said, over and over again, that all power is bad. This includes powers we would use to protect others. Protecting someone is a form of exercising power over them - you're preventing them from harm. This is OK for children; All kindergartens should be protected, but all kindergarteners, eventually, grow up. They need to learn how to protect themselves, and to take the risks of life upon themselves.
It is a false safety to be so protective of someone they become dependent on you. They are actually more vulnerable. If you die or leave to deal "with the source," they are ill-equipped to protect themselves. True protection comes with empowerment. In my line of work it's called faded supports - supporting someone less and less so they can practice more and more independence until finally you aren't needed at all.
It is natural to want to protect those we love from the dangers of the world. But, if we love them, we also will want them to grow into autonomous and independent selves, which means facing those risks on their own. So while we protect them we must also empower them. This is the best protection we can provide - protection they can take with them when we are gone.
But that requires us to, first, tell them of the dangers. We may not want to. If we can protect them, why even burden them with the knowledge of their existence? Well, at some point they will find out - don't you want to be involved in that? We hoard power over them when we avoid these hard conversations. And at some point we won't be there, and their dependence on us will become a great liability. We should prepare them for that inevitability.
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