Long Live Christ the King!

Today’s Second Reading—from Saint Paul—is truly wonderful. St. Paul first affirms the Resurrection of Christ—and our Resurrection in Him on the Last Day. This is the sine qua non of the Faith. For, if there is no resurrection, then we are nothing other than fools. But there is indeed the Resurrection and the Passion and the Incarnation to open up for us the Gates of Heaven, to repair the Felix Culpa, the Happy Fault, of Adam.

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a “myth”, a subcreation, in which he captures the real world created by God—the world found in the Bible and in Catholic belief—and makes it present to the reader’s intellect, especially in the intellect’s power of imagination. He helps us to momentarily step outside of our everyday world in order to see reality in a fresh view, as God actually made it; and this is totally consistent with Holy Scripture and the Doctrine of the Church.

In fact, people who have read Tolkien with a mind open to reality, are always finding things in reality—even in the Bible—that remind them of Tolkien’s writings, of Tolkien’s subcreation. This is not because God read Tolkien—obviously, but rather because Tolkien was so much in touch with reality: with God’s creation and with God, upon Whom Catholic belief and worship is based.

The passage from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians is a case in point. Upon hearing St. Paul say, “For, since death came through a man [Adam], the resurrection of the dead comes also through a Man [Jesus the Christ], one cannot but think of the passage from Tolkien in which Aragorn says, “… and so it seemed fitting that Isildur’s heir should repair Isildur’s fault.” Isildur, like Adam, was the king who failed. Yet Aragorn, like Christ, was the king who repaired Isildur’s fault. He is but a faint shadow of Christ the King, who repairs the fault of Adam. In Tolkien’s subcreation, Aragorn is the figure of Christ as King. How fitting this is for the Solemnity of Jesus Christ King of the Universe!

Saint Martin de Porres

Let us proclaim the greatness of the Lord, for with heavenly gifts he has raised up his lowly servant Martin. -Liturgy of the Hours, Magnificat Antiphon, November 3: St. Martin de Porres

Just one reading of the Second Reading in today's Office of Readings is enough to convince one that St. Martin de Porres is indeed a Humble Hero.