A Hobbit-themed blog post in honor of Bilbo’s Birthday at the end of the week (September 22nd)
J.R.R Tolkien begins the Hobbit by telling us that Bilbo was a hobbit who lived in a hole in the ground, though not a muddy or dirty hole but a very homely and welcoming one for “It was a hobbit hole and that means comfort.” I’ve spent the weekend in airports across the country, in the ICU, in a beach condo in Destin Florida, and will return home shortly to Honolulu. That is to say, I’ve seen a lot of things that fly under the banner of “comfort” all while praying the daily office and reading The Lord of the Rings (which I read every four years during he election cycle). All of this has given rise to a question in me, “What is comfort?”
For all of today’s “modern comforts”, comfort itself seems to elude us. We may be fat and lazy or luxurious or spoiled or well-off or even blessed, but comfort –real comfort— is a rarity in contemporary life.
Think about how inconsistently we use the word:
We say to a friend of ours who gets a promotion that comes with a nice office, “Ooooh, comfy!” Comfy here operates as a kind of complimentary insult, meant to both congratulate while also check our friend’s good fortune.
We say to someone who we fear has settled down and looks (heaven forbid) that they might be approaching something like Christian contentment, “Be careful! Don’t get too comfy…!” Comfy here implies that they are being tempted to excuse themselves from the rat-race, be happy (though possibly less successful), and bless God.
We have the “ComfortPlus” section of airplanes which, while more comfortable than the coach, still on an airplane and therefore not really “comfortable”… we still can’t wait to get to our destination which, regardless of where it is, is somehow more comfortable than the flight. Comfy here is a euphemistic relativity; its not comfortable really, but its more comfy than the back where the seats don’t recline and the first round of alcohol is not complimentary.
I visit my father in the ICU and hear him asked, “are you comfortable?” The person asking this was being incredibly kind but I have no idea what this is supposed to mean if taken literally. What the sweet charge nurse means is “can I serve you in any further way to help you in this hard time?” not “Have we gotten you, what with the hospital gown, the bed pan, the double I.V.s, the cords and nodules sticking-put all over your body, the fast you’re on for tomorrow’s procedure, the frigidity of the medical facility, the recycled air, the proximity of death, the pain of your body, etc. truly and really comfortable?”
We live, moreover, in a time where the idea of “the comfort zone” is growing more and more salient. “Um you’re in my comfort zone…” we say to signal to others that their current existence is doing violence to me in some way ---once again undefined but covered-up under the term “comfort.” Byung-Chul Han observes how “[t]oday, we are settling into a comfort zone from which the negativity of the foreign has been eliminated” (37). “Comfort” today increasingly names a zone that we build to eliminate those things that which would cause us to encounter the cross of reality. We have a personal “comfort zone” that we therapeutically police with all of the strength of the gestapo.
Now wait: It would be easy, I think, to make a false jump, an excessive reaction empty of thinking; to say “Yeah Fr. Mark, comfort is bad!” No! You’re wrong to do so. That is not what I am saying. I am saying that comfort is something good, the true definition of which we must —MUST— recover.
Just as I am not against wine, but am against bad wine —and I am against it precisely because of how much I love good wine. I think we need to push-back against false comfort precisely because we should be a people of real comfort.
What do I have in mind? Well, for now, two things: (1) St. Paul; and (2) Hobbits.
St. Paul refers praises “the God of all comfort” (2 Cor 1:3). This is the Father who sent his Son to the Cross, who calls us to follow after Jesus and carry our own, and who sometimes calls his Church into deep and radical suffering for the sake of the Gospel. These are all things that, given our modern mess about it, might quickly be identified as threats to comfort. But not, it seems, for real comfort. What does Paul, and through him the Holy Spirit, mean then?
God is the God of all Comfort who gives his people real comfort and who will lead them to the final and everlasting comfort at the end of all things. Comfort is not a zone that I must guard, it is a gift from Yahweh. It is, in some sense, Yahweh’s presence himself.
Comfort begins where bingeing fails: it lifts up the enjoyment and the rest and the surrender placed on the passing of time to offer (1) thanksgiving, and (2) contentment, and (3) a hospitality to the strange, uncomely, and foreign.
The hobbits are creatures of comfort with faces that were, “as a rule good-natured rather than beautiful, broad, bright-eyed, red-cheeked, with mouths apt to laughter, and to eating and drinking” (FOTR, I.1). For them, comfort is not a zone but a way of inhabiting the world. It doesn’t exist as a regulated privacy of insulated protection but as a sheer gratuity, a gift.
I’ve been thinking about rest a lot too, what with moving between multiple time zones multiple times in a single month, and here’s a clue that I’m following: we will not recover a biblical view of rest until we recover a biblical view of comfort. And I have this suspicion that the Bible’s view of “comfort” and the Hobbits’ view of “comfort” are far closer than we may realize.