Stay Curious. Stay Kind.

I think a lot these days about King Theoden’s words in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers as the Uruk-Hai batter Helm’s Deep: “What can men do against such reckless hate?”

It’s tempting to think that Aragorn’s response should be our answer: “Ride out and meet them.” I’d love to take a sword to racism, lies, cruelty, sexism, xenophobia. If only it were that easy.

I’ve tried the keyboard warrior approach as a substitute. That didn’t exactly work out well either.

Instead, I think our best response is the one above: stay curious, stay kind. It may be the hardest thing we ever do. But I think it’s the only way.

Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman who lived and died under the Nazi reign of terror in Holland in the Second World War, once wrote, “I feel like a small battlefield in which the problems, or some of the problems, of our time are being fought out. All one can hope to do is keep oneself humbly available, to allow oneself to be a battlefield.”

John Philip Newell writes about Etty in his book, A New Harmony, “to look inhumanity in the face was to know its madness could also take hold of her. She could capitulate to returning hatred for hatred and lose the struggle that each of us needs to be part of….Life’s essential harmony is within each of us. So also is life’s brokenness. To be part of transformation is to look falseness in the face, passionately name it and denounce it in our world, and at the same time to clearly identify its shadow within our own hearts and to do battle with it there.”