Unexpected Encounters

Even though he moved to North Carolina, I just can’t seem to keep from running into Norma Wirzba.  No, not the man that many of you like me know and love.  Not the father of four wonderful children whose most redeeming personal characteristic is his wife Gretchen.  Not the still wanna-be competitive basketball player with the suspect ankles.

It is rather the looming specter of his academic work on Christian creation care that seems to follow me wherever I go.  And not just where you would expect, as in Georgetown where he is still well known or at Duke where he is rapidly making a name for himself.

Here I am in Oxford, England and the name that keeps coming up is Norman Wirzba.  Not bad for a poor country boy from Canada, eh!

When I met with Stratfod Caldecott, he told me that he was doing a great deal of work on Christians and an environmental ethic.  Most recently, he had gone to Houston to make a presentation on the topic.  Dr. Caldecott is Catholic and moves in those academic circles, but I took a gambit when I heard about his interest and asked him if he knew the name Norman Wirzba.  He went to his crowded shelf and immediately pulled out Norm’s book on Sabbath.  He proceeded to tell me how influential he was in his thought.

But that was even less surprising than the other place his name surfaced.  I bought the book Ents, Elves and Eriador which purports to be an environmental analysis of Tolkien’s vision of Middle Earth.  It is an incisive look at Tolkien’s created world and shows within the created world both the importance and realistic understanding of sustainable agriculture as well as offering an appreciation of Tolkien’s Christian contribution to environmentalism.

I hadn’t gotten far into the introduction when the authors thank Norm for reading the book prior to publication.  And then, to drive it home, they seem to quote and reference him in almost every chapter.

During my foray into Tolkien studies, I hadn’t expected to come across anyone I had heard of or much less knew.  What a shock to know that sitting in a pew about a third of the way back on my right side nearly every Sunday for my first six years at Faith was my very own Tom Bombadill!

*On a more personal side, Janet and the Boys have safely arrived in Oxford.  As the song says, “Reunited and it feels so good!”