“In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit.” These opening words to J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” have been inscribed in my mind from my earliest memories. My father used to read the book aloud, long before I could read it myself, and the ideas of hobbits and elves, dragons and dwarves, adventures and heroism, were embedded in my imagination as firmly as my own family history. As I grew older, eventually reading “The Lord of the Rings” and then watching Peter Jackson’s movie adaptations, I fell in love with the world of Middle Earth that Tolkien created in his stories. I found a comfort in Tolkien’s stories unlike anything else I’ve read since; and, as an English major and dedicated bookworm, I’ve read quite a lot.
I recently experienced something of a “Saint Joseph Synergy,” finding a copy of Father Donald H. Calloway’s “Consecration to St. Joseph” in my mailbox, and on the very same day that we read at Mass: