I don’t know that happy endings last. There may come a time when the KFC in Fallujah is carbombed, or the whole country goes up in flames. The space of our peace is temporary. The Second World War ended in September ’45. The Cold War began right afterward. History ended in 1989. September 11 followed on its heels. Tomorrow is a blank. Christ suggested that we pray “to give us this day our daily bread”; that we should never worry about tomorrow, “because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

We celebrate our children’s birthdays without knowing what the future brings. Our task is to bring joy into the present. Before Tony Snow died he wrote that he was upborne by the intuition that “that the gift of life, once given, cannot be taken away,” that life, once lived, was one space that the darkness could never invade. Tolkien was a great connoisseur of treasures which we tread underfoot, of the secret doors we pass by, too busy to notice. His world is full of drifting leaves, shifting airs, changing shades. Everything in it passes. And yet it all endures. In his universe only evil and malice are futile. Love, and the smile that simple fried chicken can bring, last forever in the mind of God.

Though all to ruin fell the world
and were dissolved and backward hurled
unmade into the old abyss,
yet were its making good, for this –
the dusk, the dawn, the earth, the sea –
that Lúthien for a time should be.