Of all the memorable lines from the Lord of the Rings, King Theoden’s final words stirs me most: “I go to my fathers, in whose mighty company I will not now be ashamed.” Honoring an ancient pledge of friendship, Theoden musters his Rohirrim to the aid of Minas Tirith knowing full well that he will most likely perish in the battle against the hordes of Mordor. At the time of his dying, the outcome of the battle is uncertain. Yet, he has achieved a personal victory—that of placing his friends and his own oaths higher than self-preservation—and departs in peace. He will not now be ashamed to enter the halls of the mighty kings of Rohan before him.

Today, our fascination with the horizontal plane makes it easy to lose touch with this vertical sense of responsibility toward our spiritual forebears. We seem ever intent on measuring ourselves by ourselves, as if the question of what it means to be faithful today can be settled by ourselves, or by surveying our contemporaries. With information technology, the best current practices propagate faster—which is good—but there is also a sense of a flattening of our standards for what constitutes being Christ’s body on earth.

Referring to himself as “a lesser son of great sires,” Theoden seems to have been ever mindful of the great deeds of his mighty fathers. We, too, have a “great cloud of witnesses” from the past. To aspire to their heights, to identify ourselves as part of an ancient people that spans the generations, to claim the Apostle Paul, St. Augustine, John Wesley, William Wilberforce, and Nate Saint as our forefathers, in whose company we strive to one day not be ashamed … this seems to me to be a good goal for all of us.

Heb 12:1, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”