A Light in the Darkness

“They will look toward the earth and see only distress, darkness, and the gloom of affliction, and they will be driven into thick darkness.” (Isa. 8:22)

In The Two Towers, the second novel in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Frodo and Sam find themselves driven into the thick darkness of Shelob’s lair, deep in the mountains of Mordor. “They walked as it were in a black vapor wrought of veritable darkness itself that, as it was breathed, brought blindness not only to the eyes but to the mind, so that even the memory of colors and of forms and of any light faded out of…