What's your "Precious?"

Notes on Power and not a single mention of Legolas, unfortunately.

I love Lord of the Rings. Anyone who knows me knows that this is the equivalent of a sacred text. The image that visits me most often when I am running group counseling is Gollum hovering over the ring. His body language is covetous. It is possessive and revealing. You can intuit everything you need to know without ever hearing his whispers. It is beloved. It truly is precious.

It is precious because it is gold but it is precious because of what it means. Gollum is the darkest version of Gollum because of his ownership of the Ring of Power. I would also argue that Gollum was the darkest version of Gollum before the Ring but that’s for another essay.

If you listen closely enough, you can usually touch on what is most precious to people in the first few moments of meeting them. People are always communicating what they value. They will most often reveal themselves without meaning to.

You can find this on a bumper sticker, a tattoo, or an off-the-cuff remark. You can find this in a compliment given or more noticeably, not given. You can find this in body language or a menu item ordered. It is a signal, a flare sent up, a waving flag. They could want you to know that they are compassionate or that they are patriotic. They could be telling you that they are afraid of themselves or that they need to be liked. They are telling you everything they need you to know about them to keep them safe.

If you had to choose one thing for people to know about you, what would it be?

Now that you have that, think about how you hold it.

Do you hold it with your body over it, like it would disturb you to let it go? Do you whisper to it under your breath? Do you hold it like a gift, uninhibited and ready to share?

It isn’t the values or the concept or the trait that are the problem, it is the inability to part with what they mean. It is the clawing behind it, the desperation, the misplacement of them being your value. If your values, even the highest, best-intended values are where you find your center of gravity, you will be a slave to them. If you don’t know that your value is something that you could never earn by good behavior, then you won’t be able to embody your values. They won’t be in your bones.

If you would like to think of yourself as a good person, a morally righteous person, someone who makes the right choices on behalf of others, that’s not a problem. It’s not a problem until it is a problem and you can’t let it go. It’s not a problem until you are comfortable with little remarks about people who don’t think like you. It’s not a problem until you start getting comfortable with the idea of violence against them. It’s not a problem until you group them together and think they are less.

Everyone does this, by the way. We all have little nicknames for the people that are different. It’s how we keep them distant. It is how we stay safe. This is an ego game that keeps you out of love and in a rut. You can run this game forever but your spirit will come knocking when it is time for you to level up.

Jesus used the Samaritan in the parable of The Good Samaritan for a reason. He wanted to make a splash. He wanted to disrupt. He wanted to make people a little sick at the idea of that kind of generosity. He wanted you to imagine the person that you find the most repulsive, the person you would most like violently removed from this earth, and imagine giving and receiving love from them, imagine owing them your life.

This is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Full stop.

As each character in the Lord of the Rings gets taken down by the power of the ring, including Frodo, it is a moment of self-reflection. Would you fall under the spell of something so dark and lustrous? Would you have the fortitude to withstand its call? Would the ego game that you are running take you down? Do you, as my friends in the leadership coaching business would say, need to stay safe, stay comfortable, be right, or look good?

It is an easy trap to fall into. You can start with beauty-full and sidestep into vanity, sometimes moment to moment and back again. You can begin with hope and step backward into willful naivety. You can be productive and steamroll into self-slavery. The real game is to be awake to the hustle you are running so you can figure out why you picked that strategy to begin with.

Maybe you needed to be the smart one to feel secure in your family. Maybe you had to make jokes to relieve the tension of a heavy home. Maybe you need to be delightful to manage someone’s anger or be angry to cover up the fact that you have never felt safe enough to be delightful. It’s no judgment. It all works until it doesn’t.

You feel this with people’s politics, food choices, and even their faith. Ideologies get a bad rap for a reason. I would bet money that the people who find their identity in these concepts were so grateful to find them that they haven’t paused to think about what it would mean to let them go. If you are grasping at something so tightly that you would be willing to see someone suffer for it, it’s time to hold it differently or put it down for a while. If you’d ruin something beautiful to make a point, you’ve missed the boat. This is not human flourishing. This is shame.

Most of us are soaked to the bone in shame and it drives everything we do. It is the ringing alarm going off behind us, whipping us throughout the day. It isn’t a problem to get up and make coffee and exercise. It isn’t a problem to work hard and drive your kids around and watch TV and sleep, only to wake up and do it all over again. It is the way that you do it that matters.

Are you waking up grateful, and excited to see another day? Are you savoring that coffee, exercising because your body can’t wait to move? Are you giving your presence to your work and being intimate with the windows of time you get your kids? Are you watching that show or watching your phone or both or neither? Are you actually choosing any of this or just keeping the train on the tracks? Are you living or just trying desperately not to fail?

How much shame would you say lives in your body on a daily basis?

Would you be willing to let it go?

What’s your precious?

As Samwise Gamgee would say, “Throw it into the fire.”

I dare you.

❤️