In dark times, remind your children that Mordor is real.

But so is Aslan.

Several years ago I read the book, “Live Not By Lies” by Rod Dreher. The book details the stories and sentiments of those who have lived through (and survived) the nightmare of Soviet totalitarianism. He wrote it as a sort of guidebook (and an alarm bell) for American citizens and families as we quickly lose liberties that were once common and expected. He argues that there is a sharp and increasing rise of “soft totalitarianism” (and he’s right) in the West. He shared the steps that modern-day dissidents adopted in hopes that we in the West would wake up and be prepared.

One of the most memorable portions of the book came in chapter seven, titled, “Families Are Resistance Cells.” Dreher was interviewing the wife of a couple, Vaclav and Kamila Benda, who are Catholic and live in Prague. They had suffered immensely when Vaclav was sentenced to four years in prison by the Czechoslovak state. His crimes? Fighting for human rights. The couple had worked together in the Czech dissident movement and were active in the underground Catholic church. I wish I could relay the entire chapter to you and the advice given when it comes to bolstering the strength of your families and the souls of your children, in trying times.

I will share one special piece of advice that Kamila gave to Dreher when he visited her to pay respects to the memory of her late husband.

Kamila recounted her routine of reading out loud to her children for two to three hours each and every day. I’m a mother who loves literature and even I don’t read this often to my children, but she did and it was a lifeline. She stated that they read broadly - fairy tales and classics. Even some horror books and myths. Of all the books they read, she stated emphatically that J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” was the foundational bedrock they all stood on. Why?

Kamila answered,

“Because we knew Mordor was real. We felt that their story” - that of the hobbits and others resisting the evil Sauron - “was our story too. Tolkien’s dragons are more realistic than a lot of the things we have in this world.”

The children of Vaclav and Kamila expanded on that thought by sharing that they felt prepared to resist evils (communism, specifically) because they had grown up understanding the wide chasm between truth and falsehoods. Good and evil. Their parents had impressed upon them that imagination and truth were something that no one would be able to steal from them.

I have thought of that passage of the book over a dozen times in the last 10 days. We do our children a disservice when we don’t expose them to appropriate levels of evil in our world. We can’t expect them to only believe stories of darkness and light exist in the old classics we have in our school curriculum. Instead, we need to be inundating their minds and hearts with stories of dragons and knights, castaways, and war heroes. Stay up late with them and read about Gollum and his selfish, tragic fall but then follow it swiftly with Samwise and his unwavering loyalty and honor in the face of sheer evil.

In the darkest of hours, we need to remember and remind our young ones that evil is very real and they will witness it firsthand, eventually. We also need to remind them that light will break through the pitch black of night and conquer in the end.