@pontifex

So the Pope has Twitter. You may know this as, at time of writing, He has 1,115,327 followers. If you’re one of them, you may have noticed the three little Thought Of The Day style posers He’s posted, pertinent questions indeed. You may also already have your own solutions to them, but nonetheless here are mine:

1) How can we celebrate the Year of Faith better in our daily lives?

Now apparently this year, which lasts from 11 October 2012 – 24 November 2013 is a “summons to an authentic and renewed conversion to the Lord, the One Savior of the world”, in which case ‘celebrate’ could well be replaced by ‘bemoan’. However, I’ll take a stab at this one anyway. The key word for me is ‘authentic’ – and I’m certainly going to celebrate better if my conversion to the Lord is genuine. So I believe, reading the above with a dose of interpretive license, the Lord, the One Savior of the world can be more personal and unconventional than traditional or even… religious.

In preparation and to get me in the right sort of mood for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which I’ll be viewing on Sunday afternoon, I’ve recently been reacquainting myself with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (not that I need an excuse to justify doing so). And I see credible parallels between Frodo and a saviour of the world for sure:

• He saves the world.

So daily, from now until next November, I’ll be demonstrating a renewed conversion to my Lord: Frodo Baggins of Bag End, Hobbiton. Clearly the first step is to get down the barbers and sort my hair out – dark brown colouring and a perm please, one! I’ll be changing my birthday to 22 September. I’ll become more musically-minded. I’ll adopt a token in place of the One Ring, (the original can’t be used for obvious reasons) and destroy it in my fireplace on 24/11/2013 (it should be cold enough for fires then) – I’m thinking something that I can keep in my pocket; something I can wear; something others will covet; something that will melt… aha! An eyepatch it is. I’ll wear this when I want to escape the attentions of orcs and goblins (distant relatives over Christmas will do fine for these), and I might wear it too tight so it makes me irritable and snappy. And of course I’ll need to make a long and perilous journey somewhere with a group of mates – the Red Lion at the top of the hill, it gets proper icy around there in winter.

2) How can faith in Jesus be lived in a world without hope?

This one’s trickier as it unavoidably namedrops Jesus himself. I’m gonna stick my neck out here and say… it can’t. Yep – faith in Jesus can’t be lived in a world without hope. On second reading that’s a terribly-worded question anyway – can faith be lived? This one doesn’t deserve much of an answer, if I’m honest.

3) Any suggestions on how to be more prayerful when we are so busy with the demands of work, families and the world?

I’m gonna take a few liberties here and make an assumption: being prayerful is paramount an authentic and renewed conversion to the Lord, the One Savior of the world, Frodo Baggins. With this established, I say forget work, forget your family (unless they’re necessary as representative of other-worldly creatures) and forget the world. Pushed for time and can’t integrate your prayerful routine into your usual commitments? Screw the latter – and if they’re worth anything to you, they’ll be waiting on 25 November 2013.