Searching for a church: Life on the ecclesiastical frontier
Sometimes ecclesiological wisdom pops up in the unlikeliest of places. Reading through Taoism-influenced Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea for the umpteenth time, I couldn’t help noticing that her wizards—the best of whom are trained on the isle of Roke in the center of the Archipelago before scattering to heal, protect and guide far-flung communities—are for all intents and purposes the pastors of Earthsea. And like pastors, the wizards discover during the course of their service that the farther they get from the center of power, the less the knowledge they’d learned there helps.
Toward the end of the novel, the protagonist Ged finds himself in the far southeast corner of Earthsea and recites to his friend Vetch the old adage, “Rules change in the Reaches.” Vetch heartily agrees. “There are good spells I learned on Roke that have no power here, or go all awry; and also there are spells worked here I never learned on Roke. Every land has its own powers, and the farther one goes from the Inner Lands, the less one can guess about those powers and their governance.”
As it is on Earthsea, so it is in this world of ours. The rules do change in the reaches. This is the missionary’s double bind, trying to implant the faith in a new soil where the old forms won’t take root, and then finding it nearly impossible to explain why to the board of overseers back home. Sorting out the difference between the eternal and the provisional, the universal and the local, is not an easy task.
