"It is a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where terrible things happen and wonderful things too. It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil, love against hate, order against chaos, in a great struggle...yet for all its confusion and wildness, it is a world where the battle goes ultimately to the good, who live happily ever after...That is the fairy tale of the gospel... (Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth)
Because we live in an Age where our schedule and our lifestyle leave us a mile wide and an inch deep, it is only rarely that we take the time to listen to the Story that God is telling in His own words, brushed clean of the sediment of centuries of interpretation and the sentiment of our favorite pop Christian speaker. Our much-maligned (we are grown-ups now, you know) and under-nourished (they do it so much better on t.v.!) imagination is too out of practice to help us see anything in this whole Jesus thing but the things we have been (repeatedly) told we are supposed to see. Quite honestly, our chronological snobbery (as C.S. Lewis terms it) can hardly bear to admit that we go to this dusty tome - written by backwater prophets from an unadvanced society during an age of such superstitious rot - for guidance and direction at all! We are so chic, so cosmopolitan...only by a strenuous effort of compartmentalization can we allow any place in our lives for this little...intellectual indiscrection.
Like Robin Williams in the movie Hook, it has almost become necessary for many of us to go to the ancient writings each day only by our own mental version of clapping our hands together and repeating over and over "I do believe in fairies! I do! I do!"
And then, moments later, we return to our real lives: we turn on the news, check in with the market and our financial future, and begin another day-long enslavement to our real business and the technology that tethers us to it. Our expression is all "game-face", our pace is at a full gallop, our value is measured by what we accomplish and how much someone is willing to pay us for it, our relationships are means to an end, and our hearts...our hearts are written off as the last inconvenient remnant of our childhood - also simply known as those embarassing years of dependance and no market value...before we 'grew up and became somebody important'.
And with every step we take into this 'adult' world we clap our hands and say "There's no such thing as fairy tales! There isn't! There isn't!"
No wonder we can't quite figure out who exactly we are, or how we want to live our lives. How could we? The deepest truth of what we claim to be at th core of the Universe is on a destructive collision course with the entire ethos of our daily lives...and the prevading atmosphere of the culture in which we live, and move, and have our being.
Ouch. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. Doesn't the Bible say that it is supposed to be in God that we are to live and move and have our being? Dang that old book. Always saying weird, hard to believe stuff like that. Somebody ought to do a remake. An adult version,maybe. Something that takes into account how things really are here in the real world. All the useful stuff, minus the fairy tales.
Wouldn't that be nice?
Actually...
...more palatable to the modern mind, yes...
But hardly an improvement on the situation. The fact that we imagine there would be anything significant left after eliminating "the fairy tale" from God's Story just goes to show how very lost we truly are.
We know we've said this before, but it bears repeating (probably every morning if we have any prayer of letting it sink in): we are going to have to come to grips with the fact that the Christian gospel is Fairy Tale through and through - beautiful, magical, terrifying, delightful, Fairy Tale. Just look at it with an open mind: The creator of the Universe is a Lover? God had a Son? Jesus was a God in human flesh? One powerful piece of fruit screwed everything up, and one voluntary sacrifice thousands of years later fixed everything again? A terrible dark Power is warring for our souls? A Paradise beyond anyone's wildest imagination awaits in the final act of the drama?
Come on. What rational adult is going to believe all of that?
Thank God that "the rational adult" is not the final judge of Truth in the Universe.
For the gospel is a Fairy Tale. And the sooner we do come to grips with this, the sooner we will find ourselves. For when we find the heart of God we will discover that it was not He who has been made in the image of the 21st century businessman, but we who have been made in the image of the extravagant, wondrous Author of the Great Fable known as planet Earth.
"...wonderful things, and terrible things..."
It isn't just the "child" in you that needs this to be true, by the way. You can't dismiss it that easily. It's the you in you that needs this to be true. The you that has been beaten down, gagged, silenced, mocked and ridiculed into submission. It's the deepest part of you, the "original shining self" (Buechner).
It's what we call our heart.
Yes, around here we traded 'the heart' in long ago for efficiency. For maturity. For responsibility. For wealth and the external props of success. Do we need to be reminded (probably every day as well?) again that the wealthiest, busiest, most 'advanced' societies in the world have the highest percentage of people who are lonely and unfulfilled?
So what's it gonna be? The Fairy Tale God for Sundays, an ocassional kick in the m
orality pants, and the hope of Heaven...and then the grown-up World to instruct us in everything else?"Don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God?" (James 4:4).
What harsh, uncompromising words. Usually ones that we rush past, ignore, hope to avoid. I use to think that they were just religious mumbo-jumbo for super saints and Amish folk.
But they're not.
It's just the way things work.
The Anti-Fairy Tale that we have all been brought up to believe in is at odds, at war, with the Story God is telling. That is why friendship with one way of looking at Life just has to be rejection, mockery, and repudiation of the opposite point of view.
From the very beginning, God has been writing a Fairy Tale.
And you're in It.
How would your life be different if you dared to believe this? What would your character do next? Aren't you dying to find out?
We are.
Why not give it a try? Try mocking the 'world' for once and taking God's point of view as the one that really matters instead. You believe in a gospel that is nothing short of a fairy tale...and yet the most True thing in all the universe. What a glorious adventure!
"Go get your castle, Yul Brenner." (Cool Runnings)
Your servants today, tomorrow, and Once Upon a Time,
Derrick and David
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