Some Day You Will Be Old Enough to Read Fairy Tales Again
Are Nosotros Old Enough to Read Fairy Tales?
When did you stop reading fairy tales? Were you eight…ten…twelve? Perchance you've read a fairy tale to a kid as an adult and actually been caught upward in the story–wanting to push back bedtime and find out what happens next. Could it be that fairy tales are not something to outgrow?
During a contempo radio interview, folklorist Maria Tarta said fairy tales are making a comeback for adults. She points to television receiver shows like Grimm, Game of Thrones, and True Blood and notes how they weave fairy tale themes into their stories. She says, "It'due south peachy that today [fairy tales take] made a improvement. We're recognizing that these stories are not just the domain of childhood."
Perchance the idea of fairy tales for adults isn't all that new. In dedicating The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to Lucy Barfield, C. South. Lewis said, "I wrote this story for y'all, but when I began it I had non realized that girls abound quicker than books. As a result you lot are already too old for fairy tales, and past the time it is printed and spring yous will be older nonetheless. Only some mean solar day you will exist one-time enough to get-go reading fairy tales over again."
It seems to me that, unfortunately, Christians—at least many contemporary American Christians—tend to shy away from these kinds of stories. Near the start of her interview I was struck to hear Tatar say, "I retrieve sitting through sermons every bit utter torture, and maybe that'south why I was attracted to fairy tales."
It could be, though, that fairy tales are making a comeback, not only in popular culture, but in the church as well. We might be getting erstwhile enough, equally Lewis hoped, to start reading fairy tales once again.
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photograph past L. Whittaker on Flickr and licensed by http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/ii.0/legalcode[/caption]
One of my favorite books on preaching is Frederick Buechner's Telling the Truth: The Gospel every bit Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. Buechner encourages preachers to tap into what Tatar calls the "storytelling instinct" that, she says, is evidenced by the fact that "from the starting time we need to communicate to tell things that makes sense of what happened." Or, to use Joan Didion's memorable statement, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
Rachel Marie Stone, a author for Christianity Today, observes that fantasy literature might be a means to create openness to the message of the gospel. She quotes anthropologist Tanya Luhrman as saying, "I myself think that a capacity for imagination improves someone'southward capacity to experience God intimately, and I recall there's testify for this." Then, writing nigh well-known atheist Richard Dawkins' recent criticism of fairy tales, she asks, "Does Dawkins turn down fairy tales considering he rejects God, or is it the other way around?"
C. S. Lewis was one who told fairy tales himself, and was, in fact, led to Christ through the concept of fairy tale and myth. In his biography of J. R. R. Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter relates a word between Tolkien and Lewis about the Christian story as "truthful myth." In the give-and-take Tolkien said, "Our myths may exist misguided, but they steer still shakily towards the truthful harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil." Lewis responded to this past saying, "You mean that the story of Christ is just a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, just a myth that really happened? In that case, I brainstorm to sympathize."
After coming to faith, Lewis connected to understand and communicate—peculiarly through the Chronicles of Narnia and the Space Trilogy—the Christian faith in terms of story, myth, and fifty-fifty fairy-tale. He wrote a famous essay titled "Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What'due south to be Said," in which he explains that, equally a child, he had a hard time feeling "what one ought to feel about God or nearly the sufferings of Christ." In light of that, he asked himself, "Supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary earth, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, 1 could make them for the offset time appear in their real authorisation?"
In Francis Spufford'southward recent book Unapologetic, after surveying the traditional defenses (or apologies) of God's existence in the midst of our world total of evil, he concludes that none of them are ultimately convincing. He goes on to say, however, "We don't have an argument that solves the problem of the cruel world, but we accept a story." For those who might be nervous about conceiving of the gospel every bit story because it might call its historicity into question, Spufford is quick to say, "A story is not the same thing as a lie."
This calls to mind another peachy quote from Tolkien on the Gospels and fairy tales. He writes, "Of class I do not mean that the Gospels tell what is only a fairy-story; but I exercise mean very strongly that they do tell a fairy-story: the greatest. Human the story-teller would have to exist redeemed in a way consonant with his nature: by a moving story."
Wesley Colina, a New Testament professor at Trinity School for Ministry, observes that much contemporary New Testament scholarship, and specifically that of Due north.T. Wright, seeks to read the Bible in terms of a grand story "whose major buzzwords [are] 'story,' 'narrative,' and the associated terms of literary assay."
Loma shares that after an in-depth study of Wright soon later on re-reading The Lord of the Rings, he was start to read Harry Potter and the Wizard's Stone for the get-go time. "Having loved the dramatic sweep of Tolkien'south narrative, and having caught a glimpse of a derivative (just no less delightful) arc in Rowling's tales," he writes, "I was primed to encompass a biblical theology like Wright'due south."
Earlier this twelvemonth Loma picked upwards Harry Potter again, but this time, rather than North. T. Wright'due south paradigm ringing in his ears, information technology was the words of mid-20th century German scholar Ernst Käsemann. "According to Käsemann," Colina writes, "the problem with a scheme like Wright's, in which a promise-making God meets a covenant-keeping people, is that it can downplay, or even sideline altogether, the moments of sharp discontinuity, the moments of slippage and rupture, in which divine allegiance encounters only human failure and disobedience."
Interestingly plenty, though, Käsemann's criticisms didn't cause Hill to pass up the "Fairy Stories" of Tolkien and Rowling as somehow incongruent with the overarching narrative of scripture. Rather, "with Käsemann'south voice in my ear, I am noticing more narratological chaos, bewilderment, and defeat in Rowling's books than I saw before."
Fairy tales, then, have the capacity to ready one to receive the overarching continuity of the biblical story, and yet also caution confronting adopting a view of slow, steady progress toward the "renewal of all things."
Good fairy tales take what Tolkien chosen "eucatastrophe," which he defined equally "the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces y'all with a joy that brings tears." So when nosotros hear the stone table crack, encounter Gollum falling into burn of Mt. Doom with the ring, or Harry jumping from Hagrid's arms, nosotros're somehow prepared to hear—or hear over again—the story of the get-go Easter, the true myth from which nosotros describe true life.
Rachel Marie Stone concludes her piece with the declaration, echoing the famous words from Joshua 24:15, "As for me and my firm, I pray we'll enjoy a God who comes to us in story, who invites u.s.a. to fall awake into a dream that is more real than waking." Amen.
Source: https://christchurchphoenix.org/are-we-old-enough-to-read-fairy-tales/
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