It is dusk as I peddle down the streets of my small, coastal Maine village, enjoying the ambiance of people tucked away in their homes and the rustle of tourists retiring from a day of sightseeing.
A teenager washing dishes is silhouetted in the window of a seafood restaurant, the clang of dishes mingling with the blaring of his music.
A husband and wife are laughing over a glass of wine, their voices lost to the flickering of dim fairy lights.
The house known for partying is lively tonight, and I wonder if the souls inside are searching for a home, parched and restless.
The world is small and cozy, then vast and haunting.
As I coast by vignette after vignette, I wonder who is really awake tonight. A sadness creeps over me as I consider that so many people are living routinely in their insular worlds, unaware of who they are.
Often in our secular age, reality can feel like gray asphalt – hard, unforgiving, industrial. Many of us, whether we realize it or not, have come to see the world as divided between two realms: what we can prove by observable fact and what is left up to personal belief and judgement. What we call religion and spirituality has become nebulous, fusing with the subjective realm of sentiment, and thus losing its standing as “real.”
It is easy for even Christians to become steeped in secularity. We often section off our faith from the pie chart of life, and time with God becomes a deliberate few moments in the morning rather than an ever-present reality that is as constant as breathing. As we allow distraction and hurry to overrun our souls, we become increasingly cynical and wonder where the God of miracles is in this machine-driven world.
G.K. Chesterton has an illuminating word of wisdom for those of us caught in our secular age. In his masterpiece of Christian apologetics, Orthodoxy, he writes: “We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget” (56). The more our culture insists that we are nothing more than matter, the more we lose touch with our identity as God’s creatures.
We have forgotten the original telos of our existence founded in the Garden of Eden; namely, to enjoy God forever. We have forgotten that the universe we inhabit is not doomed to decay but is destined for redemption. We have forgotten that the heavens declare the glory of God, and that we are His handiwork. As Dallas Willard says, we are “unceasing spiritual beings with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe”. This is the consoling truth of which we need reminding, but we must first be awakened from the slumber of secularity.
To remember who we are, we must recall the story we inhabit and come to see ourselves in terms of that story. We must gain eyes to see beyond our fallen reality to the God who makes acorns grow out of thin air and etches intricate designs out of morning frost. Fairy stories reawaken our childhood wonder, encouraging us to imagine that it is not the Laws of Nature governing reality, but a kind of magic. Apples could just as easily have fallen upwards, one could say, for it is not gravity that drives them to the ground but the orchestration of a great Magician.
Unsurprisingly, children possess a keen eye to this magic of the world. Chesterton notes that little children do not need fairy tales to excite them; mere life is interesting enough. When we were young, we heard fairies whispering in the thicket of a mossy wood and marveled at how God could paint the sky with the colors of a rainbow. We did not need to look elsewhere to nourish our souls with ecstasy; reality was bewitching enough on its own. Perhaps fairy stories, with all their magic and wonder, are not as fantastical and childish as we judge them to be. Perhaps fairy tales cleave onto the most robust of truth; namely, that there is some intrinsic mystery lying beyond the rush-hour traffic of everyday life.
It is adults, not children, who need fairy stories the most. These tales serve to rekindle the initial wonder we derived from the cosmos as children, casting apples as golden “only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green” (56). Rather than a foolish escape from reality, fairy stories entice us to delight in the fabric of reality itself.
So, the next time you find yourself in the forests of Lothlorien, lost in the wood between the worlds, or following the little white horse, allow yourself to be reawakened to the ordinary miracle of things, and come to see that reality is not droll and material, but the most vivid of myths, the most beautiful of tales.
