One of the universals that still continues to this day is the fairy tale. Cinderella. Beauty and the Beast. James and the Giant Peach. Jack and the Beanstalk. We grew up on these. Disney made a fortune retelling them.
GK Chesterton, in his amazing book Orthodoxy (a book that truly blows my hair back), talks about fairy tales and he observes a few universals about them—universals, I think, that you will see as important to our readings today. And to your life.
The first thing Chesterton notes is that fairy tales are much different than modern novels. Fairy tales have ordinary people embarking upon extraordinary world. Modern novels often have sickly people in dull worlds. A child yawns at the modern novel, but is excitedly engaged in the fairy tale.
Second, he notes that many people think that fairy tales are simply “make believe,” which is to imply that they are not real or have no connection to reality. But such people are wrong. After all: have you never seen an elephant? Become a child for a moment and remember seeing an elephant for the first time and with fresh eyes. That long trunk! The huge feet. And a short tail, unkempt like a donkey. Why, an elephant is straight out of a fairy tale! (Which is why children awe and laugh when they see one: they see that the fairy tale is true and real!). And elephants are not the exception. Duck-billed platypuses; zebras striped like tigers and tigers striped like zebras; the Milky Way; Monsignor’s bald head; my nose – the stuff of fairy tales and yet all very real.
Third, Chesterton notes that fairy tales speak universal and ancient truths. Beauty and the Beast teaches that you must love a person before you can discover that they are loveable; Tangled teaches that you have a dignity greater than you are often aware.
And fourth, Chesterton observes that fairy tales often have laws. The Beast must find love before the last petal falls. Cinderella must be home before midnight. And why? Or, to put it another way, what if Cinderella were to protest to her fairy godmother? The fairy godmother could say: “well, why even a magical carriage or a beautiful dress or the glass slippers? Being home by midnight is part of the magic.”
If there is a problem with the modern world and, also, with the modern Church, it is that we have lost the fairy-tale worldview—not that we are supposed to believe in a fairy tale. Rather, what we have forgotten is that we live in a fairy tale.
More than simply elephants and the duck-billed platypus, isn’t it odd that we not only believe in but live in a world where a virgin has conceived and given birth to a son; where a man has died and then risen from the dead (to say nothing of walking on water); where angels dwell among us; and where demons can be driven out by men; where God waits for the command of a priest to change bread into Jesus; where ordinary men can become saints; and where the most extraordinary of men, Jesus, had a nose. And was God.
That’s the stuff of fairy tales. And what is most magical of all is that it is real.
If there should be any balking by modern man it is that the story-teller, God, who wrote this story, should include such a law akin to “be home by midnight”—as we see Him say in keep one day a week holy.
Should there be a protest against His laws, is it not enough for Him to say to us: well, why should there be elephants? Or men on two legs? Or stars? Or even Existence at all? – it all goes with the magic.
And that is what we live in: a magical world.
But that is what the world has forgotten. We pull up the weather forecast and subconsciously flatten the weather into percentages and predictability—instead of the wild reality of angels enacting the providence of God to give man food in the proper season.
“Give us a sign,” the people tell Moses. But had they not just seen a sign? Had they not seen several? The Red Sea had just parted and the waters had covered Pharaoh's chariots and charioteers; the pillar of fire was still burning. And yet they grumbled. Because providing food in the desert is the stuff of fairy tales and this was real life, not a fairy tale, Moses!
“Give us a sign,” the people commanded Jesus. But literally the evening before, Jesus not only fed them with miraculous bread, multiplied from five loaves and two fish, but He had also walked on water. Give us a sign, because You couldn’t possibly turn bread and wine into your flesh and blood, Jesus, that would be magic, the stuff of fairy tales—like Beast transforming into a man; or Eugene in Tangled being healed by Rapunzel’s tears.
Here, we arrive at St. Paul’s words. He says there are many who live “in the futility of their minds.” What is the futility of the mind? It is to make a very real, magical world flat. To reject what God has made and instead to concoct a world of make-believe—a fakeness where a day is just a day, a storm is just a storm, a person is just a person, a job is just a job; where Holy Mass is just a meeting; where confession is just psychology; where pandemics are simply accidents and problems to be solved like a math equation—instead of another engagement on a cosmic battlefield where the ordinary man is armed with the supernatural powers of prayer, the intercession of the saints in glory, and the Divinity of Jesus in the Eucharist.
Futility is grayness. A flatness and dreariness that cannot laugh at an elephant nor praise the God who made it.
Thus, Saint Paul cries out: “Put away the old self of your former way of life… and be renewed in the spirit of your minds”!
To see that not only is the fairy tale real, but that you dwell in The Fairy Tale—that is the renewal of your mind! To believe that you and I, ordinary men and women, dwell in extraordinary lands and in extraordinary circumstances. We are Belle, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Jack – facing the Giant, like David did Goliath—and all of us, you and me both, are facing a decision and that decision determines our greatness or our baseness, our heroism or our cowardice, our sanctity or our condemnation.
To put it all succinctly and in the words of our Savior: “Unless you become like little children, you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Jesus could have said those words are the beginning of this, His Bread of Life Discourse, His teaching that inaugurates the Eucharist—which we find here at this Holy Mass.
“Unless you become like children!”—and what is the hallmark of the child? That it believes that the fairy tale is real. Indeed, more than belief, the child lives in that world-- it could be no other way-- and so it swims in the splendor of God with wonder and with gratitude—the very things from which happiness springs and which, to quote our fairy tales, lead us to “Happily ever after.”
This is the
Catholic worldview. And it is wonderfully, magically real.
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