Fairy Tales

The movies and the books and the pictures and the smells and the sounds and the feelings all come together in a moment and show you something incredibly, heart-wrenchingly wonderful - they show you fairy tale. My deepest desire, I have come to realize, is to be lost in a world of fairy tale. It is to open that wardrobe and find Narnia; it is to dive into the rabbit hole and experience a strange, dream-like world; it is to make friends with the magicians and the dwarves and the elves; it is to find the princess in the castle and fight for her and hold her forever; it is to live a life so saturated with the unbelievable that I can finally laugh in the face of death. Because a lot of this life honestly feels like death, so much so that death itself seems more exciting and closer to fairy tale than most of what comes and goes around here. I'm not saying that Jesus has not made me new or that there is absolutely nothing to live for....I'm just saying that sometimes it feels that way. And the fairy tales take me into something else - call it escapism if you will, but I am still drawn to it. And it may be that I need to face up to the facts of life and just keep moving forward....like the rest of the world....and I mean that's what seems to be the only option given to us in this society to non-stop activity. But what does it mean to live?

What does it mean to live?

This is a question ignored time and time again. People just don't want to think about it. You ask them and they look at you like you're crazy and are in need of some serious counseling....but the question remains in all of us. Why do we work so hard to do what we're supposed to do? In the words of Solomon, its just a chasing of the wind. Meaningless. I like to think of myself as human, but humanity nowadays functions so much like robots that I don't know if that's a good title anymore. Maybe a better name for me would be child. At least children know that fairy tales matter. They get it. The awe that comes with hearing a story of another world is not suppressed by children. Adults, for some reason, find it more virtuous to stuff the wishy-washy talk of all that "too good to be true" nonsense and get to what really matters: the hard, cold, unrelenting facts of life. Well thats life...isn't it? You go to school to go to college to get a job to earn enough money to feed your family to live a relatively comfortable life to go on living until you retire, at which point you simply wait for the end to come.....and then it's all over. What a life.

Fairy tales are a different life. If not anything else, they are different. In fact, it is a good different, because the things that make us human, in the purest sense of the word, are actually addressed and become the point of focus throughout the entire fairy tale, ending in either happily ever after (which is only labelled "childish" because the adults are too afraid of that which is too good not to be true) or in a somber, cruel death that points again to our humanity in it's tragic state of death. At least fairy tales step up to the plate and show us ourselves as we really are, instead of trying to distract us with money, jobs, future plans, efficiency, etc. The only things that are worth our time, really, are those things that make this temporary life shine with the light of our eternal destiny. And I think fairy tales do a fantastic job with that.