Fairy dust, magic wands, flying horses, a prince that against all odds slays a 30 foot, fire-breathing dragon. For most of my childhood, stories like Robin Hood, Chronicles of Narnia, and embarrassingly even Sleeping Beauty itched the right spot for a boy like me. In my later adolescent years, stories of Jedi Knights or Hobbits and Elves were more often the stimulation. Then sometime in high school this love for the fictional, this subconscious love for the unbelievable suddenly become a conscious boycott of the ridiculous. I can't say what started it and I can't say what even encouraged it other than something inside me continually pushed me towards more concrete realities in both books and film. I began to look on my beloved childhood favorites with arrogant sympathy as I had come through a sort of graduation from the fictional world. I say arrogant, only because it had a definite sense of arriving at a truer version of reality even if it meant part of me had died. I found myself turning more deliberately to movies based on real life stories or at least based on actual events - movies based on wars (Saving Private Ryan, Enemy at the Gates) or sports movies like Hoosiers and Rudy that were based on actual stories.
A short time after that something in me began to resent some of these films as well. Now, I wanted something that not only was based on actual events but that stopped with this non-sense of concluding with the same "happily ever after" type moment. Needless to say, times of fairy dust, magic wands, flying horses and princes outdueling fire breathing dragons were well behind me. My only reality of a "fairy tale" came from Davidson beating a top ranked opponent in the NCAA Basketball tournament in late March. It was not for lack of effort that I did not enjoy such works. I was enslaved in classes that forced Great Expectations, Shakespeare, The Great Gatsby and Lord of the Flies upon me, as we all were. My friends begged me to watch movies like the Dark Knight, Transformers or Spiderman 1, 2 and 3. My voice did not waiver in response to their pleadings. The answer was always a resounding “NO”, possibly even a "hell no" on occasion.
So, where am I now? Still bent towards non-fiction over fiction for sure, but perhaps more willing to admit this doesn't mean I'm bent towards reality over non-reality. A little bit ago I finished reading Telling the Truth by Fredrich Buechner. His last chapter is entitled "The Gospel as Fairy Tale". It gets at the heart of what I am trying to say. He describes the Gospel of the Bible as fairy tale, not meaning untrue, but as a story of transformation, wonder and mystery, where there is evil in disguise and good in disguise too, the latter presenting itself as no less than a common carpenter.
A bit ago I had read a biography of Chesterton in which a critic of his wrote, "Who reads Chesterton for knowledge - unless it be for knowledge of Chesterton's curious mind? For Chesterton's highest aim, as we knew of old, is to recount the adventures of his soul among masterworks." And herein lie the potential shortcomings with my non-fiction. I feel a stifling limit to what I can purely describe as my reality without bringing in a sense of the extraordinary, the unbelievable, the fairy tale, if you will. Fiction can be free of the pesky limitations of details, free from exact explanation, free from full understanding. I may wish at times that my life was bound by my understanding but oh how limited an existence that would prove to be. For when I think of the most remarkable times or events in my life, all of them came through paths of uncertainty. My "adventures of my soul" have been successive tales starting with the uncertainty of events, leading to incomprehensible changes, and culminating with small glimpses of understanding.
Perhaps this is what fiction does for us, as Buechner writes, "Maybe above all they (fairy tales) are tales about transformations where all creatures are revealed in the end as what they truly are." If you take all of my love for non-fiction, for the true wartime heroics or fantastic athletic feats, it still comes down to a longing of the soul to seek its fulfillment, its resting place. The appeal of the story goes beyond what actually has happened. It is entrenched in the emotion and elation of the bleeding through of what we thought impossible from an even deeper level of truth.
It's as if my soul’s experience has again and again replicated the great plotline format my class learned in 4th grade English or the great structure of a narrative that Hollywood has made more than a living upon. The conflict, the quest, the seeking of fulfillment to the trouble that has come upon our dear protagonist The climax, the transformation, the turning point. The resolution and the "happily ever after". This perhaps is the metanarrative, a universal structure to our collective AND individual storyboards. For on my own storyboard I have recognized that I am moved by the emotion of the conflict, driven by the hope of resolution and SLOWLY purified by the recurring process.
A few months ago, I was asked by a close friend whether I believed in the 6 day creation account in Genesis. While the question was fair, I felt that she was asking it with the unstated assumption that to take the Bible literally is the only way to believe it as truth. Theologians and scientists will continue to argue over the literal truth of that story but the narrative of Genesis has proved itself to be true and continues to prove itself in my own life. I read the story of Adam with his separation from God, his disobedience, and his desire for redemption and reconciliation with his Creator and I feel at my core that it might as well have been me.
So perhaps I'm not ready to join a Shakespeare club and sit in groups quoting the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream but I believe I am unpeeling in my own existence the reality outside the tangible. Perhaps C.S Lewis was a bit of a prophet, especially in my life, when he said, "Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again."
Tim
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