Christmas has temporarily removed me from Scotland, and I was alarmed to find out, days after I left, that a Scottish minister, in the name of defending Christmas, has attacked pretty much all of my favourite things: The Scottish Church, Truth, Christianity, and Faerie Stories.
A ‘fairy tale’ gospel
In an article for the Scottish Herald, Rev Frater has, with the self confessed agenda of getting bums on seats, announced that he will be removing the miraculous elements of the nativity story this year: “No more going home with fanciful, fairy tale assumptions destined to make Good News seem incredible.” People can't believe this stuff, so the time has come to remove ‘the truth from the tinsel’.
Aside from completely backing him about the tinsel – horrific, gaudy stuff that should be removed from truth, lies, and staircases alike, I think he's missed the point. I'm not sure which point. Possibly all of them. No pragmatist has ever got it so wrong:
The thing is, in so many ways, the Christmas story is absolutely a faerie tale. A persecuted people forlorn and without hope, under great oppression. A wingéd Angel appears to announce the arrival of a prince to rescue them. He is born to a young virgin and the stars interrupt their routine to point out his impending approach. The wise and noble travel to see him; the poor and humble abandon their flocks to honour him.
The evil King attacks but is unsuccessful.
The weary world rejoices.
Making the incredible credible
But, of course, it differs from your average faerie tale in a crucial way: it starts wrong. Every faerie story starts the same way, doesn't it? I don't really need to spell it out.
Once upon a time, in a far off land…
It starts at an unknown point in an unspecified place. Even this year's big faerie tale for many starts a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away – Star Wars is frustratingly impervious to historical criticism.
Not so with this, my favourite faerie story of all. The first chapter starts with “In the days of Herod, king of Judea”. So, a time and a place. The second chapter: “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria.” An historical event plus detail to hold it up again. And, forgive me for being dull, but third chapter begins: “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea…” I cut it short – that one goes on a bit.
All of that, of course, as far as the story is concerned, contains specificity to the point of tedium…but we must remember the ‘incredible’ story they surround… That unbelievable, fantastical faerie tale… bathed head to toe in historical truth.
The suggestion is that we ditch the miraculous, and tell only the believable bits of the nativity. The problem is, what will we write? Mark Twain, the author of Huckleberry Finn and other boyhood adventures of mine, travelled all around the British Empire, gathering for himself a trove of true adventures and sights. In his diary he recorded the difficulty of having his stories believed:
“Truth is stranger than fiction…” he wrote, “because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”
The True Faerie stories
Before C.S. Lewis came to be a Christian, he stated his distrust for myth and fantasies to his friend John Tolkien: “myths are but lies breathed through silver”. Beautiful, but false. Intended and destined to deceive.
And, because this is how all people communicate, Tolkien responded by writing him a poem, in which, if you can't be bothered to read my excerpt, he demonstrates that legends, faerie stories and myths have always confronted men with deeper truths than their escapist reality:
Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme
of things not found within recorded time.
It is not they that have forgot the Night,
or bid us flee to organized delight
…
They have seen Death and ultimate defeat,
and yet they would not in despair retreat,
but oft to victory have tuned the lyre
and kindled hearts with legendary fire,
illuminating Now and dark Hath-been
with light of suns as yet by no man seen.
Myth become fact
Of course, what I am not doing is saying that the gospel is a myth: Lewis was the leading literary scholar of his age and declared that there was no way that he could, as a professor, even suggest that the gospels were legends, simply because that was not the style in which they wrote. Instead, he says we must accept the gospel as both:
Now as myth transcends thought, incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact…To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more necessary than the other.
This ‘imaginative embrace’ is no liberal wooliness – it is the conjuring of the feelings that faerie stories bring us – the deep longing for things to be right again, the pangs against death, the stirring of the heart at acts of loyalty and sacrifice and, as ever the aspirational longing for the happy ending.
The End
In St Andrews, back in Scotland, Tolkien once gave a lecture on faerie stories. He said ‘the [gospel] has not abrogated legend, it has hallowed it – especially the happy ending’.
And right he was.
All this has just been to say that I'm definitely keeping the faerie tale in my Christmas story this year.
I didn't ruin Star Wars for you, but here’s a spoiler for the final ending of our magnificent faerie story. At the end of the Bible, we are told in the book of Revelation what will happen when things are concluded:
The prince returns. He kills the dragon and marries his bride. He lives with his people...
Faerie stories don't actually end properly, either, do they? They just kind of fade out.
…and they all lived happily ever after...
Merry Christmas.
