On the Nature of Fairytale: Seeing the Beauty in the Bittersweet

I have just returned from a breathtaking moonlit jaunt through the countryside. I am very much of a night owl, and seeing the waxing moon did my heart good. (By the time you read these words it will be waning: the 24th is the full moon.) The landscape was transformed in ethereal splendor, the deep forest green of the trees on the hillsides contrasting pleasantly with the midnight blue sky. I write of just such encounters in “Chapter Five: Spider Webs in the Face” of my autobiography:

The fireflies, lightning bugs, or whatever you wish to call them—for the aspiring scientists out there: of the family Lampyridae, of the order Coleoptera, the North American variety of the genus Photuris—were everywhere this evening. Just like the account above records, there were hundreds of dancing, twinkling orbs signing their signatures with a “wink and a nod” through the nighttime sky. Add to this the chuck-will’s-widows’ “chuck-will’s-widowing” and whip-poor-wills’ “whip-poor-willing” and you have the epitome of an early Missouri summer night:

I could feel the blood coursing through my veins from the physical exercise and it felt exhilarating to be alive. I couldn’t help but think how perfect it all seemed, and then I began thinking about the imperfection of this world and the heavenly one to come. I wondered how it could get any better than this, the sensation of the still air brushing past my face as I sliced through it: it seemed a moment in time suspended—a moment in time transcended.

I have often contemplated the account of a new heaven and a new earth mentioned in Isaiah 65 and 66, 2 Peter 3, and Revelation 21 and 22. From these Scriptures, I am convinced that what we refer to as being “heaven,” will be “Paradise Restored,” an earthy refurbishment of the Garden of Eden (or equivalent), if you will, from the curse befallen from man’s disobedience, made possible through the satisfaction of the penalty for sin by the sinless Son of God. According to Revelation 21, this earthly paradise will descend from heaven and will be ruled from the throne room of God, perhaps allowing access between the two planes. However, I believe from my understanding of the Scripture that the bulk of our “time” will be spent on the new earth. Here time and death will both “work backward” and the futile toil of our labor will not mar the productivity of our hands.

The only thing I lament, given my description above, is that it says there will be no more night there (Revelation 22:5). If this is to be taken literally, I have to console myself in the thought that the things to come will be far more blessed than the things that have passed. Besides, I think I could get used to such a land; a land where “there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away” (Revelation 21:4). As I thought on this, it suddenly occurred to me that part of the Christian life is the ability to see the beauty in the here and now: to see the beauty in the bittersweet. In fact, I thought I would make that my new motto—seeing the beauty in the bittersweet—for it well reflects the attitude I consciously try to foster and one that is not only healthier, but I believe aspires to the childlike faith of which Jesus spoke as well. (Note the drastic difference between childish and childlike; it is entirely possible to be as gentle as doves while being as shrewd as serpents: the so-called return to innocence.)

Still, this world is a world riddled with pain and suffering. Even my “perfect” nighttime roving could have been improved by the absence of the ever-present spider webs in the face and the humidity of the Midwestern night air, not to mention the elimination of the invisible chiggers crawling up my legs, demanding recognition of their presence hours later when the itchy welts appear. And though I wasn’t bothered by them walking along the mown lawn and the pavement of the countryside road, I saw plenty of thistles and thorns, all products of the curse that will one day be reversed, earth again restored to its original “mint” condition.

As I walked along, the Queen Anne’s lace growing beside the roadside formed hundreds of tiny, soft white reflections of moonlight, and I looked up and caught the trail of a shooting star. Thinking of making a wish, of “wishing upon a star,” catapulted me into my childhood, a sense of nostalgia washing over me as I thought of the magic and enchantment of such a world where fairytales and wonder fail to fuse with or comprehend the more mundane land of the “grown-ups,” and I couldn’t help but reflect on C.S. Lewis’ sentiments, that where there exists a desire, there also exists something to satisfy that desire.

While these moments of reverie seemed miles removed from the “nine-to-five” workaday world, I couldn’t help but dare to imagine that the Scriptures speak the truth: that there really is a reality that corresponds to such wistfulness somewhere on the other side. And if there is not, if everything I believe is a lie, the silver lining is by far a healthier and happier way to look at life than much of the stressful, grumpy, impatient, short-tempered land of adults I see sprouting up around me, choking out whatever sustenance I might have sustained with perennial youth.

Tonight I understood, if I didn’t before, what it was one of my Literature professors meant when he said he looked around him at the age of eight at the boring world of adults and determined never to grow up, a promise to himself he has kept to this very day. Perhaps that is what made his classes so transcendent; wonders of discovery and enticement that left me feeling more elated than many church services? Indeed, his classes were what church ought to be; when I walked into his classroom I was no longer in college, it was no longer any certain time of the day, I was no longer on the same globe that other haggard human creatures inhabit, the old order had passed and everything was made new, if only for the moment. I walked out of his room a little taller and a little straighter, a new spring to my step, a new spark to my heart, a new gleam to my eye. He was the professor who convinced me, without ever using words, that I was to become a Literature major; that there was something magical about this medium that could inspire the same in others. But alas, I must leave you hanging for the moment, for I have ground to cover today, important ground that will hopefully challenge your head as well as your heart.

Every month, our church has what they call “Missionary Sunday,” this month offering no exception. Cay, the former teacher and librarian who hosts these presentations, spoke extensively about the religious beliefs that missionaries to parts of Africa encounter. She described the lesson as being a difficult one to teach and one she wasn’t sure she fully understood. I can wholly relate, for she was speaking, among other things, of animism and myth—that is, speaking of “tribal religion” and its version of truth telling—and how the spirituality of the natives permeates every element of their lives. No matter what happens, however trivial, there is no separation between the physical and the spiritual. Things are always present or future in these cultures; in fact, I understand that for many of these peoples, no past tense even exists in their various dialects, for the ancestors live on among us.

Perhaps one of my most intriguing courses in college (aside from the Literature class mentioned earlier) was my Non-Western Humanities course, the “part two” of Western Humanities. The same professor who taught the class also teaches courses in comparative religion and, if I am not mistaken, philosophy and ethics. Between his insights and observations and my own extracurricular reading during this time, I learned a great deal about Eastern philosophy, animism, and other world religions. (By the way, did you know that word animism comes from the Latin word anima meaning “soul” or “breath” and was coined by 18th-century German physician and chemist Georg Ernst Stahl?)

As a philosophy, animism is often referred to as panpsychism, the belief that, according to Microsoft® Encarta®, “all objects have an inner and psychological being.” In my experience however, rarely does one encounter the term panpsychism; most generally animism is the one by which academia and its offshoots address this concept of all things being interconnected, and not merely interconnected, but possessing souls as well. This extends to plants—trees have especial “notoriety,” as evidenced in surviving remnants of Druidism and myths pertaining to dryads—and inanimate objects, such as rocks, as well.

The basis of much of our modern day “New Age” is a repackaged form of animism, causing specialty stores to rake in immense profits from selling things such as crystals and amulets believed to be imbued (or capable of being imbued) with positive healing power awaiting release, to assorted books on spirituality of all sorts: very often the stranger, the better. Particularly in America, interest in a repackaged, New Age bookstore variety of Native American Indian beliefs is enjoying a several decade long revival, its predecessor also a form of animism. Many other so-called “neopagan” religions offer a more formalized, organized system of belief that owe their bases in large part to animism and Eastern philosophies; in fact, according to anthropologists, animism appears to be the oldest form of known religion, and neopaganism is just that: “new” paganism, or a conscious decision to revive pre-Christian religions. This decision is often sparked by the fact that these individuals feel the Christian church has let them down, or they are in a form of rebellion against society and religion in general, taking a certain refuge and comfort in joining a religious system that has been somewhat frowned on by conventional, Judeo-Christian mores. As Cay well noted, part of the appeal of repackaged versions of animism is that it offers a version of spirituality that permeates every aspect of their lives, though I would further add that it doesn’t require the same level of moral accountability that the Judeo-Christian teachings propose. (For an excellent article on the general state of religion in North America, see Terry Mattingly’s religion column for 05/29/2002.)

In fact, that was one of the odd things about the Israelites with their Jewish faith. Out of the middle of nowhere you have a group of people who wed morality and spirituality together, claiming that one single God, Yahweh, the Father of Isaac, Abraham, and Jacob, the great I AM THAT I AM who spoke to Moses out of the burning bush, commanded them to do these things, indeed, expected them to exercise moral restraint and accountability. As Catholic Christian apologist Peter Kreeft writes: “Worship and morality existed side by side in paganism for thousands of years. Only one people joined them together, and their own records claim that it was not they but God who did it. Their claim to be God’s ‘chosen people’ was really the humblest of possible explanations for their genius” (Spiritual History 101: How Did We Get to the Edge?).

Very well. So we have a repackaged animism that allows one to be immensely spiritual without necessarily calling for any great level of moral accountability. This attractive philosophy has been appealing to even those agnostic minded scientists who seek an explanation in the impersonal nature of the New Age thus far not supplied by science. The other classic camp of scientific and philosophic thought, however—the outlook from the more atheistic side of agnosticism to beyond—shuns all such displays as being highly irrational and irrelevant. This is the camp of skeptics, who, if they pledge allegiance to anything, pledge it solely to empirical data and rationality with little patience for anything that cannot be deduced in this fashion. One has to admit the sensibility of such an approach, yet could it be possible that they are the ones missing out on something? Could it be possible, that as Kierkegaard writes: “If it were so, as conceited sagacity, proud of not being deceived, thinks, that we should believe nothing that we cannot see with our physical eyes, then we first and foremost ought to give up believing in love. If we were to do so and do it out of fear lest we be deceived, would we not then be deceived?” (Qtd. in Creegan, from Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, p. 5.)

This seems to be the consensus of one of the most intriguing individuals who has lived in recent decades, Carl Jung, the distinguished Swiss psychoanalyst and contemporary of Freud. While Freud was a devout atheist, Jung was—well, let’s just say whatever Jung was, he was not an atheist. Some of his ideas followed closely after Christianity, such as his observation that “Nobody can doubt the manifest superiority of the Christian revelation over its pagan precursors.” Taking after a similar observation as the one cited by Evelyn Underhill above on the fusion or transcendence of the spiritual between the bridge of the intellectual and emotional, he writes: “Out of the tension of duality life always produces a ‘third’ that seems somehow incommensurable or paradoxical.” (Both of these quotations and one more cited below come from “A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity” in Collected Works: Vol. 11.)

It is widely noted that there seems to exist an innate notion of God in people’s lives the world over. For the record, not even Freud could deny this aspect of the spiritual in people’s lives, but was forced to reinterpret such claims in light of his materialistic presuppositions. Therefore, he proposed that one’s conception of God is nothing more than one’s earthly father projected into the unconscious. Today, this explanation has helped even those who devoutly believe in God understand why our earthly fathers have such a great impact on shaping our conceptions of our Heavenly Father. Typically, atheists adhere more to Freudian analysis, theists to Jungian analysis, although both approaches can be useful, synthesized to glean new insights.

Taking on a similar structure as Platonic philosophy, with its hierarchy of reality (Forms or Ideas sitting astride the top), Jung identified what he termed archetypes, or “pure” primordial/universal symbols or images, within the human psyche that manifest as recurrent themes in religion(s), myths, fairytales, and fantasies—one could say “in the language of metaphor.” This observation is a rather strange one, for Jung was well established as being an exacting empiricist, basing his theories as much as was possible around the numerous clinical studies observed from the real life patients he examined on a daily basis, his extensive reading, and his own life experiences. For him, psychoanalysis, with its study of the psyche, was in essence, at least in its purest form, the study of the human soul. There was no denying this conclusion, for in virtually ever case the departure from mental stability was incurred from losing the religious faith of one’s youth and was restored by once again rediscovering it. He also noticed that there was something about the spiritual side of humanity that seemed almost non-rational, “archetypical,” responding acutely to the mythical forms of communication, prevalent in most forms of animism, but all but lost in our postmodern culture today. In fact, that is all part of the gears behind the postmodernism protestation against the modernism brought about during the Enlightenment; modernism gave us amazing technology but stripped our souls bare in the process.

In actuality, the problem is not within Christianity itself, for within Christianity is also found the mythical and mystical, or as German born U.S. theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich has said, “The mystical and the ethical . . . There is no holiness and therefore no living religion without both elements” (Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions). Rather, the problem is found in the Western mindset that has to large degree been stripped bare of its notions of God and spirituality. The postmodern man senses this unraveling, but is so far removed from the roots of true spirituality, he often bends too far backward the other way in his relativity and extreme forms of tolerance. But let us look again at the nature of myth.

My late Grandmother Knickerbocker maintained that where there exists a “counterfeit,” it presupposes the presence of a “real.” Could it be that the reason we respond so powerfully to myth and legend, is that there is something about it that corresponds to something that is real, something that is true? Would it be possible that we have been designed in such a way as to resonate to a higher reality, so that the very vehicle of myth, even when separated from its anchor to a reality beyond, holds a mesmeric sway over our senses? Why would this be? Let us go back and re-examine something we looked at in a much earlier newsletter:

Everything that we experience is filtered through the sense organs through an act of perception. English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) tried to separate which elements literally corresponded to an external object’s objective reality, and which were merely subjective sense perceptions in response to the object. The first category, he named, creatively enough, “primary qualities,” the second “secondary qualities.” The first category included quantifiable properties such as solidarity, extensions, shape, motion, and rest, the second included color, sound, taste, smell, and texture. (Lawhead, William F. A Philosophical Journey: An Interactive Approach. London: Mayfield Publishing, 2000.) You do see the problem, don’t you? Even the first category is necessarily filtered through our sense of sight; behind even the most prestigious instruments in the laboratory lurks a pair of eyeballs and a human brain. There is no getting outside of ourselves to see what is “really there.” Could it be that in our quest for truth, we have been deceived as Kierkegaard implies?

Human creativity is limited to only the things that are, not the things that are not. At best, we merely rearrange and reassemble elements found in the world beyond us. The presence of a persistent and recurring element throughout many belief-systems presupposes the existence of an antecedent, just as human creativity necessarily “points back to” elements that existed before they were “creatively” rearranged and reassembled. Could it be that our rejection of superstitious counterfeits has led us to “throw the baby out with the bathwater”? Could it be possible that the reason why the Christian “myth” sounds so like the others is that we have lost the real among the counterfeits? Can we say with Jung, “Nobody can doubt the manifest superiority of the Christian revelation over its pagan precursors”? Could it be that what we call myth is actually the watered down version of a truth that really exists?

Reality is a “river” flowing around us. What we call “truth” is a mental abstraction or observation of this “river,” which is necessarily separate from the reality itself. Myth takes us the very closest to the fusion between the two, for its abstraction of reality is in the form of a moving storyline, a reflection of the river with many unexpected twists and turns, many ambiguous elements, just as the reality of the river itself can have more than a single interpretation, for it is itself beyond interpretation. It simply exists, doing whatever rivers always do; it is we who do the interpreting. As Whitehead observed, “We think in generalities, but we live in details.”

Can we go beyond the mere functionality of Christian “myth,” such as Jung’s observation that “The Lucifer legend is in no sense an absurd fairytale; like the story of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, it is a ‘therapeutic’ myth”? Can we go so far as to say that the reason the Judeo-Christian mythological portrayal has the power it does is because it is a powerful form of truth telling that also happens to correspond to a historical truth and an objective reality beyond itself? Wouldn’t it make sense that if a myth is a literary form that holds great meaning, affecting us in unpredictable ways, that its meaning would be even further amplified when its particulars were wedded with factual reality and not simply moral truth severed from true historical fact?

Which came first, the King James translation of the bible or the fairytales written in the same Queen’s English to supplement the moral lessons contained therein? Has it never occurred to anyone that wise adults discovered the power of the stories in the bible to move the human heart toward repentance and a better way of living, and tapped into this power as a means of instructing while entertaining their children? Or could it be possible that the mythos of animism was its best guess at what was revealed fully only to Judaism and later Christianity? Or what of the moral lessons found in the Greek and Roman myths? Do these not correspond to a reality on some level? And did these not come into being after the advent of Judaism? Further, could it be possible that all forms of myth-making contain some revelation, some truth? At the least, I believe we can safely conclude with the atheists that if there is no meaning to life, myth ultimately enriches one’s life by providing a depth and breadth which does not otherwise exist, a depth and breadth that we ignore at our own peril.

There is nothing wrong with intellectual inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge. But when we divorce the head from the heart, we are only half alive, we are ignoring the aspect that makes us most human. It is by the fusion of the two within a physical body that apprehends the spiritual; it is by the fusion of the two that we apprehend anything. Perhaps we would do well to learn to become as little children again. Who gave us the notion that in order for life to have truth, value, and meaning, that it has to be perfectly figured out down to the last atom; that anything less constitutes a form of deception?

As I have written in The Androgynous Man: Thoughts and Reflections, “Life, like so many things, ultimately defies definition and classification. Only by experiencing life with a childlike wonder that asks a thousand questions one moment and the next forgets them all in an unselfconscious frolic of exploring the vast unknown (perhaps the wonder of the greenness of the grass or the wings of a butterfly) will one ever be free. And when one is truly free is when one not merely defies the limitations, but is quite oblivious—through forgetfulness or innocence—to the roles one is supposed to play; indeed, oblivious to oneself altogether.” It is not necessary to have everything quantified, qualified, and figured out to truly live life. The meaning of life is life itself; the secret to the enjoyment of a life well lived is to be found in the wonder of living it, savoring it, taking great “gulpfuls” of air into our lungs for the sheer thrill of breathing, thinking, wondering—for awareness, in a word—the sheer thrill of being alive! What better gift could we give back to the Giver of life; what better way to say thanks?

As to the purpose “burdensome” morality serves, my friend, it is simply a safeguard protecting all this freedom of truly living—where selfishness reigns supreme, someone else always gets the short end of our stick (and is not that a clash of the wills!); where love and community are found, gift and Giver alike are appreciated to their fullest; the Giver has come so that we might have life and have it even more abundantly.

Look at every controversial issue of which you can think—abortion, gun control, euthanasia, cloning, stem cell research, even “secondary” issues such as tax reforms and governmental funding—do these issues not involve questions concerning the quality of life, whether directly or indirectly? And do these issues not constitute moral issues? Knowing full well death will claim us all, we speak of the tragedy and evil of warfare and genocide. We seem to think that even if life is short, cutting it even shorter is wrong; we speak in terms of “life or death” situations and “self-defense.” It should soon become evident that this issue of life seems to be a rather important one to us.

If the meaning of life is life itself, we have lost touch with the deeper art form of myth and fairytale; that art form that mirrors the “river” of life’s truth on life’s own terms, without quantifying or qualifying what it sees, without apology or explanation; the art form where there is no yesterday, and one must wait for the river to carry us over to tomorrow in the land where it remains forever today—worse still, we have lost touch with the ultimate meaning behind the medium.

“I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children . . .” (Matthew 18:3)

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