The Wise Imagination

I tell a lot of stories to my classes; it’s how we connect. One of my favorites is about a junior high basketball game back in Seattle. We were locked in a back-and-forth battle for the final five minutes—an ulcer the size of a grapefruit growing in my stomach the whole time.

With nine seconds left, we were down by one. In basketball, nine seconds is a lifetime; peace treaties have been signed and handbooks rewritten in that span. We inbounded the ball, “chucked” up a three-pointer at the buzzer, and it went in. The crowd went wild, and I downed two Zantac.

But the “Happily Ever After” didn’t stick. By the time I had parked the team van and realized my keys were locked in my freezing classroom, the mountaintop experience was gone. I spent the next hour banging on windows while the janitor, oblivious, blasted AC/DC’s Hells Bells. My story started well and ended hungrily.

The Cynicism of the “Realistic”

Some people stay away from fairy tales because they find the endings overused or “unrealistic.” While everyone is entitled to their tastes (I, for one, believe Brussels sprouts are the devil’s vegetable), I believe disliking “Happily Ever After” often leads to a stout case of cynicism.

The opposition is usually based on a literalist frustration: “Prince Charming isn’t coming to sweep me off my feet.” But authors like Tolkien, Lewis, and Le Guin never advocated for selling your last cow for magic beans. It is the virtues of the characters—not their literal actions—that we are meant to emulate.

The God-Spell: Tolkien’s Eucatastrophe

J.R.R. Tolkien called the Gospel the “Great Eucatastrophe”—the ultimate “Happily Ever After.” He wrote:

“The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history… the ‘turn’ at the end of a story, the happy ending of a fairy tale, if written well, is the great Christian joy; a ‘sudden and miraculous grace.’”

Tolkien believed that a true fairy tale fully understands the “dyscatastrophe” of sorrow and failure, but it refuses to be overcome by them. It embraces the “joy of deliverance.”

Salvation in the Dark

To believe in “Happily Ever After” is to believe that there is someone or something that will come to your rescue. It is the refusal to grow bitter in the darkest of nights because you believe in the possibility of salvation.

I know of no better explanation for the Gospel. We are all “little fellows” in a wide world, often locked out in the cold, but the story doesn’t end with the lockout. It ends with the “sudden turn” toward home.