Without a dark introduction, there are no fairy tale endings

“As far as I know, there has never been an age that has not produced fairy tales.  It doesn’t seem to matter what is going on at the time.  It can be a time of war or peace, of feast or famine.  It can be Calvin’s Geneva or Calvin Coolidge’s U.S.A. . . .Frederick Buechner.”

Fairy tails end well. Famously so. You know the clichés: “fairy tale ending” and “happily ever after.” Jack chops down the bean stock. A prince wakes Snow White with a kiss. Dorothy realizes that the end of the rainbow was in Kansas all along.

But, if “fairy tale ending” is a cliché because “they all lived happily ever after,” fairy tale beginnings are an all together different matter. Fairy tales open deep in the woods. No sooner has the storyteller said, “Once upon a time,” than the cyclone heads for Kansas or the wicked step sisters begin tormenting Cinderella. Indeed, the principle aim of the first couple of pages of a fairy tale is to instill something just short of terror in the child listening. Picture the horrific difficulties your average fairy tale protagonist faces. Little Red Riding Hood’s invalid grandmother lives on the other side of a wolf infested forest. A troll lurks under the bridge the three billy goats gruff need to cross if they are to avoid slowly starving. Lacking GPS, Hansel and Gretel implement a flawed method for finding their way home, and it is their bad fortune to do so a stone’s throw from the cottage of a witch who eats children, but only after boiling them first.

Predictably, some suggest we tell a bland version where the Big Bad Wolf only chases the first two little pigs. I don’t know about you, but I’m not buying what they’re selling. What a colorless land our children would visit, if for fear of thorns in the beginning, we never shared the thrill of good news at the end.

Insurmountable odds and grave danger make fairy tales work. My little girl pleads with me to read her fairy tales, no matter how scared she may get. Sometimes, she even hides under the blanket. But, she has never left before “happily ever after.” She stays because she is rightly convinced that, however wicked the step mother may be, the story will end well. There is, the promise that things will get better and that, as Buechner says, in fairy tales, “happiness is inevitable and endless.” And, though she couldn’t put it in words, intuitively, Mary Beth understands that the light at the end of a fairy tale will shine all the brighter for having started so deep in the forest.

If, as Buechner has pointed out, there has never been an age that didn’t appreciate fairy tales, surely it is because they resonate with something true, however dark the woods may be.

"So we do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.(2 Co 4:16-18)."

***********