THE HOPE IN FAIRY STORIES

'The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous 'turn' (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially 'escapist', nor 'fugitive'. In its fairy-tale - or otherworld - setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

It is the mark of a good fairy story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to the child or man that hears it, when the 'turn' comes, a catch of breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given my any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality.'

JRR Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, p.153.

THE TRUTH IN FAIRY STORIES

'"Beauty and the Beast" tells us that there's a love that can break us out of the beastliness that we have created for ourselves. "Sleeping Beauty" tells us we are in a kind of sleeping enchantment and there is a noble prince who can come and destroy it. We hear these stories and they stir us, because deep inside our hearts [we] believe, or want to believe, that these things are true. Death should not be the end. We should not lose our loved ones. Evil should not triumph. Our hearts sense that even though the stories themselves aren't true, the underlying realities behind the stories are somehow true or ought to be.'

Timothy Keller, Hidden Christmas: The Surprising Truth behind the Birth of Christ, p.26.

ESCAPISM

'...the desire to escape is not always something to be denounced, as any prisoner or slave could tell you. Jesus said, "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free" (John 8:31-32). Free from sin, he explained when they pressed him. Free from imprisonment within the narrow walls of your own not-all-that-enlightened self-interest. Free from enslavement to your own shabbiest instincts, deceits, and self-deceptions. Freedom not from responsibility but for it. Escape not from reality but into it.

The best moments we any of us have as human beings are those moments when for a little while it is possible to escape the squirrel-cage of being me into the lanscape of being us.'

Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, p.21.

TEMPTATION

'...you may have a genetic basis for that alchoholic craving or that sexual urge or that fiery temper. But the fact that you have it means that God designed you, knowing you can follow Christ even with that thorn in your flesh (1 Cor.10:13). As you face the temptation, know that God is walking you through it, just as surely as the Spirit led our Lord Jesus in and out of his desert testing. The temptation itself ought to be a revelation. God is saying, "You have been created and gifted with the ability to walk away from this."

The problem is, though, that we often think escape from temptation, promised by God, means escape from the agony of temptation, which is does not. Don't pray for an end to the struggle. Pray for your warfare to be more effective as you dodge fiery darts on the way into the kingdom. Peace is the fruit of the Spirit, but that's peace with God and with one another. It is emphatically not peace with the world, the flesh, and the Devil. That's why the Bible can include such a seemingly discordant statement about peace as "The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet" (Rom.16:20). Don't be discouraged or depressed if you're in agony fighting against your temptations. That means the Holy Spirit is there. And where the Spirit is, for now anyway, there is war (Gal.5:17).'

Russell D Moore, Tempted and Tried, p.184.

ESCAPISM

'A couple of years ago a friend of extremely left-wing and politically correct bent was looking at the shelf of children's books and remarked that they were all "escapist". She felt that my children had not been encouraged to engage in the gritty problems and troubles of real life through their reading. No, they had not. I always steered clear of "issue literature" when choosing picture books for them - but then, there were few of that kind available for the under-fives in the early 1970s and early 1980s, though occasionly there were titles aimed at helping overcome a fear of dogs, for example, or the dentist. But she did not mean that sort of simple, helpful story. She was looking through the fiction they read between the ages of around eight to thirteen or so, before they moved on to adult novels. Escapist? I would call it imaginative. But if the lives of children in Elizabethan England, or a magical countytry called Narnia, and the stories about creatures called Moomins are a means of escape from the often dull and tiresome everyday world, as well as being good books, what is the argument against that? Computer games are escapist, going to football matches or the cinema, or watching soaps or costume drama on television, are all forms of escapism. We need some.'
Susan Hill, Howards End is on the Landing, p.196.