The last of three ruminations on Frederick Buechner’s, “Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, & Fairy Tale.” Over the past few days, I’ve written on the Gospel as comedy and the Gospel as tragedy, specifically as it relates to truth. Today, I’m turning my attention to fantasy and the world of make believe…
Gospel as Fairy Tale
Once upon a time, which is to say at a time beyond time, or at a different kind of time altogether from the kind the clock measures, or at a time that is not time at all because it is without beginning and without end. There was a wizard, a woodchopper, a king, which is to say that if you are to believe that there was, you have to give up other beliefs you believe in including the belief that there was not because there could not be such creatures as these. A far country, a deep forest, a palace, which is to say that if you care to enter these places for yourself, you must be willing to enter them in some measure as a child because it takes a child to believe in the possibility at least that such places exist instead of dismissing them out-of-hand as impossible.1
It has been said that the end of imagination marks the beginning of adulthood – for a child has freedom to imagine another world, but an adult must put aside childish fantasy and look straight into the eyes of reality, that is… responsibility.
Yet, Jesus asks us to become like children and later he tells Nicodemus to be born again. There is something in the nature of a child that we must embrace if we are to see the totality of the Gospel. Buechner, Tolstoy, and Lewis have written about the importance of imagination and wonder in our relationship with God, in fable they have told of the mystery and awe found in our infinite God who is unrestrained by time or resource.
And yet when we talk of God to the unbeliever we most times talk of a formula in which a relationship can be rationally deduced to a repeated prayer and a assigned text. Hear me, I am NOT under emphasizing the importance of the reading Bible and spending time in prayer, but I am pleading with the proponents of a linear gospel to stop preaching Christ as a solution to the problems of this world. Instead let’s begin to recapture the imagination of the lost, to invigorate the senses that have become rusty from inactivity.
Tell the story of the Gospel, and don’t leave out the parts that seem unreal or unbelievable. Tell of the darkness and decay that has overrun the beauty of our world, don’t omit the mystery of winged gods that do battle for our souls in the invisible night, and please don’t exclude the promise that we are prince and princesses with access to the majestic throne of grace. Proclaim to us that in a world of tribulation and adversity, there is joy to be found and a lasting hope that darkness will be overridden and the blood from our wars will water the flowers of the field and produce a harvest of souls that float on the wind like dandelion seeds into eternities bosom.
Preach the full Gospel. And it will speak truth in tragedy, comedy and fairy tale.
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Photo: © ISIK5
1. Buechner, Frederick; “Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale.” HaperCollins Publishers; 1977. pg 73-74
