Fairytales and Erik Varden: A Renewal of Childlike Faith

The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and storytellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland

— L. M. Montgomery¹

In his book, The Shattering of Loneliness, Erik Varden illustrates the power of remembrance in the Christian life. Showing the relation between remembrance and the experience of restoration, Varden writes, ‘if I forget where I came from, the wastelands I passed through, I forfeit my right to call it “home.” For to remain in that place of light, I must know I am a guest brought in out of darkness’.² In Varden’s Christian perspective, there is an undeniable power in remembering who we once were—sons of Adam, slaves in Egypt—in light of who we have become—children of God. This means that, as we wander in the wilderness of our own lives, we must remind ourselves of the waves that were once parted for us, of the chains that were broken, the blood that was shed, and the generations set free. While there are many dimensions of the spiritual life that aid in this practice of remembrance, I would like to examine a couple of ways in which fairytales are of particular use to Christians for remembering their identity as children of the light and recapturing the childlike faith Christ invites them into when he says: ‘unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’.³

First and foremost, fairytales invite us into another world. J. R. R. Tolkien articulates this quality of fairytales particularly well in his essay, ‘On Fairy-Stories’. Tolkien illustrates how our imaginations are ushered into an atmosphere that is both familiar and unfamiliar. Through their enchanting, whimsical (albeit at times, horrifying) nature, fairytales create for us a secondary world.⁴ We are invited to engage with the ordinary elements of life in new ways. They have the ability to resurrect the imagination to be in awe of the tiniest of things, to observe what we find in the shadows as well as in the light, to notice more deeply the way things are, the way we are, having encountered a contrast. When we enter into a world where dragons can be slain and ordinary children made knights and queens, we are beckoned to ‘look at green again, and be startled anew’.⁵ What was once taken for granted becomes novel with the newness of our perspective.

What makes fairytales distinctly refreshing is their ability to free us from the limitations of our own world without abandoning it entirely. As Tolkien writes, ‘Fairy-stories may invent monsters that fly in the air or dwell in the deep, but at least they do not try to escape from heaven or the sea’.⁶ In this sense, the escapism fairytales offer is not an abandonment (what Tolkien refers to as the flight of the deserter); it is the freedom of the prisoner. To step away from our own world for a little while is not inherently irresponsible, it is deeply necessary. The artistry of the language, the beauty of a tale well told, does not lessen our ability to engage with reality, but in fact, it does the very opposite. In reading fairytales, we are freed from the conventions of human life without being made entirely hostile to them. This freedom involves the renewal of our sense of child-like wonder, which is no small feat. As Katherine Paterson writes in her essay, ‘Dog Day Wonder’, ‘what good are straight teeth and trumpet lessons to a person who cannot see the grandeur that the world is charged with?’⁷ Paterson goes on to write that wonder is not a characteristic with which we are born, merely dulled through the drudgery of human life, but rather, it is a trait that is tilled and cultivated, chosen and enacted upon. Through the portrayal of the fantastical and peculiar, fairytales are a life source for this sense of wonder; they are a seedbed for the one making his return to the mystery and majesty of childlike faith.

The sense of renewal, the restoration of perspective that fairytales offer, is, then, even more useful to man as he navigates the tensions of an aching, weary world. While fairytales have often been forgotten on nursery shelves in favour of seemingly more instructive literature, fairytales can offer their reader a restorative perspective of truth: ‘Myth teaches us meaning, not by realistic logical exposition, but rather by imagination and metaphor, entering the back door of the mind through imagination.’⁸ Fairytales offer a distinctive truth, one that does not preach in absolutes, but through illustration. It is important, however, not to identify fairytales solely as a means to an end. They are not purely teachers. On the contrary, for Tolkien, as well as for Lewis, fairytales have the potential to instruct us simply by being what they are—stories that encapsulate truth, beauty and goodness.

Fairytales serve as not only teachers, but as companions and guides, revealing to us what is possible regarding the development of virtue, in the lives of the characters, as well as in our own. To illustrate this in relation to a Biblical story, we might consider Varden’s chapter, ‘Remember Lot’s Wife’, in which Varden reminds his reader that we must not get caught in the comforts of the flesh. In Scripture, Lot’s wife looks back upon the city she has been commanded to leave behind, but she does not look back as an act of remembrance for the way God has provided for his people, but as a rejection of the way he actively is. She is grasping for the life she is leaving behind. The reader of this story has the full picture, seeing that Lot’s wife should keep her eyes on the path the Lord has provided for her. However, as she is in the chaos of the present moment, she looks back. While Varden highlights the various reasons Lot’s wife may have looked back, he acknowledges that remembering her story is ‘to prepare for a severance that may bring pain’.⁹ Fairytales offer the reader a pathway to this kind of remembrance. They have the potential to immerse the reader in a world and story so completely different than their own, they afford one the opportunity to both enter in the story and remain as we are. Through a fairytale, we are able to walk alongside the protagonist whose adversities have the capacity to mirror our own, allowing us to reflect on our own lives through the lens of the story. While we may be deeply immersed in the narrative and closely connected to the protagonist, we are not wholly intertwined with the course of events, and thus able to see things more clearly. Fairytales are of particular use to this reflective practice, as they often depict a world so different from our own. Fairyland may contain echoes of this earth, but it does not mimic it too closely. Through their inherent form and shape, fairytales exemplify virtue in the face of great discomfort, they buoy us with ‘the agility we require to resume movement towards the rising dawn’.¹⁰ Fairyland—through its invitation into childlike imagination—reminds us who we are, children of God; and restores for us a vision of what we are made for, happily ever after.

The goal of the fairytale is not to keep us in a perpetual state of childhood, however, but to accompany us along the pathway to wisdom, and, having continued along the appointed journey, serve as a reminder of the way in which this earth is merely a foretaste, a shadow of a glimpse of that which we are made for:

Children are meant to grow up…not to lose innocence and wonder, but to proceed on the appointed journey: that journey upon which it is certainly not better to travel hopefully than to arrive, though we must travel hopefully if we are to arrive. But it is one of the lessons of fairy-stories (if we can speak on the lessons of things that do not lecture) that on callow, lumpish, and selfish youth peril, sorrow, and the shadow of death can bestow dignity, and even sometimes wisdom.¹¹

By pointing us towards wisdom, fairytales are beacons of light, heralds of hope. As we remember that we are dust (an act of daring, according to Varden), fairytales remind us that we were not made to wallow in our poverty, but to allow our weakness to become the breaking ground for His glory. They remind us that while we have died with Christ, we have been raised with him also: ‘I accept that for all my desire to live, I shall die; I am dust with a nostalgia for glory’.¹² Fairytales become the instrument of this nostalgia. Through the whimsical, enchanting, terrifying nature of fairytales, their otherworldliness becomes a pathway by which the reader is able to remember that he is made for more than this world, that the desire within us is a reminder that we were made for another world altogether.¹³ Fairytales remind us that we are all, at times, the dragon in need of slaying and the vulnerable in need of rescuing.

The narratives fairytales offer are undeniably hopeful—they call us back into a faith in a God that does not condemn us to our ashes, but reminds us of our dust, our need to be rescued, and then rises out of the grave, bringing with Him all restoration, all redemption, all resurrection. Through their invitation to a secondary world, the inherent structure of the story, and accompaniment they offer to the reader, fairytales provide a means to powerful remembrance for the Christian life. The task before us is clear: we must ‘strive to live a life that is worthy of the freedom won for me [us]. In this way, even memories of time spent in the cruellest captivity can become a source of peace, erupting into praise’.¹⁴ Let us, as Christians and poets, remember the way to fairyland, embracing the truth that we are but dust, and to dust, we shall return.