Civility, Easter, and Fairy Tales

A new reflection by Ron Mock

Last week as I chauffeured Jonathan Kuttab around the Portland – Newberg area, I had the pleasure of getting to know him. He kept talking about Easter, and his uncontained delight that it was coming soon. A Palestinian born in the 1950’s, he has lived the refugee experience, engaging non-violently for four decades in a struggle to have a homeland.

Easter is the center point in his year, the core promise of his faith, the fount of hope abundant enough to get him through another year of his thus-far-unfinished lifetime of labor.

So even though I write this after Easter, after spending so many hours with Jonathan Kuttab I cannot treat Easter as being over.

Kuttab’s link to the utter reality of a refugee trying to help create a homeland got mixed for me this Easter with something that, at first glance, seems to come from an utterly opposite direction: fantasy literature. Not everyone is a fan of fantasy literature – not even everyone in my own marriage! I myself am on record warning people to be careful about drawing life lessons from fiction wherein the author can create an unrealistic world whose lessons may apply disastrously to the real one.

Even so, reading last week about JRR Tolkien’s devout Catholic faith and its influence on his writings – especially The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings – I came across Tolkien’s own link between his writing and his faith, which also centered on Easter.

In his essay “On Fairy Stories” Tolkien defines fantasy – which he also refers to as “faerie” — as secondary creation, whole worlds that writers make up but that, at their best, are true. Not factually true, but morally and spiritually so. They are (as literally embodied in Tolkien fable “Leaf by Niggle”) canvases upon which the author can paint a vision of Truth.

When done well, we do not have to suspend disbelief to enter into this kind of fantasy story. “What really happens,” Tolkien tells us, “is that the story-maker… makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world.” (Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, p. 37).

After this paragraph, Tolkien offers as his very first example… cricket fandom! Not baseball, but Tolkien was an Englishman through no fault of his own. He was not even much of a cricket fan. He had to suspend disbelief to endure watching a match. But he saw true cricket fans as having entered into a subcreated Secondary World, where the laws of cricket are True and meaningful things happen.

But what has cricket (or Bilbo, Frodo, Gandalf and Sauron) to do with Easter? Let’s let Tolkien tell us.

Fantasy stories serve three true purposes, according to Tolkien. The first is recovery of sight, of the ability to see things as they are. We tend to treat the things around us as ours, reducing them to their aspects that serve our interests, and in so doing lose sight of much of their reality. We see our cars as things to drive, or to make a personal statement with, and forget the fuller reality: they represent generations of human creativity in thousands of details; they are the product of a vast production and distribution system built mostly on voluntary choices by millions of people; they consume resources in production, and in propulsion, most of which are non-renewable; they transform the landscape, making Los Angeles possible, and cities the world over into echoes of L.A; they burn fossil fuels implicated in global warming.

Were you conscious of this every day, you would approach your car with a mixture of reverence and dismay that would make driving it a serious, passionate act. You would never treat it lightly, casually, as a trifle. It would be celebratory and solemn and tragic and complex, a Disneyland and a memorial service in a church on your birthday.

Or consider your pet dog or cat. They amaze us when they demonstrate they’ve figured us out – knowing sometimes before we do that we are about to leave the house, or finish eating, or enter a certain room, or remembering before we do that we've reached the time in the day when our spouse is due home from work. Even a well-loved pet is more than we give it credit for – descendants of lions or wolves, observers of human nature, with projects and purposes of their own we do not entirely understand. You don’t own your dog. The dog is God’s and owns you as much you own it, and is bigger and deeper than you’ve ever guessed. You’ve forgotten this only because you did not let your imagination wander freely enough. Here I recommend reading The Art of Racing in the Rain – arguably a fairy story in Tolkien’s definition – as part of your cure.

Fantasy, Tolkien says, may teach you. It “may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds.”

The second purpose of fairy stories is escape, the chance to lift our eyes from the weary, sordid world provoking in us “Disgust, Anger, Condemnation and Revolt.” To Tolkien, well-done “fairy stories were plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability… I desired dragons with a profound desire.”

It is not a good thing for a politics professor to hate politics. But I often do. It is almost impossible to read or watch much about politics without experiencing disgust, not only at what is happening today, but also that it has been happening every day for as long as we can remember, and looks like it will keep happening. If anything, politics seems set to get worse rather than better. Like most people, I’d rather not spend my precious time wading through an ever-deepening sewer.

A good story creates a place we long to see, or at least to believe in. Fantasy can help us envision a universe that has a long arc bending toward yet-unseen justice. By ducking out of the real world’s atrocity and into a story whose heroes are also experiencing atrocity but continue to struggle for healing, we can draw strength and inspiration to help us navigate the sordid places in the real world.

The third purpose of fairy stories according to Tolkien, is to bring us the “Consolation of the Happy Ending” – the eucatastrophe, the sudden joyous turn, the miraculous grace. “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.”

Tolkien believed that this glimpse of Joy was a glimpse of “underlying reality”, including the “greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe.”

Tolkien went so far as to say this (Tree and Leaf, pp. 71-72):

“The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essences of fairy-stories… The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in Joy. There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true… To reject it leads to either sadness or wrath.”

That’s where I am today, and my sense of what the Civility Project is about. We – Jonathan Kuttab in Israel and Palestine, and we here in Oregon and America – are trying to do in the real world what Tolkien was trying to do in the literary one.

We are trying to help people recover sight about the nature and costs of incivility, including inaction in the face of wrong, and the possible fruits of civility.

We are trying to give people opportunities to escape from despair and disgust into a vision of healthy politics in all our polities: governments, churches, communities, and families.

And we are trying to share a sliver of the very good news, that we are meant for Joy already made possible by the greatest of all eucatastrophes culminating in Easter, and made real in practice (in part) by responding with rich civility to the gift of disagreement.