Happily Ever After

It’s difficult to speak of this moment of global pandemic with any generalities. There are the sick and also the well; there are the unemployed and also the employed; there are those confined to small apartments—and those, like me, with backyards. Our experiences, in this crisis, are far from uniform.

For many families, pandemic has meant less time, not more. But my life, as a parent and work-from-home writer, has been far less harried by the foreclosure of the normal. My only real hassle these days is finding a consistent workspace—and preferably one with a door. We have older children and ample space, and these do a lot for getting by, especially on rainy days. There are many capable hands for unloading the dishwasher, which now runs twice daily. I can hardly complain.

I’ve even found more time to read, and these isolated days have seemed a perfect opportunity to reread C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. I read these to our first child when she was only an infant, though admittedly, entire months can be erased from memory when you bring a baby home from the hospital. There isn’t much I remembered.

Last week, I finished the first of the series, The Magician’s Nephew, which describes how Lewis’s fantastical world of Narnia came into being. As Aslan sings, the darkness is driven back, and the sky catches fire with stars, which together form a choir. A London cab driver, who has been thrust into this new world on the most ordinary of days, marvels as the world illuminates. “Glory be!” he says. “I’d ha’ been a better man all my life if I’d known there were things like that.” The cabby seems to be attesting to the apologetic qualities of beauty, to this idea that every aesthetic vision is also a moral one. If we behold the truly beautiful, our response can’t simply be one of admiration. No, true beauty insists upon the transformation of deficiency, upon the reparation of ugliness. It’s why we are never unmoved by art and literature, which have the power to enliven our moral imagination as well as invite our moral participation. 

At the driver’s response, I stopped to remember what distinguished Lewis (and his Christian contemporaries) from other writers and artists of their day. Having just emerged from the horrors of World War I, many buried the myth of progress and embraced, according to the authors of The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings, “an aesthetic of dissonance, fragmentation, and estrangement.” But the Inklings—a group of Oxford Christian writers—did not sever themselves from the notion of coherent beauty and the possibility of redemption. Instead, they longed to “reclaim the goodness, beauty, and cultural continuity that had been so violently disrupted . . . Far from breaking with tradition, they understood the Great War and its aftermath in the light of tradition, believing, as did their literary and spiritual ancestors, that ours is a fallen world yet not a forsaken world.” In other words, the Inklings looked horror squarely in the face and refused to see it as a final word. There was nothing naïve about their optimism—they could admit the reality of evil—and yet they remained hopeful about the future, which seemed far more sure than uncertain. 

Ultimately, the Inklings insisted upon the beauty of the world and held to the idea of eucatastrophe—of good overturning evil. Eucatastrophe is the happy ending, which is to say the stuff of fairy tales. But this isn’t to say it departs from reality. No, a Christian would say that eucatastrophe is the arc of the gospel story, a true story, rooted in history, which tells that God made a perfect world that humanity corrupted because of sin. But rather than ceding the world to its own ruin, God took on flesh to redeem it. As Jesus of Nazareth, he subjected himself to death on a cross to afford the world’s repair and effect its reconciliation. On the third day, Jesus was raised from the dead, putting death to death. Easter, which remembers this event, is the emphatic proclamation of eucatastrophe. It’s the paradigmatic happily ever after.

Importantly, eucatastrophe does not insist upon our naivete about evil, nor does it make us indifferent in the face of suffering. Christians worship a suffering, dying God, a God whose incarnation has reckoned with the brutal realities of human existence. It’s right to say, especially in our moment of global pandemic, that these things—tens of millions unemployed, hundreds of thousands dying—must not be. Still, eucatastrophe begs us to hold fast to hope.

These things must not—and shall not always—be.

Text: Jen Michel