We close the covers of the beautiful book, and sit and look at
each other. She sighs contentedly, the deep and satisfied sigh of a 10-year-old
who has just heard the story of Beauty and the Beast translated from its
original French. She sighs the fairytale sigh, the one that says, “They were
good, but flawed. They hoped. They experienced hardship and suffering. Evil was
defeated. Beautiful lessons were learned. They lived happily ever after.”
I close my eyes. Fairytales annoy me. When I was her age, I believed
the plotlines. I wasn’t at all enamored of the magic, but I held steadfastly to
the belief that the good girl heroine would triumph over trials and
tribulations and, sometime in her late teens or early 20s, a prince on a white
horse would whisk her to ever-after. And my life went according to script.
After a not-all-that-happy childhood, I married my prince when I was 21. My
father gave me a fine porcelain statue of Cinderella as a wedding gift.
The following year, we welcomed a fair-haired, blue-eyed firstborn
son. But of course. It’s in the script.
The year after that, I was diagnosed with cancer.
Did not see that sequel coming. Not at all.
This time, I needed more than a fairytale horse to navigate the
turbulence. I needed a lifeboat. I climbed aboard a giant one with “Religion”
emblazoned on her bow. She carried me well through various storms of the cancer
years and then the storms of the recovery years, the ones during which I was
bearing children. I thought her a sturdy and dependable ship.
The ship crashed headlong right around the time our ninth child
was born. Like a young girl who learns that magic isn’t really a thing and that
the horse will grow old and lame, I learned that even if the church is God’s
perfect vehicle of grace, the people who comprise it are not. I can only
compare this chapter in the story to the one where the heroine wanders in the
woods at night and every familiar, comforting figure in the shadows shows
itself to be something else entirely and hisses or bares fangs, or both. No one
was to be trusted.
The ship no longer seaworthy, the heroine is shipwrecked, and one
after another, bottles wash up bearing bad news from home. And this time, the
heroine is neither young, nor fair. She is neither idealistic, nor romantic.
She is tired. She wonders if this is a trilogy.
Probably not. It’s unlikely that a tidy ending is in the script
of the third installment. Instead it is an intermission marked with an asterisk,
most certainly a point of reflection. This time, there is no white horse, no
sturdy boat. This time, there is only faith in the grace of God.
For so long, grace was a gentle word, the one that captured the
nuanced breath of a nearly fairytale God. Now, I see that grace can be severe.
I believed that the goal was to be transported from the suffering. Grace, I
thought, was the intercession of a benevolent God who swept the heroine away
from heartbreak. The whole point of the plot, I thought, was to get beyond the
pain to the promised happiness. I learned that by the time one gets to the third
episode, one is weary from the effort of pushing through to the happy ending.
Now, I see that grace is in the struggle itself. And I have been
resisting grace in favor of fairytales. In the words of Flannery O’Connor, “All
human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change
is painful.”
Vigorously resisting grace. Fighting against the suffering
instead of leaning into it. Cursing the circumstances instead of confidently
resting in the faith that God will use them to change me. Resisting grace.
Even still, grace found me. It was there all along. In the
fairytale moments, to be sure. But also in the dark woods moments. I see it
now, in hindsight, because I recognize the moments of change.
Foss, whose website is
takeupandread.org, is a freelance writer from Northern Virginia.