Stories of good and evil seem to have dominated the time my daughter and I have spent together since the school year ended recently. Cinderella is her favorite princess right now; and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was the movie she requested for last Saturday’s movie night in our “home theater” (which consists of an old DVD player and a 1990’s TV). At the heart of both storylines is the seemingly timeless tug of war between a yearning for something “good” and a desire to destroy anything and everything that even comes close to the definition of something good. Somehow, our children never, ever seem to tire of this dynamic; and we adults don’t appear to be far behind our children in this–just peek at any modern-day action movie.
I was further reminded of our long history with the battle between good and evil when I heard a professor of Christian apologetics point out that, apart from the existence of good, we cannot even identify evil; good can exist without evil but there is no evil without good. And as anyone who’s spent any length of time at all on this planet knows all too well, there is plenty of evil down here; and the only upside of this most unfortunate fact is that evil’s very presence here proves that Good was here first. Jesus tells us that even before Old Testament Abraham was, Jesus was. “I AM,” Jesus has said. And he still is, even amidst the fiery battle of the flesh that is playing out within us and all around us down here.
Yes, I think we are drawn to fairy tales, to plots of good/evil, because they make sense to us both temporally and eternally. Such tales allow us to see the swords of good and evil clashing and clanging right in front of us and, in the tales we love the most, Good does always triumph…..eventually. I ask my daughter sometimes, “So, does this story make you think of the Bible?” And her response often is, “Yeah, and that sneaky snake too, Mom.” As she is very familiar with Eve/Eden, “sneaky snake” is how she typically refers to the captain of evil’s team. No, spending a little time in a fairy tale is not a bad thing at all. It’s one more way that we can get a little glimpse of God during our time in this realm of life.
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