Happily ever after marches into town
Italian folktales and eucatrastrophe.
What is Eucatastrophe?
Good question! Christian Courier’s team of Editors picked this as our Christmas theme nearly 12 months ago, and since then I’ve had to look up the meaning at least 10 times. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as a “sudden and favourable turn of events in a story” and admits its usage is rare. The problem is that most people perceive it as negative; it’s too close to “catastrophe” for comfort. But we love a challenge here at CC, so you’ll find a few columnists and at least one writer who dared to engage with Tolkien’s nuanced neologism!
– Angela Reitsma Bick, Editor
In 1941, the poet W. H. Auden started writing a Christmas oratorio to be set to music by Benjamin Britten. He imagined it as a set of modern-day monologues voicing the perspectives of characters in the Christmas story and he shifted the setting to represent the world around him.
The mood of the poem was strange and sombre and spoke as much about his worries concerning the future as it did about any present or historic past. The project seemed to get away from him, and he spun out far too many words for Britten to use, but in the midst of his imagining, we find this passage:
We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.
That is Christmas in a nutshell. The astonishing miracle of the Incarnation. Eucatastrophe.
Real fairytales
The second example that sprang to mind when Angela Reitsma Bick announced December issue’s theme comes from a bedtime storybook. My kids are growing quickly, and it’s true the eldest will be starting university next fall, but we still cap each day piled up together on the couch for a story. Lately, I’ve been reading from a book called Italian Folktales retold by Italo Calvino. The stories are completely, hilariously ridiculous and feel like Grimm’s fairytales told squint, with hillsides covered in vineyards, olives and feathered ogres. We’ve been having a lot of fun.
Most often, fairytales end well. Children are returned home, sweethearts marry, treasure is found, and happily ever after marches right into town. It can be hard to guess how events will twist to bring about the long-desired best, but good will win out in the end and we all go off to bed laughing and happy. That’s the magic of fairytales.
But in his introduction, Calvino asserts his belief that we love fairytales because they are real. He suggests that the tales contain a full catalogue of the potential struggles and destinies of human life and, in the end, will always find a way to celebrate beauty, truth and purity of heart. That is what real looks like, as much as all the struggle and grief along the way.
Beautiful additions
There is something in us that demands a good ending. Maybe it is, as Auden suggested, because we know life is short and not to be wasted. We who must die demand a miracle. But I think there is more here. We are wired for grace. We long for and are built for redemption. Nothing can save us that is possible. Only impossible Love.
There is a Tuscan proverb that states: “the tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it.” In collecting and rewriting folktales, Calvino added his own voice to traditions passed down throughout the generations. His conviction of fairytale reality rings loud and clear in each extravagant twist of fortune and each resounding happy ending. As we retell the Christmas stories this year, may our own voices be heard and our own visions of God’s great eucatastrophe be shared.
