[Originally posted December 2014…the idea of a positive, surprise turn for good, what Tolkien called eucatastrophe fits so perfectly here in Holy Week. Enjoy Maundy Thursday!]
I think my regular readers understand just how much I love JRR Tolkien’s writings. I’ve certainly blogged enough about them here. I wrote last week [in December 2014] how much of the story of grace and love, the Good news that the Angels came to proclaim, is found in his writings. No, everyone is not perfect…that is not the message of the Bible. God does not suggest that we will be perfect but that through His Spirit, we can be transformed, over time, through struggle and challenge, to walk in His ways. Tolkien’s Middle Earth world reflects this again and again….that we fall, are fallen, broken, and yet there is a spark of Real Life within that was planted there by God, and He calls us again to return to Him.
Well, as with many words in his writings, Tolkien needed to create a new word for what he really meant. See, for some people, they struggle to accept that God really exists, or that if He exists, He really cares enough to intervene. In fact, for many, the presence of any evil in the world suggests there is no God. Tolkien, however, believed that the joy of the world came through God, even through pain and often arriving unforeseen. So, to create what Tolkien called “the Consolation of the Happy Ending” in his powerful essay “On Fairy Stories,” he coined the word “Eucatastrophe,” which means “the good catastrophe.” This was his way of saying that there is the coming of this happy ending, or as some fairy tales say it….”they lived happily ever after.” For Tolkien, such an ending was demanded or it wasn’t a true fairy story—the ending “all complete fairy-stories must have.”
In writing about the eucatastrophe, he explains it as “the sudden joyous “turn” . . . a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence 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 [the gospel], giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world.” Joy beyond the walls of the world….God comes into the world that He created in Jesus, forced to enter in to save the world in a hidden way much like the god of Middle Earth, Eru, cannot simply enter in to defeat the evil but must rather send in minor angels to help guide the others.
So, to Tolkien, Christianity “is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. 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. It has pre-eminently the “inner consistency of reality.” There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits.”
Thus, all great stories “looks forward (or backward: the direction in this regard is unimportant) to the Great Eucatastrophe. The Christian Joy, the Gloria, is of the same kind; but it is preeminently (infinitely, if our capacity were not finite) high and joyous. But this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men — and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused.”
Jon Bloom said it well, writing “No faërie story or myth or man-made religion in all of recorded history compares with the Great Story of Christianity. But we need all the help we can get to turn our eyes away from our confined corner of reality and see the Story with fresh eyes. For many, looking through the faërie lenses of Middle-earth has helped them see again the real Epic we each are a small part of. They have been helped to see the gleam of the true evangelium and press on in the journeys to which they have been appointed with renewed hope and courage, knowing that at the end of the Road is Home.”
Enjoy Maundy Thursday, or perhaps you are reading this on Good Friday of 2016. Peace and blessings my friends. Know the grace of God through Jesus Christ. May He bless you deeply as you delight to walk in His ways.