{"id":4220,"date":"2024-11-26T06:57:26","date_gmt":"2024-11-26T11:57:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=4220"},"modified":"2024-11-26T06:57:26","modified_gmt":"2024-11-26T11:57:26","slug":"once-upon-a-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2024\/11\/26\/once-upon-a-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Once Upon a Time"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0<\/em>click here<\/a>

What drives the Literati <\/em>\u2013 the lovers of what is commonly identified as Great Literature \u2013 absolutely crazy?

It\u2019s the fact that the vast majority of ordinary people would rather enjoy a fairy tale than dig into a \u201cserious story.\u201d

The Academy Award for Best Picture is annually granted to a movie that is brilliantly written and skillfully acted. Members of the Academy also tend to favor films with a deeply serious tone.

Oppenheimer,<\/em> which won the Oscar last winter, certainly checks all those boxes. It was also a commercial success. But the four previous winners \u2013 Everything Everywhere All at Once<\/em> (2023), CODA<\/em> (2022), Parasite<\/em> (2021), and Nomadland <\/em>(2020) \u2013 have registered a collective \u201chuh?\u201d from the movie-going public.

Millions of people, however, are on pins and needles to get their first look next year at Avatar 3<\/em>, Captain America: Brave New World<\/em>, and Tom Cruise\u2019s latest death-defying stunts in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part II <\/em>\u2013 all of which are sequels, and none of which is likely to be mentioned when the next awards season rolls around.

People who actually buy theater tickets clearly prefer heroes, heroines, and high adventure.

J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote The Hobbit <\/em>and Lord of the Rings<\/em>, and who almost singlehandedly invented the fantasy genre known as the Great Quest, explained in his famous essay \u201cOn Fairy-Stories\u201d why this really shouldn\u2019t surprise anyone.

In his essay, Tolkien (1892-1973) suggests that secular modernity has tended to dismiss certain \u201cprimordial human desires.\u201d

But those desires haven\u2019t thereby disappeared.\u00a0

They include a yearning to \u201csurvey the depths of space and time,\u201d and to escape the finality of death.\u00a0Tolkien calls the hope of surviving death \u201cthe oldest and deepest desire.\u201d

As Tim Keller puts it in his book Making Sense of God:\u00a0<\/em>\u201cWe want to live long enough to realize our artistic and creative dreams, we want love without parting [that is, to experience a love that doesn\u2019t end when our loved ones die], and we desire to see the final triumph of good over evil.\u201d

Where can such things happen?

In fairy tales.\u00a0In fantasies.\u00a0In stories of courageous women and men who vanquish their darkest fears and fiercest enemies.\u00a0

People aren\u2019t na\u00efve.\u00a0They know that Harry Potter <\/em>and Star Trek <\/em>and Beauty and the Beast <\/em>are just works of fiction.

But there\u2019s something in a well-crafted story that stirs our hearts.\u00a0Tolkien believed that fairy tales point to a reality beyond themselves.\u00a0

Keller comments:\u00a0\u201cWe have intuitions of the plotline of the Bible, that the world was made to be a paradise but it has been lost.\u00a0The tales bring us joy, because deep down we sense that they describe the world as it ought <\/em>to be and what we were made for.\u201d

At the end of his essay, Tolkien lays his cards on the table.

He believes that the account of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is \u201ca story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories.\u201d\u00a0

That doesn\u2019t mean Tolkien thinks the Gospel is a made-up narrative no more historically valid than Superman, Beowulf, or Wonder Woman. \u00a0\u00a0

Keller again:\u00a0\u201c[The story of Jesus] is the <\/em>story to which all the other joy-bringing, spell-casting, heart-shaping old stories only point.\u00a0Why?\u00a0This is the one story that satisfies all these longings yet is historically true.\u00a0<\/em>It happened.\u201d

People are hard-wired to love great stories.\u00a0And great stories fill us with hope that maybe there really is a Story in which everything turns out right at the end.

Wouldn\u2019t it be great if there really was a Hero who died to save everybody, but who somehow came back from the dead so he could go on living with us?

That\u2019s no fairy tale.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here What drives the Literati \u2013 the lovers of what is commonly identified as Great Literature \u2013 absolutely crazy? It\u2019s the fact that the vast majority of ordinary people would rather enjoy a fairy tale than dig into a \u201cserious story.\u201d The Academy Award for Best Picture is annually granted to a… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4221,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[838,839],"class_list":["post-4220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-fairy-tales","tag-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4220"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4222,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4220\/revisions\/4222"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}