“I am exhausted.”
Photo by Natalia Y on Unsplash
“God gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”
— Isaiah 40:29-31
“I am exhausted.”
This phrase, more than any other lately, echoes in our world. I hear it from parishioners, friends, and family. I see it in the shadows underneath the eyes of those I love just as much as I witness it in the bowed heads of strangers. I feel it deep in my own bones and heart.
We’re all tired.
Sometimes we are beaten down because we have to work extra hard. Sometimes, because we don’t have enough to do. It comes from spending too much time with some people and not enough with others. The fatigue creeps in slowly and exhaustion overtakes us in sudden bursts. We sleep for too long, or toss and turn all night. We feel both completely overwhelmed with information and sense the gaps of understanding. We fill our mornings with coffee, desperately trying to stave off a weariness that goes beyond drooping eyelids and tense muscles.
Our bodies are tired.
Our minds are tired.
Our hearts are tired.
Our souls are tired.
This week, I wrote seven blog posts. Each one had a bible verse or theological quote. There were happy stories and sad stories, confessions and instructions. Every one had a pithy title and a unique eye catching photo. Yet, at the core of all of them was an attempt to express the weariness I experience personally and witness in all of you.
In the past few weeks, the world has fundamentally changed and it will never go back to the way it was. The fatigue of trying to figure out what the world we live in now actually looks like and how best to respond to it is probably a deeper exhaustion than most of us have ever known.
As I contemplated the worn and weary world around me, I started thinking about fairy tales.
Fairy tales are the wonderful stories that we tell children to help them cope with things they do not understand. These narratives instill in them fundamental truths about good and evil, danger and safety, heroes and villains. They learn how to be brave, what true strength is, and not to eat poison apples.
JRR Tolkien, a fairy tale author himself, wrote an essay called “On Fairy-stories” in which he explored the deep and complex nature of these tales in society and how they relate to Christianity. I want to offer it to you this week.
He begins the essay thus:
“The realm of the fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever present peril; both joy and sorrow sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them.”
Tolkien wrote his stories after World War I. They were a way for him to express the fundamental shift in the world following the Great War he fought in. As a solider he wandered in places too dark to speak of and so he expressed the truth of the world through characters like hobbits and monsters like orcs. At the core of those tales and the many other stories we tell is “the eucatastrophe.” This is a term that Tolkien uses to describe a moment in every fairy tale.
“The good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no real end to any fairy tale) this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories produce supremely well… is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to reoccur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure [instead] it denies (in the face of much evidence) a universal final defeat.”
There is a moment in every story when the reader cannot believe that things can turn out for the better. Too much has happened. The shadows are too dark. The agony too painful. The weariness too exhausting. In the midst of this moment comes the eucatastrophe; the turn, the switch. Things don’t go back to the way they were, but they don’t come to an end either. The characters find a new way to defeat evil and to go on living.
Tolkien claims that the purest form of such an event is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
“The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. The Gospels contain many marvels… and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe.”
When the shadows lengthen on Good Friday and everyone goes into hiding nobody thinks that Jesus might rise from the dead. It is the great dyscatastrophe. God himself has been killed by human sin. Yet, on Easter morning the turn comes. In an event worthy of the grandest tale Jesus rises from the dead and greets those he loves. This, the most incredible eucatastrophe, changes the course of the whole world and everyone in it.
This time in our lives is a dyscatastophe. It is the dark moment. The shadows are deep and the tears pour forth unchecked. What we thought might cause an inconvenience to our lives for a few weeks has become a battle that will wage for months, maybe even years. A virus that we cannot see or control is the monster which stole away what we loved most.
Honestly, I might have preferred a real live dragon. They seem to be easier to kill and move more slowly than Covid 19. And, I wish I could say that the eucatastrophe of this particular space and time is just around the corner. I wish that a knight in shinning armor would spring in to save the day. Alas, the story is still being written. The happy ending is not just a page away.
Sometimes the world around us can be just a little bit too much. Yet we hear in in the book of Isaiah the promise that when our exhaustion goes too deep, God will strengthen our weary hearts and bodies.
God has changed the ending of the story. Even if we cannot see it. Even if we have no right to expect it. The eucatastrophe is real and the promise of it sustains us even when we are so very very tired.