Fairyland

A Christian Suggestion

I recently stumbled across this quote in George MacDonald’s Golden Key:

Things that look real in this country look very thin indeed in Fairyland, while some of the things that here cannot stand still for a moment, will not move there.

We shouldn’t try to put these things in neat, tidy boxes, and ribbons on top are particularly misplaced. But I do think this gives us at least one possible “Christian” conception of Fairyland (and I put “Christian” in scare-quotes to distinguish a robust Lewisian view from cheap moralistic frameworks).

Maybe Fairyland is just as real as the world we see, touch, hear, smell, taste. Maybe things like rainbows are just as real as atoms, cells, quarks, and neurons. Maybe inanimate things really do have personalities; maybe oaks really are steady and willows melancholic.

Maybe Fairyland is simply where what is tangible here becomes intangible, and what is intangible here becomes tangible.

Maybe The Fisherman’s Wife is a true story, and I’m not talking about the moral.