Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message
Letting the Story Bear You Away
December 16, 2021
As we go into Christmastide, when we will be reading and hearing all kinds of stories that demand a willing suspension of disbelief but that have been the subject of historical and literary criticism that makes us wonder, I am reminded of a conversation I had with my wife Elena back on November 17, the feast of St. Hild of Whitby in Yorkshire.
Elena, as you know, was a children’s librarian, deeply passionate about bringing the new generation into the great conversation of our culture through exposure to books and stories. Her “book talks” and “story times” were legendary, and drew children from all over the DC metropolitan area. She understood the importance of story-telling, and was acutely sensitive to the various ways we short-circuit the ability of stories to speak to us. When a child would raise a hand and ask an extraneous question that took away from the story, say, “and why didn’t Goldilocks run away as soon as she saw it was a bear’s house,” she would reply, “That’s not part of this story. Let’s ask that another time but not right now, so we can hear what the story says.”
What you may not know is that she was an equally passionate amateur follower of geology. Over the years, many times she told me, “In my next life, I want to be a geologist!”
When I prepared a homily on the blessed founder of Whitby Abbey, I noted that Hild’s story was filled with fanciful and imaginative legendary details, as are many of the tales of the saints. In particular was the story that when Hild decided to found the Abbey, its locale was infested with snakes, seen at the time as servants of the Devil and marking the ground as unholy. So, according to the stories, Hild “cast a spell” and turned all the snakes into stone. She then had her monks gather the petrified snakes up, and throw them off of the cliff into the sea. She thus purified the monastery grounds and left a remembrance in stone of her miracle: hundreds of thousands of “snakestones” in the surf and the cliffs.
Sir Walter Scott memorialized the legend in his poem Marmion:
“When Whitby's nuns exalting told,
Of thousand snakes, each one
Was changed into a coil of stone,
When Holy Hilda pray’d:
Themselves, without their holy ground,
Their stony folds had often found.”
These “snakestones” actually are fossils of Jurassic era sea creatures called ammonites, an ancient form of a chambered nautilus, from about 200 million years ago. This particular species is called Hildoceras bifrons in honor of Hilda and the legend.
I told Elena the story, and pointed out how the geology contradicted the legend. Her response, slow and quiet through her impaired speech of late Parkinson’s, was clear all the same: “That story is beautiful. Don’t ruin it by dragging in geology at the wrong time. That would be like a child in story time asking about the name of the mother of one of the characters. I love geology. But I also love stories. We need to let them each be themselves.”
And so it is with all legendary story-telling, including the first two chapters of Matthew and Luke, the infancy stories which we read during Christmastide. When Nadia Bolz-Weber was here a few years ago, she noted that the story of the virginal conception of Jesus was too beautiful to be bogged down by extraneous questions of historicity or biology.
Great fantasy writer J.R.R. Tolkien, after the Hobbit, but before Lord of the Rings, wrote about this in an essay “On Fairy-Stories.” He says that what counts in a legend-type story is not how well it coheres with the outside world, but rather how well it coheres with itself. “It is at any rate essential to a genuine fairy-story, as distinct from the employment of this form for lesser or debased purposes, that it should be presented as ‘true’. ... But since the fairy-story deals with ‘marvels’, it cannot tolerate any frame or machinery suggesting that the whole framework in which they occur is a figment or illusion.” Fantasy or imagination were for Tolkien, as for Aristotle, a tool of perception. It brings the reader into a separate world that operates consistently under its own rules in order to open the mind and heart to better perceive and experience our own day-to-day world. “It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.” The different perspective that such stories give us allows us to escape the constraints of our own life, and find hope. Christianity itself was for him the way that God healed and made good on our tendency to use story-telling destructively, “a way fitting to … [our] strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories.” For him, the birth of Christ is the “happy ending” of human history, and the resurrection is the “happy ending” of the story of the incarnation. While “extraneous questions” are valid in approaching other issues (like the physical natural history of Whitby, or the dating of Roman censuses), we should not let them intrude in the magic of the stories that give us hope.
The point of the stories is the happy ending, the hope and trust we feel in God. Let us not allow extraneous questions get in the way of that.
Grace and peace.
Fr. Tony+
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