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Is Our World Really a Fairy Tale? Thoughts on wonder

by James Barringer  
12/16/2009 / Christian Living

A boy I know named R.J. found out recently that Santa doesn't exist.

He's about the age where these things usually happen, so his mother and sister rounded him up and told him that Santa wasn't real. "Don't worry," they added, "you'll still get the same number of presents this year. They'll just be from us instead. Actually, they always have been from us. We just put Santa's name on them."

R.J. cried and cried, refusing to be comforted. I found that really perplexing. Nothing about the situation had actually changed. He wasn't mourning the loss of presents, because he wasn't losing any. What was the loss, then; what was the cause for mourning?

The only possible answer is that he had lost the wonder.

Nothing about the reality of the situation had changed in any way. The only thing different is that the presents now had a mundane source, relatives and the money they worked to earn, rather than a wondrous source, a fat jolly guy who rode around the earth on a sleigh propelled by magical flying reindeer. If that's the only difference, that must be the thing R.J. was crying for. He lost the wonder and the magic, the boundless and amazing nature of a world where gravity could be defied and somehow, some way, one man could give presents to every child in the world in one night. He had to settle for a mundane world where his sister works at a miniature golf course making barely above minimum wage to buy him a present. Wouldn't you pick the wonderful over the mundane?

I think that we as people were engineered in a way to crave wonderful and inexplicable things. If nobody taught us about Santa, we created our own fantastic stories, creating imaginary cities in the sandbox or pretending our stuffed animals have personalities. You know this; you did the same things, and you're probably thinking of them right now. We need to pick up on the fact that this is something children do without being taught. Santa himself may be a social creation, a legend or myth, but the thing inside children that causes them to believe in Santa is already there. This is important.

There are really only two explanations for where this thing came from. The first is that it somehow evolved, which is obviously quite impossible because it is not an evolutionary advantage. It is, quite the contrary, a huge handicap, this proneness to irrational fits of whimsy which forces the sufferer to create fantasies about a world that does not really exist. It prevents a person from seeing the world "as it really is," which is a terrible disadvantage. How could such a thing have ever evolved? The alternative is that it was given to us by something other than evolution, which means by God, and that it was given to us for a very specific purpose. In other words, we come to earth already wired for belief in God.

Romans 1 tells us this, by explaining that God made creation in such a way that "his invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made." Isn't that an absurd paradox? God's invisible qualities have been clearly seen. Paul's point is that God has made us, and made the rest of creation, in such a way that we understand, without having to be taught, that it is wonderful and has a wonderful origin. This was God's intention with creation. Paul writes, "what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them." He speaks to us through creation. When we look at creation, we do not merely see rocks and gases and soil; we instinctively know that there is something more, something wonderful. We are predisposed to believe in wonder; God has made it plain to us, and we can clearly see, that what we see is not all that can be seen.

Much of Christianity is wonderful as opposed to reasonable. God is three, but also one, and one of those three became a man and died on a cross to somehow take care of our sins so that we could know God. We believe that another one of these three actually comes to live inside us, giving us the desire and power to do what pleases God. We believe in justice, but we also believe in loving those who mistreat us. None of this can be reasonably or rationally explained. It is wonderful, mystical. Try and explain it with physics or logic and you will fall miserably, infinitely short.

And that's why you don't have to understand physics or logic to be a Christian. You just have to understand wonder, which you do, because God created us with that ability built-in. That need you felt to believe in Santa and talking stuffed animals wasn't foolishness, wasn't a malfunction; it was you trying to give voice to the thing in life that is most real, the knowledge that wonder exists and can be known. The proper way to handle wonder is not to kill it as you get older, to grow callous toward sunsets and cynical toward people. The way to handle it is to fuel it, to let your breath be taken away every time the clouds explode into purple and orange, to believe in people who don't believe in themselves, to love a God who you have never seen but whose fingerprints are all over your life. In other words, as a fellow named Jesus once said, you become more like a child.

Why do children believe in a world where reindeer fly and pumpkins turn into carriages and the frog might really be a prince? It's because of wonder. Each of us was once that child, and we've never lost the capacity to believe in the wonderful. We've only lost the desire, replacing it instead with the desire to explain and control our lives. God is inviting us on a much bigger journey, into a world where miracles really happen and ordinary people do extraordinary things, where God uses imperfect people to share perfect love and truth, where God loves and accepts us all even when we do things he says not to do. Welcome to the land, and the faith, of wonder.

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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