Unless you turn and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. That child within us is the younger son.
That child within us is Christ. If we are meant to be Christ for each other, to see Christ in each other, then we must be careful that we see the younger son and not the elder brother. Jesus was born of a human mother, in a stable, not in the palace of a king. Jesus goes on the Quest on which he is sent with no proud estimate of his own worth. It’s always, “Not me, but the Father.” He knows the Quest is of ultimate, cosmic importance, and that it is he, the carpenter’s son, who has been called. But the Quest, and the Father who sent him on the Quest, always come first, are always put before his own interests.
Jesus is also the true princess, and the true princess is within each one of us, too.
All men have within them the true princess, if they’re wise enough to find her, just as all women are also the younger son, if we’re willing to be open and vulnerable. A lot of sexism has been forced on us in the name of a false liberation. Perhaps the fairy tale will help us over some of the hurdles the world has put in our paths to trip us up.
Far too often we trip. The Quest is dangerous. J. E. Fison says that
There is no possibility of contact with the Divine without running the risk of being destroyed by the demonic. This is why Bible religion…is the death enemy of safety and certainty and knowing what’s at the end of the road before you start out. It is always either bliss or perdition, salvation or damnation, the greatest curse or the most wonderful blessing in life. It cannot be the one without running the risk of the other; promise and peril must always co-exist. So long as we refuse that total commitment to the Creator by the creature, that humbling awareness of the infinite by the finite…we shall have no reality in our conscious experience to correspond with the words, Holy Spirit.
If we are to call on and be helped by the Holy Spirit we (and the protagonists of the fairy tale) must have great humility. My bishop remarked that one cannot have humility without humor, and they both come from the same root, humus—of the earth, earthy.
From humility comes strength, for only with humility can we have confidence in the Quest.
The true princess knows that only the truly strong man is able to be gentle, that tender, loving concern springs from a willingness to accept our whole selves. The world of elder brothers wants us all labeled and pigeonholed: the good people must be entirely good, the wicked must be entirely wicked. And it’s never as simple as that, though we often wish it were.
I tend to put people I admire up on a beautiful marble pedestal, but no real friendship is possible until I demolish the pedestal and accept the whole person, the younger son, the true princess, and, yes, the monster.
The princess knows that to identify is to limit, to pigeonhole. To Name is to love.
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Of course the prototypical story of the true princess is that of the princess and the pea. Once upon a time—and the moment we say “Once upon a time” we move out of the restrictions of chronology and into kairos, real time, God’s time—Once upon a time in the midst of a storm a young woman knocked on the doors of the palace. When she was admitted she looked thoroughly bedraggled, with her hair hanging about her wet as seaweed. Nevertheless she announced proudly that she was a princess.
The prince of that kingdom looked at her and saw that under her seaweed hair and wet clothes she was lovely, so he determined to test whether or not she was truly a princess. A bedchamber was prepared for her with a bed piled high with twenty-nine mattresses, and under the bottom mattress was placed a single pea.
In the morning she was asked if she had slept well, and she replied, “Sleep? How could I possibly sleep with something hard digging into my back all night?” And that’s how the prince knew that she was a true princess.
We’re all meant to feel the pea, if we’re to be true princesses, and we can name some of those dulling mattresses:
What will the neighbors think?
Will it upset the congregation?
Will it affect the real estate value?
Have I put in enough sex scenes to please the public?
Did I put in enough shock value for it to sell?
We can all add our own mattresses that may blunt our awareness of the pea.
Often we’re faced with questions for which there are no easy or visible solutions, and we must accept that for many reasons we don’t always do the right things, and sometimes the sad truth is that there is no right thing to do, and so we tend to become discouraged and turn away. In Christ there is no east nor west, black nor white, rich nor poor, but in the world there is, and though Christ has overcome the world, the world often overcomes us. But have hope, take courage, don’t give up.
Simply the fact that we couldn’t sleep all night because we felt the hard pea of awareness under all those mattresses of indifference is a step in helping Christ overcome the world.
For the true princess who is a storyteller, our awareness must lead to our making other people aware. Uncle Tom’s Cabin did more to make people aware of the horrors of slavery than many sermons. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible awakened us to the danger of witch hunts. (Surely Senator Joseph McCarthy was an elder brother. Surely the Anti–New Agers are elder brothers.) The true princess has no guarantee that she will succeed in curing the world of the ills of greed and corruption, but if we are aware of them, then other people may be, too, and if enough people become aware, then things can change for the better.
The true princess, like the younger son, sees beyond this world and beyond chronological time to the cosmic dimension. If we think only in terms of success, then our success becomes more important than compassion; if we feel compelled to succeed, we don’t have time to know anybody in the cause by name.
Jesus, who was, of course, true princess as well as younger son, was aware of the political unrest and social inequity of his day, but he refused to lead a revolution.
He was aware of the outrageous position of women in his day; a woman had nothing of her own, and if her husband didn’t like her, he could write a bill of divorcement, and she had no say in the matter. It’s difficult to realize that this was true at the beginning of our own century in England and, to a certain extent, here in the United States. Like the world of two thousand years ago it was a man’s world, and though Jesus disregarded this in his own relations with women and treated them as equals, which shocked many of his friends, he did nothing to start an Equal Rights movement. Not that I’m against Equal Rights, mind you, but I think such come after we are known by name, not before; otherwise the amendment becomes meaningless.
The world, which daily tries to overcome us and unName us and keep us from our vocation of being real princesses, wants us to think in terms of immediate worldly success; to implement instant social justice everywhere for people who are statistics, not named; to feed all the poor since the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, and if his belly is full he’ll do whatever we tell him to do; to cure all ills by a magic new drug, rather than calling the afflicted person by name, and laying on hands that heal. Perhaps it takes both for healing to be effective.
When we feel the pea and start to think in terms of success, like the elder brothers, we begin to think of the cause of social justice, the cause of world hunger, the cause of the poor, the old, and the ill. It doesn’t hurt us to be involved in a cause because we don’t have to name the individual people who make up the cause or see them one by one. We may be politically correct, but we are far from being truly human.
The vocation of the real princess is not to blunt the pain of awareness by plunging into causes. H. A. Williams writes,
Causes begin to matter more than people and the Son of God is on the way to being crucified afresh in the name of righteousness and by campaigns and committees. For how can I love my ne
ighbor as myself unless I am deeply aware of what I am, that I am being loved into life by the Father of us all?…It is only the degree in which I can begin to apprehend his love for me that I can begin to apprehend his love for all men.
That is the mainspring of all Christian social action—love, not success. Having compassion. Having the courage to share in each other’s joys and fears and pains, every single day.
The true princess ultimately must grow up. She cannot stay a beautiful young girl forever. Sooner or later she will become either the wise old woman or the wicked witch.
The temptations that lead away from wisdom are, as always, seductive. They have been the same temptations world without end, even before the Spirit came to Jesus after his baptism, after his Naming, and led him up the mountain to be tempted. The true princess who is on her way to becoming a wise old woman sees the temptations for what they are. She feels the pea of self-indulgence through the seductive mattresses of success without substance: don’t worry about hurting others; your own fulfillment comes first. Remember your integrity! Discipline is rigid, and there’s no point in praying unless you feel like it and it makes you feel good; avoid pain at all costs. Give lip service to a cause because it’s “in” right now, but you don’t have to be involved with any of the people who make up the cause. Be politically correct and all will be well for you.
The true princess as she becomes a wise woman learns the toughness of love. Often, when someone exclaims “I love you,” what is being loved is that part of us the person wants to see, rather than all of us; and our wholeness includes many things we’d rather not see—flaws and follies, weaknesses—in fact, monsters. If the princess cannot love the monster in us, she cannot love us, for only love can release the monster from its bondage.
Sometimes the line between the wicked witch and the wise old woman can be a very fine line. There may be a moment of decision. When Gertrude, Hamlet’s beloved mother, turned from her husband to her lover and conspired with him when he murdered the king, she made an irrevocable decision. She surrendered her wisdom to the temptations of lust and power. The princess faded away, the wise old woman never came to be, and the wicked witch usurped her place.
In fairy tales the witch is sometimes actual witch, sometimes wicked stepmother, and the reason there are many wicked stepmothers and very few wicked stepfathers is that in the time frame when these tales were being told many women died in childbirth, and their husbands remarried, at least partly to have someone to take care of their children.
When we are children it is hard for us to allow our parents to stop being extensions of our own needs and to become people with needs of their own. At the same time that we are clinging to them with a false dependency, we are also struggling to separate ourselves. That is why many children have fantasies of being orphans or having been switched in the cradle. As one author noted, we can work through a lot of growing up by reading or listening to fairy tales.
I know, to my rue, that if I stay in anger, justified or not, the decision to stay there moves me away from being the wise old woman and towards being the wicked witch. In the past one of my angers has been the U.S. Postal disService. A horrendous number of letters never reach their destination, nor are they returned to the sender. I wrote a dear friend of my sadness at her husband’s death. A month later she called to ask me if I had heard. She had never received my letter. I am grateful that she called; she could easily have thought I didn’t care. And this is just one among many examples. I can be legitimately angry at this lack of integrity on the part of the postal service; alas, yes, delivering mail seems to be no longer part of the job description. I have a vision of going to the New York City main post office on 34th Street with a blow torch and blasting out the words carved in the stone, “Neither snow nor sleet nor hail nor dark of night can stop these carriers from their appointed rounds.”
An assignment for one of my writers’ workshops was to take any parable of Jesus and rewrite it for this last decade of the twentieth century. One of my favorite stories was of a young woman who marches up and down in front of the post office with a large sign, I JUST WANT MY MAIL! IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK? and refuses to leave. What a pointed and delightful interpretation of the parable of the judge and the importunate widow!
And is the importunate widow a witch or a wise woman? It all depends. Witches do not have either humility or a sense of humor; wise women can laugh.
Remember, it was by gravity that Satan fell. The princess and the wise woman know holy levity. (And of course the wise old woman is also a wise old man.)
The wise old woman, like the true princess, feels the pea of awareness, and she does not blunt this awareness with forgetfulness. She is vulnerable, but when she suffers she greets the pain with love. And because she and the younger son know each other as intimately as Adam and Eve knew each other, she knows that the very small can be as important as the very great, and that God can use the least offering of love to change the course of a galaxy.
The wise old woman knows who she is. And many of us do not, or do not want to, because we are afraid.
In the Book of Wisdom in the Apocrypha, hagia Sophia—the true princess, the wise old woman—is described thus: “For within her is a spirit intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, active, incisive, unsullied, lucid, invulnerable, benevolent, sharp, irresistible, beneficent, loving to humankind, steadfast, dependable, unperturbed….”
And that is a description of the princess/wise woman we are called to be. And “successful” isn’t a necessary component. Love is, that Love that comes to us as sheer gift, so that we can first of all accept ourselves, and then accept that love which has been given us, and offer it out of our royal richness. Then our souls will magnify the Lord.
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But there are characters in fairy tales—and modern novels—who don’t care anything about love. They care about power, and to get power they are willing to hurt others. Might we say that the opposite of love is power, rather than hate? Hate is often the result of impotence, and impotence is lack of power.
One of our prominent politicians was caught with a young woman to whom he was not married. We were discussing this at dinner, and I wondered why so many politicians and statesmen have been wanton about sex. My son said calmly, “Mother, it’s not sex. It’s power.” And I think he’s right.
When I was a little girl I was terrified of witches, with an instinctive fear of those who want to exercise controlling power over others. A witch often misuses power by means of black magic, and that is terrifying indeed. The word magic is a difficult one because its meaning is wider than the evil misuse of superhuman or inhuman powers. For children, particularly, it can also mean marvel, the tiny fairy hiding in the bluebell or the cowslip; the small gnome who tends the garden and devours cookies; the dwarves who cared for Snow White; the unicorn with its healing horn; the fairy godmother who can provide Cinderella with a beautiful ball gown and a golden coach. That kind of beneficent magic is shown in Winnie the Pooh and the heffalump, or the Dun Cow, or a bull that likes flowers.
In fairy tales we accept, with a willing suspension of disbelief, good fairies, and bad ones, too; guardian angels; talking animals; and, with a less willing acceptance, monsters.
We’d like to think of monsters as something outside us, but there are also many monsters within, and we don’t want to recognize them, any more than did the man who wanted to take the mote out of someone else’s eye without seeing and removing the plank in his own.
Christians are no more immune to the monsters of jealousy and overweening ambition and resentment than anyone else. The monsters are especially strong if we’re going through a period of failure, as I know from my own experience. While my books were being rejected and other writers were being published I had many battles with my monsters. Success can be equally dangerous if we take the success seriously as a reflection of our own m
erit, our own talent, our own control of our art. But that’s the world impinging again and blinding us to the real quest which is never ours alone, but is part of all of the body of Christ and the journey to the kingdom.
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In fairy tales there’s enormous emphasis on baptism, all those lavish christening parties, the good fairies all coming with their gifts, hovering around the baby in the white-bedecked cradle. I believe that each baby is given, at birth, its own gift, and part of our quest into wholeness is to discover our gift, and to be willing to accept that even though it may not be what we want it to be, it is uniquely ours.
But, alas, there’s always some fairy who has been left out, who, through some oversight, doesn’t receive her invitation (the postal service either lost it or failed to deliver it). So she comes to the party with evil intent, to bestow some terrible destructive gift upon the infant. But the good fairies, the guardian angels, are stronger. Though they cannot take away the evil gift, they can turn it to good. It may take a hundred years, or more, but the fairy tale is patient with chronology in the righting of our wrongs and the coming of the eternal life in which we live happily ever after.
One of the ugliest of the monsters (the christening gift of the bad fairy or witch) is resentment. Don Gregorio Maranon, a Spanish, Roman Catholic, Freudian psychologist (what a combination!) writes that resentment does not figure as one of the deadly sins because “it is not a sin, but a passion, a passion of the mind, which can lead to sin, and sometimes madness or crime.” He writes,
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