George MacDonald, one of C.S. Lewis’ greatest influences, once wrote a fascinating little play called “The Light Princess.” It begins with somewhat familiar tropes. A king and queen have no heir, until finally they are blessed to conceive. In their joy, the king hand writes invitations to the girl’s christening and sends them out, but he neglects to send one to his sister, Makemnoit. Makemnoit is a clever, wise woman, it is explained, but also a witch. The lack of an invitation grates at her, so she decides to teach her brother a lesson.
She shows up to the christening, and when no one is paying attention, she puts a few drops of an elixir into the baptismal font, causing it to bubble and change while she mutters a curse.
The king and queen’s daughter, Althea, is quickly discovered to be a tad… peculiar after the baptism. Namely, she has no gravity. She floats like a balloon and is in constant danger of being whisked away by whatever prevailing wind happens to come by. As she gets older, it becomes clear that it is not merely her body that is without weight, but also her mind and heart. She laughs constantly; everything is a joke; pain means nothing; the feelings of others mean nothing; and she is obnoxious to endure.
The king’s philosophers and metaphysicians are finally called for a solution. One is a naturalist and discounts spiritual causes – he is a bore and a feckless man. His counterpart is a spiritualist who takes no mind to the physical world. He is an idiot and manic. Though individually their attempts to analyze and cure Althea’s ailment are ineffective and foolish, once they work together, they come up with an explanation:
The princess’ water is tainted. When she weeps, the poison will be expunged, and her gravity will return.
Well and good, but how to make this flippant, determinedly unserious woman cry? How can they possibly make her feel pain, remorse, compassion, or longing?
Althea’s condition is only alleviated at all when she is in water, specifically the lake. The evil witch, however, shows up again and drains the lake, leaving her without hope. Yet a dashing prince from a far-off kingdom loves the princess, has compassion for her, and sacrifices himself to restore the lake.
Finally, this selfless act, and her own remorse at needing (and allowing) his sacrifice, reduces her to tears, upon which the prince is alive again. Althea feels pain now, but also she feels real, deep joy. The witch is destroyed for her foul deeds, and Althea and the prince marry and live happily ever after.
Lessons Learned
This is a very old story. Essentially, it is Sleeping Beauty, but MacDonald had his reasons for changing the details. And in that old tale as well as this one, we see ourselves, if only we know how to look.
You see, the king made a mistake. He failed to acknowledge that darkness was in his lineage, and the consequence was a lack of vigilance that allowed the baptismal water to be poisoned, so that his daughter was not born into the true faith, but a corruption which reduced her to frippery, a fool in constant, heedless peril. Had the king been wise, he would have sent his wicked sister an announcement about the christening and triumphantly announced, “I have begotten a beautiful daughter, and you ought to know she will be christened. You may attend, if you wish, but you will be watched closely, for my child shall not grow up to resemble you.” Or perhaps he should have sent her the announcement and told her that she couldn’t come, and then he could post guards at the gates. It is the forgetting, the neglecting, that is his error. Darkness does not do well when we expose it (Eph. 5:11). Yet by allowing Makemnoit in the shadows, he empowered her to do her work.
Althea, then, was not brought into this world in the proper fashion, understanding both truth and love, pain and beauty, trial and triumph, brokenness and redemption. She was born as a living heresy – love without truth, silliness without meaning, niceness without any sort of anchor. And she blew wherever the wind took her (Eph. 4:14). It was only in the washing of the pure waters that she felt relief at all, and then, finally, it took the selfless sacrifice of a prince from a far-off kingdom (sound familiar?) to cause living water to spring out of her, expunging the corruption, allowing her to comprehend both beauty and sorrow.
You see, one without the other is neither. Love that does not tell the truth is contrivance. Truth without love is death.
In our culture, it is not truth that we have an overabundance of.
3 Witnesses
1 John 5:17 says this:
There are three that bear witness on earth: the Spirit, the water, and the blood.
As I read it, this is referring to divine revelation (the Spirit), covenant (the blood), and the natural order (the water). Have you ever heard the phrase “Blood is thicker than water?” It’s referring to something similar. Or recall Nicodemus’ conversation with Jesus, when the Pharisee acts incredulous upon hearing that he must be born again. Jesus tells him that unless someone is born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. He then says that flesh is born of flesh, and spirit of spirit.
Blood is the covenants and partnerships we make and that affect us – the greatest of which is Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Water is how we were born, our family, our gender, the way things work in nature. In our time, as Western Christians, we have forgotten the water.
When you only have three ingredients, each of them is crucial. Pancakes without eggs are biscuits. You cannot skip a key component and get the intended result. Our modern neglect to understand the natural order, and the family most of all, has left us confused and vulnerable to manipulation by the zeitgeist.
Addressing Controversy
I wrote an article a while back (that can be viewed here) wherein I pointed out one of the tactics that has worked on us Christians in the West over the past twenty or so years. We allowed our love for adoption (an admirable and good thing to love) to be hijacked and twisted, opening the door to redefining marriage, gender, and soon, the concept of “child.” Basically, I observed this pattern in our mainstream entertainment on the subject of family:
- Every rule has an exception
- Emphasize the exception and marginalize the standard
- The exception becomes the standard
- Emphasize the new exception to the new standard.
It is a brilliant and effective (and evil) propagandistic tool. One thing that struck me, however, about the response to the article was that some commenters said it was fear-based and strange to talk about propaganda in our children’s TV programs and in our action flicks. This, merely a week after leaked recordings of Disney executives explicitly outlining their “not-so-secret gay agenda” that they push in the background, foreground, storyline of every piece of content they create. Remember when “Blues’ Clues,” the allegedly educational TV show for small children, had an entire episode dedicated to pride parades, hosted by a cartoon drag queen, featuring a beaver with surgical wrappings from its gender reassignment surgery? (Not joking; wish I was.) Coming from a Christian audience, it is odd to quash the notion of an intelligent, coordinated assault on the truth as being a spurious bugaboo. We believe in the devil, do we not? The arch-enemy of mankind? Do we think that we are above being manipulated, or that wickedness in this world does not have a plan?
It isn’t even a secret anymore – that’s the sad part. Read Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals if you’d like to know what the plan is in this time and place, a book that has been described by many of our culture’s elites as their guiding light. And by the way, Alinsky dedicated the book to Lucifer (really).
So I think it is permissible in these strange times – and necessary – to identify the tactics being used against us in the war on truth.
The other objection that most stuck with me was the accusation that I was falling into the classic Evangelical idolatry of the nuclear family.
This one is difficult for me to understand. Our country – theoretically a Christian nation until five minutes ago – has a divorce rate of 50%, the average age of marriage is 34 years old, our birthrate is not even at replacement level any longer, a massive LGBTQ lobby influences every aspect of our culture, and we abort close to a million babies a year.
I understand that we can miss on either side of an issue, but my friends, the above paragraph does not describe a nation or a subculture that is idolizing the nuclear family. It is the portrait of a nation that has rejected the nuclear family, giving rise to transient associations, existential angst, fatherlessness, purposelessness, idleness, and despair.
This, interestingly enough, shows us another formula for how the truth is assaulted in our time:
- Describe a problem that other people have
- Constantly assert that a different group of people has that problem
- Distract from their real issues by chiding them about something they do not have a problem with.
Is there such a thing as turning the nuclear family into an idol? Yes. And you can even find it in the US in small, isolated pockets, particularly in super-fundamentalist circles. But this idolatry hardly runs the culture. The opposite is much closer to the truth, that we have forsaken the water, and our witness is incomplete.
We’re like the family in “The Light Princess.” When we don’t acknowledge Adam, and guard against his fallen predations, he presses the advantage.
One Final Story
In the Book of 1 Kings, Chapter 22, there is a most telling story.
To sum up, Ahab and Jehoshaphat want to go to war against Syria to capture Ramoth in Gilead, but they first want to inquire of the prophets to see if God will bless the endeavor. Four hundred prophets make a great show of telling them that yes, the Lord will give you victory over the Syrians in this battle, so go for it. Jehoshaphat insists on finding a real prophet of the Lord, and Ahab reluctantly sends for Micaiah, whom he hates for always giving bad news. Once arrived, they implore Micaiah to be encouraging and to give them good news. Micaiah describes a situation before God’s throne, in which God allows a lying spirit to go out to the prophets, such that Ahab may go to his destruction. He tells them that they will be scattered if they assault Ramoth, and they will not have victory.
Typical Micaiah.
For his trouble, Micaiah was struck and thrown in prison, and the kings went off to war, where they were beaten, scattered, and Ahab was killed.
Sometimes it isn’t good news, Christian. We have to know where we are in this moment. I say this as someone who believes in the triumph of the Church, of Christ’s return to a conquered world in glory, and I believe that somehow, the calumny of this current moment will be exposed, defeated, and replaced by something good. But there is no promise that you and I personally will be left standing on top of that hill. I say we fight, study, write, speak, and spend our money like people who understand the signs of the times and aren’t going down without a brawl. Heck, maybe we can even win the fight if we admit that we’re in one.
And love has to lead that truth.
I write this with some gravity, but not despair. After all, we can always float in the water.
-W.A.F.
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