Harry didn't take his teddies on holiday this time. At least, he did grab one at the last minute, but not the ones that have been his faithful companions for years.
Bedtime is when the heart-to-hearts happen. One night we were chatting about death and heaven. About how Jesus knows what dying is like. How we will see Jesus's face and he will wipe every tear from our eyes.
"It sounds happy and sad at the same time. The saddest thing has to happen to get happiness."
My growing-up boy stumbled onto a profound truth there.
Happy endings. How we long for them. Our best stories snatch happiness from the jaws of grief. Our best stories tell the truth.*
J.R.R. Tolkien coined a special word for it: eucatastrophe- 'a sudden and miraculous grace', 'joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.'
'The sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears ... It is a sudden glimpse of truth, your whole nature chained in a material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back. It perceives... that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made.
The Resurrection was the greatest 'eucatastrophe' possible in the greatest Fairy Story – and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love."' **
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=high+noon+andrew+peterson
*Thank you Sally Lloyd Jones for this. I can't find the interview but her facebook page is pretty wonderful.
**http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Eucatastrophe
