My wife edits most of my blogs posts. And she’s really good at it. Sometimes there’s tension over what qualifies as proper sentence structure or what is permissible as poetic license and voice. But she is talented and helps my writing be more concise. Any errors you find are probably because I didn’t take her advice.
Once in a while, she’ll ask me about something I’ve written several days after she read it. And those are the days when I feel like I’ve written something intriguing enough because it is still on her mind. I cherish that.
A couple days after she edited my previous post, she asked me how the Cthulhu Mythos ends. “It doesn’t,” I said. “What do you mean it doesn’t end?” “Well, it’s perpetually the present. The mythos is about living in the shadow of impending doom and horror. There’s no end. Just living in fear.” “Well that’s awful.” “Yep.”
My two posts on horror were tricky to write. Some of my readers may have had concerns as I encouraged Christian writers to engage with a genre that can produce some very disturbing material, and it can be overly preoccupied with the power of evil. I am aware, and that is why this series has grown from four parts into six. “Why Christians Should Write Genre Fiction” has turned out to be meatier subject than even I anticipated. If Christians are to write genre fiction, including genres that I haven’t endorsed in this series, what should set their work apart from the rest of the genre they inhabit?
The majority of Christians throughout history have affirmed the coming of an eschaton. From the greek adjective ἔσχᾰτος, meaning last, eschaton refers to the “last day,” or the culmination of the divine plan. As with any doctrine in the Christian tradition, theologians and scholars have asserted different eschatologies (theologies concerning the end times). Despite the differences of opinion, the gist of Christian eschatology is that the course of history is inevitably moving toward’s God’s final purpose, God’s τέλος. Through some mystery, all of the cosmos is recreated and emerges as all that God has desired for it all along. This is epitomized in Revelation 21 where the author writes that “the home of God is among mortals… Death will be no more. Mourning and crying will be no more.” God’s purpose, the eschatological hope of the Jesus story, is that it ends with the happiest of endings.
Our experience on planet Earth does not lend itself to believing in happy endings. When we turn on the news, many stories do not appear to have happy endings. Our world seems to be hurtling at a break-neck pace towards catastrophic tragedy, with pervasive tragedies along the way.
The playwright William Shakespeare was predominantly known for his comedies and for his tragedies. In their classical origins, tragedies ended with death while comedies ended with weddings. What a distinction! Within the realm of classical theater, the wedding is what stands in direct opposition to death. Jesus used wedding imagery frequently in the Gospels to illustrate the eschaton (check out Matthew 22). To say that the course of history in the Christian Tradition ends as a comedy is to say it ends in a giant wedding celebration. But that is not how we experience our world. We experience tragedy. We experience death in it’s emotional, spiritual, and physical manifestations. Yet, the resurrection of Christ is our glimpse of hope. It is the assurance that the great terror of mysterious death is defeated. The resurrection of Christ reminds us that the eschatological hope is that history ends as a comedy.
So how should Christian authors write? Should we write only happy endings that are void of loss or death? Should we write with a naïvety about our human experience? Not at all. If anything, I worry too many Christians do not take seriously the experience of tragedy in the world. With few exceptions (looking at you, Tolkien), we aren’t inclined to tell stories where evil appears insurmountable. But isn’t that how we experience various seasons of life? Aren’t there periods when the persistence of evil has us believing that history will end in tragedy?
Let’s write that. Write about the bleakest moments of human existence. And then pencil in at least a glimmer of hope. The issue that Christians should take with horror stories (and any story for that matter) isn’t that terror is experienced amidst the story, but that evil is often victorious, or its defeat is tenuous. When we write genre fiction, we should write an ending that is hopeful. Maybe it’s a happy ending that was costly, or maybe there is an ambiguity that shimmers faintly with hope.
In Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, God damned tragedies. God insisted that death and pain would not have the final word. If the eschatological hope that we as Christians cling to, sometimes desperately and foolishly, is that God is writing a comedy, then may we write all genres as comedies. But write them honestly. Write them with all the pain, all the tension, and all the tears, and all the laughter and joy of reality.