Learning to See Christmas and Holy Saturday: How Stories Form Us

 Prologue

I was setting up the Christmas crib with my five-year-old grandson. As we placed the figures, he stopped and looked at the scene for a moment. Then he said, quietly, "This really isn't very joyful for baby Jesus."

He was not confused. He was attentive.

Taken on its own, the crib is not a joyful image. A child lies in a feeding trough. It becomes joyful when one knows what has gone before and what is to come; as one understands the full pattern of Eden, the Cross, and the Resurrection; the promise, cost, and vindication.

The Nativity is joyful. The angels announce "good news of great joy," the shepherds rejoice, and the Magi worship. But it is a paradoxical joy, a joy in anticipation, precisely because it's joy despite poverty, vulnerability, and impending persecution. Joy is not deferred until Easter. It is joy under the shadow of the cross. It is the Father's love breaking into the world, the Word made flesh, already Emmanuel. God has come as a helpless infant, which is both glorious and terrible.

What was striking was not that a child sensed this, but that he noticed it without being troubled by it. He didn't ask for reassurance. He didn't try to resolve the tension. He recognised, instinctively, that the story was incomplete.

That capacity to see joy and sorrow together, to bear tension without demanding immediate resolution, is what Scripture requires of us. The Psalms move from lament to praise without erasing the lament. Job's questions are never fully answered. Holy Saturday sits in darkness. Yet perhaps we struggle with these texts, wanting them to be safer, clearer, and more reassuring than they are.

Part of this struggle is formational. The stories that shape our imagination from childhood teach us what patterns reality follows, whether difficulty can be borne, and where meaning might be found in darkness. And those expectations shape how we see everything that follows, including Scripture.

Stories that honour their material don't rush to consolation. They allow sorrow to stand long enough to be recognised. They trust the listener, even a young one, to bear that recognition.

Anything less isn't kindness, it's evasion.

Introduction

 J. R. R. Tolkien wrote in a 1937 letter that he felt a "heartfelt loathing" for the work of Walt Disney. The remark is often treated as an eccentric aside. This misses what he thought was at stake philosophically and theologically. Tolkien's objection was a principled position about what stories are for and what is lost when they are reshaped to reassure and console.

This disagreement was central to Tolkien's thought. It reflected his theory of fairy tales and his suspicion of storytelling that prized comfort over threat and cost. It also reflected his deeper concern that narratives shape how we see reality, including the reality Scripture offers to us.

In 1937, The Hobbit and Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs appeared within months of each other. Both drew on European fairy tales and myth. Both were stories for the young. Yet they embodied opposing philosophies of narrative. What appeared to be a difference of tone concealed a deeper divergence of purpose.

The question this essay poses is not simply literary. It asks: What happens when stories are shaped to remove difficulty? If we train ourselves through narrative to expect suffering to be brief, fear to be managed, and resolution to be assured, how will we read the Psalms? How will we sit with Lamentations? How will we understand the expulsion from Eden, the Cities of the Plain, the Flood, and the silence of God to those in exile?

Stories prepare the soul for what it will be invited to see. When they cease to prepare us for difficulty, they cease to prepare us for life.

Part I: The Pattern of Scripture

Eucatastrophe

Tolkien's position is that fairy tales should not be defined by their audience but by their content and function. They are concerned with peril, loss, wonder, and moral consequence. Their value doesn’t lie in escapism but in what Tolkien calls "Escape" properly understood; the escape of the prisoner, not the deserter.

Central to Tolkien's vision is his concept of eucatastrophe: the sudden, unexpected turn toward joy. This joy is not reassurance. It is piercing, even painful, because it depends on the genuine possibility of disaster. The happy ending matters because it’s never guaranteed. Remove the darkness, and the joy becomes sentimentality; the narrative loses its power to reveal truth.

For Tolkien, this pattern was not just literary. Eucatastrophe is not a device added to stories. Tolkien claims it is the grain of reality itself; that joy, when it comes, comes as a gift, not entitlement. He believed the Resurrection was the eucatastrophe of human history; the moment when sorrow turned to joy precisely because the suffering was selfless, real, and complete. The Gospel does not hurry past Gethsemane or Good Friday. It dwells there. And it is only because of that dwelling that Easter means anything.

Stories shaped by this understanding don’t protect the listener from darkness. They prepare the imagination to recognise the cost of choice and love by what it endures.

Tolkien's fairy stories are not tragic in the classical sense; they presuppose tragedy. Worn down beyond what mortals can bear, Frodo falters at Mount Doom. Boromir falls through courage and weakness. Gollum is pitiable and monstrous. Joy arrives, but late, wounded, and costly. Middle-earth is not safe, even when it is saved.

Abraham, Isaac, and the Shape of Joy

This narrative architecture of eucatastrophe is seen in the structure of Scripture. The pattern is not one of uninterrupted triumph but of deferred vindication. We see it as Abraham waits, and when the promise of a son is given, he is commanded to sacrifice him. The binding of Isaac offers no consolation in advance: the three-day journey, Isaac carrying the wood, the knife raised over the child. Only at the last moment does the angel intervene. We want to explain why God tests Abraham, why Abraham obeys, and why Isaac cooperates, to assure ourselves that it was only a test all along. Abraham and Isaac really knew. Anything to avoid staying with the text and what it teaches.

The text is genuinely difficult; it tests us, but Scripture refuses evasion. It dwells in the difficulty. It makes us remain present to what Abraham and Isaac endured. And it is because it does this that the angel's intervention has meaning. The eucatastrophe depends on the reality of what preceded it. Had the text softened the difficulty or signalled the outcome, the moment of deliverance would lose its power. It would not reveal faith, cost, or the love of the Father who would one day offer what Abraham was spared from offering. And this is the pattern throughout Scripture. Joseph suffers. Israel is exiled. The Messiah is rejected. Victory comes. Joy arrives, but only after darkness and cost.

Part II: The Alternative—Managed Narratives and the Domestication of Scripture

What follows treats Tolkien's The Hobbit and Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as representative instances of two broad approaches to narrative and stories; approaches that have consequences beyond children's literature.

Disney's Snow White retained the outward elements of the Grimm tale but changed their function. In Grimm's version, the queen's punishment is brutal and public: she dances in red-hot iron shoes until she dies. Disney replaced this with an off-screen fall during a storm. Justice became fate; punishment became spectacle. The moral weight of the consequences of evil was softened. The forest scene terrifies briefly, then releases. The dwarfs become comic personalities rather than uncanny figures. Fear is present, but carefully managed. Darkness is never allowed to linger too long.

Disney's broader work demonstrates a more complex relationship with darkness than Snow White alone might suggest. Bambi confronts the young viewer with maternal death, sudden, permanent, and unexplained. Pinocchio includes nightmare sequences of genuine horror. The Lion King centres on trauma and guilt. These are structural elements, not incidental shadows.

The distinction lies not in whether Disney includes suffering, but in how that suffering functions. In Disney's approach, suffering is framed within structures of consolation. The narrative signals through music, tone, and visual cues how the audience should feel. Fear is experienced, but its boundaries are marked. Sorrow is real, but its resolution is anticipated. The emotional arc is carefully guided.

Tolkien’s method represents reality without such management. Where Disney guides the audience through fear, Tolkien leaves fear unmediated. Fear is not framed; it simply is. Joy arrives without announcement. The reader navigates the emotional terrain without constant reassurance.

Disney spoke openly about his philosophy. He described adapting older tales for contemporary audiences where fear should be present but counterweighted by humour and reassurance. This was deliberate, not accidental. This is something more than just protecting children. Fear was managed not because children required it, but because unmanaged fear might alienate modern audiences altogether. Disney was mediating reality for everyone, not just children.

Here, the philosophical divergence becomes sharpest. Tolkien believed children were capable of bearing what is real in stories, often more than adults who have learned to demand reassurance. Fairy tales don’t damage children by confronting them with fear; they give fear a shape they can live with.

Formation and Its Consequences

The question is not whether difficulty should be proportioned to developmental stages; clearly, it should be, but whether that progression builds a growing capacity to bear what is real, or arrests the imagination at the level of managed fear. What harms the imagination is not darkness itself, but the insistence that it be neutralised. Children can sense when a story is unfinished; what they cannot easily unlearn is the expectation that stories and life must always hurry toward reassurance. When narratives that form us consistently signal this, we arrive unready for real suffering in our own lives or the lives of others. Our instinct defaults to removal rather than accompaniment, to protection rather than presence, because we have never been trained to remain with what does not console.

This matters beyond aesthetics. Stories don’t just entertain; they prepare and, at their best, they initiate. They teach the imagination what patterns to expect. When safety consistently replaces danger, when reassurance becomes the primary lens through which darkness is presented, we alter what stories prepare the imagination to face and what they prevent it from recognising.

If we’re formed by narratives of managed fear and guaranteed reassurance, we’ll want life to be safer than it is, and to hurry past difficulty. We’ll struggle to sit with the unresolved suffering of Job, the unanswered questions of Habakkuk, and the raw grief of the Psalms. We’ll want Scripture to be safer than it is; to domesticate Divine judgment and the material and spiritual consequences of choice and sin. We will hurry past the silence of Holy Saturday toward a Resurrection we have not learned to wait for because we have not been formed to remain present to the death.

Before the printing press and mass literacy, formation happened primarily through image, liturgy, and symbol. The liturgical year was the pedagogy, moving from Advent through Christmas to Lent, Holy Week, and Easter. Children and adults absorbed the full pattern not by reading about it but by living through it year after year: promise, cost, vindication. The Nativity and Holy Saturday do not sentimentalise joy or suffering; they situate them within the complete arc of salvation history. They reveal the cost without rushing to solace.

This is a formation and initiation that trusts the learner to bear difficulty. The Catholic tradition has long understood that Scripture requires such formation before interpretation; that the soul must be prepared to see before it can understand. What it has not yet fully reckoned with is how contemporary storytelling habits may be forming readers unable to endure the very texts they are meant to receive.

Conclusion

The pattern of deferred joy in traditional stories mirrors the pattern of Scripture. The Nativity promises something; Good Friday bears the weight of Eden's rupture; Easter vindicates it; the Resurrection confirms this. Remove the middle term, and both the promise and the vindication lose their meaning.

If we lose sight of the depth of Christ's self-emptying, the depth of His suffering, we risk losing sight of the true depth of God's love and His mercy. Narratives that constrain suffering obscure the nature of love itself.

Scripture presents reality as having both grace and brokenness. If the stories that form us systematically remove the brokenness, we may find ourselves formed as Christians who cannot read our Scripture, who cannot sit with unanswered questions, remain present to the Psalmist's unresolved lament, or endure Holy Saturday's silence.

But the concern extends beyond reading Scripture to facing life itself. Stories that train us to expect suffering to be brief and resolution assured don’t prepare us for the actual texture of human experience: the losses that are not restored, the prayers that seem unanswered, the darkness that lasts longer than a night. If we have been formed to expect immediate consolation, we will be undone by reality's refusal to cooperate. We will not know how to remain present to our own suffering, or to accompany others in theirs, without demanding that it resolve or explain itself.

These concerns extend beyond Catholicism. Many Christian readers will recognise the insight that formation precedes interpretation, that the soul must be prepared before it can see. They will recognise the same temptation to rush past Good Friday toward Easter, the difficulty of remaining present to Scripture's silences, the challenge of forming believers capable of bearing what revelation shows us.

My grandson, looking at the Christmas crib, saw what we risk losing: the capacity to remain present to joy that doesn't yet resolve, to a hope that knows the cost ahead, to love that reveals itself through what it endures. This is not just the paradox of Christmas. It is the pattern of Scripture itself, and the pattern of life Scripture reveals.

Stories either help prepare us to see this or they limit us.

Epilogue

In my study at home hangs a digitally enhanced image of the Face from the Turin Shroud. It hangs alongside images of the Trees of Knowledge and Life, the Nativity, the Resurrection, and the Ascension; the full pattern from fall to promise through cost to vindication.

My grandchildren, who visit my study, ask questions: What happened? Why does His face look like that? And did it hurt? They don't ask me to explain it away. They want to understand what they are looking at.

This Face, I show them, is what love looks like when it refuses to turn away. The eyes are closing, or perhaps opening; it is hard to tell. The Face is broken, yet somehow at rest. This is defeat, but also victory. This is darkness, but light is breaking through. This is the moment just before the stone rolls away.

They look at it with attention, without horror or sentimentality, without needing the difficulty removed. They grasp intuitively that suffering, when it is love's suffering, opens rather than closes; that brokenness, when willingly borne, becomes a victory that bursts forth in life.

This Face is what joy costs. But it's also what makes joy possible. The Resurrection depends on real pain, not symbolic, not softened, not implied. Real. The defeat must be complete for the victory to be meaningful. The darkness must be absolute for the light to shatter it.

And if we cannot look at it, or if we can only look briefly before needing to move on, then we will miss what the image is showing: not just sorrow, but sorrow opening into love. Not just cost, but cost transfigured; not just a Face marked by death, but a Face through which life is already breaking through.

Stories are no different. They, too, should ask us to remain present through difficulty, trusting that the pattern will complete itself. They should ask us to see suffering as the place where love's depth becomes visible and where joy, when it finally arrives, arrives as recognition in us rather than relief.

This is what Scripture asks of us. Not comfort, but attention. Not reassurance, but formation. Not safety, but truth, costly, beautiful, and capable of bearing more weight than we imagine.

References

Disney, Walt (Producer). Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Walt Disney Productions, 1937.

Gabler, Neal. Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. Knopf, 2006.

Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. The Complete Fairy Tales. Translated by Jack Zipes. Bantam Classics, 2003.

Schickel, Richard. The Disney Version. Simon and Schuster, 1968.

Tolkien, J. R. R. On Fairy-Stories. In The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. HarperCollins, 2006.

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, Letter 13 (13 May 1937). Edited by Humphrey Carpenter with Christopher Tolkien. HarperCollins, 2006.