Of Fairy Tales & Heavenly Glory

by Dan Bouchelle

“I don’t get it,” I said to my wife as we lay in bed watching Ted Koppel add to the mountain of coverage on the death of Princess Diana. “I’m sorry she died; it’s tragic for her children, but why are people so deeply affected by this? Diana was a celebrity because she married the Prince of Wales, but I could think of hundreds of more significant people whose deaths did not generate this kind of grief. Even Mother Theresa didn’t get this attention.”

“You don’t understand,” Amy said to me. “She lived the fairy tale all little girls dream. She married the Prince. She was the fair maiden who lived out the storybook romance.”

“So that’s it,” I thought. “We are not grieving over Diana; we are grieving over the death of our storybook dreams.”

Little girls dream of being the princess swept off her feet by Prince Charming (not Prince Charles). Little boys dream of being a powerful prince-like figure: Luke Skywalker, Batman, or Hercules. We feed off romantic images until we grow up to realize it won’t happen to us, but we won’t let go of the dream. We create celebrities who live charmed lives. We buy tabloid magazines so we can live our dreams vicariously. We demand pictures, so the paparazzi hound the famous and beautiful so we can share in their glory.

Princess Diana was the living princess of fairy tales. But in reality her marriage was a horrible torment filled with infidelity and strife. She was in continual conflict with the royal family. She lived with the misery of constant media attention so we could vicariously live through her. When she died, we could no longer escape the truth that what we had created was an illusion. (Now, of course, we are in the process of making her a legend like Elvis.)

The hunger for glory that we’re really seeking to satisfy can be sated if only we will look in the right place. In 1 John 3:1-3, John tells us that we are the children of God, even if the world does not recognize us. (They did not recognize Jesus either.) The glory that awaits us is greater than that of Buckingham Palace. While it has not been fully revealed, we know that when Jesus returns we will be transformed to be like him. This is a much more compelling dream than any storybook fairy tale. Even death cannot destroy it because Jesus went through death and back again to make it possible. Diana’s death may signal the death of romantic dreams of fairy tales, but it doesn’t diminish the reality of heavenly glory, genuine glory, in the least.