Once there was a gentleman who married, for his second wife, the proudest and most haughty woman that was ever seen. She had, by a former husband, two daughters of her own humor, who were, indeed, exactly like her in all things. He had likewise, by another wife, a young daughter, but of unparalleled goodness and sweetness of temper, which she took from her mother, who was the best creature in the world.
One of the things I love best about Charles Perrault’s “Cinderella”, collected in Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book, is how the unparalleled goodness and sweetness of Cinderella’s temper only becomes more unparalleled, the more contemptuously she is treated. Her feet are small, but her goodness is large enough to absorb all the pettiness of her stepsisters. Not only does she trim them out beautifully for the ball while they are mocking her, she seeks them there in her unrecognised beauty, distinguishes them above others, and lavishes them with little gifts. She does not try to say some noble thing that will convict them of her loftiness and their moral squalor, when they call her a “dirty Cinderwench” and refuse to lend her their everyday clothes so that she can go to the ball. She shares in their joke, with more delight than they imagine. The “hide-and-seek” she plays with their malice, after she is blessed with a fairy godmother, is not strained with the least hint of malice from her: when she is discovered to be the beautiful lady the prince loves, and raised to honor – she can’t wait to raise her stepsisters to honor, too. Their need to dominate and demean instead of welcoming her cuts her off from her father, and ruins her childhood. It twists up the whole length of the plot and threatens the outcome, but ultimately, it doesn’t derail the magic of goodness – it only crimps the stepsisters’ own hearts, like a too-small shoe. And Cinderella is eager to welcome them at the end.
What does she really lose by being so generous?
Maybe, when she was crying alone after her stepsisters mocked her and went away to ball, it seemed, rather, that no amount of laborious kindness gains anything. Maybe she was crying because, in a fairy tale way, she felt that no good deed ever goes unpunished, and there will always be people who make sure of that.
In real life, we do not expect our tears to call down fairy godmothers.
But even in real life, generosity is one of the most awing aspects of goodness. Not just the generosity that wants to share what we have. But the generosity that wants to forgive those who have what we have not, and don’t share with us. Generosity is the largesse of goodness, its immense hugeness that does not need to answer tit for tat to evil – because goodness so vast simply absorbs evil, and goes on being what it is.
Psalm 52 says something like this in its opening verse: “Why do you boast of evil, O mighty man? The goodness of God endures all the day.”
The setting of those words in history is much more bleak than even the Brothers Grimm version of “Cinderella” (where the stepsister lop off parts of their feet to try to fit into the slipper, and birds pluck out their eyes during Cinderella’s wedding procession). No fairy godmothers show up to save the day. Doeg, the liar, has just slaughtered an entire village of priests with their wives and children: only one priest escapes. When I had to go through this section of the life of David in my weeknight Bible class, we were all visibly troubled.
Doeg seems to have won: he boasts in a sickening victory. And on hearing what happened, David takes whatever quill or implement he used to scratch out a Psalm, and writes that God’s goodness will outlast Doeg’s wrong.
How did he come to that conclusion? At this time, David was a fugitive; and Saul, so eaten up with envy that he would throw a spear at his own son for saying anything kind about David, would damage the virtue of his own daughter, to tear apart David’s family. David seems to be at the mercy of this malice – even so, he refuses to behave in kind, when Saul is at his mercy. Whatever else Saul grips and squeezes to his will, he has not strained the generosity of David’s heart.
Samuel had prophesied that David would be the King: God’s intention to do good somehow, out of all these events, must have anchored David. But besides God’s purpose for which David waited – I think it’s possible that when he wrote Psalm 52, his heart gave him insights. So that when he heard of Doeg’s terrible cruelty, he could write that goodness is longer and stronger, even than this.
In some similar fashion, old cultures told stories about Cinderella’s sweetness of temper even while they experienced wars, plagues, poverty, enslavement: because through all the hard history of the world, people have sensed a goodness so ample, so purposive and patient as it spreads over time, that it just absorbs evil. At the cross particularly, God absorbed our whole story of wrong. He forgave us, and went on being the goodness He eternally is. We sense some quality of this in nature, and it stills us: a silent, enfolding abundance that can take all our throes, even our flesh and bones, bury them, and go on returning in beauty through the seasons. Leonard Nathan wrote about how the very “grass lifts so quietly / to catch everything / we drop and we drop / everything” (“Kind”). Our short lives and the happenings in them can hardly be the right frame through which to fathom this immense ingathering. Like David, we wait for God’s purpose: “[t]he character of everything, good fortune and bad, is changed when its ultimate meaning awaits the great unfolding of [God’s] intention” (Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis). Robinson points out that we can only really fathom something so much bigger than we are, and so ineluctable through all our ignorance (none of us really know what we do), by faith.
But I think people have always fathomed a little by fairy tales.
And maybe, also a little by heart – if our hearts can develop some of God’s absorbing immensity toward everyday evils. We may wonder what it accomplishes, when we are figuratively weeping in the garden while the stepsisters are at the ball – and there is no fairy godmother. We may wonder what advantage there is in a heart like Cinderella’s when we read the headlines. It is not easy to see headlines and respond that goodness is longer and stronger.
But for every headline, there is also grass, lifting quietly to catch everything we drop. And do we really envy the stepsisters at any point, even when Cinderella is weeping in the garden? We know while she cries, because of her sweetness, that an “ultimate meaning awaits.” And we know, today, in our own temptation to a pinched heart, that wherever a sweet temper remains unparalleled, evil is already being swallowed up in the eternity of good.
The Joseph Tree, a collection of poems, is available from Wiseblood. For a preview of West of Moonlight, East of Dawn, her retelling of an old fairy tale, visit westofmoonlight.art.
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This is profoundly encouraging. Thank you, Isabel.