I just started a book called Peace like a River. It talks a bout faith a lot. I have been talking about it a lot. And considering the title, I wasn’t too surprised to be asked if the book was written by a Christian. My answer is that I think so, but I’m not sure. The narrator affirms his belief in miracles, but I am not sure yet that the author himself believes in them. You can’t tell if a book is Christian until you see how it ends. Only three endings are possible, really. Hope, false hope, or despair. Christians end with hope, Lifetime movies end with false hope, and everyone else must either accept despair or uncertainty. Because of this, Christians write the greatest epics, for every epic must end with the triumph of good over evil. And it is the weight of the author’s belief in triumph that inspires joy in the reader.

Two years ago I read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. It is meant to be the anti-Narnia, the interpretation of Paradise Lost in which Satan is heroic and God unfair. But in order to be consistent with his belief system, Pullman cannot simply reverse the old polarities. Everyone must be both good and evil. So in the end, there is nothing to triumph over. God is weak, not bad. Satan is indifferent. The large battle at the end diffuses rather anticlimactically. This may make sense in the logic of an absurdist play, but it does not make sense in a fantasy epic. And it is certainly not inspiring. Pullman tries to showcase some transcendent aesthetic of atheism, but it does not work as fiction. It is falsely transcendent. It is admittedly flat, confined to a one dimensional self-defining universe. And any plot which veers into false hope is never very convincing.

Despair is, by definition, not good, so I won’t bother to say why we don’t like it.

Anyhow, every story brings its characters either closer to hope or closer to despair, and in this sense, every story reflects the greater metanarrative. So then how do we think of our own stories? Faith is faith that the end is triumphant. And we have to interpret the intervening events accordingly. But in life, as in stories, we often discover information or experience something that causes us to reinterpret everything that came before it. I’ve told my life story to groups twice before, once in high school and once in college. And as I prepare to tell it yet again, I realize how differently I perceive the same events. Although I still pinpoint the same events as pivotal, every few years their meaning and significance changes. And so it will continue. God is a good Aristotelian and gives every story several reversals. We must have faith that the final reversal will reveal everything, and that everything will be good.

But it is difficult to have faith that the ending is good, when dark things come out of secret passages, and the clue in the diary leads to broken relationships rather than to clarifying mysteries. How do we live in light of the end, without spending all of our moments anticipating it? How do we interpret God’s will in the midst of the story? I must believe that all of God’s actions are good, whether or not they appear to conform to the standard of morality. Because if I do not, I cannot have faith that the end will be good. Of course, I cannot conceive what the end will look like. Perhaps, as I exist now, it would appear frightening. But I must trust that the light of eternity will not burn, but will heal and clarify and allow me to truly see for the first time.