The Little Mermaid as Knight in Shining Armour

“Believe me, Grim, when I find the right girl, I’ll know, without a doubt; it’ll just – bam! – hit me, like lightning.”

The Little Mermaid (1989)

 

So there’s this artist Azalea who makes some of the prettiest dress-up games on the Internet, including the Fantasy Girl Creator that I plundered for this quick impression of the Little Mermaid. Do check out her stuff if you’re at all into that sort of thing: http://www.azaleasdolls.com/index.php.

I’m sure it hasn’t escaped your notice, O Culturally Informed Reader, that Disney princesses often get a lot of flak for the messages their stories are perceived to be advocating to their (frequently young and impressionable) audiences. I’m sure I don’t need to reel of a list of the kinds of criticisms that tend to be levelled at our beloved royal protagonists – and at any rate, the following case study should illustrate a fair few of them, because Ariel is one of the most avidly censured examples. She’s a reckless sixteen-year-old who willingly sells her soul (and her voice) to an evil witch in order to stand a slim chance of getting together with a guy she literally saw once and didn’t even speak to properly; indeed, for the sake of pursuing that goal, she’s quite prepared not only to leave behind her family and her whole society, but also to have major changes made to her physical body. Not much of a role model for the young girls who like to deck themselves in her official merchandise, right?¹

But then, let’s flip things round a bit. Suppose Ariel were a role model not for girls, but for boys. You see, I have a bit of a theory going that if The Little Mermaid’s central couple were gender-swapped – not Ariel and Eric, but Arius and Erica, shall we say – our protagonist would come across rather differently. Allow me to work through the specifics.

Prince Arius is a daring, adventurous sort of youth, whose casual disregard for the rules of the kingdom in which he lives (not turning up to important ceremonies) is perfectly matched by his casual disregard for perilous situations (exploring shipwrecks with no fear of being ripped apart by vicious sharks). When we meet him, he’s not particularly looking for love or anything; most of his time is taken up working on his illicit personal project of finding out about the forbidden world above the ocean’s surface.

On one trip up into prohibited territory, Arius catches sight of a human more beautiful than any he’s ever seen; captivated by her exquisite appearance, he can but stare. This is Princess Erica, and the key theme of her life at the moment is the pressure her advisers are putting on her to get married. She, however, is a firm believer in true love and won’t settle for anything less (as per my opening quotation).

Suddenly, disaster strikes: Princess Erica’s ship is caught in a storm and sinks. She herself seems on course to drown helplessly, unconscious among the wreckage, but Prince Arius steps in to rescue her and carry her safely ashore.² He spends some more time staring at her and remarking on her attractiveness before declaring a determined intention to pursue a relationship with her, but then has to retreat to avoid being seen by any other humans. She for her part wakes up dazed and totally enamoured with her rescuer. In fact, she starts spending all her time moping about the palace beset by an undimmable yearning to marry him.

Meanwhile, Prince Arius’ resolve hasn’t weakened: he’s rescued his damsel in distress and he’s jolly well going to claim her hand, whatever it takes. He’s prepared to give up everything for her: his family, his society, his voice, his species; he will stake his very soul on the smallest chance of winning her. Unfortunately, Princess Erica isn’t exactly the sharpest harpoon on the ship and doesn’t twig that the mysterious guy that has randomly materialised on her favourite beach is the same mysterious guy she’s been obsessing over all this time.³ That said, not all the blame can be laid at Erica’s door, because it doesn’t exactly help when the evil villain (also gender-swapped for our purposes) shows up again and puts the princess under a spell so that she will marry him instead of Arius. Arius rushes to stop the wedding and, with the help of a comical sidekick or two, manages to break the spell. The lovers rush into one another’s arms, but their joy is short-lived: the villain is still at large and meaning them harm. During the ensuing confrontation, Arius saves Erica’s life once again by grabbing hold of the villain’s stolen weapon as he directs it against the princess.

At this point the gender-reversal stops working quite so well, because it wouldn’t exactly accord with the princess stereotype for Erica to navigate a ship through inclement conditions in order to impale the villain on its prow. Still, I think that’s about the only major plot point that doesn’t fit. Note that it is major plot points that I’m talking about: I don’t think transplanting the film’s every frame and line of dialogue onto my gender-swapped version would achieve quite the effect I’m talking about.

And what effect exactly is that? Well, just look at the number of fairytale tropes that crop up in my gender-swapped version. The adventurous prince saves the life of the beautiful but slightly dim princess; he is the one who takes the initiative that enables them to be together despite the circumstances that would prevent them, while she doesn’t seem to do much but mope about; the villain almost snatches the princess’ hand from under the hero’s nose, but the hero stops him. In a lot of ways, Ariel actually plays the traditional role of the knight in shining armour, while Eric makes almost as good a damsel in distress as anyone.

And perhaps this is just me, but the protagonist’s actions strike me as rather more acceptable when that protagonist is Prince Arius rather than Princess Ariel. For a woman to give up that much for her beloved seems distastefully needy, for a man to do so seems endearingly, romantically self-sacrificial; for her it’s pathetic, for him it’s heroic. Now, why is that?

I hope you won’t be too disappointed to learn that I don’t propose to answer that question here. Nor is it my aim – at least not today – to point out some flaw in the way Disney has presented the Little Mermaid’s story. Rather, I hope to prompt a bit of self-reflection as regards the expectations we have of fictional characters, the standards to which we hold them, based on their gender. I’m not saying the right thing to do must necessarily be to wipe the slate clean altogether, as if male and female made no difference, but I’d anticipate that the expectations and standards we do have in our heads are probably based more on a murky cocktail of social and cultural factors than a clearly thought-through interpretation of what God has revealed to us about his design for men and women; as much is certainly true in my own case.

Another question that might be worth posing is, while we might not think too much of Ariel as a female role model, would we consider my theoretical Erica at all a better one? Similarly, would my theoretical Arius be perceived as any better a male role model than Ariel is perceived to be as a female one? Or, alternatively, are Ariel and Eric just both a bit daft and both pretty rubbish role models entirely regardless of gender? Come to think of it, that sounds about right, actually…

Footnotes

¹ And if you think Disney might be about to try to correct that in a live-action remake, please be assured that the following trailer that has recently popped up, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWhmheEtIdI, has nothing to do with Disney – just as well considering the film doesn’t look like a particularly outstanding one, though I’m entirely prepared to be proved wrong.

² I have it on good authority that the scene in question took a full year to animate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LjROkIrn8U.

³ See also the relevant scene in Buzzfeed’s hilarious take on what Disney princes might be like to date in real life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ct-CdyT4HkM.

Mary and the Mystical Pregnancy Trope

Owen:  Listen, Gwen, you are going to be fine, I promise, OK? If there was any biological incompatibility, you would be dead. Now, according to this scan, you are carrying a non-sentient blastopheric mass.

Gwen:  A what?

Owen:  It’s a kind of alien egg. But don’t worry; I’m going to look after you, I promise. We’ve got procedures in place for this situation.

Gwen:  You mean this has happened before?

Jack:     You’ve heard of immaculate conception, haven’t you?

Torchwood S2 E9, ‘Something Borrowed’ (2008)¹

 

I wanted a picture of a pregnant lady; this one struck me as rather endearing.

It isn’t, I will freely admit, a particularly inventive concept for a blog post to disagree with Anita Sarkeesian about something. Vast swathes of the civilised world, indeed, seem to have ploughed time and effort into producing media designed to disagree with Anita Sarkeesian about something. If you don’t know who she is, the most comprehensive way of describing her is probably something like ‘feminist media critic’;² she assesses representations of women in a variety of media, but has found herself subject to particularly fervent denigration for her comments about video games.³ My intention in this post is not at all to join the cacophony of voices condemning her as a person or her whole approach to her subject. In truth, I actually find a lot of what she says very illuminating: it’s thanks to her Tropes vs. Women YouTube series that I am able to identify, in the fiction I enjoy, such things as the Smurfette Principle (when a distinct group of characters includes, among many males, only one female, who is characterised primarily by the fact that she is female); Women in Refrigerators (when a female character is killed purely for the sake of the impact her death has on a male one); and the Euthanised Damsel (a hashtag-edgy⁴ elaboration on the Damsel in Distress trope that has the hero who set out to rescue this woman being morally obliged to kill her instead).⁵ I think it’s helpful for these kinds of recurrent character and plot devices to be recognised, defined, and labelled, just as I think it’s always helpful for one to strive to be conscious of the ideas any particular fiction is advocating or assuming, and how it’s doing so. Plus, Sarkeesian always makes her points with clarity, professionalism, and plenty of supporting examples. All in all, then, I really do have a good deal of respect for much of her work. What I want to do in this post is challenge one particular point she makes as part of a broader explanation of another trope that dogs the footsteps of fictional women, namely the Mystical Pregnancy.⁶

As Sarkeesian explains (I paraphrase), a storyline may be considered to fall under the category of the Mystical Pregnancy trope whenever a female character’s reproductive functions are exploited by some sort of supernatural entity to produce some sort of extraordinary and important offspring. This typically represents a short-lived side-plot rather than a major theme of the fiction as a whole: the actually gestation period tends to be enormously accelerated so that the storyline can be crammed into one or two episodes (or equivalent). According to Sarkeesian – here referring to the work of another scholar, Laura Shapiro – the trope distorts the natural process of pregnancy into something alien, disturbing, and to be feared, for the sake of producing the kind of Anguish, Tension, and Drama that tend to populate engaging storytelling. Unsurprisingly, she’s not a fan of its use. And neither, I hasten to add, am I. I agree that it tends to reduce female characters to their biological functions, while failing to consider issues relating to pregnancy and childbirth in appropriate depth as part of the story.⁷

But I don’t agree that the miraculous conception of Jesus⁸ represents, as Sarkeesian puts it, ‘the original Mystical Pregnancy narrative’.

Granted, at first glance, the story seems to fit the trope quite well. Sarkeesian tells it like this: ‘an all-powerful being descended from the heavens and impregnated a young woman with the Chosen One destined to save Earth and the souls of humanity’. A woman becomes pregnant under unusual circumstances, tick; this is at the behest of a supernatural entity, tick; the pregnancy results in an extraordinary and important offspring, tick.

But that exact same combination of ingredients can be found in narratives hailing from centuries before Jesus was a speck in the womb. Just think, for instance, of all the extraordinary children Zeus was supposed by Greek mythology to have had with mortal women: he impregnated Leda in the form of a swan to produce Pollux (i.e. Castor and), as well as, according to some sources, Helen (i.e. of Troy), Danae in the form of a shower of gold to produce Perseus (i.e. and Medusa), Alcmene in the form of her husband Amphitryon to produce Heracles (who surely needs no further introduction) – the list goes on,⁹ and plenty of other gods were meant to have been up to the same tricks too. Even more strikingly pertinent are the first few verses of Genesis 6, that odd little chunk sandwiched between the accounts of Noah’s genealogy and Noah’s ark-related exploits, which sees the ‘sons of God’ impregnate the ‘daughters of man’ to produce mighty and famous progeny.¹⁰ And that’s not to mention the elaborate traditions that subsequently grew up around these verses – 1 Enoch, anyone?¹¹

 

The whole swan thing also meant that Leda’s children were hatched out of eggs rather than being born in the usual way, which is surely at least as bizarre as any modern instance of the Mystical Pregnancy trope.

So the basic, mechanical shape of the Mystical Pregnancy narrative – the elements of her description of it that Sarkeesian identifies in the story of Jesus’ conception – is clearly much older than that particular event, making Sarkeesian’s claim that it is the ‘original’ Mystical Pregnancy entirely misplaced. Moreover, beyond that basic, mechanical shape, the story of Jesus’ conception doesn’t have much in common with modern instances of the Mystical Pregnancy trope. Your average manifestation of the trope in modern fiction sees a woman’s body hijacked by inhuman forces without her consent. These forces have no interest in her as a person, only in the functionality of her reproductive organs; she becomes nothing more than a carrier for whatever variety of remarkable progeny her pregnancy is designed to produce. That remarkable progeny develops remarkably fast in the womb and is probably born in some unpleasantly abnormal fashion (much as I don’t imply that ordinary childbirth is some kind of picnic, it’s surely got to be a little bit preferable to having a vampire baby tear you apart from the inside¹² or performing an emergency Caesarean section on yourself to get rid of a hostile alien squirming about in your womb¹³). The whole thing is entirely weird and unnatural and terrifying; there is probably an altogether more substantial threat to the woman’s life than even ordinary childbirth presents. Then you can bet she doesn’t get to bring up whichever variety of supernatural offspring she’s brought into the world, because that wouldn’t make a very exciting next episode, now would it? It’s these things, rather than the basic elements of the narrative, that make the trope a damaging one; it’s these that reduce female characters to mere biological functions and shove aside real issues surrounding pregnancy and childbirth.

The experience of Jesus’ mother Mary was an altogether different one. I know you know the story, but it’s worth taking another look at it:

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, O favoured one, the Lord is with you!” But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favour with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”

And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”

And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy – the Son of God. And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” And Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her.¹⁴

If you’re having flashbacks to services of nine lessons and carols by candlelight, rest assured that I am too. Regardless, there are some key contrasts to draw out here. Mary is not just a carrier, selected for biological convenience; rather, she has found favour with God. It’s the same kind of language that was applied to great heroes of the faith like Noah and Moses:¹⁵ God is interested in her as a person, not just what he can use her reproductive organs for. He is with her, not just acting upon her from afar. He is ready to supply her with answers to her questions about how this process is going to work. And she for her part willingly consents to the plan. Nine months later, she gives birth in what we have no reason to think was anything other than the ordinary fashion, and subsequently raises the child she bore to adulthood. When God chose Mary to bear his Son, he wasn’t just choosing a womb; he was choosing a mother. He was, just as he so often does, graciously gifting an ordinary human being with a massive role in bringing about his plan for the salvation of his people.

A mystical pregnancy it might have been, but it’s a far cry indeed from the modern Mystical Pregnancy trope that Anita Sarkeesian talks about.

Footnotes

¹ Thanks to chakoteya.net for the transcript, http://www.chakoteya.net/Torchwood/209.htm, and NowMyWingsFit for recommending the site.

² It’s very close to how she describes herself, after all: http://www.anitasarkeesian.com/.

³ For more specific details, this interview is a good one: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/29/anita-sarkeesian-gamergate-interview-jessica-valenti.

⁴ A term I use to mean edgy for the sake of being edgy – when you can tell a piece of media is more interested in pushing boundaries than actually being good.

⁵ Here are the relevant videos: Smurfette Principle, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opM3T2__lZA; Women in Refrigerators, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DInYaHVSLr8; and various Damsels in Distress, including the Euthanised Damsel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toa_vH6xGqs&feature=youtu.be.

⁶ Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rhH_QGXtgQ.

⁷ If you want examples, check out the video (link in previous footnote): Sarkeesian’s list, while obviously not exhaustive, is superior to any I could compile.

⁸ A little bit of Wikipedia-ing has taught me that Sarkeesian’s addition of a speech-bubble reading ‘The Virgin Birth’ to the moment of her video when she describes Jesus’ conception as ‘the Immaculate Conception’ represents not a gloss but a correction. The Immaculate Conception is apparently a Roman Catholic doctrine stating that Mary was conceived free from original sin by virtue of the foreseen merits of her firstborn, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immaculate_Conception. Who knew? Well, evidently not the writers of Torchwood, if my opening quotation is anything to go by.

⁹ Some kind human has in fact compiled a list: http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/ZeusFamily.html.

¹⁰ In case you need to jog your memory: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis+6&version=ESVUK.

¹¹ Or specifically the bit of it known as the Book of the Watchers, that is, chapters 1-36. English translations are really easy to find online; here’s one at random: http://www.ccel.org/c/charles/otpseudepig/enoch/ENOCH_1.HTM.

¹² In case you have been fortunate enough to avoid the Twilight Saga altogether, that’s a reference to Breaking Dawn, the last instalment in the series and the only one I’ve read all the way through. Fancy an Honest Trailer for it while you’re here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvo5_Zi-Yxs.

¹³ And here I reference Prometheus, which honestly I like even less than Twilight. You can have the How It Should Have Ended for it this time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLbcZggwVCw.

¹⁴ That’s from the gospel of Luke, the only one which actually gives any detail about this part of the story: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+1&version=ESVUK.

¹⁵ The link in footnote 10 will do you for Noah, but you’ll need another one for Moses: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+33&version=ESVUK.

Careful What You Wish For

“Happy is what happens when all your dreams come true. Well, isn’t it?”

Wicked (2003)

Last time I wrote a blog post about Wolfblood – CBBC’s award-winning drama featuring a bunch of teenagers with the ability to turn into wolves, and a few other superpowers to boot – I expressed my suspicions that the programme’s then-upcoming fifth series would entail a major decrease in its quality, on account of it having thoroughly demolished its original premise – the need to keep the wolfblood identity secret – in the dramatic final scene of Series Four.¹ Well, all ten episodes of that latest series have now been broadcast,² and I’m pleased to be able to say that my suspicions were not vindicated. Certainly the programme is no longer the same one it was when it launched, but it’s still very entertaining viewing. Indeed, much as I normally complain when TV programmes massively and superfluously expand the scale and scope of their plot complications (*ahem* Moffat’s Doctor Who *ahem*), in Wolfblood’s case, such expansion really worked – and, as an extra bonus, avoided locating the better part of the drama in interpersonal deceit and betrayal, which was what had made Series Two just ever so slightly tedious compared to the others.³

 

How nice to have a good excuse to adorn my blog with such a pretty picture of a wolf.

The tenth episode wasn’t my favourite one of Series Five, but it certainly incorporated such elements as one would hope to encounter in a series finale: the revelation of a startling truth behind a mystery hinted at in earlier episodes; more than one intense confrontation between protagonist and antagonist; heroes reunited; dastardly plots foiled; villains given their due comeuppance. One such villain – and here I’ll place a spoiler warning – was Madoc, a wild wolfblood who had been revealed in the previous episode to have been conspiring with the series’ primary (human) bad guy, Alex Hartington, to destroy any possibility of integration between humans and wolfbloods. Hartington’s plan was to offer wolfbloods a choice: be made human, or go and live in the wild, in a specially fenced-off chunk of countryside which he dryly codenamed Blydissiad after a legendary wolfblood paradise. Madoc, believing separation from humans to represent the best course of action for his pack, agreed to lead them to Hartington’s Blydissiad on the false premise that he had seen the real thing in a vision, but it didn’t take long after arriving there for his treachery to be revealed. He had lied to his pack, broken codes to which he had expected them to adhere, usurped their rightful alpha, and led them to a cage instead of the paradise he had promised, all because he was so set on achieving their separation from human society. And so the first matter on the agenda in the series finale was to settle on a suitable punishment for him.

The punishment settled on is indeed eminently suitable: Madoc is left alone in his false paradise while the entire rest of the pack heads off to save the day. The parting words of TJ, Madoc’s replacement as alpha, are as follows: “You wanted to live in Blydissiad? It’s all yours.” Madoc’s punishment was to get exactly what he had striven to get.

Which is a bit weird, really, isn’t it? Surely giving people exactly what they have been trying to get ought to represent a reward, not a punishment? But then again, what could confirm someone’s status as villain rather than hero more poignantly than the revelation that the thing he or she had been desiring and seeking after all this time was actually bad and wrong and undesirable enough that it really was a punishment rather than a reward? The punishment is to have to put up with the thing one was so wrong ever to want, and, in this way, the extent of one’s guilt is laid bare even as it is penalised: no sentence could be more apt.

We see God dispensing justice in this kind of way all over the Bible. A few examples at random (by which I mean, a few examples I could most easily think of and find):⁴

And all the people of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The whole congregation said to them, “Would that we had died in the land of Egypt! Or would that we had died in this wilderness!” … And the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying, “How long shall this wicked congregation grumble against me? I have heard the grumblings of the people of Israel, which they grumble against me. Say to them, ‘As I live, declares the Lord, what you have said in my hearing I will do to you: your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness, and of all your number, listed in the census from twenty years old and upwards, who have grumbled against me, not one shall come into the land where I swore that I would make you dwell, except Caleb the son of Jephunneh and Joshua the son of Nun.’” – from Numbers 14

Oholah [that is, a female personification of the northern kingdom of Israel] played the whore while she was mine, and she lusted after her lovers the Assyrians … She bestowed her whoring upon them, the choicest men of Assyria all of them, and she defiled herself with all the idols of everyone after whom she lusted … Therefore I delivered her into the hands of her lovers, into the hands of the Assyrians, after whom she lusted. These uncovered her nakedness; they seized her sons and her daughters; and as for her, they killed her with the sword; and she became a byword among women, when judgement had been executed on her. – from Ezekiel 23

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. – Romans 1:28

Often, then, God’s judgement on those who rebel against him isn’t so much to jump in and do some targeted smiting as simply to let the rebels have exactly what they want. You wanted to die in the desert? Wish granted. You wanted to subject yourselves to the Assyrians? Go right ahead. You wanted to live your life without knowing God? Be my guest. But a word of warning: you’re not going to like where you end up as a result. Thus the evil and the stupidity of rebelling against God are made blatant even as justice is served. And what justice it is – the punishment is, can only be, perfectly proportional to the offence, because it is entirely determined by it.

And so justice is done.

Really, I could tap out a short doxology on the perfection of God’s justice and end the post there. People getting their just deserts is praiseworthy enough all by itself. But there’s actually even more going on than that. Let’s briefly scoot back to Wolfblood and Madoc sitting alone in Blydissiad. Interestingly, he’s not actually trapped there: there’s a perfectly good hole under the fence through which the rest of the pack are able to leave. As they do so, one of them raises the question as to whether they ought to seal Madoc in behind them, but TJ says there’s no need. Madoc will stay where he is of his own accord: he was banking everything on living in Blydissiad and he now has nowhere else to go, however disappointing it has turned out to be. Still, the option to leave is left open, and later in the episode, we find out that he actually took it, and, having relinquished his false paradise, even helped to foil the latest twist in Hartington’s dastardly plans. The punishment Madoc brought on himself does more than cause him appropriate suffering: it offers him the chance to recognise that he was wrong to want this, and to change his mind and do something about it.

And when God passes totally apt judgement on people by letting them have the very thing they were rebelling against him by seeking, he is similarly offering them a chance to recognise that they were wrong to want this, and to change their minds and do something about it – the process known in Christianese as repentance. Take another look at the Ezekiel chapter I mentioned above: many more details are given of the punishment that Israel and Judah will receive for their spiritual infidelity, but the end of the chapter is quite startling: And they shall return your lewdness upon you, and you shall bear the penalty for your sinful idolatry, and you shall know that I am the Lord God. This, then, is the key consequence of the perfectly apt punishment – that the people will come to acknowledge who God is, instead of putting him aside in order to chase after idols. Being disappointed by everything they were banking on will provide them with the vital reality check that God is their only hope.

And so, in punishing people by letting them have exactly what they’re trying to get, God displays not only his perfect justice but his abundant mercy. The punished get the chance to recognise that the effects of seeking after wrong things are distinctly bad, to see their own depravity in wanting to seek those things, and so to turn to God for rescue from the slavery of that depravity. And this is happening now. The verse from Romans that I quoted above refers to all people. Humanity has declared its desire to live outside God’s rule, and God has passed judgement on that rebellion by letting us have what we want. But the paradise we have tried to build on our own terms has turned out to be nothing more than a cage, our very own false Blydissiad – and in Christ God offers us a way out of it and into the true freedom of relationship with him, if we are prepared to take it. Still, that opportunity is not going to be around forever. The end of the age is coming, when everyone will ultimately get what he or she wants – either to live under Christ’s perfect, everlasting kingship, or to remain outside it.

Getting what you want is a reward only if what you want lines up with what God, in his perfect wisdom and perfect love, wants; under any other circumstances, it’s a highly appropriate punishment. So God be praised that, if we are trusting in Jesus, he will not leave us in our wrong desires, but will teach us to want better things – and then, what’s more, will freely and graciously give us the better things we have learned to want.

Footnotes

¹ The post in question is ‘Marks of Honour’, under ‘2016’, then ‘November’ in the box on the right.

² And indeed, all ten are currently available on iPlayer: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b03b5gpv.

³ Although, on a totally different note, the theme tune of the first three series was undoubtedly superior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RKO18ZVJOg.

⁴ Do check this stuff out, otherwise you don’t know whether the ellipsis I’ve included in my chosen extracts conceals stuff with major implications for their meaning. Here’s the Numbers, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=numbers+14&version=ESVUK, the Ezekiel (which you might want to keep open), https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ezekiel+23&version=ESVUK, and the Romans, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans+1&version=ESVUK.