Fairytale Truths
A sermon delivered to the Don Heights Unitarian Fellowship
Sunday September 18, 2011

When the king forgets to invite one of the old mothers to the christening, enraged, she casts a spell: on her sixteenth birthday the princess will prick her finger on a spinning wheel and die. When an overburdened mother sends her silly son to market to sell the cow, he returns with some useless-looking magic beans. When a father remarries, his new wife and her two daughters make life unbearable for his little girl. And, when three little pigs try to build their houses and a young girl walks through the woods to grandmother’s house, we realize the world is filled with big bad wolves who may eat you up.

The land of fairy tales. Stories for children. Simple narratives involving a few generic characters. There is no character development. Only this: every tale presents a problem and the story revolves around how that problem is solved. Perhaps the king, the ruling principle, the-way-it-has-always-been-done-before doesn’t work anymore. The king is dying. He has three sons. According to the old kingly way of looking at the world, the third son is completely incompetent. And yet, it is this third son who always bumbles through somehow or other, marries the princess and inherits a new kingdom.

One might even categorize fairy tales according to the problem being addressed. The three little pigs are trying to form strong enough egos (houses) to live on their own in a challenging and sometimes frightening world. Cinderella is not “married” to daddy anymore; she needs to find her own prince Charming. Jack needs to get out into the world and make something of himself. And Sleeping Beauty has to wake up to the truth about her birth family – something in her past is trying to kill her.

I have been in school since I left the ministry, and this fall I am taking my final exams. One of my exams is on analyzing fairy tales. This morning we are going to analyze Hansel and Gretel. Hansel just means “generic boy” and Gretel just means “generic girl.” This is the story of the problems that might arise within any typical family with two young children, a boy and a girl, and their parents, the mother and the father. This morning we are asking: what is the problem this fairy tale identifies and how does the story suggest that we solve this problem?

Let’s start by naming the problem. What is not working in this family? In the opening paragraphs we learn that great dearth has fallen on the land and, faced with this challenge, the father is unable to provide even daily bread for his family. They may starve to death; they may die. And naturally, he feels anxious. He cannot sleep, tossing and turning, worried about their survival. When he tells his wife about his worries, we discover that this family has another problem. The father can’t provide and the mother is unable to love. Speaking generically, or archetypally, she is a step mother. She feels no motherly love for these children. Her solution to their difficulties? Get rid of the children and save ourselves. The two parents argue. The father objects to the stepmother’s solution. But, as the story tells us, “she left him no peace until he consented.”

So, what is the problem? Great dearth in the land, a father unable to provide, a mother who wants to get rid of the children, a father who goes along with the program even against his own better judgment, and two children who are going to have to save themselves.

Have you ever encountered this constellation of problems in real life? Recession/unemployment/dearth in the land; a father who doesn’t or can’t provide; a mother who rags on the children when frustrations mount; a husband who lets his wife run the show; and parents so caught up in their own drama that they forget to think about the impact of their actions on the next generation?

Sounds pretty familiar to me.

However, we are not going there this morning.

Instead, I am going to talk about this fairytale as if it were a dynamic inside your own mind, as if each character: mother, father, Hansel, Gretel, even the witch and the beautiful snow-white bird were components, dynamics, urges, dispositions alive within your own psyche. What would your personality look like if this “family dynamic” was running its script inside?

Let us imagine, this morning, that you have a “father” force inside your own mind that is responsible for providing. You might call “father” Freud’s superego. Father makes sure your life is in good working order, that you are living responsibly. You also have a “mother” imperative inside your own heart. This “mother” feeling is an internal sense of being loved and lovable, cared for, secure and safe. Erik Erikson’s trust vs. mistrust developmental stage speaks to this basic need. Mother represents a feeling of being at home wherever you are.

This is a big leap, and I want to make sure you are with me here. I have a client who beats herself up every time she makes the tiniest of mistakes. What kind of internal mother and father does she have? I have a friend who is perfect. Her hair is perfect, her garden is perfect, her house is immaculate. What about her internal parents? I have another friend whose favorite activity is counting his money and his probable future life expectancy to make sure there will be enough. He tosses and turns at night. What about his internal mother and father? I have another friend whose thirty-year-old son still lives at home. He is pretty helpless. He can’t find a job and likes sleeping. What about his internal parents? Each of these individuals lives in the house of their own body. Each chooses to expend his or her energy in certain ways that characterize the habits, the patterns of behavior, the personality that marks them as an individual.

And what about this imaginary person we might call Hansel and Gretel? Is this person’s internal father ready, willing and able to provide for “the family”? Are the bills paid at the end of each month? Is “the roof” in good repair? Does he get out of bed every morning, put on his big boots and go to work, or does he lie in bed, tossing and turning, “Oh, woe is me, what is to become of us, how will we survive?”

And then there is the internal mother. Are these children cared for? Even when there is dearth in the land, does their home protect them? Do they have access to a warm and nurturing internal presence? Is there a deep and abiding trust, a feeling that no matter where life takes them, this universe is a warm and welcoming home? Are mother’s arms open wide, ready to embrace the new young creative life within, ready to nurture the small and fragile potential, encouraging each young child to grow big and strong?

Here is the problem. There is no safe haven for these children. The father principle is neither able to provide nor able to stand up for what he knows is right. The mother principle is neither nurturing nor loving. The children, the new life, this person’s creative potential has no home to grow up in. The children are abandoned at the least sign of trouble, left to wander alone and lost in the deep wood.

What might these children represent? Something young, intriguing, small, not yet given a voice: a new way of behaving, a potential alternative to a tired old habit, a readiness to think about oneself in a fresh new way. But maybe you are too frightened to change. You don’t want to nurture that new impulse; it shows up and, in a flash you send it back into the deep woods where it is hidden even from your own awareness.

The old habits don’t work well and something is whispering “time to change”: a dysfunctional relationship; an anxious habit of tossing and turning at night; a wimpy pattern of not standing up for yourself, of acquiescing even when you know something isn’t right; a defeatist attitude whenever life presents a challenge: when life hands your own internal father a lemon, does he make lemonade? When those young children, those new possibilities, emerge, does your own internal mother love them; does she eagerly wait to see how they will grow?

In the story of Hansel and Gretel, father feels helpless and anxious; mother is rejecting; and the children are terrified. Let’s look at how the problem is solved.

First, it takes both children to reach a successful resolution. We need both our young masculine capacities and our young feminine internal strengths, both our head and our heart, our thinking function and our feeling function, to turn this situation around. Let’s get beyond the gender issue. Every person in this room has both an internal Hansel and an internal Gretel. At first Hansel wants to do it all on his own. Rational mind tells courageous heart to go back to sleep; he will take care of everything. He is going to lay the pebbles along the path, and they will find their way back.

But Hansel’s logical method does not solve the problem. Going back to the same old situation does not change anything. In my work as a therapist I see this attempted solution a lot. The last ninety-nine times I tried to talk to my husband he said he wasn’t interested. Let’s just go back and try it one more time. But these children have to go in the other direction, in a very scary direction. They have to rescue what is missing. They have to find the solution that lies at the very heart of the difficulty … if they want a real resolution. Hansel has to feel how trapped his pebble-laying-strategy makes him feel, by being put into the witch’s cage. And Gretel needs to stop relying on Hansel and claim her own power. She needs to use her strength to push the witch into the oven and release her brother.

Who is this witch? She is the other half of the stepmother. Everything in life can go too far; everything needs balance. Sometimes the mother bird has to push her little chicks out of the nest. In the story of Hansel and Gretel, the stepmother rejects … and the witch consumes. A good mother needs to be able to do both. Yes, she needs to embrace the child. But she also may need to kick the thirty-year-old out of bed and out of the house. This stepmother is completely one-sided. All her embracing energy has disappeared, trapped deep in the forest. In my therapist world we say that it is in the unconscious. And it needs to be released. Gretel is the new feminine, courageous young heart that brings the two extremes together, that brings the treasure in the witch’s home back to the land of consciousness.

Look at it this way: there are two “worlds” in this story, and the action involves two children, Hansel and Gretel, logic and love, moving back and forth between the two. Whatever the conscious world doesn’t have, the other world has in abundance. Listen to the opening sentence: “Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor woodcutter.” The wood is there; he just can’t seem to turn it into a form of sustenance. One house doesn’t even have daily bread. The other house is built of bread and covered with cakes. One home has a mother who wants to get rid of the children; the other home has a witch who invites them in because she wants to eat them up. She doesn’t want them to go away, she wants to consume them.

The dearth is in the conscious world. But there is no shortage in the unconscious. There are lots of riches. But the woodcutter-father part of this personality is not able to turn all that wood into food on the table.

Notice that when Hansel drops pebbles on the path, they arrive right back where they started; but when he drops bread crumbs, when he drops food, “they found no crumbs, for the many thousands of birds which fly about in the woods and fields had picked them all up.” Think about those birds. They prevent the children from returning home. And when the children are at their most desperate moment, what happens? “They saw a beautiful snow-white bird [, a lone, wild bird,] …, which sang so delightfully that they stood still and listened to it.” It caught their attention, and “they followed it until they reached a little house, on the roof of which it alighted.”

The birds in this story play an important role. When Gretel refuses to put her head into the oven, the witch calls her a “silly goose.” When Gretel releases Hansel the story reads: “Then Hansel sprang like a bird from its cage when the door is opened.” And, as you will hear at the end of this service, it is a duck that carries the children across the river so they can return home.

Who are these birds? They fly through the air. Winged thoughts perhaps, flitting through our mind? Those illusive ideas that come and go, and can lead us into the darkest recesses of our own internal terror. Sometimes one little idea sings so beautifully that we stop and listen. Could the birds represent some inner inspiration that knows where the solution might be found? The birds don’t solve the problem, but they function as guides leading Hansel and Gretel to the very heart of the potential solution and then home again.

The stones represent the path of blind habit. The birds are flighty and insubstantial and they take Hansel and Gretel in an unexpected direction.

Trudging along the old habitual pathways … or confronting our own internal demons. Hansel and Gretel need to wrestle with those demons and take back their power. They need to find the witch, bake her and turn her raw, terrifying energy into something edible. Gretel, the young heart, needs to find her courage and her strength. She needs to push the witch into the oven, and I suspect it is at that very moment that the stepmother also dies. Hansel, logical mind, needs to feel how trapped he is by his pebble-laying strategies. He needs to trust his heart; he needs to rely on Gretel to release him.

How to really grow up; how to negotiate that transition from dependence to independence; how to take care of ourselves; how to turn dearth into daily bread; how to transform our hidden desire to have mother take care of everything, how to transform that deep yearning into the rich internal treasure of an abiding maternal presence, a deep trust, a sense of being at home, no matter how far we travel and no matter how much dearth comes to the land. To find and to hold onto a deep and abiding trust that this universe is my home.