Where’s the Happily Ever After?

The idea “that once we make it, once we attain our goal or reach our destination, we will reach lasting happiness,” also known as the Arrival Fallacy is not new to me. Up to now, I thought I had a good handle on my own tendency towards it. However, when I recently read Katherine Paterson’s middle-grade classic, The Great Gilly Hopkins, the actual ramifications of its correction struck me anew.

Gilly is the story of an eleven-year-old girl who’s been chewed up and spit out by the foster care system her whole life, including a stint with a family “who couldn’t keep a five-year-old who wet her bed.” Her experiences have made her hard, mean, and prone to acting out, even going so far as to indulge in some pretty severe racism. But she keeps holding out hope that someday her beautiful birth mother, Courtney, will come back and bring her to San Francisco with her. Early in the book, after yet another foster placement doesn’t pan out, Gilly is sent to live with Maime Trotter, a woman she initially dislikes who has been caring for foster children for over twenty years.

Before she realizes how good things are with Trotter, she plots a reunion with her birth mom that turns out far worse than she could have ever imagined. Heartbroken, Gilly runs off to telephone Trotter:

Gilly was crying now. She couldn’t help herself. “Trotter, it’s all wrong. Nothing turned out the way it’s supposed to.”
“How you mean supposed to? Life ain’t supposed to be nothing, ‘cept maybe tough.”
“But I always thought that when my mother came …”
“My sweet baby, ain’t no one ever told you yet? I reckon I thought you had that all figured out.”
“What?”
“That all that stuff about happy endings is lies. The only ending in this world is death. Now that might or might not be happy, but either way, you ain’t ready to die, are you?”
“Trotter, I’m not talking about dying. I’m talking about coming home.”
But Trotter seemed to ignore her. “Sometimes in this world things come easy, and you tend to lean back and say, ‘Well, finally, happy ending. This is the way things is supposed to be.’ Like life owed you good things.”
“Trotter —”
“And there is lots of good things, baby. Like you coming to be with us here this fall. That was a mighty good thing for me and William Ernest. But you just fool yourself if you expect good things all the time. They ain’t what’s regular — don’t nobody owe ‘em to you.”
“If life is so bad, how come you’re so happy?”
“Did I say bad? I said it was tough. Nothing to make you happy like doing good on a tough job, now is there?”

When I first read this, I tried to assure myself it was too simplistic or negative, but the more I thought about it, the harder the truth of it hit.

After all, our lives are not stories. When we solve a problem or achieve a goal, God doesn’t swoop in with a “and they lived happily ever after. The End.” There’s no cut to the credits. The things that we hope will be our happily-ever-afters end up not being endings at all.

When good things do come our way, and life feels better in whichever arenas they come, there is no guarantee that we won’t be back in pain and strife in those same arenas in the future (maybe even in just a few minutes!), and they certainly won’t protect us from pain and strife in all other parts of our life. The good and bad, sorrow and joy, are even often happening simultaneously. Bishop Michael Curry recently gave a talk in Minneapolis at which he said, “Sometimes Good Friday and Easter Sunday happen at the same time.” He’s right, not, as he noted, sequentially, but existentially. This is how life is actually experienced. And the only end to all the backs and forths, ups and downs, and toughness of life on earth is death. The bad news is that the end of the downs is also the end of the ups, the end of the toughness of life is also the end of the tenderness.

Because we have no firsthand knowledge of what life in the eschaton will be, we cling to the false idol of heaven on earth. Like Gilly waiting for her mother to come, we wait to fall in love, to achieve that one professional goal we’ve dreamed about for years, to retire to our favorite vacation spot, or to unexpectedly come into a windfall of some kind, but when those things end up being less fulfilling than we think, we’re back at square one.

Christians do have hope that death has ultimately been defeated through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and the knowledge of God’s unshakable promises. But, it’s important for us to remember that death is, nonetheless, real and imminent. Life, as we know it, will end. There is no other earthly destination/end-point.

This realization, though terrifying, can also be freeing. If none of our goals will actually bring fulfillment, it’s not the end of the world if they don’t work out. With this freedom, we are given the space to try new things, the space for creativity, the space for failure. We can be, as Paul Zahl said in a recent podcast, “outta gear.”

Life proves itself to be tough over and over again. But it also proves to be beautiful and miraculous. When we experience moments of God breaking-in that blow up our mundane hopes with completely unexpected things that we didn’t even know to hope for. When we’re shown a glimpse of the unadulterated joy that is in store, joy that is often found in the wake of pain, we can more easily brush the arrival fallacy off. As the point of our actual arrival is past all the pain of our journey there, and is more perfect than our limited imaginations could ever conceive.