I’ve been reading through Grimm’s Fairy Tales with my daughter. I don’t have the time, or will, to write about everything I read. But I try to make it a point to write about things that stand out to, or affect, me in striking ways. This doesn’t happen too often. Fair-tales are hit and miss to be sure. But the general effect of these stories is cumulative. But, I digress. I’ll follow up on this idea in another post. The subject at hand is a particular tale of ‘one who traveled to learn what shivering meant.’
It’s a short story and you can read it for yourself, so I won’t do more than summarize and note what I took from it.
The story is about a youth who longs to know what the experience of shivering is. He hears folks in the town speaking of an event which made them shiver, and cannot rest until he learns by experience what this means.
His quest in search of the illusive shiver leads him to various places. In each place he repeats his refrain, ‘O that I could shiver’ (and the like), and in each place he meets someone who says they know how to make him shiver. He encounters seven dead men swinging from the gallows, an apparently haunted castle with evil cats and dogs who, apparently, like to bowl using bones for the pins and a skull for the ball. He meets a dead cousin who he thinks he can revive (and eventually does). But none of these things cause him to shiver.
In the end he earns the right to marry a princess and finally learns to shiver as someone simply throws some cold water on him.
Now what could you possibly get from a story like that? I believe it’s making a very profound point (as fairy tales at times do, in their own charming way). As I read the story I found myself to be the lad in some sense. Yes, I have shivered before, but I fear I have forgotten how to.
Our modern world, I think, tries to drive all the shivering out of us. Of course, I don’t mean shivering from the cold, but another kind of shivering. We have forgotten the idea of what Rudolph Otto called ‘the numinous.’ C.S. Lewis spoke often of this idea. He summarized fear of the numinous like this (I’m paraphrasing). If you were to be told that a tiger was in the hall outside your door you would be afraid, and justifiably so, for it could kill you. That’s one type of fear – natural fear, or animal fear, we might call it. But if you were told there is a ghost in the hall, that would evoke a different sort of fear, after all, who’s ever been killed by a ghost? That is fear of the numinous. It’s this sense in which I, and I think many others, have forgotten how to shiver.
The idea that the youth of the story would not shiver at the sight of seven men, dead, hanging by seven nooses should be ridiculous. But it’s not. We see that sort of thing on movie, television, and computer screens daily – and we don’t shiver.
The sight of a dead human body, soulless, in a casket should make us shiver. Just the thought that someone living, vital, thinking, loving, moving about, etc, suddenly being rendered into a state of death and decomposition should stun us. But it doesn’t. We’ve taken the vaccination, we’ve built up a tolerance, we’ve forgotten how to shiver.
In the story, the boy sees his cousin raised from the dead, and yet doesn’t shiver. Imagine that the resurrection of the dead would fail to evoke such a reaction. It should send chills down the spine, but it doesn’t. When’s the last time you read the end of the one of the four gospels and shivered in awe of the miracle that took place when Jesus Christ was raised from the dead? We’re numb, face it. If that doesn’t move us, what will?
But I suppose Abraham (in Jesus’ story) had a point:
He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead'” (Luke 16:3).
Nothing could make the boy shiver but cold water. We’re not much different. And so we shiver like the animals – when we’re cold, when we’re sexually stimulated, when we drink ice water, or a slush, or something of the like, too fast and get brain-freeze, etc, etc. But, just in the sense of this story, we’ve forgotten how to shiver over the numinous, the unexplainable, the miracle, and the like.
In biblical terms, the very idea of sin should make us shiver, but we don’t. Seeing a husband commit adultery and ruin his family should make us shiver, but it doesn’t. Seeing a shoplifter caught at the grocery story should make us shiver, but it doesn’t. Seeing a man shot dead on the street corner (as I did a few weeks ago) should make us shiver, but it doesn’t (at least it didn’t me). The very pride and lust in our hearts that rises up suddenly, unasked for, and without seeming provocation should make us shiver, but it doesn’t. It’s too commonplace, we’ve been there and done that and bought the phone app (you can’t say t-shirt anymore, right?).
Very early in my reading of the story my mind drifted to words I remembered from the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah:
Were they ashamed when they committed abomination? No, they were not at all ashamed; they did not know how to blush. Therefore they shall fall among those who fall; at the time that I punish them, they shall be overthrown,” says the LORD (Jer. 6:15).
The people of Israel had come to a point where their sin no longer made them blush. They were numb to it. It was ordinary. They had forgotten how to blush, and so have we. I bet they didn’t shiver either.
I will be giving my thoughts on Chesterton’s Orthodoxy soon. He was right – sometimes fairy tales are the best means of conveying truth because we need to see something take place in another world before we realize that it is taking place in ours (more on this to come). Give this fairy tale a read and some thought (if you like fairy tales, but hey, you probably wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t!).
