Peace, peace.

Advent and Impossible Creatures

Today is the second Sunday of Advent. In our family, we stick with the four Advent themes of hope, peace, joy, and love, which means tonight, we will sit around the dining table and light the peace candle. I’ll read a few pages of The Book of Belonging and say a quick prayer, and then we’ll move on our way. Last year I spent the first two Sundays of Advent arguing with my children to sit down and then abandoned the practice all-together. I’ve lowered my expectations this year.

This afternoon, though, I took a few minutes to tidy up the dining table. It was strewn with school papers, charging cords, the empty reel from a strand of Christmas lights, and a pickleball paddle. (Ruthie’s craft projects had to stay.)

I set the Advent wreath in the middle of the table, and I decided to also set out a globe. Because how could I think about peace and not recall the headlines I read in bed this morning?

I remember the words of the prophet Jeremiah, who said, “They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, ‘Peace, peace, when there is no peace.” I spin the globe slowly. My fingertips skim over Ukraine, Sudan, the Rio Grande, Venezuela, Haiti, Jerusalem, and Rafah. Last night, while my family slept (“the children nestled all snug in their beds”), a violent regime fell in Syria. And I feel like the whole world awake with this question hanging in the air: Will there ever be peace?

A century before Jeremiah, there was another prophet. Isaiah foretold a future reality—a remade world where peace prevails. He described it this way:

The wolf shall live with the lamb;
the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
the calf and the lion will feed together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze;
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:6-9)

This afternoon, I find myself wondering what is required for a vision like this to be true. For a world and a lamb to live together in health and safety, what is required is not for the lamb to no longer fear the predator; that is no real peace, for the threat remains. The onus is on the wolf. Something profound and fundamental must change about how the wolf views the lamb. The wolf’s hunger must be sated another way, or perhaps he must lose his taste for meat.

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Yesterday, I finished reading a truly wonderful story: Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell.¹ Everyone in the children’s literature community has been talking about this book, so I put it on hold at the library for Ian. He loves fantasy and mythology so it seemed like a perfect fit for him, and sure enough, he devoured it. This child reads multiple chapter books a week, but he rarely tells me, “Mom, you should read this,” so when he does, I try to oblige. That is how I found myself reading Impossible Creatures long after everyone else in my family was asleep, my Kindle on airplane mode so the library check-out wouldn’t end before I finished this incredible story.

Impossible Creatures imagines a world in which magical creatures really exist—dragons and centaurs and mermaids, but also ratatoskr and longma and manticore.² But once humans realized they could use those creatures for service and resources, they were in danger. The magical creatures and those who care for them have been sequestered in a hidden, unmapped region of the Earth called the Archipelago, and they’ve lived safely that way for many generations. But now, the magic that protects this world seems to be fading, the gateway into the Archipelago has been opened, and creatures are going extinct. The story begins when a girl from the Archipelago, Mal, and a boy from “the otherworlds” named Christopher set out to save the Archipelago and their beloved creatures.

Impossible Creatures absolutely belongs in conversations with Bridge to Terabithia and Tale of Despereaux and Charlotte’s Web and all the children’s literature classics that teach us about friendship, grief, courage, good, and evil, not to mention those ideas we return to at Advent: hope, peace, joy, and love. And while I’m confident it will be a classic that endures, it’s also a book written precisely for our time. Maybe one day I’ll write more about the climate story, the lessons about power and control and fear. I’d love to write above the Christology of the story, too, but I haven’t yet figured out how to do that without spoilers.

“Listen. I need you to tell people this; I need you, when you get back, to tell them: the brutality is terrible. And yes: the chaos is very great. But tell them: greater than the world’s chaos are its miracles.” —Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell

But this morning, what I’m thinking about most are the differences between the Archipelago of Impossible Creatures and Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable kingdom. Because Isaiah’s prophecy insists that one day, there will be no need of siloing. It proclaims that the Roof of Jesse at the center of it all brings not a mere absence of conflict, but shalom, a true safety that exists only in wholeness and unity.

Another of my favorite children’s books, All the World by Liz Garton Scanlon and illustrated by Marla Frazee, ends like this: “Hope and peace and love and trust. All the world is all of us.”

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My middle son, Leo, is on the dark side. He loves the villains best. Once, when he and I were talking about Star Wars, he was insistent that I should choose a favorite Sith.³

“I don’t have a favorite, bud.”

“Well, you have to. Just pick. Darth Vader, Darth Maul…which one?”

“I can’t. I don’t like any of them. I’m a pacifist.” I explained what pacifism meant to me, how my faith compels me toward that position, etc. etc. (The lovely kind of parenting lecture that every expert will probably say is useless with small children.)

He looked at me with complete sincerity and said, “That sounds very boring.”

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Ravenous, ferocious, toothy creatures make for good fairy tales, certainly, but it is so painful to live in the middle of that real-life story. The world’s hurt is immense, and most days, I’d prefer the boring version of the story. But here is where the power of Advent lies; this is why I love a faith tradition whose calendar tells a story, because it’s true. We are in the painful, conflict-ridden middle, and we can’t yet turn the page.

Tonight, our family with gather around our Advent wreath. We will pray, “Peace, peace.” As we light the second candle, my imagination will be alive with pictures of wolves, and lambs, and other impossible creatures.

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2. As someone who generally doesn’t read fantasy and has never studied much mythology, I had to Google many of these creatures. I thought Rundell was making them up; turns out, they are all pulled from ancient myths from across the globe.

3. The Sith, if you’re not aware, are basically the evil foil to the Jedi.