Redemption and the Possibility of Happy Endings

A couple of months ago, I was reading The Road by Cormac Mccarthy. I won't ruin it for you, but let's just say it's a bummer. While beautifully written, and arresting in the way of roadside traffic accidents, the book is not exactly sunny.

Not that I found this surprising. It seems that serious fiction often represents a contest to see who can most ably articulate despair. There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and love almost never conquers all.

The cynic in me approves. And to be honest, there is some theological validity to tragedy. We live in a fallen world. Sin and death exist. "Vanity of vanities," says the preacher in Ecclesiastes. "All is vanity."

And yet as Christians, we live in the tension of a fallen world being redeemed. We lean into the possibility that love does, in fact, conquer all, that the rainbow itself is the pot of gold. God will never again destroy the earth. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.

Conditioned as we are to accept tragedy (and, in the absence of joy, comedy's half-sister, satire) as the only valid literary expressions, what are we to do with redemption? As our little press moves toward Christian fiction, might we dream of happy endings?