The Neverending Story, Part 3: The Other Half of the Story
“Afterthoughts” is a new Fear of God blog series featuring co-hosts and guests further unpacking thoughts, themes, and ideas that keep them up at night from the conversations and content covered on the show. This entry is by recent guest, Dave Courtney, and is part 3 of 4 of a follow-up article series to this week’s episode featuring The Neverending Story. Enjoy, then, the latest entry in this new chapter of The Fear of God…
CLICK HERE FOR PART 1 AND PART 2 OF THIS SERIES
The Other Half of the Story: Amulets, The Water of Life, Gmork and the Essential Human Struggle
On the podcast, we had some wonderful discussion about the goodness of humanity set against humaniy’s failures. The question of how it is that we fulfill the role of Christ in our world as part of God’s good creation while also recognizing our failure to do so fully and completely. This idea gains some clarity, I think, when we consider the essential tension that exists in The Neverending Story within us as image bearers and Christ’s unique reconciliatory ministry as the great and true representative standing in the space of this necessary collision between heaven and earth. This gets better representation in Ende’s book in that we only get half the story in the film.
In the book, at the point in which the film ends things don’t find immediate resolution. Bastian ends up going on these new adventures in Fantasia by declaring these promised “wishes” and seeing these wishes come true. This imaginative power to create comes to fruition through the power of the medallion. The more wishes he makes though, the more convinced he becomes that this was the role he was always intended to play, exchanging this notion of being an “image bearer” for the desire to remake Fantasia in his own image.
He uses his new found story to then rule over others for his own gain, and as he does this his memory of who he was back on earth begins to fade and the Emperor herself disappears. It is only through realizing the true nature of the human vocation - found not in self reliance and the power of human ambition but rather in bringing what in the book is the “water” of life (the source of life) back to the real world as a means of healing and reconciliation - that the fullness of this division we see in the Garden between Eden and the wilderness comes to light. By telling the other half of this story I think the book helps to establish how thin this line is between being imager bearers of God and making God in our own image. This is, after all, the seeds of the lie that the serpent plants in the garden and then preys upon and manipulates, this notion that we can become gods ourselves and therefore we have no need for the Emperor. And as we see in the book, the more we buy into this lie the harder it is to locate the image of the Emperor within ourselves.
One really potent image here that helps to underscore this idea is that of the amulet, or the AURYN, which plays a much more active role in the book than it does in the film. This is where the power that Atreyu is given, and thus Bastian (when in the book it is given to him) comes from precisely because it is the thing that declares and reveals his true identity. It identifies him as an image bearer, and it ties him to that which he is then imagining into the world. What’s interesting here is that when we read of the priestly garments in scripture, that which functions in a similar way by locating the image of God within the human person, the words for the crown on the head and the rings on the finger that accompany these priestly garments actually have a deep connection to the word for amulet or medallion (noted by Amy Peeler in her book You Are My Son: The Family of God in the Epistle to the Hebrews). It makes me wonder whether Ende chose this image for this very reason.
Along these same lines, one thing we didn’t get to talk about in the podcast episode at all was the figure of Gmork, who plays such an integral role in the story. It is through Gmork that we gain a fuller definition of precisely what the Nothing is. As Gmork declares, he is the servant of the power behind the Nothing, which in the book is described as “the manipulators” or the deceivers who prey on the sadness, apathy and despair that the Nothing evokes. As we said in the podcast episode, the Nothing is the true emptiness that is left when it appears there is nothing left to be lost or gained.
If Gmork can be seen in line with the serpent imagery of the garden, its death becomes an important and essential point in this story for liberating this present reality from the grip of its lies. This is where the witness of the Empress manifested in the story of Bastian is able to then emerge, shedding light on our true identity as her presence allows us to confront and put to death the lies of our false selves. It is here that our vocation as participants in the new creation comes about, with our realized stories opening us up to the stories of others as an expression of the goodness of creation. It brings the way the world is together with the way we hope the world to be in the Truth of the Empress’ own vision for Bastian’s incarnate ministry. With the beauty of this being that even when we can’t see God’s presence in this present reality, the truth is that God is still here, walking with us through our struggles and inviting us into our true vocations as image bearers, and this presence often comes in the shape and form of the others in our lives.
The Truth then, to bring this back to that existing tension between the goodness of creation and our failure to bring this goodness about ourselves, is found both in God’s eternal goodness and presence and in, as it was so wonderfully put in the podcast, God’s desire and choice to entrust us with the task of bringing this goodness about in the world through our presence in the lives of others. It is the universality of the God-Creation-Human story playing out in the particulars of our lives just as Bastian discovers in his own experience of this Heaven and Earth collision. Our failure to bring about the promise of the new creation then doesn’t point to our essential depravity, but rather points to our goodness as image bearers needing to be revealed within the mess of the lies. This Truth is as much apparent in our failings as it is in the story of the Rockbiter’s eventual coming to the edge of the sea of possibility and recognizing that all the promises of modernity haven’t done away with human suffering. Those big strong hands still hold power, but they hold power in the Truth of the Empresses’ promise of Resurrected life. The promise that in the hurt healing can come. The notion that every hopeful story of new creation begins in the darkness. The promise that in the suffering of this present reality something new is being unearthed. This is where the fallacy of human progress is forced to rewrite itself within the very metaphysical reality of Christ’s death and resurrection, the place where history and theology collide, where dependency on human achievement gives way to the real hope of the incarnation.
COME BACK TOMORROW FOR THE LAST PART
