What is fiction, really? Is it imagination? Is it lies? I've been reading Changeling: the Dreaming books (by White Wolf), specifically the players guide and, more recently (it came in the mail yesterday), The Autumn People. You see, the fae folk (aka changelings) live and breath Glamour, which is fed by imagination and joy. The antithesis of Glamour is Banality (aka mundanity), which is fed by conformity and compromise of dreams to harsh reality.

I mention that simply as a preview to my main point today, such that I know that Changeling was created as a fictional game in which people can roleplay characters with which they feel some similarity with their own identity (or totally opposite their identity, as is sometimes the case with other games, less often this one). And yet it feels real to me. How do I reconcile this with my belief in God, in a world created by a single being, a world created for men and entrusted to men, who were given free will and allowed to do as they please (with concequences, of course, for every path of action)?

First, fae spirits were born out of the dreams of men, and in fact, they are not separate from us. We all have souls, but could not those souls, created by God and inhabiting us by His will, have a significant and permanent pull toward dreams? In fact, why did God give us free will in the first place? What, before Satan, was there for us to choose between? Worship God or don't worship God? No, the choice was belief or disbelief, not merely in God, but in everything. Nihilists have taken this choice to the extreme: disbelief in everything, while Religious Fanatics choose belief in a particular thing to the disbelief of anything that does not conform to that idea. What ever happened to the God for whom anything, meaning everything, is possible? Can God not make impossibilities real? Can God not choose to set different rules for different people to follow when they worship Him? Can God not choose to allow us the possibility of making ALL of our dreams come true, however implausible and difficult the path may be to make them come true? If I want to be a dragon, can I not begin to act like a dragon, and call myself a dragon, and eventually be treated as a dragon (though it would be the police, and not a knight in shining armor, that would slay me in the end)?

What I am realizing is that God gave us free will for us to be happy. No one is forced into unhappiness. Many are forced by people or circumstances into situations in which they are unhappy, but that does not mean they are trapped in unhappiness, nor does it mean that there are not still many possibilities before us. Every person has the choice to live or die, to try or to slip quietly into despair and failure, to strive for more or settle for what one has already, risk all daily or never risk anything at all.

As Arthur "Fishlips" says in The Autumn People, "That's not my life. I fight and I lose. I hope, and hope dies. But I never give up." The story of the garden of Eden is not a story of man failing to conform to God's rules, and getting punished for stepping out of his specified place. No, the story of the garden of Eden is that man's nature is not to be satisfied even with paradise, for we must have something to strive for. In the movie, The Matrix, Neo is told that the world inside the matrix was originally created perfect, but no one would believe in it, and it failed miserably. What joy is possible if we need not strive for it, succeed against all odds and earn it, whether it is an easy victory or a victory against impossible odds. Eddie Izzard says, "[Our national anthem should be] 'God attack the Queen, send big dogs after her, that bite her bum,' so that she can fight them off with her handbag...and have self respect for the first time in her life."

God made us free right from the start, in the garden, he made us free, even knowing that we would not be as happy having been given paradise than if we were forced to earn it, and risk failure. Do you know why I think that anyone who desires to be near God in their dying moments will be with him in the afterlife? Because they still strive for it, they still have hope, and from hope comes the will to move forward, to take another step, to rise above the muck and crud of life that holds us down. Or at the end, there is nothing left but hope and powerlessness that one's life was good enough. And it was! It was because there is still hope at the end.

This hope and freedom of choice that God gave us does not merely apply to happiness in the next life, but to happiness in this one as well. The world tells us to conform, but we must conform neither to unhappy states of life, nor to identities that are not us, nor to defeat. There is no such thing as defeat when there is still possibility ahead of us. And there is always possibility ahead of us because there is always freedom of choice in our present. We can be free to try again. We can be free to make up for our mistakes. We can be free to love. We are not defined by what others think of us, but what we think of others. We are not defined by those who love us, but by those we love. We are not defined by those things we have succeeded in, but by those things we have striven for.

Martyrs have risked not money or happiness but their very lives striving for something they believed in, and we forget that sometimes martyrs exist who did not die, who went on to live their lives having succeeded against the odds. Is even our image of martyrs being those who die an ideal that we have conformed to? Can we not risk as much and hope to succeed, rather than believing something must be sacrificed for something else? The only thing we sacrifice is that which is meaningless without that which we sacrifice it for. I am in love, and all other things are meaningless without that. What then may I not choose to sacrifice for it, when I believe that sacrifice is worth it? Who has the right to tell me what is valuable to me? This is the truth of freedom of choice. This is the truth of life.