Halloween got me thinking. A group of us had decided to get dressed up this year. Usually we don’t dress up because one we are too busy having a birthday party for one of our friends whose birthday is on halloween, but this year we decided to go for it. I decided to be the Paper Bag Princess from the Robert Munsch children’s story.
It’s a story of a “princessy” princess engaged to a prince, gets attacked by a dragon who kidnaps her fiance Prince Robert, burns everything and leaves the princess with only a paper bag to wear as she sets off to defeat the dragon and rescue her love – only to hear the jerky Prince Robert say, “”You smell like ashes, your hair is all tangled and you are wearing a dirty old paper bag. Come back when you are dressed like a real princess.” So she leaves him with the dragon and goes to live her own life. The End.
Everybody with me?
Naturally I couldn’t just wear a bag with arm/head holes – I decided to make a princess dress out of paper. It was tonnes of fun and was kind of Project Runway meets kindergarten:all A-line panels and craft glue. Maybe it’s just because I’m a Four on the enneagram and, according to one book, Fours “often feel like aristocrats in exile,” but the metaphor was working for me. I thought a lot about the story: the fairy tale beginning, the dragon, loss, rebirth, adventure, lack of acceptance by loved ones, and finally the guts to be oneself.
I love how God disguises the truth in fun ways for us to find. The overarching story of the gospel echoed in a children’s book and brought to life for me in a halloween costume. I contemplated the reality of the princess – fallen, broken, bereft, but still a princess. I identified very strongly with it all. I was a child of God. The pretty trappings have long gone; my crown is dented, wonky, and rather precariously worn, I have dirt on my face, but nothing can take away my heritage. When I wrote the previous post about membership, I thought about how the church sometimes sounded an awful lot like Prince Robert, “…come back when you are dressed like a real princess.” And yet, I know the same thing comes out my mouth far more often than I know. Am I smugly aware that I am a paper bag princess and yet still requiring that others come back when they’re pretty? Yup.
Thank God that it doesn’t have to end there. There are still adventures to be lived. There are people that want to be free from their dragons – and who are okay with the fact that we are just survivors and not the Saviour.
Welcome to the Paper Bag Kingdom.
“we are just survivors and not the Saviour”. I love that. It’s a problem when I try to be the saviour.
Ahh! The richness of your ‘story’ blesses my threadbare socks off, K…it reverberates truth to all…including the snotty princes, too, I might add.
…the ‘reality of who we are’…how true is this?! ‘Nothing can take away our heritage’…thank God!