One Sunday morning while the offering was being collected, I stood facing the altar cross thinking of a parishioner’s disapproval at my use of an Oscar Wilde fairy tale in a previous sermon. What had bothered her was not the story I had used but its author. She had challenged me about whether something he had written could be used for Christian edification, given that he was gay.  Over the years, I have found that the mere mention of Oscar Wilde’s name often makes pupils dilate and eyebrows rise. In truth, I know only the basic outline of his life; I have never read any of the biographies or seen any of the biopics, nor do I feel the need to do so anytime soon. But I do plan to keep reading his works and returning to the deeply human and profoundly Christian truths contained in them, especially in his fairytales.

Published in 1888 as The Happy Prince and Other Stories, the tales are connected by themes of selfish blindness, transformative sight, and sacrificial love; in short, they depict the desperate human need to be more wide-eyed and generous. Wilde’s tales grant vision through (and to) his windows of the soul which cannot help but affect the perception of the serious and childlike reader. If Christ, the Servant-Savior of us all could say, “Blessed is the one who is not scandalized by me” (Matthew 11:6) and Paul (that greatest of sinners), in writing about the “mercies of God,” could discourage pride and encourage “associating with the lowly” (Romans 12: 1, 3 and 16), then maybe even Wilde could have something to teach us about seeing anew and living with greater self-abandon as followers of Christ. 

Perhaps most worthy for consideration during Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany are The Star-Child and The Happy Prince, tales that present images of Christ within the context of a wounded world longing for redemption and restoration. Here are bold reminders of what Isaac Watts proclaimed in Joy to the World: “Let earth receive her King; / Let ev’ry heart prepare Him room / And heav’n and nature sing… No more let sins and sorrows grow / Nor thorns infest the ground; / He comes to make his blessings flow / Far as the curse is found.”

The Star-Child tells of two poor woodcutters heading home on a winter night so bitterly cold that the snow-covered ground seemed like the earth’s burial shroud to the linnets but like a bridal dress to the turtledoves. The woodcutters are dazzled by the earth’s wonder yet downcast by the callousness of its many inhabitants. Just then, a bright star falls from the sky and lands in a stand of trees. Hoping to find a pot of gold, the men instead find a child wrapped in a golden cloth covered with stars. While the one man instantly sours and says the last thing he needs is another mouth to feed, the other can’t bear the evil of letting the child die and knows that he and his wife will find a way to care for the boy.

So the Star-Child grows in the same meager surroundings as the woodcutter’s children, yet with each passing year he becomes more stunning to behold and is adored with awe by all in the village. But his beauty becomes his undoing, and he grows “proud, and cruel, and selfish.” He has no pity for the poor, afflicted, or injured but is enamored by his own appearance. He gains a following of other boys who laugh as he tortures animals in defiance of the priest’s searing indictment: “Who art thou to bring pain into God’s world? Even the cattle of the field praise him?”

After leading the other boys in mocking and throwing stones at a beggar-woman one day, he recoils in horror on learning that she is his mother who has been wandering the world looking for him. On seeking solace from his friends, he instead hears words of insult and disgust for he now looks like a toad! He then begins a three-year search to find his mother and receive her forgiveness; a time in which “there was neither love nor loving-kindness nor charity for him,” for it is the world as he has made it by his great pride. At the end of that sojourn, he encounters a form of redemption and forgiveness so restorative that I will not deprive the reader of such an exquisite discovery.

The Happy Prince begins high above a city where the statue of a young royal stands towering over all, covered with gold leaf, possessing eyes of bright sapphire, and holding a sword crowned with a ruby on the hilt. Parents often ask their ­children why they can’t be like the Happy Prince who “never dreams of crying for anything,” and the charity children thought he looked just like an angel.

One night a heartbroken swallow six weeks behind on his way to Egypt decides to rest for the night at the feet of the Happy Prince. Just as he is falling asleep, drops of water start falling on him, tears running down the cheeks of the stately prince. The tired and lovelorn bird inquires and learns that when the prince was alive and had a human heart he never knew what tears were because his life was pleasure and delight, but dead and with a leaden heart he can do nothing but weep as he surveys all of the ugliness and misery of his city. While the swallow wants nothing more than to fly away and escape the encroaching winter, the prince convinces him to stay and carry out his requests: take the ruby from his sword to an impoverished embroiderer with a sick son, pluck out his sapphire eyes and deliver them to a struggling playwright and a match girl who lived with an abusive father.

Seeing that the prince is now blind, the bird decides to stay forever and be his eyes. The swallow tells the prince about his travels in distant lands and all that he has seen from above, only to hear the request that he fly over the city and report what he saw. So he flies and sees “the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates… the white faces of starving children looking out listlessly at the black streets.” On reporting back, the prince instructs him to take off his gold “leaf by leaf, and give it to my poor.” After it is done, the prince looks a shabby gray but the children’s cheeks are rosy and their lives are filled with cheer. The swallow flaps his wings to stay warm but eventually succumbs to the cold of death. The prince’s leaden heart cracks when the faithful bird dies. The next morning, the mayor sees how disgraceful the statue now looks, has it pulled down and melted so that a statue of himself can take the prince’s place. Seeing all of this, God sends his angels to bring him the two most precious things in the city. They bring the leaden heart (which would not melt) and the dead bird, and God says they chose rightly for the prince could praise him in the city of gold and the swallow sing forever in Paradise.

St. John declares the profound mystery and devastating reality of the Word made flesh: he showed forth the glory, grace, and truth of the Father but was rejected by those among whom he came to dwell; those who received him became children of God (cf. 1:10–14). Christ came into this suffering world as one from whom others hid their faces, acquainted with grief and despised for his sorrows (Isaiah 53:3). Yet he is the one we anticipate anew in this time of light in darkness, “the one who walks righteously and despises oppression, the one our eyes see as the king in his beauty… in a land that stretches far” (cf. Isaiah 33:14–17). Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose, The Selfish Giant, and The Young King lead forth from there and connect to the ensuing observances of Lent and Easter. 

Oscar Wilde died in Paris on the day which determines the beginning of Advent, St. Andrew’s Day, November 30, 1900. At forty-six, he was destitute and broken by personal betrayal, public disgrace, and the ravages of hard-labor imprisonment, yet on his deathbed came his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Roughly thirteen years earlier, at the peak of his life, he had written the fairytales that are a lasting treasure for us all. Even then, he wrote these words (at the start of The Sphinx without a Secret) that let us see through his eyes as much as the Star-Child and the Happy Prince: “One afternoon I was sitting outside the Café de la Paix, watching the splendor and shabbiness of Parisian life, and wondering over my vermouth at the strange panorama of pride and poverty that was passing before me....”

May our eyes be wide open in humility and grace to Christ the Incarnate Word, this broken world, and its inhabitants he came to redeem!

* I highly recommend the Collector’s Library edition of The Happy Prince & Other Stories (London, 2008) and P. Craig Russell’s illustrated Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (New York: Nantier, Beall, Minoustchine, 1992).

Joel Kurz is pastor of Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Warrensburg, Missouri.