The Tooth Fairy:

Your child loses her first tooth. The scene is traumatic. This young child has blood streaming from her mouth and is so frightened by this drastic change in herself that she is in an absolute panic! If you try to explain that she has lost this tooth because a new one is growing in its place and has pushed it out, will that calm her down?

Perhaps. But we have a tradition in place (many at least do this) where we tell our children in exuberant tones that we are pleased she has lost her tooth and is bleeding all over! She can put the lost tooth under her pillow this night and in the morning she will find money left by the tooth fairy!

Money! Her face immediately changes from one of panic to one showing great interest in how this can be. Money? For me? Already at this young age the concept of money has great impact. It is powerful. You can use it to get things.

You continue to explain:

The tooth fairy will come at night to gather the tooth and will leave money there for her! What is the tooth fairy? She and her friends are very little, winged people that fly around looking for teeth at night that they use to build their castle.

Meanwhile, you stop the bleeding but now the concentration is on getting the envelope putting the tooth in the envelope and putting it under the pillow. You explain: make sure you leave it there and make sure you are asleep tonight or when the tooth fairy comes by they will not check your pillow!

In the morning you find the tooth is magically gone and money and a note from the tooth fairy is in the envelope!

Not many days later another tooth is lost! But this time the child comes with a big smile on her face even though blood is pouring out of her mouth. She proudly holds the bloody tooth up for you to see! “Can I put this under the pillow tonight so the tooth fairy will give me more money?” Answer, “Yes.”

Again the magic occurs. You leave the tooth in an envelope and the child “falls asleep.” In the morning, the tooth is again magically gone with money and a note left in its place.

And still again this will repeat until eventually the child no longer shows concern over losing a tooth. She knows she will get money for it, but now the concept of the tooth fairy is held in question.

“There really are not tooth fairies.” Someone has told her? She has figured this out for herself? Did you lie to your child?

You have used fantasy to build a story that explained why something so traumatic should be accepted as a good thing and expected.

How many stories like this do you know? There is Santa Claus, our Halloween stories, the Easter Bunny, Cupid. Have you seen any of these stories develop during your lifetime? I remember Charles Shultz creating the story of the Great Pumpkin in his comic strip. Charlie Brown believed the story but only Snoopy would sit out at night with him. No one else believed the story and they all belittled him for his belief.

Were many of the stories technologically primitive cultures believed like this? These kinds of stories come to our aid when we need an explanation for something that lifts our spirit when other explanations may be readily available.

Thomas Hobbes felt that religion served just this sort of purpose. But in what sense do we think our stories are not true? Within the context of the story itself it is right to say that someone has the story right. If for example, you were to say that Aslan did not sacrifice himself for the greater good, you would be wrong. So there is a true and false from within the context of the story. We can even say true or false things about the story from outside the context of the story. Say, we may compare Aslan’s sacrifice to the sacrifice that Jesus made in the context of John or the synoptic Gospels. You could say some things that everyone would agree were true, some things that most would say were false, and there would be other things that would result in great disagreement.

As you go to different metanarratives the same sort of relationship results. So if we are concerned that a whole story is false we have to be considering it from a perspective outside of the story itself and so we must be considering it from inside another story. Today, one of the most important metanarratives that does this is science. There does seem to have to be a story that holds together for the world of everyday life. But this still turns out to be a story.

The Postmodern view leads us to the concept of truth as true only within the context appropriate to the metanarrative it belongs to.