With the semester finished, Commencement come and gone, and the college all but empty of students, I’ve been thinking about our Abbey monks, who remain on campus throughout the year in their quiet faithfulness. These kind, holy men continually model the unsung significance of stability within our human vocations. And as I learn more every year from their example, I’ve started to wonder – strange as it sounds – if the fruits of stability and the joys of fairytales might be more akin than you’d expect. According to J.R.R. Tolkien, one of the essential gifts of a fairy story is that it helps us to recover the ordinary. In a fairytale we escape our distractions and preoccupations not so that we transfer our allegiance to a fantasy world but so that we turn with fresh eyes to the wonder and the gift of our own: the enchantment so matter-of-factly present under our noses.  Fairytale characters may well (though by no means always) express some initial surprise or fear when encountering wish-granting fish, eggs that spill forth jewels and silks, a talking bird, or terrible, dancing shoes. But when it comes down to it, the denizens of fairyland tend to accept the inexplicable without any interior juggling to speak of. Fairytales certainly waste no time explaining the mechanisms of magic to a skeptical princess or a rationalizing reader. If you pick this flower and tuck it in your sash, you’ll be able to fly. If you tap someone with this willow wand, they will turn to stone. That’s just what happens. So when we return home from fairyland, each of us has the chance to rediscover how strange and remarkable a thing existence is – and how wonderfully inexplicable are the rules of our own world. Certainly we have many good,...