Seeing I’m a fantasy writer, it’s not surprising that I love fairy tales. Those beautiful, deep, haunting stories are classics that have survived for centuries for a reason.

They speak to the human condition, to what it means to be human. They reveal deep, universal truths, and so have a universal appeal.

Well, ever since I first saw the Disney animated classic “Beauty and the Beast” in theaters as a kid in the ’90s, I have LOVED this fairy tale above all others.

I realized the reason when, my senior year of undergrad, I read “Orthodoxy” by G.K. Chesterton for the first time.

Chesterton dedicates an entire chapter of that book to fairy tales and what he learned from them. It’s called “The Ethics of Elf-land.”

In it, he claims that the lesson of Beauty and the Beast is that “a thing must be loved before it is lovable.”

When I read that for the first time, I realized, THAT’S IT.

That is the lesson, and the lesson is true.

I realized, as well, that that love that makes us lovable is what God offers to each one of us through Jesus and His Cross. As St. Paul says in Romans 5, Christ died for us while we were yet enemies.

None of us can recognize the depths of our moral distortion, but we intuit it. We know something isn’t right. We all know we aren’t what we should be.

We both fear and long to be known completely, and in being known, to be accepted. To be LOVED. To be MADE LOVABLE in that love.

As St. Augustine famous said, “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

Of course, you don’t have to be believe to love Beauty and the Beast. But I realized that was what unconsciously drawing me to that story, why I always has gripped me so deeply.