Meg Raspberry has given up. And frankly, it’s a pretty rational thing to do—maybe even a healthy thing. After all, she is cursed to die within the year, and acceptance is one of the stages of grief. So, isn’t it right that she just accept reality, come to terms with her mortality, and see what good she can yet do in the time that remains to her? But what seems on the surface to be a realistic outlook is actually consigning her to an early grave, as Meg discovers one night thanks to an encounter with Wisdom. You see, Meg still has one crucial thing remaining to her, something that can give her hope and a future: faced with the curse of death, Meg Raspberry can choose life. And so too can we. Meg’s story in episode 3 taps into a couple of the most profound promises of God in the Old Testament—promises that are still alive and well and giving life today. Let’s dive in!

Meg is legit doomed. She is faced with a ferocious curse that will age her at breakneck speed to the point of death upon her eighteenth birthday, and the means of escaping said curse are more or less untenable. There’s no way she can collect a thousand teardrops of joy by year’s end when she’s only managed two properly joyful tears after weeks of trying. Even if other types of tears are accepted, the statistics don’t lie: Meg is going to die. So why not just accept it? Why fight the inevitable?

Meg is still alive, but she’s not living. It’s not just that she’s moping around (in episode 3) and not putting herself out there—it goes deeper than that. When Inori, the Witch of Wisdom, invites her to become her assistant and research partner once her apprenticeship is complete, Meg can’t work up more than a brief dazed expression before falling back into a frown, rejecting the idea with several half-baked excuses. Even when life reaches out to her, Meg bats it away. Her hope has already died, and with it, her ability to look forward to anything or contemplate new experiences.

Here’s the thing: Meg later confesses that she had actually been elated by Inori’s invitation. Yet, none of that excitement or joy was visible in her expression, her body language, or her tone, never mind her words. She was so consumed with trying to accept her curse and impending death that she was giving up on living all the moments that were still hers. This is how the curse of death works: it’s not just a future event that puts a full stop at the end of the story of our lives; it seeks to crawl back along our timeline to our very present and rob us of today, too. That’s what happens to Meg. She could see life before her, in the form of Inori’s offer, but she couldn’t claim it as her own.

Later that night, Meg is out in the field trying to meditate. Trying, perhaps, to make peace with death. And that is when Wisdom intervenes, gently, yet decisively. At first, it seems that Inori has joined Meg simply to chat. But when the troubled apprentice asks a hypothetical question about having only one year left to live, the Witch of Wisdom reveals that she had already deduced Meg’s plight. And then she does two things for Meg. 

First, Inori concedes that, despite all her scientific expertise, she would likely not be able to break the curse were she in Meg’s shoes. In other words, Inori validates Meg’s concerns, acknowledging implicitly that giving up in the face of such odds would be a reasonable response. In doing this, Inori is building trust with Meg, showing that she has compassion—and not judgement—for her in her suffering and fear. 

Inori doesn’t stop there. Wisdom and fear are mutually exclusive, after all, and Inori is not only a scientist, but a wielder of magic too. (Significantly, her name means “prayer,” indicating that her wisdom comes not just from her scientific know-how…) In her wisdom, she knows that the moment has come: she dims the night sky of its light pollution, draws the meteors streaking across the heavens just a little bit nearer, and puts on a most spectacular show of shooting stars for Meg, reminding the girl of the wonder and beauty of the cosmos and the fathomless power of magic—that which defies rational, scientific prediction. 

This is exactly what God does, too. Two of the most powerful exhortations from God in the Old Testament come during crisis moments for his people, when despair is looming. The first is from when Israel has fled Egypt and is lost, wandering in the desert: “I set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose, therefore, life!” (Deuteronomy 30:19). And the second, from when Jerusalem has been destroyed, and the Israelites are living in exile in Babylon, having lost the promised land: “I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to do you harm; plans to give you hope and a future,” (Jeremiah 29:11). In these crisis moments, like Inori, God does not deny reality and pretend that everything is fine. Nor does he condemn them for their fear or their precarious state. Instead, he acknowledges that death and curses are real, and by extension, he implicitly acknowledges how intimidating such times of uncertainty can be. But he doesn’t stop there—he goes on to remind his people about life! And more than that, he cheers them on to choose life in the face of death, to choose hope in the face of fear, to remember that he is sovereign, with power over more than just the night sky, and he is on their side.

He extends these same promises and invitation to us today. 

But how do we choose life and not death, blessings and not curses? And for that matter, how can we even see this supposed choice set before us when, frankly, our situation looks pretty bleak? Where is the hope in any of this?

Let’s go back to Meg’s story. As the Witch of Wisdom comes to Meg that night, meeting her where she is both literally and metaphorically, their conversation prompts Meg to realize that, as she says, “At some point, I’d been working on accepting death instead of trying to live.” As her eyes begin to open, Inori jumps up with a flourish and performs her miracle, whereupon Meg is moved with awe, both at the beauty before her and the reminder of the glory of magic. “I’d realized something after seeing this meteor shower,” she says to herself, “the potential of magic is limitless.” 

This moment becomes a touchstone for Meg, and we see her thinking back to it in episode 5, as she speaks hope and life to others who have just about given up. Significantly, the magic she uses to help people in this episode is a fireworks display, lighting up the sky for them just as Inori did for her…

We’re like Meg: we need some help to see the choice we have, and when it is that we’re choosing death instead of life. Meg did not stage an intervention for herself or come to some revelation by thinking hard or working hard or being hard on herself. Instead, she found life because Wisdom/Prayer chased her down and extended an invitation to her, over and over again, to live today with hope for a good future, until at last she was able to grasp it. We have a Savior who pursues us like this, too, winning our trust with his compassion and dismantling the limits of our fear-limned perspective of how life and the world work, filling us up instead with hope, with dreams, and with life. 

We have something more than Meg, though, too. Unlike her savior, who admits to Meg she wouldn’t be able to break the curse, our Savior has himself faced off against the curse of death, and in doing so, has shown us what it looks like to choose life. Just consider Jesus’s final few hours, as he literally walked to his own death: he did not stop living, not even for a moment! He continued to be who he had always been and do what he had always done right up to his final breath. For instance, in the Garden as the soldiers closed in on him, Jesus persisted in showing compassion for the most despicable figure, his own betrayer, Judas, as he called him “friend” one last time, as if extending an olive branch to him—one last prompt for Judas to remember their relationship and reconsider what he was doing. Later, once he was on the cross, Jesus not only ministered to the criminal by his side, but also interceded for his executioners. Then, as he looked out over those whom he was leaving behind, he used his waning strength to care for his mom and his most beloved friend, John, guiding them to be a comfort and support for one another. Even to his final breath, Jesus lived life full to overflowing; he faced death on our behalf and overcame it, so that we too might live so abundantly. Jesus did not come to “make peace” with death—he defeated it; not by fighting and protesting and railing against it, but by refusing to stop choosing life.

So let’s follow his example! And let us begin by learning, like Meg, to listen to Wisdom, and through Prayer, to allow our Savior to open our eyes, fill us afresh with wonder, and stir up in us the hope and courage to keep choosing life until our very last breath.

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claire

Claire is a cultural historian by day and anime enthusiast by night. She grew up watching anime without knowing it, misspent her youth studiously avoiding it, and finally came to her senses a few years ago and embraced it. Mostly because of Boogiepop, Kensuke Ushio and Naoko Yamada.

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