EuCatastrophe

The sudden joyous turn — catastrophe's mirror: the seemingly hopeless situation that at the very end overturns into the good.

The word was coined from two Greek roots, good and to overturn, by a writer who believed it named the deepest thing stories do. A catastrophe is a sudden downward turn. A eucatastrophe is the same suddenness running the other way — not a happy ending tacked on, but a reversal arriving at the last possible moment, when the situation is genuinely lost and everyone in it knows so.

It is load-bearing because it is the shape this Story bets on, and naming the shape changes how a person holds the present. It is not optimism, which predicts that things will be fine, and it is not denial, which declines to look. It holds the disaster as entirely real — the edge is real, the fall is real, the mourning is real — and holds, at the same time, that the turn is possible and comes late (The Chasm, The Train of Civilization, Faith).

Its structure has two halves, and the canon keeps both. One half is the genuine best effort of the people in the story: faith, hope, and work, with nothing withheld. The other is grace — an intention and assistance pouring in from beyond anything the protagonists arranged. Neither half alone produces the turn, and a body that believes only in the first exhausts itself while a body that believes only in the second waits (Do the Work, Divine Participation, The Divine Whisper).

It is what the collapse will feel like from inside. While many mourn the falling of the old, something is simultaneously rising out of its ashes — and the two are the same event seen from two places (Collapse, The Fall, New Era, Liberation and Exodus).

Also called: the sudden joyous turn Stands on: Story · Faith · The Story of LIØNSBERG Opens onto: The Chasm · The Train of Civilization · Collapse · New Era · Redemption · Joy · Prophecy · Forward-Looking Story · The Great Story In play: the door — the shape the Story is told in Sources: LIØNSBERG Wiki Blogs/Jordan Nicholas/EuCatastrophe.md (a dispatch; unmarked — the coinage, its roots, and its application to the collapse) · Collapse, The Story of LIØNSBERG (wiki) · lionsberg.wiki: Collapse Open: The word is borrowed and the canon uses it as a word-tool rather than defining it; nothing states whether the joyous turn is expected, hoped for, or merely held as one of the shapes the ending could take.