The Four Dragons by Xochitl Alvizo

I’m writing a book, a constructive intersectional ecclesiology theologically grounded in the Gospel According to Mark. In other words, a book about what it means to be church today in light of the constellation of challenges it faces, that turns to the earliest gospel as a resource.

Early on in the book proposal writing process, one of my editors gave me a creative writing assignment; I’m sharing the prompt with you here along with my response. Sit back and enjoy a short story about four evil dragons and a struggling community that lost its way…

THE PROMPT (1/15/26): 

I want you to pretend that you are going to tell the story of your book to a 6 year old heading off to bed for the night.  This needs to be a kind of mythic story – Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there lived….. And it has to be short. There needs to be an evil dragon, and a wonderous bi princess who slays the dragon and restores peace to the Kin-dom. 

MY RESPONSE (1/20/26):  

Once upon a time, there was a small community of people who discovered there was a whole new way of living and relating that was much better than the old way. The old way left some people were scared, forgotten, and punished for being different. They discovered it from their friend, who had the spark of this new way of life and invited them to consider joining. In the new divine way, people were more important than rules and were friends to each other. If people got sick, they were helped; if they were hungry, they got fed; and if they didn’t have friends, the small community would welcome them. Even after their friend with a spark died, the divine way of living and relating lived on with the small community.  

But since it was a whole new way of living and relating, the community didn’t always get it right, especially among so many other people who lived by to the old way. The old way was ruled by four big dragons that tried to trick and bully people into staying and living there. One dragon, named Fundy, wanted everyone to follow all the old rules, all the time, which he made up himself. He didn’t care if the rules hurt people, to him, the rules were the most important thing. The other dragon, a boy dragon named Pappy, always wanted to put things in hierarchical order, like a pyramid, where some people were put at the bottom to carry the heavier load and get crushed by those on top.

The third dragon was the White dragon; he was one of the worst. He thought that everything and everyone that was white was better that everyone and everything else. He wanted white to be the only color and the only way of doing things. He was very good friends with Pappy, because Pappy always put all the white people and all the white things at the top of the pyramid, and all the other colors went on the bottom. The fourth dragon, Binary, really liked to get into everybody’s personal and private lives. He was a bully about everything, telling people who they could be friends with, who they could be family with, how they could dress and move and love! Binary thought his way of living and loving and dressing were the best and only ways.  

All the dragons worked together to keep the old world just the way they wanted—with only their rules, their pyramid, their color, their loves. They worked hard to trick, threaten, or bribe people into the old ways.  

So, imagine how hard it was for the people in the small new community to stick with the good new way. The dragons were always around. They were strong and powerful and did not like it when groups of people got together to live a new and different way, especially one that was better than theirs. The dragons were hard to resist, they got people to agree with tiny, small things from the old way that little by little made them slip back into the old ways. They didn’t notice it right away, because the dragons started small. But over time, the small things added up, and it got easier and easier to give into more and bigger old things. And, sure enough, one day all the people from the small community were living in the same old dragon ways. Some of them knew that they had been tricked out of practicing their new divine way, but they felt trapped and a little hopeless. They wanted to live the good way, but how? 

Then they went back to the memory of their friend with the spark. Their friend had warned them it would be hard to live into the new way because the old way was easier and the dragons were good at keeping people tricked, trapped, and bribed. But the way back was always still available, all they had to do was to practice living the new divine way together. It didn’t matter where they were or in what part of the pyramid they ended up in, the trick to getting free from the dragons was to go ahead and break their rules, move things around the pyramid, bring all the colors, and celebrate lots of ways of living and loving in community with others, even if with just one other person. Their friend said it would be scary and sometimes it would feel impossible to stand up to the dragons, but if they just kept moving, and doing, and trying, looking for the small places where the spark of the divine way could ignite, then it would always be possible to stand up against the dragons. 

They smiled at the memory, because all of a sudden, they could see the spark again! The spark was still in them and in their neighbor. They were hopeful again, and they knew they could come up with a plan of action for their next new good step, together.

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Can you see the book from this story? I’d love to hear your thoughts!