A typical first-grade morning begins with a prayer and a story. Virtue education is at the very center of the culture of St. Benedict Classical Academy. The curriculum is imbued with examples and opportunities for virtue. Perhaps the most compelling means of teaching virtue is through literature. Living stories offer a valuable opportunity of modeling virtue to our students in order to form the moral imagination. Great stories allow children to enter into the world of the characters, to identify with their motivations, strengths, and struggles in a way that they will wish to acquire the qualities they admire in these characters in order to face the challenges of their own circumstances.
These stories can serve to form the moral imagination, in that they help one to recognize what I should do or how I should behave. Yet they can do even more in forming the spiritual imagination, which goes deeper into addressing who I am, where I am going, and for Whom this is all for. Stories in which the characters struggle and grow throughout a journey can serve as a call to the adventure of our own lives as we strive to gain Heaven.
Children have a great capacity to accept unseen realities. We just need to watch them at their games to see that this is true. The eyes of a child are able to recognize that the unseen world is more real than that of the world that we can see and touch. This natural capacity children have for accepting the supernatural can be fostered through stories. Reading great stories with the children can be a gateway through which they can explore the mysteries of their Faith. Our Lord, the Divine Teacher Himself, taught in parables. He taught about the Kingdom through stories and familiar imagery.
There will be times when the children just need the space to think and contemplate what they’ve read or heard. Like the sower of the parable, we allow these stories to plant the seeds that will later flourish with time and the grace of God. The hope is that the children will be able to draw on these resources when they need them, especially when the storms of life arrive. Stories can help children grapple with the more difficult and frightening aspects of their lives; pain, sin, suffering, and loss. The hope is that they will see that it is through the cross that we come to the resurrection. We become who God created us to be. In the words of the Skin Horse of Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit, we become Real. “It doesn’t happen all at once…You become. It takes a long time…once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”
A. Milne’s Christopher Robin heartbreakingly illustrates this longing for the eternal when it is time for him to leave the Hundred Acre Wood. At the very end of The House on Pooh Corner, Christopher Robin is leaving to go away to school, to go out into the world. After the animals have made their goodbyes, they trickle away until Christopher Robin and Pooh are left alone to go up to their Enchanted Place together. It is here that Christopher Robin appeals to Pooh, “Pooh, promise you won’t forget me, ever. Not even when I’m a hundred.” It’s striking to note that Pooh, this figment of a boy’s imagination, is not the one who is asking for remembrance. It is not Pooh’s appeal to Christopher Robin not to forget his childhood. Christopher Robin is the one who asks Pooh to remember. He knows that in a mysterious way, he belongs in this enchanted world. It could be that children are drawn to fantasy worlds and adventure stories because they recognize that we are all wayfarers in this life. We don’t belong in this world. The longing for places like Narnia, Neverland, the Hundred Acre Wood is an echo of our longing for our true homeland.
We want to ask ourselves, when considering the books we present to the children; “Will they lead to an encounter with Truth? Will they lead to an encounter with Him who is the Truth?” Stories can help us recognize that we’re not just longing for a ‘somewhere’ but for a ‘someone’.
The giant of Oscar Wilde’s Selfish Giant has just such an encounter. The giant has enclosed himself in a walled garden of his own selfishness. He has cut himself off so completely from others, that even the spring will not enter and the garden is always winter. But through a small chink in the wall, the children find their way in to play once more in the giant’s garden, and with them comes the spring. In the midst of those children, unrecognized, is the Christ Child for Whom the giant’s heart melts and he knocks down the wall. Literature can serve to widen that chink in the wall so that Christ can enter into the lives of the children, into their games, their studies, hopes, and struggles; so that they may know Him in this life and finally hear Him say to them, as He did to the giant; “You let me play once in your garden, today you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise.”
AUTHOR: Julia Hieronymus, Grade 1 Teacher
