Friday, September 13, 2024
Memorial of Saint John Chrysostom, Bishop and Doctor of the Church
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
The young and the restless, the old and the wise
The swallow builds a nest in which to put her young.
And so do we.
Thinking of the children first, and then the rest of us, GK Chesterton turned the idea of a fairy tale on its head.
Fairy Tales are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already.
What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of evil. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon. (Tremendous Trifles, 1909)
It could be that we adults still need fairy tales, with their redemptive qualities, to ourselves survive as we grow older. We certainly need to understand the skin and bones of teaching our children well. We want to pass on our own failure LESS and God’s idea for us MORE.
Friedrich Froebel, the German teacher who invented kindergarten in the early nineteenth century, has this to say:
Play is the highest expression of human development in childhood. It alone is the free expression of what is in children’s souls. Childhood play is never trivial, but deeply significant. Play is the first means of development of the human mind, its first effort to make acquaintance with the outer world, to collect original experiences from things and fat, and to exercise the powers of body and mind.
Play is the great game of life itself in its beginnings. Hence the intense seriousness often observed in the attitude of children at play.
When I tease Miles or Jasper about how serious they are, what a disservice I do to them. But this is not obvious at first, at least not to me, because I forget my place, that I am further along in “the great game of life.” Herr Froebel suggests that I be careful to respect them and do less rather than more to “help” them.
Do not disturb children’s free play. You would do better to look the other way, unless you can enter into the spirit behind it, because their play is a seed, a way of grasping for life’s meaning. In their innocence they learn to cherish what is holy.
My friend Laura teaches in a Montessori school. She loves this work, or play, or work as play. Senora Montessori began with profound respect for children, then observed them, individually, without judgment. That’s the Montessori way.
What does she mean by observe?
Imagine you’ve never met your child, be curious, and write down in objective language what you see. Remove any information you already know, along with preconceptions and judgments. See your child with fresh eyes every time you look.
How difficult! And how rewarding. A mother writes of her children, and herself, “Observation isn’t what comes before the work – it IS the work.”
She writes of observing how children do their own observing of the adults around them, of their parents and their teachers, and also of each other, and how beautiful that is, especially when it is neither encouraged nor discouraged but simply allowed to be.
Fairy tales can have alternate endings, in our minds or even written into the story. Robert Southey (whose birthday was yesterday in 1774), heard a story from his uncle about an old woman “who invades the house of three bears, tries out their porridge, their chairs, and their beds, and then jumps out the window when they come home.” His story (eventually called “Goldilocks”) ends …
Out the little old woman jumped; and whether she broke her neck in the fall, or ran into the wood and was lost there, or found her way out of the wood and was taken up by the constable and sent to the House of Correction for a vagrant as she was, I cannot tell. But the Three Bears never saw anything more of her.
When I make up a story and try out a few endings, when any of us does that, whether we are 5 or 7 or 75, we feel God’s joy, not only in a race, but in this particular creative moment of human life.
This isn’t an everyday occurrence, but it could be.
It should be.
Yahweh withholds no good thing from those who walk in sincerity.
Here’s a story, a thought from Henri Nouwen, that itself deserves an alternate ending:
Much violence in our society is based on the illusion of immortality, which is the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not a gift to be shared.
When the elderly no longer can bring us in contact with our own aging, we quickly start playing dangerous power games to uphold the illusion of being ageless and immortal. Then, not only will the wisdom of the elderly remain hidden from us, but the elderly themselves will lose their own deepest understanding of life.
For who can remain a teacher when there are no students willing to learn?
Jesus does not stand for this illusory and self-protective way to “teach” children how to live. And in his most famous Sermon According to Luke he goes on, about how God rewards us when we live freely as men, women, parents, and children, young becoming old, old remaining young.
Stop judging and you will not be judged.
Forgive and you will be forgiven.
Give, and it will be given to you, a good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over will be poured into your lap.
And the measure you use? That also will be measured unto you.
(1 Corinthians 9, Psalm 84, John 17, Luke 6)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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