Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Method Five

Cast Aspersions upon the Heroic and the Patriotic

“Learn to despise the place where you were born, its customs, its glories and its shame. Then stick your head in a comic book. That done, you will be triple-armored against the threat of a real though or the call of the transcendent.”

Ideology is a system of ideas and ideals formed upon the basis of economic or political theory and policy. Piety, on the other hand, is a belief that is accepted with ritual reverence. Patriotism reveres the things that ideology cannot touch: the small and the old, the vulnerable and the venerable. The place we are committed to, the people we honor don’t have to be grand and glorious to earn our love and loyalty. We are devoted simply because they are ours. But when children have been raised on the flashy, the simple pieties of hearth and home--a hot meal, the love of a good wife, the praise of God and songs sung for a country whether it deserves it or not--will be lost on them. A patriotism of piety can be heady alcohol for the young mind.

“Piety nurses the imagination because it places us in both greatness and smallness, in the stillness of a single moment and in the long sweep of the generations. Ideology digs many graves but tends not a single stone.”

Without a love of past people hanker after what is supposed to be new and thus desirable without asking where it has come from or where it will take them. “A man with a past may be free; but a man without a past, never.” That is why, in 1984, Big Brother shreds any artifacts that might be a link to the past. In contrast, the hobbits in The Lord of the Rings have a rich history of great deeds--glorious and disastrous--that stretches all the way back to the dawn of the world. It is this very history that gives them the capacity to take part in their own chapter of the saga of Middle Earth.

The past never changes but that only makes it boring to those who grow up on the constant stream of unceasing movement in video games and movies. The past is like a secret room in an old house filled with ancient armor, antiquated odd tools, and books recalling words and deeds of men and women who now lie in their graves. We come into the presence of those who once were as we are and are now as we will someday be. When children go into such a room they will bring those people--larger than life--into their own lives. In fact, because the past is simply there, never to change, its constancy reflects the eternity of God. “It presents to the young mind a vast field of fascination, of war and peace, loyalty and treason, invention and folly, bitter twists of fate and sweet poetic justice.” When that past is of one’s own people or country or church, then it makes claims upon our honor and allegiance and fires the imagination all the more.

To honor the past is not to whitewash it, romanticizing those we admire and flattening those we don’t. Such caricatures do little to inspire. Neither do we need to expose the past, magnifying the tarnish and taking everything noble and making it small--like ourselves. That leaves us with nothing but cynicism and moral and intellectual superiority. When we do not gloss over the faults of our heroes we get to know them as men and women and we can admire and respect them all the more. Bring the past to life, not just on the pages of history, but also in the expanding heart and mind of the young.

“The imagination seeks out the ideal and beholds its beauty. In doing so it penetrates farther to the truth than does the sloth of cynicism. Anyone may see a wart or a mole--faults about in every man and the grime of life tarnishes us all. When we apply its wisdom to our country, whatever that country may be, we can grow to love her enough to wish to correct her.”

Nowadays we have lost our love of past and place. Instead of patriotism we have multiculturalism which turns up its nose at our own local and national pastimes in favor of the fashionably foreign. This fascination with any other place but our own--kills patriotism. Pretending to love every place, you love none at all. Encouraging this will produce either the mildly interested tourist who collapses everything he sees into the two-dimensions of a brochure or the couch-potato who never ventures out because one place is as dull as the next.

Even some Christians (us included) tend to take an ideological outlook on our country because the economics and politics are not going in a direction we agree with. We, more than any other people, should be the ones to have a love that desires to reform, reshape, rebuild.

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Method Four

Replace the Fairy Tale with Political Cliches and Fads

“Fairy tales are for children and childlike people, not because they are little and inconsequential, but because they are as enormous as life itself.”

Fairy tales are full of characters that are recognizable for their types: the damsel in distress, the knight in shining armor, the evil step-mother... The world they inhabit is a moral world where good is good and evil is evil. The two are at war but we know that good will always triumph. The stories and the characters in them resonate with us because they are fundamentally true--not in a “true,” historical way, but rather in a real, typified way. They may be exaggerated or simplified, but they are like a child’s palette of colors--you know, the ones that come in the Crayola eight pack of crayons. To a child the sky is blue and trees are green. As he grows he will learn that the sky is sometimes gray and trees turn vibrant red, orange and yellow in the fall. But his understanding of the basics will be a firm foundation upon which to build a deep appreciation for the variety, richness and complexity of life.

“When you starve a child of the folk tale, you not only cramp his imagination for the time being. You help render vast realms of human art (not to mention life) incomprehensible.”

Characters that are real feats of the imagination are not wholly good or wholly bad--the elemental motives of human nature drive them to make the choices they do. But the good and the evil in them remain unchanged. If our imaginations are full of types from fairy tales, we will be able to understand these subtler, finer-drawn people. We will see jealousy and self-sacrifice in the same person, or foolishness and vitality, weakness and strength. The hero’s armor isn’t always quite so shiny and the villain’s motives not quite so black. But the heroism and villainy is there nonetheless, just like it was in the fairy tales. As these people come to life on the pages of the books we read, they “become parts of our moral universe... they are the lights to shine upon what we have seen and known to reveal what would otherwise have lain hidden from our understanding.” They are the telescope we use to see the stars by which we navigate through life. They are a magical device for seeing deep into the human heart. They will reveal truths about the lives that are being lived out around us.

In our enlightened day, though, we sneer at the archetypal figures in fairy tales and call them antiquated “stereotypes.” We flatten them into homogeneity and use them to push political agendas. We replace the types with cliches. Men become beasts, religious people are bigots, women are never weak, Indians are good because they are In Touch With Nature... Every subtlety is replaced with current platitudes.

Cliches are easy. Instead of making us think, they elicit “a cheap, automatic, superficial, and temporary response.” We aren’t changed, we don’t grow in our perception of humanity. We just laugh or mock or hate as the movie, book, or song suggests. Fundamental truths, on the other hand, require “a real response: they cause us to brood over the mysteries of this life....[They] require silence, and patience, and thought.”

Cliches are rooted in the here and now. In fact, people reading them ten years from now probably won’t even understand them. Powerful imaginative literature is not about ourselves. Like a ship, it transports us to lands unknown. It transcends time and the people we meet feel familiar to us just as they felt familiar to the people who read the stories in earlier generations. It’s not the setting or the message that fire the imagination. It’s what is fundamentally true: an innocent person outnumbered by evil people, men united in a death-defying purpose, the lowly exalted to glory and the arrogant reduced to nothing.

Of course it’s easy to think of modern movies and books full of political and cultural cliches and those of us who grew up on “good” literature are quick to scoff. But Christians also produce literature that pushes our own agenda and provokes an automatic and superficial response. We give our kids sugar-coated stories with morals that are easy to swallow and not hard to think about. We gloss over the faults of history’s heroes minimizing complex, multi-dimensional men and women to flat caricatures. The stories in the Bible too are often reduced merely being about people who go to heaven and people who go to hell. Perhaps even God, who moves in such wondrously mysterious ways, is reshaped into a nice, bland deity we can understand.

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Method Three

Keep Children Away From Machines and Machinists

“The young man sitting on a tractor for the first time will be both the child he is and the man he is going to be.”

“We forget as we sit comfortably in front of our computer screens how fascinating a large machine can be.”

This chapter will be the hardest, the least natural, for us to implement. Esolen talks about the imagination-growing effects of spending time around big machines, really seeing how things work. He writes of learning from people who really know their craft and love it. He mentions hunting, learning how to wait in the cold and mud for just the right moment to shoot the prey. And there’s more: shovels and hammers, engines and batteries, ropes and sailboats, trespassing, bonfires, battle plans, blueprints...

You can’t just take kids to museums which present science and nature as so much political propaganda and you can’t just sit them down in a class or in front of a demonstration. They need time and space and equipment to experiment whether it’s in the backyard (with rope, wood and a tree), in the garage (with wires, batteries and screws), in the garden (with shovel, seeds and dirt), in the sewing room (with fabric, needles and thread) or in the kitchen (with pans, ingredients and the stove). If kids can learn about The Way Things Work from people who truly understand and delight in their craft, their imaginations will grow all the more.

As parents we are tempted to look for the worth in our children’s undertakings. If they might someday make money off of one or two of their hobbies or, even better, if it might be the beginning of a career path, then we are willing to let them invest time in it and maybe we’ll even pay for some lessons or equipment. Otherwise all we see is the mess. So much of what looks like pointless tinkering to us encourages inquisitiveness, observation, and (of course) imagination.

If we do allow our children to dabble in hobbies, we like to keep them small-scale, you know, something easy to store and easy to clean up. But children can learn and experience much more if it is on a larger scale, especially if it has a practical purpose. They will become engineers when they try to rig a rope swing or farmers when you give them a corner of the yard to clear and tend.

Many of these pursuits are not safe. Fingers will be pounded and knees scraped, they will learn the feel of an electric shock, and they just might earn a scar or two from bumping a pan hot from the oven. But the mind will thrive, the body will toughen, and each experience will teach them something not to do next time. Don’t let safety concerns remove the wonder of discovery and the joy of creating. Let them learn how to be careful and responsible. Doug Wilson is not the only one to say that the body is for using up: we’ll get a new one in the next life.

Besides physical machines and equipment, our children’s imaginations can also grow by pouring over blueprints, plans, maps, etc: anything that puts an abstract concept down on paper. Just as Wallace went first to the drawing board before building the rocket that would take him and Gromit on their cheese holiday, so most invention begins with paper and pencil. When we supply our kids with examples they can imitate, they should be encouraged to go off and invent for themselves. Whether it’s a diagram of a new machine, the design of a treehouse, a battle plan to attack Russia, or the plot to the next Great American novel, they’ll be able to come up with anything.

By getting their hands on as much that is real and tangible as possible, our children’s imaginations will flourish. As they experience a physical world, their mental capacity blossom and they will be better fit to take dominion.

The Boy Who Made Me a Mommy

This picture was taken when Joshua was exactly one day old. We had survived our first night together and I remember sitting there the next morning looking at each other, marveling at the new life that was beginning--for both of us. He was mine and I was his.

In January that little baby turned five! Once he was inside me; now he's half my height. He's still mine and I'm still his.

Shutter Island: A Mother's Review

Set in the 1950‘s, Shutter Island is a psychological thriller with all the creepy music, mysterious characters, and “dark, stormy nights” that make movies like that work. Then it has the big plot twist at the end. If you are planning on watching it you might not want to read my review because I’m not going to keep any secrets. If you are a woman with children, please do read my review. You shouldn’t watch this without knowing what you’re getting yourself into.

Andrew Laeddis is a US Marshal who fought in WWII. He dearly loved his wife but there was only one problem: she was manically depressed and suicidal. He refused to see that and tried to live with her in love until one day he came home from work to find that she had killed their three children. She had drowned them in the lake and he had to wade out and carry their limp, lifeless bodies to the shore. Then, as his wife talked about how much she loved him and how they could dry the kids off and take them on picnics, he shot her.

The movie opens with him arriving at Shutter Island, where there is a psychiatric prison for the criminally insane. He is on an assignment to investigate the disappearance of one of the patients: a woman who had drowned her three children. He also thinks that the wardens and doctors are using the patients to conduct weird experiments using barbaric Nazi methods to create a person without emotions or pain. His hope is to uncover this conspiracy and expose it to the world. By the end of the movie we learn that it’s all in his head. It’s all part of an alternate reality he created for himself to disassociate himself from what he went through and did. He’s actually been a prisoner/patient on Shutter Island for two years himself, living and reliving this imaginary story.

Using elaborate roll-playing techniques, the doctors are able to show Andrew the truth: that there are no conspiracies and his children are dead and he killed his wife. Over the two years of his imprisonment, he has gone through cycles of realizing the truth, only to regress into his fantasy again. They really believe that he can break out of this cycle, but since he has military training, he is a very dangerous crazy man and this is his last chance. Realization comes to Andrew--slowly and painfully--and for a moment he is sane. But in the morning he falls back into denial and the movie closes with him walking off to be lobotomized. “Is it better,” he wonders, “to live as a monster or to die as a good man?”

And that’s it. No hope of change for the better. No redemption.

I could handle all the horrific stuff in the prison/hospital with all the creepy insane people, the long hallways, the unreliable lighting, and all his weird hallucinations of Nazi death camps. But a momma drowning her children...my heart was ripped out. And then there was hope. He remembered. It was tragic, but he was going to get better, move on. Then--no, never mind. Reality was too much for him. He would rather have some nerves cut out of his brain and live in the stories in his head. My heart was left bleeding on the ground.

These were my thoughts right after watching it. But as I thought more about it, I realized that the movie couldn’t have ended any other way. After seeing the things he saw and doing the things he’d done, he couldn’t have forgiven himself. Without Christ he was a monster. The doctors did everything they could for him and it was almost enough. But they didn’t give him Christ.

Without the forgiveness of Christ’s blood we can’t get over sins or mistakes or sinful mistakes. We can’t just forget them, forgive ourselves and move on. We commit them and become monsters. The only way out is to rewrite the story to distance ourselves from the sin. In our minds we can be the victim instead of the villain. We might as well be drugged and have the dangerous tissues cut out of our brains.

I was fine watching this movie, “dark, stormy night” and all, until he came home to find his children drowned. Finding my own children drowned in a pool or in the bath is already one of my worst nightmares. I will literally wake up at night in a panic thinking of it. I didn’t need to see it lived out on screen. The thought of a mother holding her children’s heads under the water till they drown made me (makes me!) feel sick. I wish I could watch Shutter Island and think, “I could never do that,” distancing myself from it all.

My children are small and fragile. Comparatively, I am big and strong. I hold them in the palm of my hand. They have no one else to turn to and they can’t get away. That responsibility is scary. Mothers do cruel things to the children in their care every day and but for the grace of God, I could be one of them. Therein is the horror of this movie. Without the grace of God we are all criminally insane. I am criminally insane.

My response to Shutter Island is to thank God for His forgiveness, to thank Him for forgiving me every week and renewing covenant with me during worship. My response is to pray for His grace to saturate me every day so I can hold my children in the palm of my hand just as I am in the palm of His hand: lovingly, patiently, forgivingly. He has given me a new reality to live out, but it’s not fiction. It’s true. It’s real.

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Method Two

Never Leave Children to Themselves

“People who can organize themselves and accomplish something as devilishly complicated as a good ballgame are hard to herd around....They become men and women, not human resources. They can be free.”

Boys playing baseball in a field or an empty lot must use their imaginations to set up the game, pick teams, and arbitrate disputes. They argue, using evidence (which must be respected if the game is to succeed), appealing to others or pretending the play never happened. “Anyone who harbors hard feelings is labeled a Sore Loser and is looked down upon with contempt by his fellows; it is a deep character flaw. But anybody who can engineer a quick solution acceptable to all sides is labeled a Good Sport, and of him great and glorious things are expected.”

Boys simply will not develop their characters if everything is always kept perfectly safe for them. Boys ought to be able to bear a few falls, knocks, and bruises. When we adults over-manage the activities of children we take the joy of discovery out of it and by removing the risks, we remove any chance they had to grow and mature. We emphasize fairness and fun for all which does not build character or a sense of duty.

Now you may be thinking of gangs. Gangs are groups of kids organizing themselves into a society: a society that goes around getting into mischief or worse. Children should be supervised or they might join or form a gang, right? After all, Proverbs says, "He who walks with wise men will be wise, but the companion of fools will be destroyed." You don't get much more foolish than a pack of boys left to themselves. The solution to the gang (or pack of fools) is not to obliterate childhood or community by controlling it and overseeing it. It is to provide the genuine article--solid family and community living--for which the gang is a perversion or a counterfeit. “It’s not that these boys [who form gangs] spend too much time outside the home. It’s that they have no genuine home to spend time outside of.” Children left to themselves will reflect the morals they have been taught.

My children are still little and I can’t expect to send them off with a group of their toddler friends to organize a baseball game. But I do want to be teaching them the kind of morals here at home that will make them be Good Sports and not Sore Losers. Three and five year olds do need to be supervised, but with the goal of instilling honorable ethics and then turning them loose to figure out exactly how it works in the real world.

It's My Birthday!

I woke up today to a powdered sugar world. Snow clung to every branch of every tree until each one looked like a sugary confection fit to eat. These flowers from a friend were on the table providing kind of a funny combination of seasonal beauty (thank you, God, for hot houses!). Then the clouds separated and for a while we had blue sky and sunshine. Now when I look out the window the snow is falling again in thick, fat flakes putting me in my very own snow globe.

This year I turned 24 on the 24th. We call that a golden birthday and I was always disappointed as a kid that I would have to wait so long for mine to come around. Besides, I reasoned, I'd be so grown up by then I probably wouldn't care. Well, the year finally came and I decided: You know what? I do care. So I told Eli he'd better make it special. He didn't tell me what he had in mind, even though I kept telling him that surprising me was a big responsibility. I mean, what if I thought the big surprise was kind of lame? He kept dropping hints that he was making plans so I decided to trust him, but I had no idea what was up his sleeve.

So I was totally astonished when I walked in the door after our ultrasound on Monday to find just about every single one of my friends standing in the hall and in the dining room and in the kitchen and living room all yelling, "Happy birthday!" I love my friends and I love big parties so it was the perfect way to celebrate my once in a lifetime golden birthday. And I had no idea it was coming! As my heart rate settled and snacks and cake were put before me I began to make connections, like when he said this, what he meant was this! And that's why we went there then. It was a lovely party with plenty of loving people around to talk to, no matter which room I walked in. And it ended the way the best parties must: hours later than it was supposed to.

Thank you, Eli, for thinking of it, planning it, and keeping it secret! Now I feel really bad that your surprise party got snowed out.

Tonight the kids are eating with Nanny and Poppy and Eli and I are going downtown to P. F. Changs. Next to a party with my friends, a dinner I don't have to cook is the best birthday celebration. Or any day celebration, for that matter!

P.S. I know that I used an over-abundance of italics. A birthday post about a surprise party warrants that.