A professor links children's literature to religious imagination

From the very first pages of David Almond's Skellig (Delacorte, 1999), the narrator, Michael, tells of trying to see the beat-up, broken-down, junk heap of the family garage with his "mind's eye." He learns quite quickly, alongside his friend Mina, that their ability to see with this unusual lens will be challenged by something far more heartbreaking than an old warehouse, by the strange being that inhabits the space. As Michael's extraordinary tale of befriending Skellig unfolds, our own sensibility about the real is challenged. Like Michael and Mina, we are immediately confronted with our need to be visionaries of a sort as we weave through this gorgeous story. We struggle with the questions it poses to us: What is the real? What evidence is required for belief? How do leaps of faith reshape our world? Above all, we must seek these answers with our imaginations fully intact.

In Lois Lowry's The Giver (Houghton, 1993), we are confronted with equally difficult themes as we journey with Jonas through his 12th year, the year that changes his life and that of everyone around him. On his birthday, the boy is given the daunting Assignment as Receiver for his community, the job of bearing the secrets of true joy, love, pain, and difference on behalf of everyone. As Jonas receives instruction in this task from the wise, grandfatherly man, The Giver, his eyes are opened not only to the horrors of suffering, but also to the tremendous loss of love and happiness in a world shielded from all emotion—good and bad.

This insightful novel helps us to explore some of the biggest and most difficult of life's questions: What is the meaning of human suffering? How are happiness and pain connected? At what price comes the eradication of suffering? We too, hold our breath as Jonas flees his community in order to save it, running away not to protect it from the knowledge he carries, but instead to share this burden of mixed joy and anguish, love and complexity, with the community itself. We stand in awe of Jonas's bravery and wonder if we have the capacity for that much courage somewhere inside us.

In my role as a professor of religion, the questions that ground The Giver and Skellig have a familiar ring: they are deeply religious. Like these stories, religion too grows from life's most profound questions. Why are we here? What is our purpose? Where do we come from? One of my personal favorites: What is Meaning? One of the best parts of teaching religious studies is being able to highlight certain words like Meaning, Ultimate, Reality, and Truth with capital letters, indicating to my students that we are about to explore these topics in a particularly Big way. There is something fun and grammatically playful about capitalizing concepts, in stretching our "mind's eyes" like Michael, to delve into these ideas in the deepest possible manner.

The other favorite part of my job, though, is exploring how cultures have tried to answer such difficult inquiries, navigating the complex jungles that rise from these roots. And one of the most common ways to do this is through story.

When discussing sacred story, or myth, within the context of religion, it is usually the tales of Greek gods and goddesses, the Gospels, and Genesis that first spring to mind, and less common that novels like Skellig or The Giver will appear on a Religion 101 syllabus. We are more likely to find St. Francis, the Dalai Lama, or Mother Theresa put forth as spiritual role models than a brave boy named Jonas or a wide-eyed, high school activist like Jerry Spinelli's protagonist in Stargirl (Knopf, 2000). Yet, whereas Mother Theresa seems a likely candidate for a discussion about radical activism, it is Stargirl who resonates most deeply with my students, challenging their sense of the price of conformity and their deep longing to fit in while at the same time making a difference in the world. It is someone like Winnie from Natalie Babbitt's Tuck Everlasting (Farrar, 1975) who best helps us to ponder whether we even want to drink from the spring of eternal life, and what choosing immortality means to us.

To some, it might seem strange to take the literature used in sixth-grade classrooms and present it as reading material in a college religion course. While I am well schooled in the various, traditional mythic sources and religious figures, I'd rather turn to children's literature as a primary resource for dialogue. Anyone who has taken a course in religious studies knows that it can be a dry topic in the classroom, one of those subjects that evokes the pulling-teeth syndrome for teachers and parents. Yet when students walk into my classroom at the beginning of a semester, I see it as my job to awaken them to the myriad ways that religion is relevant to their lives and, through their lives, to the world around them. I see it as my job to introduce them to the religious imagination.

One of the best ways to explore the religious imagination is through the eyes of a child. Children's literature has long held an important place in the life of the religious imagination, and children's authors are no strangers to sparking spiritual reflection, some, like Philip Pullman and C. S. Lewis, explicitly so. While Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia" (Macmillan) and Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy (Ballantine) are obvious candidates for the task of religious reflection, it is in the less explicitly religious stories like Skellig, The Giver, Stargirl, and Tuck Everlasting that I have found the most effective windows into the study of religion. It is the element of surprise and the subtlety of content that make these books such potent resources for discussion.

At first glance, the provocative questions and intense emotion at the root of children's literature might seem a far cry from the hard-lined debate between the religious right and the liberal left so prominent now in Western culture. This is also exactly what makes these stories such a good place to start. Unfortunately, most people today hear the word "religion" and think only of the culture wars and the institutional dimensions of tradition, and not the questions that lay at its foundation. We think of outdated moral prescriptions and even more of out-of-touch officials, imposing cathedrals and temples dotting neighborhoods and cities, and countries at war over religious strife and scandal. The picture we draw about religion from looking around us is often a hardened portrait, a religious sensibility that has already answered all possible inquiries, that is more about conformity than struggle, and that decided right from wrong a long time ago.

While all of the above is certainly the stuff of contemporary religion, it does not tell the whole story. In fact, in looking only at the trappings of religion before us, we miss some of the most important things that lie behind this powerful force in our world. In order to understand religious passion, we need to learn how the building blocks of religion are also the building blocks in our own lives; it's just that most of the time we don't realize it. We've forgotten to teach our children, and even forgotten ourselves, that religions emerged from people who, at least at one point in time, were moved to struggle with core questions about who they were and what they were doing in this world. And it has never been more important than now to be reminded that there is more to religion than what meets the eye on 24-hour news channels and across the red state/blue state divide.

Looking to children's stories as the magical doorway to the often-forgotten religious imagination is not a skewing of the realities religion presents to us in our world today; it allows that which has been hidden, shut away in the attic of religion, to be happened upon again, discovered through enchantment. Stories allow us to become explorers of religion, tantalizing us up the stairs to that locked door, that forgotten chest, the jeweled gowns at the back of the closet, hidden behind the stuffy, woolen coats. These stories have the power to move us from one place to another, to tear open the surface of tradition to a deeper, more primal place. A children's story opens the door to religious contemplation like nothing else can.

Anyone who teaches literature and writing knows that when we hand someone a good story it's like handing them a world of possibility, that stories provide some of the greatest sources for soul-searching available to us. Eudora Welty describes great fiction as those stories that cause us the most confusion, and states that "there is everything in great fiction but a clear answer." Good stories leave us asking, leave us wanting. Good religion doesn't give us answers either, but instead gives us the space to ask, to want, to seek, provides us with a roof over our heads, a bench where we can sit and ponder, and a place to soar high up into its rafters. Children's literature, in its own small way, offers us a similar house for reflection, a safe place to cry and to love, to get angry and cry out in wonder, to leap with joy and abandon.

Today, we live in a political climate teeming with religious rhetoric. This is a world that answers its religious disputes with war and is populated with generations of young people struggling to find meaningful community. It has never been more important to address religion than now. Yet, while public schools resist it out of skittishness about overstepping boundaries and colleges present the gravitas of religion on the world political stage, we often forget to go back to the basics of what it is all about, those Big Questions that so enchant us. It is human to ask them, seek them out, letting them inspire our journeys, taking leaps of faith that require leaps of our imagination. In this well of inquiry sitting behind the stories of our lives and those of our hearts, we will encounter the seeds of religion. And it is through Stargirl's joyous bunny hop at the Ocotillo Ball, leading her classmates dancing in the desert under a starry night sky, and the lonely, angel-creature Skellig, nursed back to life by two, wide-eyed children, that teachers and students alike can begin to explore the stuff of which religion is born.