What Will the Children Say?

A Treatise on Art as Truth

By Evanell Ator Davis

If ever the world needed art and truth and childlike innocence, now is the time. Using forty dollar words when four dollar ones would have done better, Michael Vander Weel appears to be speaking only to the educated elite. Perhaps he cannot use words ordinary people do simply because of his subject matter, “What is Reading For?” Afterall, who is his target audience? More professors like himself? Was he ever a child? Would he know how to speak with children? Is he even aware of children?

How much more refreshing to read Madeleine L’Engle’s perspective on reading and writing. “If it isn’t good enough for children, it isn’t good enough for adults,” she says. She insists that children are more open to new ideas than adults, that children are not afraid to tackle complicated subjects such as science, physics, chemistry, and mathematics (or philosophy and Christianity?) if those disciplines are presented in an understandable format, and that adults often fail to satisfy children’s curiosity. Children seek learning like a sponge seeks water. Jesus himself said that we must become like little children to receive salvation. He reprimanded his disciples for running interference to keep the children away from him. To receive the message of salvation, one must have a childlike faith. A rational person could not accept His invitation to leave everything and follow Him, could not conceive that the world we see is an illusion, impermanent and deceptive. A rational person might not even accept the idea that merely reading a text could cause a person to change.

I distinctly remember watching my older son learn to read. He was born in 1959, several years before public kindergarten became available. Of course, I read to him and his brother almost from birth, but Charlie had a restless spirit, an inquiring mind. Before he was two years old, he began running away from home. The first time this happened I thought he was asleep, taking a nap like his baby brother. We lived in Pharr, then a small town in the Rio Grande Valley. He was wearing only a pair of training briefs when he unlatched the screen of the open window, climbed out, jumped to the ground, ran across the yard to the hurricane fence, hooked his toes in the mesh and climbed over, leaving in his wake a swatch of white knit fabric on the top barbs. From there, he trotted barefoot to the new highway being constructed not far from our house. I was in the next room sewing contentedly when the phone rang. It was one of my friends.

“Do you know where Charlie is?” she asked.

“Of course. He’s taking a nap with Johnny.”

“Well, would you just check to be sure? The radio announcer said there was a small blonde boy wearing nothing but training pants walking down the middle of the new road.”

This scenario was repeated several times, despite my vigilance and great embarrassment, until Charlie started first grade, until he learned to read. Whatever he was looking for, whatever he was seeking, he found in learning to read. His chaos became cosmos. He sought understanding. He found it in books, in reading.

Perhaps that is what Weel is saying, too, in his tedious text. Reading does bring order to one’s world, just as writing does. L’Engle says (like Kathleen Norris) “ … when the words mean even more than the writer knew they meant, then the writer has been listening” (Walking on Water, 22). L’Engle says this ability to listen is achieved through quiet, prayer, and waiting.

Reading does more than that. In his article, which appeared in Christianity and Literature (Vol.52, No. 1, Autumn 2002), Weel discusses at length two terms, lectio spiritualis and lectio divina. Referring to a work by Brian Stock, Weel defines the difference: lectio divina (divine reading) meditation is a communal activity, a reading of the word itself; lectio spiritualis (spiritual reading) focuses on an autonomous internal reflection, on the words or images that arise during or after reading” (65). This explanation was one of the first things this man said that made good sense to me, mainly because I had read Kathleen Norris’s account of visiting the monks in their monastery in Dakota. She was refreshed and renewed by the simple, slow savoring of words in certain Bible passages. I finally began to understand Weel’s purpose. I recalled John’s “[i]n the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God from the beginning” (John 1:1 NIV). As Derrida said, “The word is not the thing.” The word is a symbol for the thing, which, in this case, is the Spirit of Christ, of order, of the universe, of God. Mere speaking of the words of scripture together, slowly, thoughtfully, evokes a communal spirit; reflecting on those words, each person, internally, evokes images, thoughts that change people’s lives, and feelings that bring transcendence, a recognition of the truth of man’s inability to save himself.

In my thesis, I defined art as truth in this way:

Someone said a painter becomes an artist when he or she composes an

image of lines and colors in such a way as to reveal truth. A writer

becomes an author when he or she writes a series of words and phrases to

record events in such a manner as to reveal truth. An author becomes an

autobiographer when he or she diligently records his or her own

experiences in a sequence that constructs a whole portrait of that person.

Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). Beauty is truth, whether it be in words, music, dance, or art. Truth comes from God. Weel says, “In truth, a Christian theory of pleasure is badly needed for Christian art to survive” (71). In the next paragraph of his article, Weel mentions another philosopher, Lyotard, who discusses society—“creating a rational society while preventing the creation of a society that is only rational” (71). Or, looking at this from another angle, have we traditionally as Christians rationed beauty and therefore truth and art?

Weel also speaks of the hermeneutics of tradition, “an understanding of texts is like our understanding of time and language—fragmentary and incomplete” (65) because not everyone has read the same texts, the same canon. There is limited community because of limited texts in common. When I read this, since I am one who has not read all the texts in our canon, I was reminded of playing Taboo a few years ago shortly before my daughter and five of her friends graduated high school. We all met for dinner at one honoree’s house, ate, then competed. The graduates were on one team; the parents on the other. As parents, we didn’t have a chance. The girls were so close, had spent so much time together that one of them could simply say a word with a certain inflection or raise an eyebrow to elicit an immediate correct answer. That’s what it means to have that hermeneutics of tradition, a common knowledge.

That’s what we Christians have, a common knowledge. If only we could be like children and share that knowledge, forget our differences, like children quickly do, and come closer together in truth and love and imagination. As one who “grew up in the church,” one who is at least a fourth-generation Christian, I can state unequivocally that beauty and art and imagination have not been prominent on my family’s list of proper Christian pursuits. As L’Engle and Ryken say, imagination is a God-given gift, one that we, as a Christian nation, have traditionally tried to stifle if not outright destroy. I read once that a child beginning school has lots of imagination, but by the third grade, little remains. If we must become like little children to enter the kingdom of heaven, should we not pay more attention to little children and try to emulate their special qualities of imagination and creativity, their knack for suspension of disbelief? As Christians, we have more responsibility than anyone to make this world more beautiful, to create great works of art, music, and literature. Christ brings us to it. If we have truth, we must show it through our works of art. As L’engle says, in the end, “Do we want the children to see it?” If it isn’t good enough for them, it isn’t good enough for anyone.

Even Tolstoy said

… if I were told that what I shall write will be read in twenty years by the

children of today and that they will weep and smile over it and will fall in

love with life, I would devote all my life and all my strength to it.

These are noble thoughts from a great writer, but why would he want to wait so long to be read? Why didn’t he think of writing a story for the children right then? So they could grow up knowing him and later read his books for adults? Why couldn’t he be like C. S. Lewis? I never ran into Lewis when I was young; I do not know why he totally escaped me because I always read voraciously. What a thrill it would have been to me to have read his children’s books, then his science fiction books, and later his books for adults. And let us not forget how often secular writing and other works of art have something to say to Christians, especially if we read or listen or look with love for the artist and what he or she is trying to portray. That ability to bring love to the process could and should begin in childhood, transmitted by loving adults to the next generation.

As for the various writers mentioned here, L’Engle is by far, from my point of view, more in touch with the reality of what is truly important in the eternal scheme than Weel and Tolstoy. Ryken (After all, he does dedicate his book, The ChristianImagination, to his grandchildren.) is okay up to a point and he does have a section about children featuring Lewis and L’Engle. Ryken does expound on the idea that books and movies are all about story, story that leads to redemption. If the characters who do evil are not punished in the end … Wait a minute. Isn’t redemption about salvation, not punishment? Ryken is correct to write that Christians must view what they see with discernment, not suspending their critical abilities when lost in the delight of an especially entertaining movie.

Tolstoy, a true artist, explains art in his essay, “What Is Art?” Art is …

… [o]ne man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to

others the feelings he has lived through, so that others are infected by

these feelings and also experience them.

In this statement Tolstoy depicts lectio spiritualis, where by reading, a person internalizes images and words and feelings evoked by the text and is therefore forever changed. Children do this every time they discover, through reading, something new. As adults, we often become jaded and fail to recognize a new idea or image when it’s right under our noses. We have lost the wonder, the delight of childhood. L’Engle is an old woman who has enjoyed some of the best—husband, family, grandchildren, and fame. Dealing successfully with such a rich life requires wisdom, skill, patience, and insight. If she can do all that and still treasure children and respect their ability to learn complicated concepts, I would take her advice any day and listen to her words of wisdom over Ryken, Tolstoy, or Weel, learned as they are. After all, what would the children think about them? Are they in touch with their own “inner child?” ________________________________________________________________

Evanell Ator Davis, formerly from  Abilene, TX ,  resides in  Modesto, CA . Her poems have been published in the Corral, Shinnery Review, Texas Echoes: Five Generations of Women Who Write, Maiden  Texas , Echoes, Acappella, Acapella Deux, An Honest Woman, Where  Dust Devils  Dance, Odyssey, Woman of the Third Age, Song of the  San Joaquin ,  and Modesto’s  Poets’ Corner .