Heroes and stories
I'm slowly reading through the every growing stack of books I have piled in the bathroom. (I'm sure I'm not the only one to do this. Sometimes you just need a quiet place to read and the bathroom door has a lock.) I tend to put non-fiction books on the bathroom stack because they lend themselves to being read in smaller bits. Fiction is too dangerous; I might never come out. The trouble with non-fiction, though, is that I find it far too easy to put one book down and pick another one up as the whim strikes. This is what leads to a pile of seven books teetering on the back of the toilet. I've made myself promise that no new books would be added until I whittle down the stack some.
This is all a prelude to why I was reading a book I started over a year ago earlier today. I picked it up initially because for many years I would compulsively read homemaking type books. I just couldn't get enough of them. Now, I'm finding that they don't speak to me quite as loudly as they used to. This is probably because after 26 years of being a parent, I know what works and what doesn't for our family. I'm not really searching for new ideas, and I'm thinking I probably picked up this book out of habit. Since I actually purchased it, I was feeling obligated to at least give it a cursory read through.
Just when I thought that this book didn't have anything new to say to me, I come across an idea that I loved. (Isn't that so often the case?)
"'You are part of God's story on earth,' my parents whispered again and again in our ears. 'You can be like Aragorn or Frodo or Sam in the battles of the world. You can bring beauty like Monet or Yo-Yo Ma or discover something new like George Washington Carver. What kind of hero do you want to be?'" (from The Lifegiving Home: creating a place of belonging and becoming by Sally and Sarah Clarkson, p. 152)
And there was this one,
"... heroism isn't just about taking your own life in your hands. It's about being taken hold of by something much bigger and more beautiful than yourself. A heroic view of life and tradition is one in which you join an ongoing story, a lived drama, following faithful people who went before. That's why memory, history, and story are so important. By encountering the vision of the heroes before us -- those who aspired and sacrificed and dedicated their own lives to noble pursuits -- we gain the resources we need to rise to their challenge with fresh vision of our own." (p. 153)
We are each part of a bigger story. Each of us will play a different role, but until we see the end of the story we will not have any idea at that role's importance. But it is extremely difficult to see oneself as an integral part of any story if the importance of story has not been communicated and shared. We learn through stories. We share who we are with others through stories. Stories are integral to our existence as human beings. It's how we were designed.
A sense of story gives us a shared sense of past, and purpose for our present, and a hope for our future. Without this, we are adrift. I feel so many of our children and youth are adrift. In the drive to cram as much education in them as possible, so that they can get better test scores, so that they don't fall behind, so they can get a good job and earn more money, we have lost our own story and certainly not communicated it to our children. Stories tell us what is important. They tell us what is good and beautiful and heroic. Conversely, they also tell us what is evil. When we lose our stories, we lose our way and our purpose.
Share stories with your children. Introduce them to Aragorn and Bilbo, Odysseus and Hercules, King Arthur and Lancelot. Teach them about people who stood up for what they believed in, Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, Corrie ten Boom and Brother Andrew, Eric Liddell and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Share your family stories. Give your children a scaffolding for making sense of the world.
Stories are not just nice extras; the fluff around the edges of 'real' learning. They are the best and most expedient way of communicating great and necessary truth. Our stories act as a mirror which shows us who we are. I don't think it is by chance that God's great story, written to us, begins, "In the beginning..."
This is all a prelude to why I was reading a book I started over a year ago earlier today. I picked it up initially because for many years I would compulsively read homemaking type books. I just couldn't get enough of them. Now, I'm finding that they don't speak to me quite as loudly as they used to. This is probably because after 26 years of being a parent, I know what works and what doesn't for our family. I'm not really searching for new ideas, and I'm thinking I probably picked up this book out of habit. Since I actually purchased it, I was feeling obligated to at least give it a cursory read through.
Just when I thought that this book didn't have anything new to say to me, I come across an idea that I loved. (Isn't that so often the case?)
"'You are part of God's story on earth,' my parents whispered again and again in our ears. 'You can be like Aragorn or Frodo or Sam in the battles of the world. You can bring beauty like Monet or Yo-Yo Ma or discover something new like George Washington Carver. What kind of hero do you want to be?'" (from The Lifegiving Home: creating a place of belonging and becoming by Sally and Sarah Clarkson, p. 152)
And there was this one,
"... heroism isn't just about taking your own life in your hands. It's about being taken hold of by something much bigger and more beautiful than yourself. A heroic view of life and tradition is one in which you join an ongoing story, a lived drama, following faithful people who went before. That's why memory, history, and story are so important. By encountering the vision of the heroes before us -- those who aspired and sacrificed and dedicated their own lives to noble pursuits -- we gain the resources we need to rise to their challenge with fresh vision of our own." (p. 153)
We are each part of a bigger story. Each of us will play a different role, but until we see the end of the story we will not have any idea at that role's importance. But it is extremely difficult to see oneself as an integral part of any story if the importance of story has not been communicated and shared. We learn through stories. We share who we are with others through stories. Stories are integral to our existence as human beings. It's how we were designed.
A sense of story gives us a shared sense of past, and purpose for our present, and a hope for our future. Without this, we are adrift. I feel so many of our children and youth are adrift. In the drive to cram as much education in them as possible, so that they can get better test scores, so that they don't fall behind, so they can get a good job and earn more money, we have lost our own story and certainly not communicated it to our children. Stories tell us what is important. They tell us what is good and beautiful and heroic. Conversely, they also tell us what is evil. When we lose our stories, we lose our way and our purpose.
Share stories with your children. Introduce them to Aragorn and Bilbo, Odysseus and Hercules, King Arthur and Lancelot. Teach them about people who stood up for what they believed in, Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, Corrie ten Boom and Brother Andrew, Eric Liddell and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Share your family stories. Give your children a scaffolding for making sense of the world.
Stories are not just nice extras; the fluff around the edges of 'real' learning. They are the best and most expedient way of communicating great and necessary truth. Our stories act as a mirror which shows us who we are. I don't think it is by chance that God's great story, written to us, begins, "In the beginning..."
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