An Excerpt from "Wild Things and Castles in the Sky: A Guide to Choosing the Best Books for Children" by Co-Editor, Author Leslie Bustard
Please note the following is an excerpt written by Leslie Bustard from the book "Wild Things and Castles in the Sky: A Guide to Choosing the Best Books for Children" being released this month by Square Halo Books.
Far overhead from beyond the veil of blue sky . . . either from the sky or from the Lion itself, . . . the deepest, wildest voice they had ever heard was saying: “Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.”
—C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew
These three words—love, think, speak—grabbed my attention the first year I guided my seventh-grade literature class through C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew. Aslan’s call to his newly-ordained talking animals to awaken and to love, think, and speak was a call to image him to the rest of Narnia. This reminded me of the awe-inspiring truth that humanity being is made in God’s image; we love, think, and speak because the Creator did so first.
Not only do these three commands of Aslan remind us we are image bearers of God to the world, but they also show us that the words we use and the various ways we use them are part of our image-bearing work. The use and importance of words is woven throughout Scripture as we see God acting for and speaking to His people, as well as commanding and teaching them (and us) how to speak with love and wisdom.
As a parent, church member, teacher, aunt, and friend, I am called to the imaginative and intentional work of shepherding, in large and small ways, the hearts and minds of the children around me. And so are those who find themselves in communities with little ones, tweens, and teenagers. As we love, think, and speak in our communities, we also need to bring into our children’s lives life-giving words, good stories, and meaningful conversations so that they, too, can grow as image-bearers of God. Bible reading, worship, service, outdoor time, movies and plays, stories, books, poetry, humor, artwork—these are seeds we plant in our children’s lives that can add to the treasure in their hearts. As Jesus taught, “Out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks” (Luke 6:45). In her book Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, Marilyn McEntyre says,
Words are entrusted to us as equipment for our life together, to help us survive, guide, and nourish one another. We need to take the metaphor of nourishment seriously in choosing what we “feed on” in our hearts, and in seeking to make our conversation with each other life-giving.”1
The way our taste buds grow accustomed to the foods we eat and how those foods affect the health of our body is an apt metaphor for how we decide which words and ideas to offer our children. A child accustomed to sweet foods and cheese-covered vegetables (I am very sympathetic to this) might struggle to appreciate the variety of flavors and textures found in nutritional foods. A steady diet of dumbed-down stories, illustrations, and conversations will not prepare them for all the glorious ways words can be used in times of joy and delight and in times of sorrow and suffering.
The stories we offer our children are important to their growth as people. As James K.A. Smith says, “My feel for the world is oriented by a story I carry in my bones.”2 These stories are experienced through a variety of written and visual forms, including history, poetry, fiction, memoir, and songs. Children also learn an orientation to the world through advertisements, social media platforms, video games, TV shows, celebrity culture, and music videos. Smith elaborates,
The imagination is acquired. It is learned. It is neither instinctual nor universal . . . Rather, the imagination is a form of habit, a learned, bodily disposition to the world. Embodiment is integral to imagination . . . This is why the arts are crucial to our collective imagination. Grabbing hold of us by the senses, artworks have a unique capacity to shape our attunement, our feel for the world.3
C.S. Lewis’s words about stories solidified what I intuitively knew about children and books when I became a mother. In his essay “On Stories” Lewis states,
“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty.”4 This became my guide for how to choose good books. I found, over time, that if I was reading a book out loud and its illustrations or words were insipid or banal, I would get a knot in my stomach. These books did not stay long in our home.
Lewis’s belief that stories have formative power is intertwined throughout The Chronicles of Narnia. Prince Caspian, the second book in the series as Lewis wrote them, highlights the power of stories. The young Prince Caspian, whose nurse and then his tutor told him stories of Old Narnia—full of talking animals, high kings and queens, and Aslan—felt a strong connection with and loyalty to Narnia so that later he longed to be crowned its rightful king. On the other hand, King Miraz—as well as previous Telmarine kings—perpetuated fear in his subjects by insisting that the stories of Old Narnia and Aslan were myths and that only evil came from across the waters and forests. His subjects lived in this fear and kept away from the seas and woods as much as they could.
“There was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it,” begins The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the book following Prince Caspian. It is a story that fleshes out Lewis’s belief concerning the negative, formative power that the lack of good stories can have on a child’s heart and mind.
From the very beginning of the book, we know that Eustace is truly an insufferable boy. His teachers and parents—whom he called by their first names— gave him facts and opinions, not stories or edifying conversations. “He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.”5 When Eustace entered into an adventure on the high seas, he had no imagination for its possibilities and lacked the largeness of heart necessary to welcome new people (or talking mice) into his life. He was full of disdain and self-righteousness—he needed a heart change.
Stories can train our imaginations and help us grow in empathy and sympathy, but stories can also help us understand how we fit into the kingdom of God, as well as prepare us for a life of being molded by the word of God.