N.D. Wilson: Stories are Catechisms for the Imagination

What are stories for? Ask an average group of young American narrative consumers this question and they most likely won’t know what you mean. What you’ll likely get are blank faces, shrugs.

So, let’s get more specific. What are movies, TV shows, comic books, and novels for? What’s the point? Why watch? Why read? Why do we as a culture bother to spend billions of dollars (and hours) creating and consuming stories?

The consensus answer—regardless of whether the kids asked are active and aggressive readers or merely passive imbibers of whatever happens to be on—will almost always come down to one word and one word only: fun. Why do we watch? For fun. Why do we read? For fun.

Spider-man and Harry Potter and The Hunger Games and The Walking Dead all exist for fun.Twilight is fun. Or it isn’t fun. And so this girl is absorbed in the books while that boy sneers and mocks. Personal and peer-group tastes and pleasures are adhered to as if they were indisputable and authoritative.

But the word fun is a simplistic label for what is actually a remarkable and complex experience. Stories make people feel. Stories (particularly novels) take control of and govern the imagination, causing readers to feel things on command. Stories create empathetic and sympathetic bonds between readers and fictional characters, and those bonds are truly real. In fact, they can be more lasting than the bonds between readers and their fellow earth-walking humans because a fictional character is fixed and unchanging. I have deeply admired and looked up to Faramir (from The Two Towers, the second book of the Lord of the Rings series) from my youth, and that admiration has only grown. On the other hand, there are real men whom I long admired, and whom I admire no longer.

Stories create affection and fear and joy, love and hate and relief. Stories can create loyalties and destabilize loyalties. Stories are catechisms for the imagination. Catechisms for emotions, for aspirations. Stories mold instincts and carve grooves of habit in a reader’s judgments.

Stories are dangerous, and that isn’t a bad thing. Rain is dangerous. Sunlight is dangerous. Stories are potent, but that potency can be used for true and good and beautiful ends, or it can be used to attack and destroy and undermine truth and goodness and beauty.

Let a faithful author guide a child’s imagination, and that child will learn (and feel) what it is like to be courageous, to stand against evil, to love what is lovely and honor what is honorable. Hand them the wrong book, and they could learn to numb their own conscience, to gratify and feed darker impulses. The wrong stories catechize imaginations with sickness.

Twilight is a manual for adolescent girls on how to become abused women. Is that man moody and mercurial and vicious? Is he death and danger? Let’s have tens of millions of young girls practice (through emotional connection to a character proxy) envisioning themselves trailing around behind him like kicked puppies, just hoping for a sparkly smile. And let’s have that imagined behavior rewarded. What could go wrong?

Of course, it’s rarely that simple. Books (and stories in general) can weave just a single layer of dissonance through an otherwise harmonic structure. The Hunger Games begins with a girl selflessly offering herself as a substitute for her little sister. Grand. We see beauty there and we bite. We attach to Katniss (our heroine) because she has earned our sympathy, and then we ride with her through her awful and horrific servitude to the debauchery of a corrupt nation. But a switch takes place. We linked up with her when she was driven by selflessness, but she quickly moves into a radical Darwinian selfishness, willing to participate in the murder of innocents in order to preserve herself. Cruciform behavior is subbed out and survival of the fittest (as an ethical justification for bloodshed) is subbed in.

And here we see what happens when a book (and a character) is well-crafted but false. When I criticize the motivation of a character in The Hunger Games, it is easy for people to respond emotionally as if I had insulted their most beloved sister. Because, even though the character isn’t real, the affection and loyalty and pride and worry created in the readers is very real indeed. And once the affections are involved, objective critical discussion is emotionally charged (and zesty).

Critical thinking and imaginative selfcontrol are obviously essential things to give to young readers. We should want to raise children with the ability to resist an author and a narrative, to laugh, criticize, and dismiss folly, no matter how hard a storyteller might be working to feed them falsehood. But the first step is to establish their tastes in truth with stories that will root their instincts and loyalties in goodness and beauty. Feed them narratives that love the lovely and honor the honorable. Let them wander Narnia and Middle-earth and be edified and strengthened and inspired. Give them a strong foundation and stubborn taste. When it comes to story, there’s nothing wrong with being a picky eater.

Motivation: Now Shapes Forever

In contemplating the rewards that the Lord has for believers in heaven, I was reminded of God telling Abraham "I am your shield, your very great reward."

Sam Storms says this in his book One Thing: "To think that everyone in heaven is equally knowledgeable, equally holy, equally capable of enjoying God, is to argue that the progress we make now on earth is irrelevant to our heavenly state. But we are often exhorted to do things now precisely because it will build up and increase for us treasure in heaven. Not everyone responds to these commands in the same way or to the same degree or with the same measure of faithfulness. Thus people will enter heaven at differing degrees of holiness, love and joy. All will be subject to increase and expansion based on the depth and measure of our development here on earth. What we do and know and achieve now, by God's grace, will have eternal consequences.
"Your capacity for happiness in heaven is shaped by the development and refinement and depth of your capacity on earth. ... What we experience in joy and understanding and insight now ... is the foundation on which all our eternal experience and growth is based."

That is a reward that truly excites me. God Himself, and more of Him. Forever.

Nancy Wilson on The War on Woman

This may be stating the obvious, but for each abortion, there is a woman. Our streets and offices and homes and schools and churches and malls are full of women, and millions of them have an abortion (or two or more) on their conscience. These women do not have marks on their foreheads so we can identify them. Nevertheless, they carry an unseen burden. Abortion doesn’t just maim and kill babies. It maims and kills women. It kills their femininity; it kills their desire to be womanly; and it certainly kills their capacity to be maternal . . . or to rejoice in others being maternal. The womb is not just the place where physical abortions occur. The womb itself can be spiritually aborted, and that is what is happening around us.

 

Woman is made in the image of God. She is created to be fruitful and created to nurture and nourish that fruit. When she willingly destroys the fruit, she is at war with her very nature and purpose. She is deforming and defacing the essence of her feminine gifts and calling, and this has a hardening and deadening effect on her person and soul. These consequences are as real as the baby is dead.

 

This collateral damage affects our culture at large. Massive, large-scale blood guilt is not inconsequential. It weighs on the individual women (not to mention the husbands, fathers, doctors, judges, and politicians who enable and support abortion). It changes the way women view themselves, their purpose, and their relationships. Everything is expendable. Throw it away. Even the most precious thing in this world is simply trash if we “choose” it to be.

 

Woman’s God-given feminine instinct to protect her young is at the heart of any healthy society. It restrains much lawlessness. Children, being utterly dependent, need safety and security and care. When mothers fiercely protect their own children, all of society learns to back off. But when this barrier of love is broken down, men are free to do awful things. Cruel things. Destructive things.

Abortion makes women hard and heartless. It leaves them estranged from their very nature and estranged from other women who embrace their feminine calling. Society urges them to ignore this and invent themselves all over again, which explains the constant striving and chasing the wind, looking for fulfillment and meaning in a meaningless world. But a creature cannot find meaning and purpose while simultaneously denying the Creator.

 

Finally, we have not been left without an answer. Our Maker has provided a way of forgiveness and restoration. He makes all things new, no matter how defiled they may have become. The Gospel is the Good News. Jesus Christ died for sinners. And it turns out, we are, all of us, a race of sinners. That makes for a perfect fit.

Charity

Some seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge:
That is curiosity;
Others seek knowledge so that they themselves may be known:
That is vanity;
But there are still others who seek knowledge in order to serve and edify others;
And that is charity.
               -- St. Bernard of Clairveaux

Piper: On the Language of the Sense

      "The mighty world of the eye and ear" is always there for us. It is very sad when anyone passes through life oblivious to the joys this world can quicken—like that joyful motion in your chest when from atop Mount Wilson you can see the sun boil its way into the Pacific; or like the quiet gladness of rising before the sun and smog to join the happy birds in welcoming the day.

     There is an intimate relationship, however, between our power to enjoy a sensuous experience and our capacity to describe it with words. In "Lines Composed Above Tintern Abbey" Wordsworth is not taken up nearly so much with the joy of revisiting the banks of the Wye as he is with the pleasure this moment will bring him in the coming years "recollected in tranquility."

      To put it simply, without a full and rich language of the sense, we will lose the enduring quality of our sensuous joys, and, what's worse, with the atrophy of our descriptive capacities the power of all our enjoyment languishes. When you cease to use the word "tree" in your vocabulary, you have probably ceased to look at trees.