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Recent Reading: The Magic City, by Edith Nesbit

I have yet to read anything by Edith Nesbit that I didn’t enjoy. Her children’s books tend to be a bit long and plodding at times for the modern reader suffering from distractions and attention deficits, but that is part of what makes them all the more worthwhile. They are entertaining, yet countercultural reading for the modern child. At times her writing smacks of well-to-do Victorian England. But hey, that’s the world in which she lived. Not everyone has ponies and large gardens, but that shouldn’t cause us to despise her stories.

Her dialogue is always a pleasure, and this book has a lot of it. Her moral vision is helpful, and this book has plenty of that as well. This is not a review, and I will not spoil anything; I will simply give my main takeaways from the story.

The Magic City is imaginatively enlivening. The main character, Philip, is an imaginative builder, as most children are. What child in the presence of sand would not build a sandcastle? The difference is that Philip’s toy building projects come to life. His play castles become real castles in an alternate world.

Philip is orphaned and lives with his older sister. The main story revolves around Philip’s struggles as his older sister gets married. He will no longer be the main focus of her life. This causes his struggles. His new stepsister, Lucy, comes into play and has a sanctifying influence on Philip – drawing his hatred at first, but ultimately winning his love and making him a better person through her own. Chivalry comes to life in a new context with these two brave children, as they seek, despite the friction of being new step-siblings, to deliver Philip’s magic city from the hands of a Destroyer.

The love and devotion of children, in the midst of heartbreak and confusion, is the great takeaway of the story. It provides an imaginative glimpse into how bravery, humility, sacrifice, and selfless love (witnessed and practiced) can change even, or especially, a child. In addition to that, the lively imaginative feel of the book is inspiring for those who aspire to greater creativity. I heartily recommend the book to families with young children. My eight-year-old daughter enjoyed it tremendously, and I did as well.

The book is available in print or FREE for Kindle HERE. You can read an overview HERE. You can read a wonderful introduction to her life and writing HERE.

20 Principles for Christian Parents (Richard Baxter)

Here I offer a condensed summary of Richard Baxter‘s The Duties of Parents for their Children:

1. Understand their need of a Savior and dedicate them to God’s covenant mercy

2. Teach them the principles of their relationship to the Covenant of Grace

3. Serve as an authority and do not let them be self-willed

4. Serve as a loving authority, both to be feared and befriended

5. Teach them to have reverence for the Scriptures and holy things

6. Always speak with reverence and seriousness about the things of God

7. Teach them by example to respect those who are worthy of respect and to loathe the life of sin and godlessness

8. Teach them and show them that the way of holiness is the way of happiness

9. Teach them of the dangers of sensuality and encourage them to care for their minds before their bodies

10. Teach them to care for their bodies and exercise physical self-control

11. Allow them to engage in sports and hobbies, but not to the point that those things become central priorities

12. Discourage pride and promote humility

13. Teach them of the dangers of materialism and seeking riches

14. Teach them to control their tongues from lying, crudeness, and taking the name of the Lord in vain

15. Guard them from company that will further corrupt them

16. Teach them to value time, improve time, and consider that their time is short

17. Use corrective discipline (a) not too often but not too little, b) according to the temperament and ability of the child, c) primarily for sins rather than pet-peeves, d) never when you are angry, e) with tenderness and love, f) with the aid of Scripture texts

18. Teach by example (not ‘do as I say; not as I do’); strive to be the person that you would desire them to emulate

19. Be proactive, not just a spectator, as they seek someone to marry

20. Especially for mothers: 1) Look for every opportunity to teach them throughout the day and 2) be especially concerned with teaching, and encouraging, them to read

A word for those who cannot have children:

But if God deny you children, and save you all this care and labour, repine not, but be thankful, believing it is best for you. Remember what a deal of duty, and pains, and heart’s grief he hath freed you from, and how few speed well, when parents have done their best: what a life of misery children must here pass through, and how sad the fear of their sin and damnation would have been to you.

Read the original work in its entirety HERE.

Side Effects: She Swallowed the Spider to Catch the Fly

This nursery rhyme, ‘There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly,’ was quoted in the PBS Frontline documentary entitled Medicating Kids. As someone who has children, is a student of psychology, and works in the pharmacy business, it resonated. Medication can do wonderful things, but it can also do harmful things; and those harmful things, which we call side effects, need to be treated with another medication, and another: swallowing the spider to catch the fly. I’d recommend the documentary for anyone interested in ADHD and other psychological disorders diagnosed in children. You can watch it for free HERE. Note that I am not making a personal statement here; I am only recommending the documentary, which is quite intriguing.

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.
I dunno why she swallowed that fly,
Perhaps she’ll die.

There was an old lady who swallowed a spider,
That wiggled and wiggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
But I dunno why she swallowed that fly –
Perhaps she’ll die.

There was an old lady who swallowed a bird;
How absurd, to swallow a bird!
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider
That wiggled and wiggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
But I dunno why she swallowed that fly –
Perhaps she’ll die

There was an old lady who swallowed a cat.
Imagine that, she swallowed a cat.
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird …
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider
That wiggled and wiggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
But I dunno why she swallowed that fly
Perhaps she’ll die

There was an old lady who swallowed a dog.
What a hog! To swallow a dog!
She swallowed the dog to catch the cat…
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird …
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider
That wiggled and wiggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
But I dunno why she swallowed that fly
Perhaps she’ll die.

There was an old lady who swallowed a goat.
Just opened her throat and swallowed a goat!
She swallowed the goat to catch the dog …
She swallowed the dog to catch the cat.
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird …
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider
That wiggled and wiggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
But I dunno why she swallowed that fly
Perhaps she’ll die.

There was an old lady who swallowed a cow.
I don’t know how she swallowed a cow!
She swallowed the cow to catch the goat…
She swallowed the goat to catch the dog…
She swallowed the dog to catch the cat…
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird …
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider
That wiggled and wiggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
But I dunno why she swallowed that fly
Perhaps she’ll die.

There was an old lady who swallowed a horse –
She’s dead, of course.

The Pleasure of Self-Limitation

It is plain on the face of the facts that the child is positively in love with limits. He uses his imagination to invent imaginary limits. The nurse and the governess have never told him that it is his moral duty to step on alternate paving-stones. He deliberately deprives this world of half its paving-stones, in order to exult in a challenge that he has offered to himself…

I have [played] myself, by piling all the things I wanted on a sofa, and imagining that the carpet around me was the surrounding sea.

This game of self-limitation is one of the secret pleasures of life.

– G.K. Chesterton, The Romance of Childhood, from In Defense of Sanity, pp. 251-252

I thought of this quote yesterday and had to go back and look it up. My wife and I were walking with our children in a large outdoor shopping center. Throughout the plaza are large, elevated patches of garden holding various plants. As is always the case when we visit there, my daughters climbed up the planter walls and started using them as balance beams. We were surrounded by space: sidewalks, roads, stores. And they limited themselves to the smallest space available. So, I said to my wife, Chesterton is right. She had no idea what I was talking about (but that’s beside the point).

Every time we walk through Kroger, with its black and white tiled floors, the choosing of a particular color to step on ensues; every time they wander off into the neighborhood, we always find them coming home – to a small house in a big world.

Last year I listened to an interview of a wide receiver in the NFL. He talked about learning to run routes. In college he usually ran straight down the field or wandered around through zone coverages until he found an opening. Now, in the NFL, he had learned the discipline of proper route-running. He found, he said, that limiting yourself to one route and one sure destination freed him up to play at his fastest (which is 4.3/40 fast). If you know where you are going, you can run hard to get there. If the route is sure, you can knock obstacles out of the way to get to that spot. It limits you, but it makes you faster.

There is a romance and liberty in limitation if we have eyes to see. If all were right, a man who limits himself to one wife would find romance and liberty. If all were right, a man who limits himself to one God would find romance and liberty. For romance and liberty do not demand wide open spaces; they only demand a willingness to see the beauty of the limitation itself. Can your children see this better than you?

On Reading Tragedies with Children

I just finished reading a book with my young daughter. I will refrain from sharing the title of the book at the moment because the author is still alive. I have learned from experience that when you reference a living author your post might end up on that person’s Twitter. Believe it or not I don’t really want that type of publicity! And also, for full disclosure, I am in a somber mood at the moment. That will likely come across in the post.

Anyway, the book turned out to be a bit of a Tragedy, ending in somber despair. I am not big on Tragedies, at least deep, dark Tragedies – Tragedies that are tragic all the way up and all the way down with no hope in sight. Those types of tragedies quite frankly aren’t true to reality…or are they? That’s the big question.

Nihilism is Tragedy (with a capital T). All is meaningless. Life sucks and then you die. And while, for some, life may appear meaningless, and while life may suck, and while they, and I, will surely die, the vast majority of humanity, not just Christians, have always realized that the premise simply isn’t true. We demand hope.

The question, then, becomes, Do we demand hope and therefore invent forms of hope to satisfy us, or Is this something engrained into us from the outside in? Is this an inside out thing – we feel the need for it, and so we invent mechanisms to provide what we need (hope in this case)? Or is the sense that tragedy is meant to be overruled and overturned engrained into us because of the Truth of reality? Are Freud and Nietzche right or are Tolkien and Lewis right? Freud says we invent big daddy in the sky in order to make up for the failures of little daddy down below. Nietzche says we need Supermen who, in the end, can’t save us anyway. Tolkien and Lewis say that tragedy and disaster are little stabbings of pain, shared by all of humanity, that never end a story ultimately. They never end the story because God himself took on flesh, in the person of Jesus Christ, to share in our suffering, that when we suffer we might be sharing in his – and that his resurrection might become ours.

So I do not believe that a good story ever ends without hope. It may not end the way we want it to. But the question is, Does the story leave you despairing, or does it leave you longing? Even if you are not rejoicing, are you at least crying out for the happy ending? Is there enough there to whet your appetite, as you close the book, for the possibility that something good good happen on the next page, if there were another page? That’s the tell-tale difference. And it makes all the difference in the world, and in your soul. If it doesn’t do that, then chuck it right across the room. I’ve done it before, you should try it. It’s no tragedy to quit a bad book.

The title of this post mentions children, and here is where they come in. Children should not be sheltered from sad books. I do not mean that children should be forced to read sad books. But when you read with your children, or when they share what they are reading with you, and they don’t want to read what comes next (this is what happened to us tonight), I do not think you should encourage them to stop. They need to see that not all stories, in the here and now, end happily. They need to see the main characters suffer, and even die. It is better for them to experience it there before they have to deal with it in their own literal experience. Having read of such givens them imaginative furniture to may lead to greater poise when real tragedy strikes.

There goes that word again – tragedy. I am not a fan of the word in general, because most things that we call tragedies are not truly tragic. And most books aren’t either. We have made cliches out of clouds and silver linings and songs about rainbows for a reason. So let the sadness of the book waft over the imagination of your children. But remember that your job is to teach them that Nihilism is a farce. Jesus Christ says that he is making all things new. If he rose from the dead, then indeed it is true. There is hope, no matter how bleak the present, or the present story, is. He calls light out of darkness. He really does. That is why Tolkien could never have truly finished The Lord of the Rings, or at least it could never have been the masterpiece that it is, if Sam Gangee had never said, ‘Is everything sad going to come untrue?’ Catastrophe is meant to lead to eucatastrophe, death to resurrection. That’s Reality, with a capital R.

So read on. Be sad. Cry if you need to. And then teach your children that we do not grieve as those in the world because our hope is sure. And if you’re in the Nihilist camp, then why do you care anyway? Just move on. This post doesn’t really mean anything anyway. And neither does the book you read. It’s all dust in the wind.

A Small Home is a Big Place

In his essay, Turning Inside Out, G.K. Chesterton makes a case for the central importance of education in the home, especially by mothers. The essay is quite timely. He sees a world in which education is seen as a grand task – so grand that it takes great experts and specialists to accomplish it. But he doesn’t think this is the way the world actually is:

Private education [i.e. education in the home] really is universal. Public education can be comparatively narrow. It would really be an exaggeration to say that the schoolmaster who takes his pupils in freehand drawing is training them in all the uses of freedom. It really would be fantastic to say that the harmless foreigner who instructs a class in French or German is talking with all the tongues of men and angels. But the mother dealing with her own daughters in her own home does literally have to deal with all forms of freedom, because she has to deal with all sides of a single human soul. She is obliged, if not to talk with the tongues of men and angels, at least to decide how much she shall talk about angels and how much about men.

In short, if education is really the larger matter, then certainly domestic life is the larger matter; and official or commercial life the lesser matter. It is a mere matter of arithmetic that anything taken from the larger matter will leave it less.

Hence his case for the massive, and massively important, role of mothers in the education of their children.

Modern Western societies would argue that in going out into the world, mothers are leaving the cramped, claustrophobic confines of a small house for the big wide world of freedom and advancement; or the small, tedious interaction with a child or two or three for ‘life out there’ to seek their fortunes on the market and with the masses. Chesterton says this line of thinking is wrong:

Every word that is said about the tremendous importance of trivial nursery habits goes to prove that being a nurse is not trivial. All tends to return of the simple truth that private work is the great one and the public work the small. The human house is a paradox, for it is larger inside than out.

His argument goes like this: society says that the State should be highly, maybe most highly, concerned with education. Mothers have the greatest opportunity to educate their children. And if these premises are true, then why on earth would the state want them separated from their children? That’s the argument (look up the essay to see it fleshed out), but that last quote is the takeaway for me.

When your children are at home, do not let them get the notion, and don’t get the notion yourself, that they are trapped in a small world. The home is, or at least should be, a place filled with God, the heavens, the stars and planets, human history, art, poetry, drama, story, love, joy, and much more. A small home should be a big place. And it ought to produce big people – who will, in turn, create their own small-big homes.

Quotes from the essay Turning Inside Out by G.K. Chesterton, from In Defense of Sanity.