Back to School

As every parent knows, September and the start of the new academic year is a shock to the system, especially if both parents are teachers themselves. After several weeks of lying in of a morning, it’s back into the old routine; up with the lark to make sandwiches, get breakfast on the table and in our case chivvy the girls to do an hour of music practice before they leave for school. As I write this, I can hear Charlotte’s moody ‘Moonlight Sonata’ on the piano fighting Katy’s wailing violin from the adjoining room. Though they don’t always appreciate it, they’re fortunate to have a mother who can dart from one place to the other to keep them at it.

Like most Christian parents, Rachel and I have tried to encourage the girls to squeeze in a short time of prayer and reflection to the start of the day, but to be honest that has often been a struggle. One faithful God-parent has sent Bible notes from time to time, but Charlotte has rarely incorporated them into her daily life. We’ve also tried to persuade them to read good literature since they were old enough to do so for themselves, and we’ve certainly had more success over the years with this campaign. However, the telly and the computer are always a bigger draw after a long day at school for obvious reasons.

Nonetheless, in the last six months we have found a way of killing two birds with one stone! It began by reading a chapter or so of the Bible at the breakfast table. This was endured rather than enjoyed, to be honest, until I began reading them an excellent adaptation of Pilgrim’s Progress by children’s author Geraldine McCaughrean. It’s an excellently written and beautifully illustrated abridgement of Bunyan’s original novel about Christian’s quest for the Celestial City and it has helped us to establish breakfast reflections as a permanent feature through reading a short passage from a novel each day.

Since then we have read ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Animal Farm,’ but the most popular by far has been ‘To Kill a Mocking Bird’ by Harper Lee. Was there ever a better book to impart the essence of Christian values to children, or maybe even more so to adults? Indeed, in the novel we see very clearly the tragic ignorance of the adult community through the eyes of eight year old Scout as she learns the facts of life from her wise and humane father, Atticus. This quietly heroic lawyer stands against the prejudice of a whole town to defend the Negro, Tom Robinson against charges of rape, but beyond that he gently but firmly combats his children’s innate impulse to dismiss others they have as yet barely understood. Toward the end of the story Scout, the narrator, sums up her father’s philosophy: “Atticus was right. One time he said you never really knew a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.” However, good novels like all the best art don’t impart values by preaching, but by enabling just what Atticus exhorts his children to do; they get us to see a vivid picture of the world through the multiple perspectives of their cast of characters and thus to recognize how complex morality can be. Through identifying and empathizing with a range of characters, we perhaps become more forgiving of ourselves and others. Above all good novels are able to transform us through stimulating our imagination as we construct the writer’s world through the building blocks of their language.

So for now the Bible has been left on the shelf at breakfast time, as we work through some modern classics. Yet, in truth, this sacred book is really a whole library of novels in itself, interspersed with much poetry (liturgical and prophetic), proverbial wisdom, a sequence of letters, and that strange apocalyptic work which rounds off the entire body of literature in the cannon. In my own times of reflection, I have begun to read ‘The David Story,’ Robert Alter’s acclaimed translation of the two books of Samuel in the Old Testament which tell the epic story of King David’s rise to power in Israel around 1,000 BC. In his introduction Alter encourages the reader to regard the telling of the story in much the same way as one would approach one of Shakespeare’s great history plays. In other words we should avoid the mistake of seeing them just as a chronicling of events from the life of King David in order to preserve a meticulous record of Israel’s history, but rather recognize the great literary technique employed to draw the reader into the intriguing world of court life in Israel at the time, and above all the inner lives of the protagonists. This craft of story-telling he argues enables us to explore the profound political and spiritual themes which interested the writer and to place ourselves in the shoes of the key players like Saul, Samuel, David and so forth. Moreover, some of the episodes like the slaying of Goliath, for example, clearly draw on universal narrative features such as the idea of an unknown warrior stepping up to deliver a King and his subjects from a monster in response to the reward of a princess. This literary model was later used in many of the folkloric tales of European literature. In literary terms the towering figure of Goliath takes on the symbolic significance of the gigantic obstacles we often face to put our faith in the living God. The figure of David who discards the borrowed armour from his King reminds us that “the Lord does not save by sword and spear,” but through our trust in his providence. In the same way Shakespeare’s dramatization of the battle of Agincourt may have taken some license with history, but through his characterization of ‘King Harry’ in the play, he reveals universal truths of the human condition which teach us much the same message as that of the Goliath narrative. Discussing the book of Samuel in his introduction, Alter states’ “the writer feels free to invent an inner language for the characters, to give their dialogues revelatory shape, to weave together episodes and characters with a fine mesh of recurrent motifs and phrases and analogies of incident, and to define the meaning of events through allusion, metaphor and symbol. The writer does all this not to fabricate history but in order to understand it.”

The vicar of my local church recently lamented the Biblical illiteracy of contemporary Western culture. I think this is partly because the Church has unwittingly turned one of the great literary masterpieces of all time into something it was never intended to be; a rather dry book of rules. Until we recover the magnificent literary dimensions of the Bible in the way Alter suggests my girls will perhaps opt to leave it on the shelf to gather dust. In the meantime we will shortly move onto another American classic, at breakfast: ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’