Faith Lessons from Children's Stories

I’ve been obsessed with reading for as long as I can remember. While other two-year-olds were reading “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” with their parents, my mom decided to read me “Little House on the Prairie”. When I was three, I was reading on my own. In Kindergarten, my favorite game was “book shop” where I’d make my own books and then sell them to family. From then on, reading became my secret sanctuary, my perfect escape, my favorite hobby, my constant friend.

Somewhere in between devouring book after book and realizing how much fun it is to write my own, I discovered that I might have a thing for English. So, it isn’t a surprise that I decided to pick English as my major. Hopefully, within the next year or so, I’ll be standing in front a classroom of my own, helping my students fall in love with reading the way I had, and creating a new generation of life-long readers.

In thinking back on some of my favorite pieces of children’s literature, many of which I might even be teaching next year, I’ve realized that some of the most beautiful and true lessons of faith and love come from books that we read years ago. Here are a few of my favorites.

Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne

I’ve loved Pooh stories for a long time. I loved them as a tiny child, but then fell in love with them all over again when I was seven and my sister was old enough to listen. There are countless Pooh stories and somehow more are being written and retold. In the end, Pooh represents the simple, genuine, and pure love of friendship. There are so many delightful quotes that come from Pooh such as, ”If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you,” “Love is taking a few steps backward maybe even more…to give way to the happiness of the person you love,” and “A day without a friend is like a pot without a single drop of honey left inside.“ I think we should aspire to love like Pooh, to forget the complexities of our relationships, and just love simply.

Charlotte’s Web by EB White

During my mom’s “read-my-two-year-novels” stage, this was one of the first ones we read together. I’ve reread it since and it’s a story that sticks with you your whole life. Wilber the pig is sentenced to be slaughtered, but he makes friends with the resourceful and brilliant Charlotte, a barn spider determined to save him. She does so in the most ingenious way, by writing words in her web that describe Wilber. It’s a really endearing story of friendship and love, and if you’ve made it to college without reading it, you need to pick it up during Fall Break. There are many lessons to be learned in this book, but I think my favorite might be in the words she chooses to describe Wilber. She calls him “terrific,” “radiant,” and “some pig,” but she also calls him “humble.” I think we should all strive to live lives that are terrific and radiant, but also humble.

Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo

This book was definitely the coolest book to read in fourth grade and has given me weird excitement about seeing Winn-Dixie Supermarkets ever since. It’s about a girl named Opal who discovers a dog in the grocery store, which she then adopts and names after said grocery store. While Opal is living a very difficult life, she finds hope in Winn-Dixie and through Winn-Dixie is able to find hope in the places and the people around her. In the same way God is always placing signs of hope in our lives. Just as Opal finds hope in her dog, we can find hope in a beautiful sunset, a warm cup of coffee, or a rich conversation with a favorite friend. These signs of grace give hope and peace even in moments of sadness.

Harry Potter by JK Rowling

Of the things that bothered 13-year-old me, the fact that the church disapproved of Harry Potter was probably one of my biggest frustrations. I had been obsessed with good old HP since I went to a cousin’s Harry Potter themed birthday party in 3^rd grade. I had raced through the books, awaiting each new one’s arrival at midnight. I had the robes and wands, and in elementary school my friends and I spent each recess pretending we were witches and wizards. So by the time I was 13 and the last book had been released, I had found a new grown up way to appreciate the HP series- by finding faith filled messages inside them.

I think this message of faith hits home the most in the last book, Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows. After a lifetime of battling Voldemort, Harry realizes that the only way to vanquish him and to save his friends, and really the whole wizarding world, was to die himself. It didn’t take college level theo classes for me to realize that there was something definitely something Christ-like about the way that Harry sacrificed himself for others. However, when I did get to Notre Dame, I went to a lecture by the Center for Ethics and Culture, where Professor…. To be looked up… discussed the way Harry’s sacrifice at the end of seventh book is the perfect example of living a Christian life. Harry is taking up his cross, just as Christ did. When I read Harry’s decision to die for the wizarding world, and the courage it took to walk to face it- it reminded me so much of the bravery that Christ must have needed to die on the cross. While we might not be called in our lives to die for others, we are called to make sacrifices for those in our lives. We are called, in big and small ways, to parcel out parts of our life to those who we love and those who we know God loves.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

When I read this book my senior year of high school, I thought it was immensely heartbreaking, but astoundingly beautiful. When I traveled abroad, I even made sure to visit spots from the book when I travelled to Amsterdam (link). It’s the story of a boy and a girl whose lives have both been touched by cancer and happen to fall in love. However, they both have very different outlooks about what it means to live a good life. Hazelwants to live her life causing the lease amount of pain to people as possible, even if that means protecting them from herself and the pain of her own inevitable end. Augustus wants to live a heroic life, dying for something that matters. As they both contemplate life and death together, they learn from each other, and find balance in between. Hazel learns that it’s okay to share her own presence and light with others. Augustus learns that there is beauty in living an ordinary life (something my friend Katie wrote about last week). In the end, we too are called to live in those two ways. We are called to let our own light shine, sharing our gifts and ourselves with others. But we are also called to be ordinary, knowing that there is elegance and purpose in each of our everyday lives.

There is something enduring about children’s and young adult literature. It’s the reason why I can look at all these stories and remember the comfort of snuggling in bed as a very small child listening to my mom read to me, or the wonderful excitement of getting a new Harry Potter book at midnight, or even the delight I feel at teaching these stories to students. The lessons in children’s books can be pure and simple, like Winnie the Pooh, but they can also be rich and complex, like in Harry Potter. Each lesson is so valuable. My challenge to you this week is to take five minutes to open up an old favorite book of yours and re-discover lessons in faith, love, and friendship.