“There is not a crack in the ceiling that has a ‘habit of sometimes looking like a rabbit’.” My nine-year-old stared up from his hospital bed the morning after his emergency appendectomy. I groggily rose from the couch the nurse had made up for me and looked at the ceiling with him as other lines from the children’s picture book Madeline, written and illustrated by Ludwig Bemelmans, repeated in my head again and again. When Mark drove our son to the ER the day before with a fever and severe abdominal pain, he said to our son in the car, “DANton-ten-six—nurse, it’s an appendix!” When one of my daughters cried upon hearing about the diagnosis and the surgery, I thought to myself, Everybody had to cry—not a single eye was dry. And by the time I got to the hospital, my son had already been given a cool Lego set from the child-life specialist, which brought to his mind Madeline’s “dollhouse from papa.” And, of course, text messages from multiple people came in with references to the same story—we have yet to see if there will be a noticeable scar from the surgery that was conducted laparoscopically through his bellybutton.
Yet, a scenario like this, where a book assists a child through a life experience, and help others relate to that experiene with him, is one of the reasons why we have a carefully developed “family canon” of books that are part of our daily conversations and experience of the world. This “canon” or “family mythology” consists of those books and stories that are part of our shared experience and through which we encounter the world. We reference books we have read together all the time. For example, when we were picking strawberries a couple of weeks ago, I told my kids that we had to make sure we picked enough to have “food for the winter,” like the mom in Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey. When we got home, we ate strawberries to our hearts’ content, like the young Almanzo Wilder in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s novelization of his childhood, Farmer Boy. Because of Watership Down by Richard Adams, we call every rabbit we see “El-ahrairah.”
J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis both experienced their lives and faiths through their experience of myth. Tolkien held that the stories we read and know shape who we are and how we see the world—this is true of the myths of ancient cultures but it is also true of the stories of more recent “legend-makers,” as he described in his poem “Mythopoeia.” Our lives are all a part of a larger story, the story of Salvation History, and reading stories helps us make sense of who we are and of our place in the story. Our family canon has made it so that we go through our days “myth-woven,” as Tolkien puts it, seeing more to the world than what is there at face value. Through immersion in myths and stories we prepare our hearts to seek our Creator—to reach the stage of the spiritual life where we seek God as our beloved and go about creation “anxious to find traces of him everywhere,”as St. Edith Stein says in The Science of the Cross. When we are “myth-woven,” we see more than just a tree before us, but also the trace of the Creator in it.
So, my son referencing Madeline, even looking for that rabbit in the ceiling, shows his imagination and heart disposed to finding his Creator in his daily experience.
The development of our family canon includes more than just the stories we have read. It includes our experiences together, cute things the children said when they were little that have worked their way into the family dialect, and of course, lines from movies. I think most families have a canon unintentionally, but there is a virtue to developing a family canon intentionally. Because we live in a time when true culture has to be sought out and carefully experienced, we cannot rely on what has been passed down to us to be enough; we have to seek out the good, the true, and the beautiful. Thankfully, we are not alone in this search and have travelers along the way to assist us.
Part of the way we educate our children from a classical angle has been to immerse our children in the Western tradition. We have relied heavily on a list in an appendix (of a book, not the organ) of The Death of Christian Culture by John Senior, in which he names “The Thousand Good Books.” Senior asserts that every child should read the books he listed before reading the “Great Books.” Following his recommendations, we read countless nursery rhymes to our children when they were young, as well as the corpus of Beatrix Potter again and again. I went out of my way to find beautifully illustrated versions of fairy tales and we collected the “Coloured” Fairy Books, with fairy stories from around the world and from throughout history, compiled by Andrew Lang and his wife. We were intentional about reading Aesop’s Fables and D'Aulaires' books of Greek myths and Norse myths. Books for independent readers include those by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Heidi by Johanna Spyri, books by Frances Hodgeson Burnett, Louisa May Alcott, Howard Pyle, Rudyard Kipling, and Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper. In older grades they read classic adventure stories like Robinson Crusoe and Call of the Wild as well as children’s books by George MacDonald, Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Gene Stratton-Porter, G.A. Henty, and Robert Lewis Stevenson. And we have, of course, read the novels of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien to them more times than any other books. Our later middle school and high school reads include Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, James Fenimore Cooper, and Sir Walter Scott.
As we read these books, we become woven in myths and stories, and are steeped in ideas that are inherently good, beautiful, and true. This lays the foundation for our children to understand the concepts of philosophy and theology, while opening their hearts to the story of Salvation. Like Lewis, we can realize that the historical Christian story is the true myth—the one that really happened.