On beauty, truth, and sharing "hard" books with children

Pieta, by William Adolphe Bouguereau

One of the blessings/curses of being a writer married to an artist--who happens to share my personality--is that we get into deep discussions of philosophical points pretty much all the time. It's kind of funny when I stop to think about it: one moment we'll be commenting on how hard it is to wash honey out of our toddler's hair, and the next we're in a deep discussion on what constitutes beauty and what our obligations are toward it. (Why a curse? Because we forget about the honey in the hair only to rediscover it, tangled beyond belief, two hours later.)

I won't get into the details, but one of these discussions led to hours of research as to the historical changes in how to define beauty... to deep delving into certain works of St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Plato, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI... and, because this is me we're talking about, to considering how this all relates to children's literature. 

Regardless of what the "great minds" of the 18th century may have had to say about it, I believe that beauty is objective. Beauty manifests goodness and it elucidates truth. But sometimes...the most beautiful things in life look really ugly.

Pope Benedict wrote of this when he described the paradox of Christ's passion. On one hand, the Gospels describe Christ as "the fairest of the children of men." And yet in His passion, "He had neither beauty, nor majesty, nothing to attract our eyes, no grace to make us delight in Him." Why then, do Christians and non-Christians alike hold up the sacrifice of Christ as a beautiful thing? Christians have the resurrection and redemption to look forward to through faith, but even non-Christians can recognize a beautiful sacrifice when they see it--and this is why so many great works of literature and film and visual art use the Passion as inspiration for the bold and beautiful sacrifices in their created worlds.

Benedict writes that in its very ugliness, the Passion of Christ is able to point to a beauty far greater than mere physical beauty, and he maintains that this spiritual beauty has the capacity to pierce our hearts, to wound us (to borrow from Augustine and, before him, Plato) and shock us into looking beyond ourselves to a greater truth. In this case, the truth is Love. "God so loved the world," as John tells us, and "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." 

So... children's books. Some children's books have a lot of ugliness in them. I have sometimes been criticized (okay, it's more like non-subtle eyebrow raising, but I can read faces pretty well) for sharing these stories with my children. My response is a little complicated. I DO shield my children from plenty of ugliness. But when it comes to ugliness and difficulty that is pointing to a beautiful truth--that's exactly what I want my children to encounter and think about and discuss with me. After all, I also make them eat broccoli and brush their teeth and help out with family chores. A child (believe me) often sees these things as ugly and abhorrent, but I'm hoping to guide them to a view of the truth in which they can see past the annoyances to the good. 

And the best thing about the difficult, beautiful books we share is that they can fast-forward, if you will, to that moment of redemption and understanding. Children's books get to have a happy ending--or, at least, a hopeful one. Kate DiCamillo went so far as to say that she is honor-bound as an author for children to end with hope.

Obviously you don't throw Anne Frank's diary at a two-year-old. You start with what they can handle--and every parent will know best what his or her child can handle. I read Where the Wild Things Are to my three-year-old now so that at six she'll be able to face Roald Dahl's vermicious knids and at eight she'll be ready to match wits with Smaug the Dragon. None of these are just randomly throwing scariness at children--they're confirming children's instincts that evil exists and must be overcome. And they fill children with hope that it can and will be overcome.

Of course fantasy is one thing and realistic fiction another. Pam Muñoz Ryan's Echo is a harder book than The Hobbit, because while we can readily accept that dragons are scary, it's harder to see evil rear its ugly face in the person of our own fellow men. It's hard to accept that outside appearances can be normal and beautiful and hide behind them ugly, sinister hearts. It's hard to learn that "beauty" can lie. But when you've already built up a habit of looking for true beauty, for the good in bad situations, it becomes easier to find it. 

Echo, as an excellent example, deftly shows the power of music (beauty!), family, and friendship in overcoming even the vilest of human oppression. It's one of my daughters' favorite books (we're talking the 8-year-old and 10-year-old at the moment). Why? Because, as my oldest daughter put it, "It makes me feel brave about what I would do if things ever get bad like that." Interestingly enough, it's also a bridge between fantasy and realistic fiction--with the fairy tale beginning giving young readers just enough familiarity to have confidence that this fairy tale, like all the others they know, will have a happy ending.

And maybe that bridge will be what they need to soon face May B. or Number the Stars or Moon over Manifest or Out of the Dust. (Obviously this is no prescriptive order...) And soon after those, The Diary of Anne Frank. Not to mention their high school history books. Or the daily news.

Because do you know what really scares me? The thought that they'll open the New York Times someday without having read difficult books. That they'll encounter evil without the assurance that good and beauty and truth will always be more powerful. Or, worst of all, that they won't even recognize the evil when they see it.

So, thank you, authors who write books that are terrible and true. Thank you for making hope a reality in my children's lives and my own. Thank you for showing us beauty until it pierces our hearts and makes us look beyond our own understanding to something far greater.