The Call of Great Literature

I saw Little Women at the Hale Center Theater this weekend. It was a wonderful musical production of one of my all-time favorite novels, and unbidden, it unlocked a wistful, aching weeping through much of the production. Somehow, immersing myself in the world of the March sisters transported me back to the autumn of 1995, to one of the most important private lessons of my life.

I was a mostly overwhelmed mother with a busy 5-yr-old boy and a differently busy 5th grade girl. My daughter was coming home from school nearly every day with a different book from the Goosebumps series - a series of “horror” novels for teens and pre-teens by R.L. Stine. Writing that in retrospect I can hear my brain saying, “Excuse me???” At the time, they seemed fairly harmless. Megan was borrowing a new novel from a classmate as quickly as she could read the last one.

This lasted for a couple of weeks and about a half-dozen novels, and the first inkling of real concern about this new reading penchant came as a quick, specific thought, clearly formed in my head, in this sentence: “If you don’t intervene, she will never love Jane Eyre.”

Specific much? And don’t you love that the Spirit chose maybe my favorite novel of all time to make the point?

I’ve learned to recognize the Source of specific thoughts like this; I knew it was a loving nudge from a loving Father in Heaven, and I spent a couple days pondering it. My daughter’s voracious reading habits mirrored mine as a child; she was in the 2nd grade when she would sheepishly admit she’d finished a book we’d started together on her own. I assumed she had outgrown being read to aloud, and continued to read aloud to her younger brother.

But then this strong impression - almost an assignment - to intervene - to make a renewed effort to influence and educate her tastes and desires. I recalled my 8th and 9th grade students fifteen years earlier, thrilled when we got enough work done for me to read a novel to them on Fridays. Perhaps you didn’t outgrow the love of being read aloud to - and Audible has certainly proved that to be true, eh?

After sitting with this prompting and praying about it for a few days, I randomly - or so I thought - chose Little Women as my intervention project. I simply announced to Megan that we were going to read this book together. It was long enough where her 10-yr-old reading abilities, advanced as they were, needed a docent into such a book. I knew Father wanted me to gently teach this important lesson to the daughter of my heart: “You’re higher than this.”

Then began one of the most sacred experiences I shared with her, as God revealed some of my biggest weaknesses to start to work on. We read about Jo - and the impetuous decisions she nearly instantly regretted, and I would find myself praying more intentionally about my own impetuous decisions, nearly instantly regretted.

We read about Marmee mastering a terrible temper - WHAT??? We were as surprised as Jo to learn this, and as filled with wonder as Jo to watch her mother after years of practice at it. I found myself praying more earnestly to master my own temper, and needing to practice the same thing over and over again.

Watching the March family with their struggles often mirrored our own, and in the arena of our struggling, often broken little covenant family, I was grateful for the call of my own to stretch past my weaknesses and practice mastering them: “You’re higher than this.”

Reading Little Women together was a seminal event in my children’s childhood. Megan and I went on to read Little Men, Treasure Island, and The Hobbit - eventually joined by Grant. Somewhere in either Narnia or Watership Down, Megan peeled off again. Having experienced an important course correction, she was a different reader as she forged on ahead without us, leaving Grant and me to forge the same kind of connection with reading higher books together.

Friday afternoon, the weeping started as I watched the story of a young girl, desperate to tell a story of her own, be gently prodded on in her own journey. While the play missed the finer point of the novel, my own experience with the novel rushed in to fill in the blank.

Jo’s character was forged and refined in large part by the good friend who would become her husband - who had the courage to be frank with her about her sensational, Goosebumps-of-the-day writing - telling her, “You’re higher than this.”

Reading to my children is one of my sweetest memories of their childhood. Thanks to a heavenly intervention of my own, I was able to intervene in forming the tastes of my children, and I’m equally convinced that doing so helped in forging their character as well.

All this flooded back to me Friday afternoon as I watched the story that was key to the process. It was a poignant reminder of how important it is to climb - out of bad habits as well as bad books.

Daunting as it often is, great literature beckons us on climbs worth taking, and develops more than our character; it develops climbing muscles for the next mountains. Great literature is always whispering to us: “You’re higher than this.”

“There’s something higher… than this.”