http://www.tehachapinews.com/home/Blog/samheath/10906 There is a needed dimension of magic in order for children to exercise a healthy imagination, and few things inspire such imagination as fairy tales. Fortunate is the child raised in an environment of books and reading. How well I recall those earliest stories of Mother Goose, Hans Brinker, Black Beauty, Snow White and so many more. Even Henry Thoreau mentions Cinderella. A couple of years ago a headline read, “The age of Potter VI officially dawned today as millions of fans from sweaty New York to chilly Australia got their hands on ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’ and began the darkest of J.K. Rowling’s fantasy novels.” I believe J.K. Rowling is to be greatly commended for bringing a world of imagination and fantasy to children, for the great encouragement she is giving to children causing them to want to read, and while I have not heard I would not be surprised to learn she owes a debt to the Bible and early Sunday School lessons for Harry Potter. Apart from the history and lessons clearly intended for adult readers, the Bible is replete with the stories of demons and witches, conjurors and sorcerers, of enough magic and fantasy to fire and encourage any child’s imagination. Having been born into the age of radio long before TV in homes, children of my era had the benefit of all those great radio shows that required and inspired imagination. Reading and radio— a magical combination that gave free rein to our imagination. To read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn is to involve yourself in the world of imagination the peculiar domain of children Sam Clemens so well understood, and had the rare genius to communicate. Harper Lee certainly understood the importance of books, and emphasized this in To Kill A Mockingbird. The old radio programs like Let’s Pretend along with Terry and the Pirates and a host of others had most of us children tuned in. But there were also programs like I Love a Mystery, Inner Sanctum, and The Whistler that drew children into a darker world of imagination. Admittedly, many fairy tales, radio programs, and children’s books of my time included a large degree of violence, of murder and mayhem. But the visual element made so graphic in films and TV were, apart from some illustrations, lacking, which left us largely to our imagination, and it was the stimulation of imagination required that among other things made my generation the last of the real readers and writers in America, primarily because TV being a passive medium simply cannot compete with books and those old radio programs when it comes to stirring the imagination. But when it comes to the power of graphics, however, this is a double edged sword. Charles Lamb in his essay Witches, And Other Night-Fears writes of a book in his father’s library History of the Bible in which there were several woodcuts. One of these depicted the conjuring forth of the last judge of Israel, the prophet Samuel, by the Witch of Endor. Of this picture Lamb writes, “I wish that I had never seen.” With the keen perception peculiar to his genius Lamb concludes, “Credulity is the man’s weakness, but the child’s strength.” However, as Lamb continues to point out in his essay that woodcut haunted him all his life due to the strength of his “child’s credulity,” requiring his need of a night light from childhood on, of his words of admonition to parents not to leave their children alone in the dark “where there be monsters.” The child’s strength of credulity lends itself, as Lamb recognized, to both beauty and monsters. The harm of it in adulthood is to subscribe to harmful fantasies, to be gullible and easily taken in by the “fairy tales” of charlatans and scoundrels, and one can only wonder what Lamb would have to say of the monsters children face today, the graphic and all pervasive violence and perversion children are being made to endure today. In a world seeming gone mad and intent on nuclear annihilation unless sanity is restored, there is a lot of comfort to be found in the old hymn that goes “Farther along we’ll know all about it, farther along we’ll understand why; cheer up my brother, walk in the sunshine, we’ll understand it, all by and by.” As a child, singing that hymn in my grandparent’s small church in Little Oklahoma brought me a lot of comfort in the very uncertain and dangerous world of WWII, one in which children needed all the help and encouragement, all the comfort and escape from reality they could find. I believe J.K. Rowling is offering children something that is not only stirring their imagination and encouraging them to read, but offering a source of escape and comfort to children in a world adults seem intent on making increasingly unfriendly and dangerous to them. But when people ask what’s wrong with kids today, the immediate answer that comes to my mind is most don’t have my maternal great-grandmother Mary Wright Hammond Smith. Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. Proverbs 22:6 If you were among the fortunate like me, you were raised in the instruction, “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” Ephesians 6:4 No, not admonition meant to frighten; but such that you feared doing wrong for all the right reasons, the kind of admonition that taught lying, cheating, stealing were wrong, the kind of fear of being disobedient and doing anything of which to be ashamed and hurting a parent or other loved ones because of their love and trust. Among my most precious of possessions is a New Testament with Psalms. Grandma paid a dollar for it from the Jewel Tea salesman that made regular stops in Little Oklahoma. But that dollar was real money in the 30s, when a penny had real value and a dollar in your pocket was real wealth. It is little short of miraculous that over these several decades of life and moving around the country as much as I have, through so much turmoil and upheaval in my life this New Testament is still in my possession while so many other things have disappeared in one manner or another. However, that I still have it is proof of its extraordinary value to me. What makes this New Testament so valuable to me, actually priceless beyond any amount of money is what my great-grandmother did with it. Quite elderly, the years weighing hard and heavily upon her and with failing eyes and hands painfully crippled by arthritis she laboriously went through the whole book from cover to cover marking specific passages that were meaningful to her, passages of Scripture she marked for my benefit, passages she hoped and prayed would be of benefit to me as I grew and began to read the Bible for myself. In the flyleaf of the book, my great-grandmother wrote: Darling, grandma has read and marked passages she loves to think you will read someday when she is gone. But dear, grandma will love you even if she is not here and will always know if you are a good boy and serve and love God and His son Jesus. God guide and keep you always honest and truthful. A world of love my precious boy. Grandma. I don’t believe any child so blessed with anyone like my great-grandmother in their life can possibly turn away from such love, can possibly do anything to betray the memory of such love. And here these many years later, as I hold and turn the pages of this precious book, made so by Grandma’s love still speaking to me through all the many passages she marked for me, I know how very blessed I am. There is a hymn Precious Memories, and grandma’s gift of love, its pages like me showing the passage of time, causes the hymn to come alive in my soul. While books about angels proliferate, I choose to think of grandma along with other loved ones now passed as angels, those who loved and sacrificed for me, who did their best to raise me properly “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord,” and made the Bible more than just a book to me by their lives. Among too many things lost to children today is the heritage passed on to me by my great-grandmother and grandparents, the heritage of America being founded on the precepts of the Bible. This was the early textbook of America, of the Founding Fathers, the families and children, the earliest universities and schools of America. It was to be expected a Bible would be found in the homes of even those in the most humble of circumstances throughout America in a bygone era. Yet it is correctly noted that none can consider themselves properly educated that do not have knowledge of the Bible, who have not read it in its entirety and know somewhat of its history and influence on the world, most especially its primary influence on the rise and progress of Western Civilization. And who can legitimately argue nations like America would have been better off with the Koran rather than the Bible as their basic textbook. The separation of Church and State were intended to serve a noble purpose, but casting away our religious heritage and the Bible cannot but do grave damage and invite grave harm to the most important things that made us the greatest and freest nation in history, something grandma clearly understood and hoped someday I would as well. While Jews are commonly known as People of the Book, Americans are no less but in fact even more People of the Book, even as grandma was. The ongoing attacks by those that would remove God and the Bible from all public institutions, most especially from our schools, do so in the face of the fact that America was founded a Christian nation on Christian principles, and much of the very language of our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution and Bill of Rights, the very writings of the Founding Fathers throughout is grounded in the Bible and Christian principles. Religious extremism, not God, was the thing the Founding Fathers attempted to avoid. As we view the situation today one might get the impression from some of the media and pundits there is fear of Christians getting the upper hand in politics. But as we hear “moderate” Muslims claiming the murderers among them are not the “true believers” while at the same time refusing to denounce the crimes against humanity committed by their fellow Muslims it is nothing less than intentional obfuscation of the facts for any to claim they have a like fear of Christians in America. Considering those like my great-grandmother, it is impossible for me to believe the claims of those like Bush that they are Christians. No doubt the president of Iran believes himself to be a good Muslim, but that makes him no less a tyrant. Whether Bible or Koran, it is the claims by fanatics that the words of men are the words of gods that makes for the organization of hatreds, but good people will not be persuaded their books or gods approve cruelty and murder in the name of some deity. It was the love my great-grandmother expressed by her note to me, the verses she lovingly and laboriously underlined in this precious New Testament, made precious by her own hand and love that told the story, not the book. It was not the Bible that made grandma the loving person she was, but those things she believed of importance in the Bible continue to be important to me as further evidence of her love and the way she lived her life as a Christian. There is a needed dimension of magic in order for children to exercise a healthy imagination, and few things inspire such imagination as fairy tales. Fortunate is the child raised in an environment of books and reading. How well I recall those earliest stories of Mother Goose, Hans Brinker, Black Beauty, Snow White and so many more. Even Henry Thoreau mentions Cinderella. A couple of years ago a headline read, “The age of Potter VI officially dawned today as millions of fans from sweaty New York to chilly Australia got their hands on ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’ and began the darkest of J.K. Rowling’s fantasy novels.” I believe J.K. Rowling is to be greatly commended for bringing a world of imagination and fantasy to children, for the great encouragement she is giving to children causing them to want to read, and while I have not heard I would not be surprised to learn she owes a debt to the Bible and early Sunday School lessons for Harry Potter. Apart from the history and lessons clearly intended for adult readers, the Bible is replete with the stories of demons and witches, conjurors and sorcerers, of enough magic and fantasy to fire and encourage any child’s imagination. Having been born into the age of radio long before TV in homes, children of my era had the benefit of all those great radio shows that required and inspired imagination. Reading and radio— a magical combination that gave free rein to our imagination. To read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn is to involve yourself in the world of imagination the peculiar domain of children Sam Clemens so well understood, and had the rare genius to communicate. Harper Lee certainly understood the importance of books, and emphasized this in To Kill A Mockingbird. The old radio programs like Let’s Pretend along with Terry and the Pirates and a host of others had most of us children tuned in. But there were also programs like I Love a Mystery, Inner Sanctum, and The Whistler that drew children into a darker world of imagination. Admittedly, many fairy tales, radio programs, and children’s books of my time included a large degree of violence, of murder and mayhem. But the visual element made so graphic in films and TV were, apart from some illustrations, lacking, which left us largely to our imagination, and it was the stimulation of imagination required that among other things made my generation the last of the real readers and writers in America, primarily because TV being a passive medium simply cannot compete with books and those old radio programs when it comes to stirring the imagination. But when it comes to the power of graphics, however, this is a double edged sword. Charles Lamb in his essay Witches, And Other Night-Fears writes of a book in his father’s library History of the Bible in which there were several woodcuts. One of these depicted the conjuring forth of the last judge of Israel, the prophet Samuel, by the Witch of Endor. Of this picture Lamb writes, “I wish that I had never seen.” With the keen perception peculiar to his genius Lamb concludes, “Credulity is the man’s weakness, but the child’s strength.” However, as Lamb continues to point out in his essay that woodcut haunted him all his life due to the strength of his “child’s credulity,” requiring his need of a night light from childhood on, of his words of admonition to parents not to leave their children alone in the dark “where there be monsters.” The child’s strength of credulity lends itself, as Lamb recognized, to both beauty and monsters. The harm of it in adulthood is to subscribe to harmful fantasies, to be gullible and easily taken in by the “fairy tales” of charlatans and scoundrels, and one can only wonder what Lamb would have to say of the monsters children face today, the graphic and all pervasive violence and perversion children are being made to endure today. In a world seeming gone mad and intent on nuclear annihilation unless sanity is restored, there is a lot of comfort to be found in the old hymn that goes “Farther along we’ll know all about it, farther along we’ll understand why; cheer up my brother, walk in the sunshine, we’ll understand it, all by and by.” As a child, singing that hymn in my grandparent’s small church in Little Oklahoma brought me a lot of comfort in the very uncertain and dangerous world of WWII, one in which children needed all the help and encouragement, all the comfort and escape from reality they could find. I believe J.K. Rowling is offering children something that is not only stirring their imagination and encouraging them to read, but offering a source of escape and comfort to children in a world adults seem intent on making increasingly unfriendly and dangerous to them. But when people ask what’s wrong with kids today, the immediate answer that comes to my mind is most don’t have my maternal great-grandmother Mary Wright Hammond Smith. Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. Proverbs 22:6 If you were among the fortunate like me, you were raised in the instruction, “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” Ephesians 6:4 No, not admonition meant to frighten; but such that you feared doing wrong for all the right reasons, the kind of admonition that taught lying, cheating, stealing were wrong, the kind of fear of being disobedient and doing anything of which to be ashamed and hurting a parent or other loved ones because of their love and trust. Among my most precious of possessions is a New Testament with Psalms. Grandma paid a dollar for it from the Jewel Tea salesman that made regular stops in Little Oklahoma. But that dollar was real money in the 30s, when a penny had real value and a dollar in your pocket was real wealth. It is little short of miraculous that over these several decades of life and moving around the country as much as I have, through so much turmoil and upheaval in my life this New Testament is still in my possession while so many other things have disappeared in one manner or another. However, that I still have it is proof of its extraordinary value to me. What makes this New Testament so valuable to me, actually priceless beyond any amount of money is what my great-grandmother did with it. Quite elderly, the years weighing hard and heavily upon her and with failing eyes and hands painfully crippled by arthritis she laboriously went through the whole book from cover to cover marking specific passages that were meaningful to her, passages of Scripture she marked for my benefit, passages she hoped and prayed would be of benefit to me as I grew and began to read the Bible for myself. In the flyleaf of the book, my great-grandmother wrote: Darling, grandma has read and marked passages she loves to think you will read someday when she is gone. But dear, grandma will love you even if she is not here and will always know if you are a good boy and serve and love God and His son Jesus. God guide and keep you always honest and truthful. A world of love my precious boy. Grandma. I don’t believe any child so blessed with anyone like my great-grandmother in their life can possibly turn away from such love, can possibly do anything to betray the memory of such love. And here these many years later, as I hold and turn the pages of this precious book, made so by Grandma’s love still speaking to me through all the many passages she marked for me, I know how very blessed I am. There is a hymn Precious Memories, and grandma’s gift of love, its pages like me showing the passage of time, causes the hymn to come alive in my soul. While books about angels proliferate, I choose to think of grandma along with other loved ones now passed as angels, those who loved and sacrificed for me, who did their best to raise me properly “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord,” and made the Bible more than just a book to me by their lives. Among too many things lost to children today is the heritage passed on to me by my great-grandmother and grandparents, the heritage of America being founded on the precepts of the Bible. This was the early textbook of America, of the Founding Fathers, the families and children, the earliest universities and schools of America. It was to be expected a Bible would be found in the homes of even those in the most humble of circumstances throughout America in a bygone era. Yet it is correctly noted that none can consider themselves properly educated that do not have knowledge of the Bible, who have not read it in its entirety and know somewhat of its history and influence on the world, most especially its primary influence on the rise and progress of Western Civilization. And who can legitimately argue nations like America would have been better off with the Koran rather than the Bible as their basic textbook. The separation of Church and State were intended to serve a noble purpose, but casting away our religious heritage and the Bible cannot but do grave damage and invite grave harm to the most important things that made us the greatest and freest nation in history, something grandma clearly understood and hoped someday I would as well. While Jews are commonly known as People of the Book, Americans are no less but in fact even more People of the Book, even as grandma was. The ongoing attacks by those that would remove God and the Bible from all public institutions, most especially from our schools, do so in the face of the fact that America was founded a Christian nation on Christian principles, and much of the very language of our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution and Bill of Rights, the very writings of the Founding Fathers throughout is grounded in the Bible and Christian principles. Religious extremism, not God, was the thing the Founding Fathers attempted to avoid. As we view the situation today one might get the impression from some of the media and pundits there is fear of Christians getting the upper hand in politics. But as we hear “moderate” Muslims claiming the murderers among them are not the “true believers” while at the same time refusing to denounce the crimes against humanity committed by their fellow Muslims it is nothing less than intentional obfuscation of the facts for any to claim they have a like fear of Christians in America. Considering those like my great-grandmother, it is impossible for me to believe the claims of those like Bush that they are Christians. No doubt the president of Iran believes himself to be a good Muslim, but that makes him no less a tyrant. Whether Bible or Koran, it is the claims by fanatics that the words of men are the words of gods that makes for the organization of hatreds, but good people will not be persuaded their books or gods approve cruelty and murder in the name of some deity. It was the love my great-grandmother expressed by her note to me, the verses she lovingly and laboriously underlined in this precious New Testament, made precious by her own hand and love that told the story, not the book. It was not the Bible that made grandma the loving person she was, but those things she believed of importance in the Bible continue to be important to me as further evidence of her love and the way she lived her life as a Christian. en-us