"Minute criticism is in its nature irksome, and as commonly practiced in books and conversation, is both irksome and injurious. Yet every mind must occasionally be exercised in this discipline, else it cannot learn the art of bringing words rigorously to the test of thoughts." ~ William Wordsworth [1]
Being irksome is one thing, and I can accept that I might err in that direction. But I pray that what you find here may never be deemed injurious. What matters most to me, though, is that over time, through close reading and sharing of perspectives on that reading, we might help one another to learn this art of bringing the words we choose to use in our storytelling rigorously to the test of thoughts.
And then there's the art of getting ready, in part the practice of being mindful of one's adult preoccupations and assumptions, and checking those at the door. If we can enter the room as an open and authentic presence ready to engage with children in wonder and deep play and mutual discovery, then maybe we have begun to get ready. To do our best to come close, as Jerome put it in Colorado Springs this past summer, "from the outside."[2]
But what about this problem of coming close to children, and the mystery of childhood, "from the inside?" Again, this summer, Jerome spoke of the difficulty of this mode of approach, and suggested that there might be for us moments of "significance"—memories that allow us to connect with, to come close to, our own inner child. As I had brought several poems with me that seemed to corroborate this insight, at least insofar as some poets were concerned, I began to feel more reassured that there might really be some value in bringing a closer look at the poets to our work as Godly Play learners and guides.
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky
So was it when I first began,
So is it now I am a man,
So be it when I shall grow old
Or let me die.
The child is father of the man,
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
~ William Wordsworth[3]
The short poem by Wordsworth above is one I have used off and on in plenaries on children's spirituality and the theology of childhood since I began training. Wordsworth and his siblings were orphaned early, and his poetry is filled with childhood remembrances. In fact, his magnum opus, published posthumously, "The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind," deals largely with the experiences in childhood that built his poetic sensibilities. What the short poem above does not do, is to give us any specific information about a particular experience. But it does point to another aspect of significance. I have begun to think about the way that certain experiences in childhood can build into continuities—moments of deep significance that link and strengthen into what can become a pathway for living an authentic life.
When my cousin Tom was a boy of 5 or 6, he fell in love with trains. A trip west on the Trans-Canada railroad through the tunnels and passes of the Rockies to visit me in British Columbia probably cemented the deal. It didn't hurt that our mutual grandfather was a surveyor and engineer who had worked on those tunnels. Back home in Connecticut, his mother would walk with him every day to the nearest railroad crossing to watch the local "bud car," a short commuter train, pass through town. Tom and my Aunt Isabel waved, and over time the engineer began to wave back. A relationship formed, evolving to include the toot of a horn, and this routine went on for months and months. Then, on a Christmas Eve day, as the faithful pair waited by the barrier, the train slowed unexpectedly and came to a full stop. The engineer stepped down, holding a box wrapped in paper and tied up with a ribbon, and handed it to Tom. "Merry Christmas!" he said, and returned to the train. The next morning, the opened package revealed an engineer's cap, which, from that moment on, Tom wore religiously on his appointed daily round. From train-watching he moved to model train building and collecting, to train magazine subscribing, to train photography, to train magazine editing, to working for a freight railroad, to locomotive purchasing and leasing, to executive director of a tourist railroad and museum in his home state.
I tell Tom's story because he is one of those lucky few, the people I know and admire and, to be honest, envy, who discover a passion early in childhood and somehow against all odds manage to build it into a life work. My brother David has had a similar continuity of significances shape and influence him: from the morning in his crib in Guyana when my mother overheard him saying "Shut up, birdies!" to the flocks of parakeets flying overhead, he has been a bird person. He has parlayed his lifelong love of birds into becoming a nature journalist in Paris, an ornithological field researcher in Venezuela and Peru for Cornell University, a resident bird expert for France's premier television nature show, Ushuaiya, and a totally annoying passenger in the car when you're trying to keep your eyes on the road. I have no doubt that one of the reasons I was so drawn to my painting teacher, Frank Mason, was that he had a similar biography—drawing and painting from childhood, and unlike so many of us, never stopping.
It seems to me that this part of the work of getting ready is much more than borrowing a poet's memory or my cousin's experience to get into a child-friendly state of mind. It involves, with the help of the Holy Spirit, a deep search for the significances and the continuities that have shaped my path and have led me across the threshold and into my circle of children. The poets can be good and true guides, but something utterly personal and specific must be at the heart of why I am there, and why I keep coming back. I am not entirely sure of myself in this, but I trust that the process is right. To be ready, I need to find my own way in, or down. I need to behold my own rainbow. The poets do not give us their significances; they remind us that the search for our own is not fruitless. And we do it in the company of children or of each other not just to grab our own blessing and be gone. Being open to the possibility that our deep self might show up helps us to be attentive to the children's search for authenticity: to notice, to get out of the way, and when the time is right, to encourage, to affirm.
I am revived by the simplicity of Wordsworth's lines, and the suddenness and physicality of the leaping, the movement of that sensation from the absolute certainty of the child, nested within the renewed vow of the adult, to the prophetic promise of the elder to choose life: the poem acts on me like an electric charge to the heart. It is an act of will, this claiming of significance, this practice of continuity. As Jesus says to Nicodemus, Do not marvel that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The second naïveté, unlike other reflexive and regressive adult immaturities, is something we must choose. In this, the certainty and the willing surrender to joy of our inner child fathers us.
And so, the binding of our days each to each by our own natural piety, our own assent to the Holy where we find it, is another aspect of this art of getting ready. Mary Oliver, in her poem "The Ponds," puts it this way:
Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled --
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking
into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing --
that the light is everything -- that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.[4]
There is a lot in Wordsworth, I believe, that can serve us in what we do, and I would like to revisit him, perhaps setting his work side-by-side with some more recent poets. One of the things I wonder about most in regard to him is his early orphaning and its effect on his imagination and his sensibilities, as an adolescent, and an adult. Does the untimely death of a parent predispose one to working with childhood memories more deeply, and continuing to mine them for significance and meaning well into maturity? The work of some other poets suggests as much. (I am thinking primarily here of Theodore Roethke.) I am in this wondering quite strongly this week as I have gathered with my mother and two brothers to witness my father's dying and to wade together through a rising tide of memories. I am today more clearly an adult in my own mind, as if Dad's absence were a further prod towards growth, and yet his passing has turned me back to sift the significances again in search of the continuities that make up my authentic, my deep self. When I find them, this poem will help me to claim them, as choosing life.
Maria Montessori was interested in Wordsworth's work and cites him in her writing. I'll close this post with a quote from her that incorporates what is perhaps the most memorable line in Wordsworth's short poem. This quote is also a reminder of what or rather who we are getting ready to meet in the circle. And what we need to be ready to say in our training.
"I beseech you, do not go around speaking of an educational method that has convinced you, nor of having studied the way to make culture for children easy, universal, and attractive. Therefore speak to everyone of the child and of his secret; unveil the truth; Proclaim him for what he is; the father of man, the builder of humanity, reveal the powers of this 'spiritual embryo' of the human soul; the creative and transforming energy which can act on the hearts of men and can offer new elements for the solution of social problems."
~ Maria Montessori[5]
[1] from Wordsworth's Literary Criticism, N.C. Smith, ed., Bristol Classical Press, 1980. p.120.
[2] Here, and in what follows, I take no credit for the actual ideas contained in my memory of Jerome's remarks, but all the credit for any misremembering or misconstrual of what he actually said.
[3] Cited here: http://www.journeywithjesus.net/PoemsAndPrayers/William_Wordsworth_My_Heart_Leaps_Up.shtml
This is from a new site to me, and I do not know much about it, save for the fact that it has a great poetry section, which I am still discovering.
[5] I am hunting the source of this down still, and will report it when I find it.
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