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The Curious Effect of Exposing Children to Beauty
Anybody who goes through life with an open mind and heart will encounter moments that are saturated with meaning, but whose meaning cannot be put into words. These moments are precious to us. When they occur, it is as though, on the winding, ill-lit stairway of our life, we suddenly come across a window, through which we catch sight of another and brighter world – a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter. There are many who dismiss this world as an unscientific fiction. I am not alone in thinking it real and important. – Sir Roger Scruton
When C.S. Lewis was a little boy, his brother Warnie showed him a miniature garden he had constructed in a “biscuit tin”. Something about that miniature world grabbed Lewis’ imagination and created in him what he later called “joy”, though one gets the impression from Lewis’ elaboration on the idea of “joy” that in some sense he meant “longing”. As an adult convert to Christianity, Lewis harkened back to that miniature garden as something that over time became a kind of a lodestar for him, because the beauty it represented planted a seed that was eventually instrumental in undermining his determined atheism.
Lewis did not have a particularly happy childhood. His relationship with his father was fraught. He lost his mother at a young age, after which he spent time at a boarding school which was run by an abusive headmaster.
What I find fascinating is that this seed, planted during his childhood by his exposure to beauty, only ever germinated in his adulthood. His memory of childhood beauty was so impactful that he himself credited it as being a factor in his coming to faith.
J.R.R. Tolkien was another writer who recognized the importance of beauty and goodness as clues to the meaning of the universe. He also had a difficult childhood, during which he was orphaned. Nevertheless, as a child, he fell in love with the beauty of the natural world, and those childhood impressions of natural beauty informed both his faith and his writing in his adulthood. Notwithstanding the difficulties of his childhood, his exposure to beauty was formative, significantly affecting the trajectory of his life.
For both Tolkien and Lewis, their ability as children to recognize beauty ultimately altered the courses of their lives, even though it was only later that they understood the profound significance of that childhood experience.
Hopefully the reader is starting to detect a pattern. What prompted me to write these observations was something I stumbled across when I was looking for a quote by Whittaker Chambers. Chambers, though he is almost forgotten by contemporary media, was one of the most consequential men of the twentieth century. His memoir Witness is more than a memoir – it is a theological work of art.
Chambers, like Lewis and Tolkien, had a difficult childhood, not least as a result of his own parents’ determined atheism. Chambers grew up to be an atheist himself, a determined communist, and was actively engaged in espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. Eventually he broke with the communists and ultimately informed on his contacts in the U.S. State Department. He also came to a faith in Christ.
In his memoir, he describes two childhood experiences in which he was exposed to beauty and goodness. That exposure planted seeds which germinated in his adulthood and, like Lewis and Tolkien, nudged him toward faith.
The first experience Chambers writes about was a time when he wandered off and found himself in front of a high hedge that he could not see over. He wormed his way through the hedge and discovered, on the other side, an entire field full of purple thistles in full bloom.
“Clinging to the thistles, hovering over them, or twittering and dipping in flight, were dozens of goldfinches – little golden yellow birds with black, contrasting wings and caps.
This sight was so unexpected, the beauty was so absolute, that I thought I could not stand it and held to the hedge for support. Out loud, I said: ‘God.’ It was a simple statement, not an exclamation, of which I would then have been incapable. At that moment, which I remembered through all the years of my life as one of its highest moments, I was closer than I would be again for almost forty years to the intuition that alone could give meaning to my life – the intuition that God and beauty are one.”
Three giants of twentieth century literature. Three difficult childhoods. All having seeds planted in them, seemingly unexpected and unintentional, by their childhood exposure to beauty. All of these seeds germinating in their adulthood, finally emerging as faith, infusing each of their writing in profoundly impactful ways.
One almost gets the sense that childhood exposure to beauty can have an inoculating – even preservative – effect on a person’s spiritual life. Notwithstanding each of these authors’ difficult young lives, there is something about having been exposed to beauty as a child that they credit as decisive in their respective understandings of their faith.
Chambers recalls another impactful moment in which he witnessed the beauty of goodness. I can hardly read what follows without weeping. How can anyone not be moved who loves a child?
There was a big girl at school who seemed much older than I; she may have been fifteen or sixteen. Her family was extremely poor; I had heard that her father was a drunkard. I thought that she was dreadful to look at. Her head was rather large. Her face was red-skinned, bony and hard, and there was an expression on it that I did not understand, but which I now realize was hunted and knowing.
The other children call the unhappy girl “Stewguts”. As she walked home from school, they would form a pack around her, yelping “Stewguts! Stewguts!” until she went berserk. They were careful to keep out of her reach, for she was quick and strong. I never took part in these baitings. My mother warned me never to have anything to do with that girl, never to speak to her.
Stewguts had a younger sister in my class – a pasty-faced child who looked a little like a sheep. She always kept her eyes down, as if she were keeping a secret. She was also very stupid.
One day, during recess, I found myself alone in the classroom with this younger sister. Nobody else was in the room. The door to the cloakroom, which was beside the blackboard at the front of the classroom, opened cautiously. Stewguts peered in warily, and, seeing only the two of us, slipped in.
She had come for a purpose. To impress the meaning of words on us, the teacher used to draw a column of flowers on the board with colored chalk – a different color for each flower. Opposite each flower was a word. The teacher would point to the word. If you knew it, you were privileged to go to the blackboard and erase the word and the flower. This was called “picking flowers”.
Stewguts drew a column of colored daisies on the blackboard. Then she beckoned her sister to come up. Patiently, she went down the column of words, asking her sister each one. The younger girl got most of them wrong. Gently, they went over and over them again. Stewguts never showed any impatience. Sometimes, she let her sister “pick a flower”. I watched fascinated, listening to the girls’ voices, rising and falling, in question and answer, with the greatest softness, until, with Stewguts’ help, almost all of the flower had been “picked”.
Then there was a tramp of feet in the hall outside the room. Stewguts slapped down the pointer and hurriedly erased the last of the flowers. Suddenly she took her sister’s face in both of her hands and, bending, gently kissed the top of her head. As the hall door opened with a burst of voices, Stewguts silently closed the cloakroom door behind her and fled.
I knew that I had witnessed something wonderful and terrible, though I did not know what it was. I knew that it was a parable, though I did no know what parable meant, because I knew that in some simple way what I had seen summed up something very important, something more important than anything I had ever seen before. It is not strange that I should not have understood what I saw. What is strange, and humbling, is that I knew I had seen something I never could forget. What I had seen was the point at which from corruption issues incorruption.
I originally decided to write this post simply because I had been struck by the curious overlapping experience of these authors – Chambers, Lewis, and Tolkien. All with difficult childhoods. All exposed to beauty as children. All profoundly affected as adults by their memories of that exposure.
But maybe there’s also a call to action here. For anyone who has felt helpless to alter the difficult trajectory of a child’s life, it could be that by exposing that child to beauty, you are placing a marker that points him back to what is true. Maybe every time a child is exposed to beauty, some breadcrumbs are being scattered around his childlike mind and heart, a trail which he can someday follow to find his way to God. That’s how it seems to have worked for some of the most consequential writers of the 20th century. Maybe it’s worth at least giving it a try.
Published in General
Carolyn Casey, an astrologer and writer dealing with symbology, uses her ability to listen to people as a way to encourage those in prison to reach some kind of closure. (As well as to better her understanding of what makes people “go wrong.”)
On one occasion, she asked this prisoner just when and where it was that he thought he had gone wrong. This prisoner was doing hard time for various violent crimes including murder.
His story was the following: as a boy of eight or nine, and pressed by unrelenting abuse at home and in the community, he was idly walking across the school yard.
A single flower had broken through the concrete. He thought about its beauty. He wondered if he should respect that beauty or stomp the flower out of existence.
He chose to do the stomp.
The Stewgut’s parable was a tears on the keyboard moment. Thank you for this essay and for sharing that parable.
I have often wondered about the environment in which we live our daily lives. I am talking about the day to day, living, working, environment, not necessarily nature. The buildings we work and shop in, the schools designed with cement block walls, our homes. Look at older architecture, turn of the 20th century (late 1800’s and on) art deco, art nouveau, or even older if still allowed to stand. There is no comparison to today’s blandness.
The large stained glass windows of a church I would pass on my way to the YMCA when I was going for my swim lessons as a kid always drew my attention. The lobby of the Y looked like an old hotel lobby, with a wrought iron staircase, tile floor, and muted blue walls. There was even a tall potted palm tree. I loved walking in there. The rest of the building was utilitarian, but the lobby was special, to me as a kid at least. We are missing these special details that invite awe and wonder with our square, big box stores, minimalist architecture and interior design, and, especially, the horrible schools, where you cannot even open the windows to let in a fresh breeze. And don’t get me started on the church designs starting in the 1960’s. There is nothing to inspire belief in God from a blank brick wall and lack of imagery.
It would be a good thing for all of us to be daily exposed to beauty. Natural and man-made.
Amen to that!
Remember when Trump issued an order “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” with federal buildings more in classical architectural style instead of modern, brutalist garbage?
And the elites howled!
Typical responses:
Yeah, yeah . . . beauty is “white supremacy” I guess.
I really hate those people.
“Yet my break (from communism) began slowly before I heard those screams [of a soul in agony]. Perhaps it does for everyone. I do not know how far back it began. Avalanches gather force and crash, unheard, in men as in the mountain. But I date my break from a very casual happening. I was sitting in our apartment on St. Paul Street in Baltimore. . . . My daughter was in her high chair. I was watching her eat. She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life. I liked to watch her even when she smeared porridge on her face or dropped it meditatively on the floor. My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear – those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: ‘No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature. They could have been created only by immense design.’ The thought was involuntary and unwanted. I crowded it out of my mind. But I never wholly forgot it or the occasion. I had to crowd it out of my mind. If I had completed it, I should have had to say: Design presupposes God. I did not then know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.”
Whittaker Chambers
It has long been a belief of mine that beauty is a way to God, and that “art” that is ugly and without order, craftsmanship, or intelligibility is ultimately anti-God. It is not surprising, then, that the “art education” students receive in schools is designed to warp their innate sense of what is good and beautiful. Kids have to be taught to disbelieve their own eyes when being told that Picasso is an artist just as much as Michelangelo, and this celebration of ugly begins at an early age.
Thanks for this post, Keith.
Thank you!
Scruton, Lewis, Tolkien, Chambers. Beautiful!
Sir Roger Scruton: Defining Beauty In The Way He Lived His Life – Magnifissance