The below excerpt is from a a wonderful book called Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong by William Kilpatrick. In the chapter “Life is a story” Mr. Kilpatrick analyzes two famous psychiatrists–Bruno Bettelheim and Victor Frankl–and their belief in the vital importance of good literature in people’s lives.
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Our greatest need, says Frankl, is to find meaning in our lives; and the most effective therapy, he suggests, would help clients to see their lives as a meaningful story.
Bruno Bettelheim makes much the same point. His main task as a therapist of disturbed children was, he writes. “to restore meaning to their lives.” What is the most important source of meaning? After his relationship with his parents, it is literature that best conveys meaning to the child. What type of literature? Fairy tales and hero stories, replies Bettelheim. Why? Because they teach that “a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, is an intrinsic part of human existence–but that if one does nor shy away, but steadfastly meets unexpected and often unjust hardships, one masters all obstacles and at the end merges victorious.” And what is true for children is true for adults. “To find deeper meaning,” writes Bettelheim, “one must be able to transcend the narrow confines of self-centered existence and believe that one will make a significant contribution to life–if not right now, then at some future time.”
Nothing serves this purpose better that the ability to visualize life as a story. Chesterton wrote: “My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery….The things I believed most in then, the things I believe most in now, are the things called fairy tales.” This is all the more significant coming from Chesterton, who, among the English writers, is perhaps unmatched in his sheer enthusiasm for life. The perspective he maintained as an adult was the same as in childhood. In Orthodoxy, one of his best books, he confesses: “I had always felt life first as a story.”
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I heartily recommend William Kilpatrick’s great book, especially now, when the argument over the importance or unimportance of fiction is raging on in our over-centralized realm of education.
Life is a story, and when we stop reading those great stories that form our moral imaginations, we begin to not only lose a sense of right and wrong, but what life is all about. We become disoriented. We begin to forget where we come from, where we are going, and why we are alive. One senses this particularly during old feast days whose meaning has been stripped away. For instance, today is the festival of St. Patrick, a great man, whose people are well known and loved in our world for their stories and their storytelling ability. However, when do we hear about the story of St. Patrick? We don’t really, at least not in popular culture. The same goes for other festivals, like Halloween, Easter, and Christmas.
When we lose the story, we lose the meaning as well. And then folks wonder why there is so much depression during the great feasts. Why do people grow sad at these times? Because down deep they want the real story, the story that gives meaning to what we celebrate, and places them within the grand narrative of life. They stumble away from the St. Patty’s Day parties wanting the mirth to last, but fail to realize that true joy is rooted in realities far deeper than the bottom of a tavern glass. When we lose the narrative thread of live, we can easily fall into a loneliness that seems unescapable.
C.S. Lewis once said “We read to know we are not alone.”
During this grand feast of St. Patrick, let us not forget that stories have the power to change minds and hearts, and reorient people’s lives. For those who want to banish fiction from the shelves of our schools, I ask you to rethink this attitude! Though it is important to teach our younglings the skills they need to perform in professional life; though it is important they they learn how to work with their hands; though information and facts are necessary for college acceptance and professional life, let us not banish stories, for by doing this you will banish the memory of who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. And you will only increase the loneliness that many people now feel so intensely when trying to celebrate festivals-fesivals they know longer understand.
Riverside will continue posting about this theme throughout the year. The topic is so important that we must do this. We are facing an onslaught of materialist and mechanistic views of life which see education as mere preparation for work–not as induction into an authentic folk culture rooted in a meaningful narrative. Losing stories means losing the soul of education.
Please enjoy the video attached to this post. It is a humorous retelling of the story of St. Patrick by a little Irish girl. Teaching the young how to tell stories again will not only help them renew culture, but will orient them and give them a skill which will be a light of meaning when this present darkness begins to overwhelm them.
