From the November/December 2001 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

Compass Points
Journeys of the Spirit

by Betsy Hearne

was a very spiritual child and also religious, two different things that don’t always go together. Overseas missionaries and homeland ministers, some wiser than others, were part of my family and culture. Singing in a choir, memorizing scripture, and absorbing Bible stories genuinely enriched me — great literature and music are never a waste of time. Fortunately, my family had more open-minded ideas than those endemic to the Sunday school lessons and sermons I attended. There may even have been a touch of pantheism in my earliest development. The deep Alabama pine forest where we lived afforded me unmitigated consolation in times of trial, as did, later, the East Tennessee mountains that became my second home.

In due course, my parents’ liberal views and my own troubling experience combined to stir up questions and shake blind faith. That’s the heart of my autobiographical novel Listening for Leroy, which includes incidents of racism in the closed Southern society of the 1940s and 1950s, along with the hypocrisy of church-related religious observance required in the segregated public school system of that time.

As an adolescent with a growing awareness of global events, I found out that the year I was born, Anne Frank was dying; that while I was absorbing the world around me, other children were being flashed out of existence by a bomb dropped over Hiroshima. Later still, I went to Israel and studied the Holocaust as the final outcome of intolerance. There I also explored the Old Testament as folklore and the New Testament as history and archaeology. In my graduate work, I discovered that fairy tales such as “Beauty and the Beast” (which was sometimes performed as an Easter play in the nineteenth century) contain transcendental elements of resurrection through love and forgiveness that echo biblical stories of redemption. Not to mention that a holy stranger in ragged disguise wanders through various religions in the form of Elijah, the baby Jesus, and others knocking at your door to seek shelter. Studying my own family lore revealed spiritual progenitors, the ordinary heroes I wrote about in Seven Brave Women who drew strength from various professions of faith: Mennonite, Quaker, Presbyterian, Catholic, and — what shall I call it? — Humanitarian.

In the course of aging, I now find myself more and more spiritual, less and less religious, as our historical habit of fighting wars in the name of religion takes its everlasting toll. And still I believe — like Robert Coles — that all children, religious or not, go through some kind of spiritual journey. Increasingly often, they do it alone, without guides through either their wilderness of contradictory values or their underworld of destructive temptations. Sometimes it seems to me that little Elian, lost both at sea and on land in a maze of conflicting adults, physically symbolized our children’s losing their way.

As a veteran reviewer, I have thought a lot about the representation of religious and spiritual life in children’s books. What I have found is that — with some notable exceptions, and for a complex web of social, economic, political, and (multi)cultural reasons — religion and even spiritual life seems an uncommon subject in books for children. I thought about this recently while looking at some Medieval and Renaissance paintings, many of which portray the Virgin Mary reading a book to her child. The depiction struck me as somewhat subversive, since women were not encouraged to read at all in those days, and holy scripture — which I assume this book to represent — was the sole province of male clergy in a rigid hierarchy. Yet here was this ultimately righteous female modeling behavior alien to the society at large and the institution in particular. I began to think of the precept “a little child shall lead them,” along with the emphasis that Christianity places on the child as holy, which is celebrated annually in a sacred festival called Christmas. Then I began to wonder where this little child was going to lead us, and how, if his mother was no longer reading him any books of a spiritual — and, yes, religious — nature.