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The Tools of Language as an Aidin Moral Development
Roger FrittsApril 21, 1996 Cedar Lane Unitarian Church Bethesda, Maryland
The Reading: If I had been asked in my early youth whether I preferred to have dealings only with men or only with books, my answer would certainly have been in favor of books. In later years this has become less and less the case. Not that I have had so much better experiences with men than with books; on the contrary, purely delightful books even now come my way more often than purely delightful men. But the many bad experiences with men have nourished the meadow of my life as the noblest book could not do, and the good experiences have made the earth into a garden for me. . . .
Here is an infallible test. Imagine yourself in a situation where you are alone, wholly alone on earth, and you are offered one of the two, books or men. I often hear men prizing their solitude but that is only because there are still men somewhere on earth even though in the far distance. I knew nothing of books when I came forth from the womb of my mother, and I shall die without books, with another human hand in my own. I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human being looking at me. Martin Buber, Pointing the Way, Harper & Row, 1947, p.3.
The Sermon: Not all comments on books are as reverent as the comments of Martin Buber that I used as a reading this morning. For example, Groucho Marx once said to a person who had sent Marx a copy of his new book: "From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend to read it."
However, many of my own experiences with books and reading have been positive. As the days grow warmer I resonate James Wall who writes, "My early memories of reading fall into two categories. The dark memory is of Miss Drew's first grade classroom, where I struggled to decipher the letters that described Dick and Jane running. The brighter memory is of a backyard tree with limbs strong enough to climb and foliage thick enough to keep away prying eyes. That was where I read library books through long summer afternoons."Wall, James, "Something of Substance," The Christian Century, April 17, 1996, page 419.
I have been thinking a lot about reading these past few days due to a member of the church, David Yano. Each year at our "Heart's Desire" Auction, I offer to the highest bidder the opportunity to pick a sermon topic, along with the opportunity to be my guest at a restaurant to discuss his or her sermon topic over lunch. Two years ago Phil Goldrick was the highest bidder and he asked me to speak about the social decline of men in our society. Last year John Daniel asked me to explore the continuing threat to religious pluralism in America. This year Karen Yano won the bidding with a generous contribution to the church, and she gave the opportunity to pick a topic to her husband, David. When David and I had lunch together at a comfortable Bethesda restaurant, he talked about his interest in the importance of children developing a vocabulary.
It's my experience, [David said] that children who have not developed the skills of communication, end up dealing with difficult situations by having temper tantrums. When we say to these children, "Why are you angry?" they cannot tell us. I think reading plays a role in this. Children who do not learn to read, do not learn the skills to express themselves. As they grow into adulthood, they are less able to deal with issues using words. They are more likely to become frustrated and try to resolve things physically.
A few days later David lent me a copy of a book called The Read-Aloud Handbook. There I read:
Churches have a proud history of support for family reading. Unfortunately, it is largely ancient history. In Colonial America church elders regularly inspected homes to ensure that children and servants were being taught to read. Since church theology held that only those who read the Bible could be saved, those who impeded that opportunity would be held accountable.Trelease, Jim, The Read-Aloud Handbook, fourth edition, Penguin Books, New York, 1995, p. 160.
The author of The Read-Aloud Handbook, Jim Trelease, went on to complain that today clergy seem to spend more time trying to ban books, instead of encouraging reading. He believes that "at least once a year clergy should remind the parents of the importance of reading aloud within the family, the ease of obtaining a library card, and the dangers of overviewing television."
In the past few days, I have been interviewing folks about their early memories of reading. One person clearly remembers the first time she ever read a book. She was standing in the kitchen of her home and she was about four years old. She read completely a book called Come for a Walk with Me.
Another person clearly remembers the moment in her first grade classroom when she understood that letters made sounds. It was as though she has suddenly broken a mysterious code. She could suddenly go to a book, sound out the words and understand their meaning.
Still another person remembers the first sentence she ever read. It was printed on the milk bottle she saw each morning at breakfast. One morning she looked at the words on the milk bottle and saw for the first time the sentence that the words made up: "We come to visit, not to stay. Return our bottles every day."
And still another person mentioned the comic strips in the newspapers, followed later by comic books, as his first experience of reading.
I remember when I was a child of about five and a friend of my mother's was baby-sitting my sister and me in the afternoons while my mother was at work. This woman had two daughters about my sister's age, four or five years older than myself. I remember in the afternoons we would gather in the bedroom, sitting on the bed or the floor. The baby-sitter would read aloud to us a chapter from a book. One book was The Secret Garden. On those week day afternoons I fell in love with reading.
The first book I remember reading was when I was nine years old. My mother had started reading it to me, a chapter a night, but she got busy and for a few nights could not find time to read to me. The book interested me and I was eager to know the outcome of the story. So impatiently I picked up the book one evening and I struggled to make out the words, skipping those words I could not understand. To my own amazement I was able to finish the book, an exciting account of the adventures of a field mouse. From there I went on to read the twenty-six books of the Happy Holster series, about the adventures of a positive-thinking family consisting of a mom, a dad and five children. Soon I was reading a book a week, a habit that continues to this day.
Perhaps these stories stimulate you to recall your own early memories of reading, and I hope they are positive memories. The stories point out that most of us did not learn to read in school. As the educator Ivan Illich wrote in 1970:
Most learning happens casually . . . Fluency in reading is . . . more often than not a result of . . . extracurricular activities. Most people who read widely, and with pleasure, merely believe that they learned to do so in school; when challenged, they easily discard this illusion.Illich, Ivan, Deschooling Society, Harper & Row, New York, 1971, pages 12-13.
The author of The Read-Aloud Handbook, Jim Trelease, presents convincing evidence that the best way to teach children to read is for parents and teachers to read aloud to children. He is critical of reading programs that try to make something simple complex and expensive. Trelease writes: "One of the saddest facts of the last ten years has been the incredible numbers of parents who think the product Hooked on Phonics will be an incentive to their child. In December 1994 the Federal Trade Commission charged that Hooked on Phonics was unable scientifically to substantiate its product claims and issued a cease-and-desist order." Even Woody Allen shares this doubt about costly programs to teach reading. He reports "I took a course in speed reading, learning to read straight down the middle of the page, and was able to read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It's about Russia."
In 1970 the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire described in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, his success in teaching peasants to read and write effectively with a minimum investment of time and money. Freire found that people immediately learned to read words with real meaning in their lives. Freire wrote that people learn to read quickly and easily, if they can see how learning to read gives them tools that help them effectively improve their situation. A teachable moment occurs when people see the value of reading in real life encounters.
This speaks directly to the issue that David Yano was raising. Paulo Freire's Brazilian students used the tools of reading as an aid in their own moral development. No sooner did the peasants learn to read than they organized peasant leagues through which they tried to bargain with their employers. They were scrupulously careful to observe the law and the customs of the region. Nevertheless, their employers, government authorities, and the church united against them. They fired and jailed the leaders, and the church denied its sacraments to members of the league. Reading had liberated the mind and the spirit.
Reading can be a tool that frees us to understand better the moral issues of our society and our culture. Our children live in a stress filled environment: Advocacy groups receive three million child-abuse calls each year. Parents abuse 1,200 children to death each year. A theft or violent crime occurs on school grounds once every six seconds. Guns kill fourteen children each day. One thousand teenagers attempt suicide every day, and one succeeds every ninety minutes.Trelease, Jim, The Read-Aloud Handbook, fourth edition, Penguin Books, New York, 1995, p. 77-8.
How can reading help? To survive in this world and remain ethical it helps to be physically strong. However, it also helps to be mentally strong. In the words of Joseph Addison, "Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body." Reading aloud to children so that they will become excited about reading is one tool we give them to help them prepare for life. When children love reading, a world of information is open up to them that helps guide their lives so that they might become better people. A British politician was speaking of the power of the written word when he joked: "I have every sympathy with the American who was so horrified by what he had read of the effects of smoking that he gave up reading."
Shirley Brice Heath, a professor of English at Stanford, has been examining American reading habits.Quoted by Franzen, Jonathan, writing in Harper's Magazine, April 1996. Repeatedly, readers told Heath the same thing: Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive -- a sense of my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
Heath found that substantive works of fiction offered people places where there is hope of coming to grips with the ethical, philosophical, and social dimensions of life. "Strong works of fiction are what refuse to give easy answers to the conflict, to paint things as black and white, good guys versus bad guys."
These last few days, I asked people, if they have every had a religious experience reading a book. Everyone I asked said yes, and they described with reverence some books and writers that came to mind:
For one woman, reading as a child the book A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle was a childhood spiritual experience, and reading Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein was an adult religious experience.
For another reading the writings of Albert Camus as a college student, was a religious experience.
A man listed several books: Robertson Davies Deptfort Trilogy, John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, and John Knowles, A Separate Peace.
A woman mentioned Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse and several persons mentioned Slaughter House Five by Kurt Vonnegut, and J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.
For me the first book that comes to mind is W. Somerset Maugham's story The Razor's Edge. Published in 1944 when Maugham was seventy, The Razor's Edge, tells the spiritual odyssey of a young American searching of God and the meaning of life. When I read it at the age of fourteen, it stimulated my imagination, and encourage me to see all of life as a religious pilgrimage from which I could learn.
Perhaps this stimulates in you a memory of a religious experience that you had when reading a book. Dr. Shirley Heath, the English professor at Stanford says, "Reading good fiction is like reading a particularly rich section of a religious text. What religion and good fiction have in common is that the final answers aren't there, there isn't a final closure."
The third question that came to my mind these last few days as I thought about reading is the classic desert island question. What book would you take with you if you knew that you were going to live away from people for several months? If you could only take one book, what would it be?
For some the answer came quickly and easily. One man said the one volume Columbia Encyclopedia. A woman said without hesitation Our Bodies, Our Selves by the Boston Woman's Health Book Collective. Another woman said she would want a book that would teach her sign language, a skill she has always wanted to master. Another said she would take the largest poetry anthology she could find, and use it not only to read poems but also to memorize the ones she liked the best. No one I asked said that they would take the Bible, although a student preparing for the ministry said she might take Norman Gottwald's The Hebrew Bible,a Socio-Literary Introduction, a book she was never able to master. This brought back to me pleasant memories of Norm Gottwald, my Old Testament professor in Berkeley twenty years ago. He was a good teacher and I would like to read his book on the Old Testament, but I don't think I would want it with me on a deserted island. Of all the suggestions, the idea of a large, one volume encyclopedia appeals to me the most.
On the way to the public library last week, I asked my nine-year-old son the question, "Do you remember the first book you ever read?" He said, "It was a Boxcar Children's book. You read the first couple chapters, and I got tired of waiting for you to finish it so I read it." At the library I headed over to the adult section to research this sermon. With no parent to set limits, my nine-year-old checked out twelve books to read in three weeks.
As you can see, I love reading. Reading is one of my sources of joy and happiness in life. The reading I have done has guided my moral and ethical development throughout my life.
Yet in the end, as Martin Buber said, given a choice between books or people, I will choose people. In Buber's words:
I do indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human being looking at me.
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