"Enchanting Children" -- must-read essay

I blogged ages ago about a wonderful Touchstone essay by David Mills, on the power of story to enchant children, and of the duty parents have to shape the moral imagination of the young. David e-mails today to say the essay is finally available online here. By all means go there, read it, print it out and share it with friends and fellow parents -- and with your pastor. It's one of the wisest and most important things I've ever read about fatherhood and motherhood. Here's an excerpt:

At the best of times, our imaginations are under "the evil enchantment of worldliness," as C. S. Lewis put it in "The Weight of Glory." We are bewitched, even those of us who think of ourselves as countercultural.

And we, I should note, are one of the teachers of worldliness. We are sinners and inadequate icons for our children. Every father knows that his children will take much of their image of God the Father from him, and knows that they may mistake his softness or laziness in disciplining them for the Father's mercy, or mistake his annoyance when disturbed for the Father's wrath, or mistake his self-interested discipline for the Father's justice. The problem is not only Hollywood, it is us.

Hence the need to form our children's imaginations, to counter what the culture and our failings both teach them. By "imagination" I mean the faculty that controls what we, and especially children, think the world is like. It gives us the map by which we plot our course. It gives us our vision of the world about which our mind thinks and on which our will works. It tells us what feels normal, average, to be expected, what feelings should go with what actions.

To the extent a child has learned it in childhood, it changes his whole life, even when he thinks he has left his childhood behind. Even if he insists on losing his faith, it limits the sort of faith he will adopt instead. If he insists on sinning, it limits the sorts of sins he can commit with (so to speak) a clear conscience. It will determine how he rationalizes his sins.

It directs what charity he exercises. "[A]s we were driving through Sag Harbor just now," wrote the lapsed Catholic writer Wilfrid Sheed,

. . . I saw three hopelessly fat, plain girls, who by the sound of it were also stupid, and I thought a certain pagan friend of mine might quite reasonably say, "Why do these fat, ugly people marry and procreate and produce such hideous children?" And I thought, No Catholic could ever say that. Nobody is altogether worthless to us.

There you have a man who, though he had lost his faith, was still governed in this matter by the Christian imagination he had gained in childhood. He saw the world--"imaged" the world--as a Christian, even after he rejected the practice of the Faith. He could not be a worldling.

Read the whole thing -- and pass the link on. It's important.