The Little Way

“The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.”

—Albert Einstein

Today, I’m going to talk about two books I’ve read recently that have been some of the best books I’ve read in years--and I have read a lot of books.

They are both children’s books, but I hope, taking a cue from Albert Einstein, that you will see that the pursuit of truth and beauty is something in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives; meaning this.

My youngest child, Charlotte, and I had a picnic yesterday for lunch, and she kept talking about the “glorious day.” She does what most three-year olds do, and what Einstein was referring to in this quotation. She has intellectual curiosity--constantly asking questions about the world around her in order to learn truth--and an appreciation for beauty--constantly reveling in the sheer joy of either being outside or of drawing and painting and music and dancing. Unfortunately, many of us think we have to lose this curiosity and appreciation for beauty in our teenage years and beyond. I believe strongly that this is not the case, and I believe that our school does and should continue to stand as a notable exception to this idea.

Some of the most dense and philosophical literature ever written has been intended for children--think Winnie the Pooh, for example, which is simplistic on the surface but also contains deep meaning about how to live. If you have a difficult or complicated idea, but can communicate it to children, you really understand your idea better than someone who can only communicate it to adults. If you have ever tried to help a little brother or sister with homework, or if you’ve tried to teach little children in Sunday School before, as I do, then you know this.

The author I’d like to talk about this morning, someone who does many of the things I’ve just talked about in her work, is named Barbara Cooney. She won the Caldecott Medal, which is a medal for illustrations of children’s books, in 1959 for a book called Chanticleer and the Fox, an adaptation of one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales for Children. What is notable about her work shows up in her acceptance speech for the Caldecott that year.

She said, “I believe that children in this country need a more robust literary diet than they are getting. It does not hurt them to read about good and evil, love and hate, life and death. Nor do I think they should read only about things that they understand. 'A man’s reach should exceed his grasp.' So should a child’s. For myself, I will never talk down to—or draw down to—children.”

What Cooney was able to do so well, however, was not just include love and hate, or life and death, in her children’s books just to shock or to push the envelope, but to do so for the reason that all great literature includes such topics--to make us think more deeply about the meaning of life, to help us understand what, perhaps, we each were put on this earth to do.

Cooney’s insights into children and human nature, as well as her experiences summering off the coast of Maine, give her writing and her illustrations a presence and meaning that most children’s books can only hope to aspire to. And I think that her works pursue truth and beauty with a child’s eye, and therefore they have profound lessons to teach all of us.

Cooney’s most famous work is a book called Miss Rumphius. It is dedicated to Saint Nicholas, patron saint of children; in other words, a protector of children, but not in the sense of shielding them from unpleasantness; rather, a protector in the sense of a teacher and friend who recognizes the power and depth in a child’s understanding of the world. The book begins by introducing The Lupine Lady, pictured here on the cover, who lives in a small house overlooking the sea.

It then flashes back to her early girlhood, when Alice Rumphius helped her grandfather in his shop. He hand-carved and painted the figureheads for the prows of ships and painted other things as well, and Alice would often help him, as Cooney writes, “put in the skies.” She listens to the stories her grandfather tells her of far lands beyond the sea, but he tells her that even though she should travel, she must also “do something to make the world more beautiful,” as he has tried to do. As all children do, she grows up; she leaves home; she travels around the world; and then after having enough of it all, she thinks to herself, “it is time to find my place by the sea.”

She does so, creating a beautiful haven for herself that allows her to enjoy the beauty of nature all around her, but she realizes she has not yet found what it is that she has to do to make the world more beautiful.

She finds after a long hard winter that a few flower seeds she had sown before the winter began have bloomed; she appreciates their beauty, insignificant though they seem, and decides to sow as many lupine seeds as she can, all over the town and the countryside. They bloom everywhere and, indeed, make the world around her a more beautiful place.

As she is extremely old now, Miss Rumphius tells her great-niece, the narrator, that she, too, must make the world a more beautiful place.

But the book ends in an open-ended way, as the narrator says “I do not know yet what that can be.”

I love this book for many reasons; for its slow, deliberate pacing which, instead of boring my three-year-old, keeps her engaged, much like the calming, soothing cadences of Mr. Rogers’s speech. The best children’s literature and television has realized that children don’t need to be entertained in the way that our culture has embraced; they don’t need fast-pacing, quick cuts, a rapid succession of images . . . they need, and desire, the warmth of human connection.

I love this book, too, for its beautiful illustrations, which continue to yield new insights every time they are viewed, like the best works of art.

But I love it most, perhaps, for the way it teaches children to value what is truly valuable and to think about their vocation, their calling in life. Miss Rumphius does have the opportunity to leave home, to see the world, to be attracted by all that it has to offer; but she also decides to return home, to the natural beauty around her, and contribute to her own community’s betterment, which will continue even after she is gone.

I love it, too, for its embrace of the impractical and its rejection of the idea that a life of “accomplishments” is the best possible life. The book never mentions Miss Rumphius’s resume or income or net worth. She is a librarian for a time, which is the only occupation or education mentioned. And, of course, these things are not mentioned because they are not important to Miss Rumphius or to the narrator. What is important about her legacy is something seemingly insignificant, something seemingly very small and even fairly ridiculous. She planted a lot of flowers: so what? But in the context of the book, this is indeed a most significant accomplishment, because Cooney is trying to teach children that life is not really about the kinds of accomplishments we often think are significant.

David Brooks puts it well when he contrasts resume virtues and eulogy virtues. He says this: "It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love? We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones. But our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate that sort of inner light. Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character."

I used to have my Western Civ students write their own eulogies as part of an assignment dealing with a story by Leo Tolstoy. It’s a fascinating assignment to undertake, because it causes us to reflect on what about our lives can, and should, remain important and what we know in our hearts is ultimately temporary.

Miss Rumphius tries to live a life more in line with eulogy virtues. We don’t measure a life’s worth by the things that seem to obsess us while we’re alive; we measure it by how well the person was really able to live.

And often our definition of “living well” actually creates more stress and frustration than a life like one of Barbara Cooney’s characters, who often live in small, rural communities without technology or grocery stores or or any of a hundred other things we imagine as necessary for a good life.

I don’t really know anything about Barbara Cooney’s spirituality or religious beliefs, but I can’t help but believe that she had heard of St. Therese of Lisieux, a French nun in the 19th century who was herself known as “the little flower.” St. Therese took seriously the passage in the Gospel of Matthew in which Jesus says one must become as a little child to enter the kingdom of heaven. What this meant for St. Therese is that, as she said, a child should never be afraid of God, but should always think of, and embrace, God as a loving parent.

St. Therese believed that the path to God for most people was not a path of upward struggle and magnificent saintly heroism, but quiet, patient care for those around us. Her life, the “Way” that subsequently was named for her, has been described thusly:

"She had a commitment to the tasks and to the people we meet in our everyday lives. She took her assignments in the convent of Lisieux as ways of manifesting her love for God and for others. She worked as a sacristan by taking care of the altar and the chapel; she served in the refectory and in the laundry room; she wrote plays for the entertainment of the community. Above all, she tried to show a love for all the nuns in the community. She played no favorites; she gave of herself even to the difficult members. Her life sounds so routine and ordinary, but it was steeped in a loving commitment that knew no breakdown. It is called a little way precisely by being simple, direct, yet calling for amazing fortitude and commitment."

Therese died at the age of 24. Her life and death reminds us that the worst tragedy is not necessarily death, but a life not lived in pursuit of eulogy virtues rather than resume virtues.

Barbara Cooney in another book reminds us of the same thing, as she tells the story of Matthias, a young boy who grows up on an island off the coast of Maine. He takes the opportunity to sail the trade routes to Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and builds a prosperous business for himself over a span of 15 years. But he returns to the island of his birth. He marries and has three children.

His wife dies, as does his son-in-law, and his youngest daughter and grandson come to live with him on the island. His life is not easy but it is meaningful. Cooney, ever the master of understatement, summarizes much of his existence with the line “For a long time, his life continued in this peaceful way.” Then, in his advanced years, Matthias goes out into a storm to fish and dies at sea.

But, just as in the example of the real-life St. Therese, the fictional death of Matthias is not a tragedy. It is sad, to be sure; but not tragic. The way Cooney describes his funeral, is beautiful and, I believe, exactly correct. In the words of his grandson, who gives the briefest but best eulogy: “A good man, a good life.”

It may seem odd to you that I believe that a group of teenagers needs to hear a message from a children’s book and a tragically failed 19th century French nun. But I believe it is exactly what you need to hear.

If you seek for meaning and significance in many of the ways our culture demands of you, you may actually end up living a tragic life, a life always pushing for the next accomplishment, the next set of resume virtues. But if you find a different way of measuring the significance of your life, one that depends on the Little Way, on small but consistent acts of beauty, kindness, charity, and peaceableness, you may have the best, and richest, life possible. I want that for you, for your families, and for our community. You may not yet know how you can contribute that beauty to the world, but we are here as a community to help each other figure it out--and do it.

I will close with a prayer:

God of truth and beauty, we honor you daily when we ask good questions, when we seek the truth, when we paint, draw, act, sculpt, when we appreciate everything around us and seek to live with a child’s sense of wonder and gratitude. May we continue in that work so that it might be said of us, A good person, A good life. Thank you for your love and presence with us always. Amen.