Tikkun Magazine, March/April 2010
Reaching for the Moon: A Children’s Book Author Challenges the Separation of Science and Religion
by Graeme Wend-Walker
Clouds of dust swirl from the young boy's shoes as he races through lanes and over the arching bridge, scampering past the donkey that draws a vegetable cart to market. He cannot wait to tell his father what he has heard in school today -- that a most incredible thing has happened before it could even have been imagined. The father is busy mending a shoe as the boy, breathless, arrives to tell him the news: the Americans have sent an airship far into the sky, and its men have walked on the moon.
Come forward in time, and the boy, now a grown man, has left behind his village in Turkey and is visiting the United States as a Fulbright exchange teacher. Talking one day with children's author Chara Curtis, he pauses and looks to the night sky. Then he turns to her and says something that for a moment she cannot comprehend. "My world ended," he says to her, "when your man walked on the moon." Recovering herself, she asks what he means. He explains that when, as a boy, he had told his father of the landing, he had been severely punished. The moon, his father had insisted, is the face of God's shining light, and for him to speak of stepping on it was blasphemy. The gulf that was opened that day between the boy and father had yet to heal.
Curtis felt sadness for both the teacher and his father, but she felt also that each was missing something important. "I set out to find a way to reconcile the two points of view," she says. She found herself writing a story for her Turkish friend; it begins with his childhood experience. The father, who has never gone to school and has read no book but the Qur'an, demands that the boy apologize for lying and blaspheming, and that he seek Allah's forgiveness. The boy swears he is telling the truth. The father, enraged, takes up a stick and "beat[s] him until he [is] too weak to utter a cry." When the father is done, he holds out his hand for his son to kiss.
From here, Curtis's story -- and the boy within it -- begin seeking out a different ending for themselves.
It is some time before the boy returns to school; clearly distressed, he asks his teacher if it is "possible there is more than one moon." The teacher considers the question, then explains: "There is only one moon that revolves around our Earth, yet it is a different moon for each one who sees it." It will be known as a "silvery disk" if gazed upon only when full, or as an "immense, golden ball" if seen only in the harvest. If studied only through a telescope, it will be known as "mountains, craters and valleys." For the one who never cares to look upon it, it does not exist at all. "The answer to your question is both yes and no, for in truth is the many in one."
The boy takes this lesson home, and night after night sits contemplating the moon, attempting to understand the teacher's words. "Yes and no. How could this be? Was it not true that things must be one way or the other?" One night the father finds the boy thus occupied and orders him to bed. "Please, first tell me, Father," the boy asks, "when you look at the moon, what do you see?" The father tells him, "I see beauty not possible for anyone but God to create, and magnificence no person nor thing can ever soil. I see hope for my soul, and hope for even the soul of my son who is foolish and confuses the moon with a rock for climbing."
The boy kisses his father's hand: "Tonight, without lifting a hand or shouting an angry word, you showed me what you wanted me to know. And though I never lied to you, neither was I able to speak the whole truth, for I did not know there could be many in one."
"Like the boy in the story," Curtis explains, "I pondered the question in my heart. Over three months, the book was written. I asked the Turkish teacher to read the manuscript. He did and wept. When he returned to Turkey, he visited his father and achieved reconciliation."
Fortunately for readers, the story's message of healing did not end there. Accompanied by eloquent illustrations from artist Rebecca Hyland, it was published as a children's picture book, No One Walks on My Father's Moon. And it joined a small but growing group of works for children that have been quietly questioning the commonplace assumption that religious and secular points of view are mutually exclusive.
Children's books are not alone in this, yet it may be that they have been freer to occupy this postsecular in-between space without that embarrassment that has, in ideologically secularized, "adult" discourse, tended to keep the religious and secular poles opposed. Considering the enormous potential children's books have to shape the minds of a generation (and thus, the future of an entire society), they have a particularly important role to play in cultivating understanding between people of different faiths -- including those whose faith is in secularist reason.
And yet, this very capacity to shape minds has also made children's literature something of a battleground for control of the future. Every aspect of the life of a book -- from the writing of it, to its publishing and marketing, its selection by bookstores, librarians, teachers, and parents, right through to the actual reading of it -- can find itself enmeshed within a multitude of conflicting ideological demands, which on balance may do little more than repeat the familiar antagonisms. If one considers also how lucrative children's publishing has become, it is not surprising that books like No One Walks on My Father's Moon are often displaced by those that come down firmly on one side or the other of this sometimes highly polarized cultural divide. Children's publishing, as a consequence, tends to become partitioned between a relatively small segment that markets to specific religious beliefs, and a much larger segment that, while manifesting a kind of benign secularism, effectively renders belief invisible. Though a great multitude of books now encourage children not merely to tolerate but to positively embrace diversity in all its forms, one does not often hear of books promoting tolerance toward the religious.
Part of the problem can be traced to the way we have come to think about the relationship between reason and spirituality. Institutions founded on the pursuit of reason have tended to define their reasonableness specifically in opposition to religion -- supposing, like the boy, "that things must be one way or the other." As a consequence, academics (including many of those who educate our educators) have tended to proceed from a certain bias even as they aspire to objectivity -- thus producing what noted children's literature professor Perry Nodelman has called "a vast conspiracy of silence about children's literature with a spiritual emphasis" and "a common form of intolerance by theoretically tolerant people, an intolerance that amounts to censorship."
Nodelman, however, is not alone; as philosophy professor John D. Caputo has noted, many "otherwise ‘secular' intellectuals have become suspicious of the Enlightenment suspicion of religion" and are questioning the idea that the work of reason is necessarily opposed to belief. For such thinkers, the gap between the religious and the secular is no longer an intellectual demilitarized zone but a space within which to expand reason's horizons, and across which to reach toward reason's Other.
It is just this that Curtis seems to be describing in the reconciliation between the son and his father. The boy, we are told, is "eager to learn all this great world could teach him"; but though he tries, night after night, to understand the problem rationally and intellectually, his understanding emerges only when he is able to open himself to the Other, to the father from whom he has become distant. He sees then the moon reflected as two silvery crescents in his father's eyes:
The sight was so beautiful, he could not look away. He stared deeper and deeper until, in the brilliance, he felt himself to be a part of their cool fire.... And here, seeing through his father's eyes, did he know the awe of beholding God's radiant reflection. This was not the moon he had been watching night after night.
The boy's concluding declaration -- "Though it is true a man stepped on a far distant stone, this also is true: No one walks on my father's moon" -- demonstrates that he now appreciates not only the fact of the lunar landing, but also the fact that his father's moon, properly understood, is not one that can actually be walked on. And it also suggests an attitude of defiant protectiveness: just as the moon is sacred to the father, the father's way of seeing it (and thus, that other moon itself) has now become sacred to the son and is to be defended against displacement by competing forms of knowledge.
Curtis's story suggests one need never fear that, in becoming open to the Other -- whether to one's estranged father, people of another faith, or God -- one will somehow compromise one's identity or one's capacity for reason. Perhaps this, then, is the new ethical landscape that children must now learn to navigate: in a world where the power of reason has been misused -- used to divide people from each other and from creation, or at best to argue for mere "tolerance" -- we may need to ask whether reason's own dividing of itself from the religious is an offense not only against the faiths of others but even against reason itself. For it no longer seems reasonable to allow a narrow faith in reason to preclude the reason of faith, or scientific knowledge to displace those poetic ways of knowing that ultimately make even our scientific pursuits meaningful to us. It is to be hoped that tomorrow's children will feel free to choose, without prejudice, their own metaphors and values from within that greater spiritual truth that is the many in one.
No One Walks on My Father's Moon is currently out of print. Curtis and Hyland are seeking a new publisher.
Graeme Wend-Walker teaches children's literature and critical theory at Texas State University, San Marcos. His scholarly interest is in the way spiritualized literature speaks back to an academic interest in it.
Wend-Walker, Graeme. 2010. Reaching for the Moon: A Children’s Book Author Challenges the Separation of Science and Religion. Tikkun 25(2):58 http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/mar2010wend-walker
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