…..Mary Poppins says that until your baby curls are cut, babies can understand the languages of nature–birds and bees and breezes and other babies all sing together to tell the story of creation.
When I was little I listened hard to the story, attending to the spirits alit on the wind, looking for the chatter that filled up the clouds, attending to the adults as they told more and more stories of how the world worked.
You know how every single relationship is a story in action? How every time you relate to someone in your life sister, love, fairy godmother, you are storytelling. I want to know the big story, I want to participate in writing the world, co-creating reality, understanding the endings. I want to know who plotted this world, and how, and where all the people fitted together in the cloth of time.
You know why names are magical? Because they are first gift we are given, because to name something is to claim it through perception. Stories grow with us, they change as we change. The more complex we are, the more complex the story becomes. To name something is to grow it into creation. Which is why we are able to become old enough to read Fairy Tales again (as C. S. Lewis says). I’m working on being mature enough to hear the bird, breeze, bee, and baby breathe their true names into my ear once again.
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Author: katyandtheword
Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant since 2010, where the church has solidified its community focus. Prior to that she studied both Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She also served as an Assistant Chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as the Christian Educational Coordinator at Bethany Presbyterian at Bloomfield, NJ.
She is an writer and is published in Enfleshed, Sermonsuite, Presbyterian's today and Outlook. She writes prayers, liturgy, poems and public theology and is pursuing her doctorate in ministry in Creative Write and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
She enjoys working within and connecting to the community, is known to laugh a lot during service, and tells as many stories as possible. Pastor Katy loves reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, theater, arts and crafts, music, playing with children and sunshine, and continues to try to be as (w)holistically Christian as possible.
"Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time," L'Engle wrote, "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adult's book, anyhow?" The next year it won the prestigious John Newbery Medal.
Tolkien states in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories and that the story was not one.[66] Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times.
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