Spirituality in Children's Media

One of the greatest storytellers in the world was Jesus Christ.  He taught in parables, which were allegorical and metaphorical.  They were meant to be read into deeper than just the surface discussion.  One of the great uses of these parables is their capacity for personal interpretation and application.  The Prodigal Son can be on the one hand a story that warns of the consequences of sin and the joy of repentance.  It can also be all about humility and the need to forgive others.  Or it can simply be a discussion of the infinite love of God.  This is one of the great uses of parables as well as naratives that emphasize spirituality in general.  When a child reads The Good Samaritan, they may understand the plain and simple fact of needing to love each other and help people who are in need.  As they get older they may understand some of the underlying messages of not being hypocrites, or being willing to ignore prejudice and show tolerance and charity.  They may even get something out of it that only they can understand or apply.  This is useful as they seek to grow in a spiritual nature.  It is one thing to be told what to believe, but another to choose what you believe of your own will and agency.

Agency is one of the biggest themes in a spiritual narrative,  the righteous use that brings about blessings or the unrighteous use that brings about punishments.  But there may also be deeper themes too.  In Babe- Pig in the City there can be found a metaphor for Christ in Babe's dealing with the pitbull.  He chooses to save the dog that would've killed him in a heartbeat a second before.  Christ is the perfect example of turning the other cheek and helping others even if they hate him.  So a story doesn't need to be explicitly spiritual in nature in order to be useful in teaching a spiritual lesson.  In fact, any story that has a moral lesson to be taught or else an act of selfless love and service can fit into this category. 

We read "The Giving Tree" in Class, which can be seen on the one hand as simply a sweet children's tale, or as an allegory of a parent and child, or even as a spiritual story of God's dealings with his children.  The tree gives selfless service and sacrifices everything for the happiness of the boy.  But often the boy is too busy to notice.  This is too often the case between God and us his children.  We only go to him when we need things, and yet despite this, he continues to give and share and love.  One of the purposes of a spiritual narrative is to teach by proxy.  We can learn from the action or inaction of a character and avoid the adverse consequences of their choices ourselves by learning from their mistakes.  You may or may not ever have a chance to experience the same sort of thing that a character in a story goes through, and thus you are able to learn something that you would never have learned on your own.  Children often learn through experience, and tend to struggle with learning by proxy, often needing to experience the adverse consequences themselves before a lesson is fully comprehended.  But the more they are exposed to this form of media, the more likely it is that they will get the message.

As we watched Ponette, we saw the incredible faith of a child, as she dealt with conflicting opinions of where her mother was and how to communicate with her at all.  Her father claimed there was no God and therefore no purpose to Ponette's continued attempts to speak with her mother.  Other adults gave her differing points of view of who God was, who Jesus was, and how she could communicate with them.  Even her friends, little children as well, tried to convince her of the truth of things as they saw it.  But despite these discordant opinions and concepts, Ponette never gave up faith and hope, as her faith was placed not in an attempt to understand and reach God but in her loving attempt to see her mother again.  She never gave up, and she held to the one thing that stayed constant, her love for her mother.  This is what allowed her to see her mother again.  One message that could be taken from this story is that it doesn't matter how you believe in something, what matters is that you never give up faith.  There also must be a purpose to faith.  Ponette's faith was based in a desire to see her mother again.  If we all could have that same faith and desire to see our Heavenly Father again, we probably would.  The Brother of Jared in the Book of Mormon was able to see the Lord because of his incredible faith.  He couldn't be "kept within the veil" because he believed so strongly.  Nor could Ponette be kept from seeing her mother again.  While it is a sweet story, it is only useful if we learn something from it.