Musings on Rookmaaker, C.S. Lewis, and Ideals

“What do you think of Hans Rookmaaker?” That question bounced into the chat box during one of my talks at our virtual “Greenville SC” Great Homeschool Convention three weeks ago.

“Hmm,” I thought. “Now there’s a new name for me!” Following chat activity while delivering my online talks resembles an athletic event: I struggle to coordinate pen and paper with my ability to squint at the chat box while staying coherent on camera.

What a superb cavalcade of information races by! Book titles, web-site addresses, questions answered quickly by other attendees, our and others’ misstatements quickly corrected, and a weave of old-fashioned and new-fashioned advice. It becomes as much a chance for us to harvest information as to provide it.

Should it be surprising that the chat is so fascinating? No, because conference attendees today arrive bubbling over with ideas, queries, and references to share. In real time, a speaker can entertain only a limited amount of it. But online, with high-octane chat plus meet-ups with folks in the Zoom-rooms thereafter, the possibilities are limitless.

So back to Hans Rookmaaker, a name endorsed by several in my virtual audience. The next day I ordered one of his books: Art Needs No Justification (1978). Is not the title marvelous? And so are his opening sentences:

The artist in our society is in a very peculiar position. On the one hand he is regarded very highly, almost like a high priest of culture who knows the inner secrets of reality. But on the other hand he is a completely superfluous person whom people like to think highly of, but are quite ready to allow to starve.  

A touch point of his thesis is found a few sentences later: 

But the Christian artist’s problems are often greater because it is difficult for the Christian to live in a post Christian world. An artist is expected to work from his own convictions, but these may be seen by his atheistic contemporaries as ultra-conservative if not totally passé.

This statement applies not just to artists, but to persons across the board who are ardently devoted both to nurturing their religious lives and to pursuing the Classical virtues we name as Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.

The fact is, as we pursue these things, and teach our children to do the same, we are vulnerable to every possible label and marginalization, much of which gets nasty very quickly.

This is not news, of course. Still, it causes me to reflect upon the complex issue of people’s reactions to today’s unprecedented circumstances. These circumstances are unprecedented solely because of the ways we are linked electronically. What a game-changer such intimate virtual connections are, both for good and for evil.

For people plunged into disastrous economic or physical circumstances, impossible to have foreseen, today is awash in challenges. My heart goes out particularly to those unable to tend the sick, or join communal grieving in the form of funerals or memorial services. I think specifically of a long-ago undergraduate at SMU who yesterday lost her father. For her family and friends it will be impossible to gather and grieve.

But as always, extraordinary statements of inspiration arise from the very people caught in such crumbling circumstances. They say, and do, what spiritually minded people always have, proclaiming eternal truths that surround and sustain them. After all, faith and despair cannot coexist in the same spot, although they must incessantly tussle with one another.

On a different note, we suddenly have chances to read books that fail to fit into our ordinary schedule. Along with Rookmaaker, two other new titles lie on my kitchen table. One I had planned to comment upon today—a slender volume entitled Nurtured by Love (1969) that was suggested multiple times by Andrew Pudewa in our Classical Education Unhinged panels. It presents overwhelmingly beautiful statements of pedagogical and spiritual truths by the renown Japanese teacher Shinichi Suzuki (Pudewa’s own teacher). I decided to wait, though, to digest the second of Suzuki’s books suggested by Pudewa, Ability Development from Age Zero (1969), which arrived yesterday.

The third book on the table jumped into my hands at our local used bookstore: C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955). I confess to being newer than most of you to C.S. Lewis. I went nuts over The Screwtape Letters in high school, but had no context for it. Other titles like Mere Christianity have become mine, but Lewis’ inimitable words do not pour effortlessly out of my mouth. I never (that’s right, never) even heard of Narnia as a child, perhaps because I was one of the Golden-Bookers who graduated more likely to Nancy Drew than Narnia.

In Surprised by Joy, Lewis selectively presents his not-easy childhood. At one point he tells how two types of nightmares disturbed his then pristine life as a six-year old: dreams about ghosts (spectres) and dreams about insects. These pages grabbed my attention since, two nights earlier, my six-year old granddaughter had come to me with a troubled countenance, expressing fears about precisely those same nightmares. When I read her Lewis’ words (she, who loves Aslan), her eyes widened. Perhaps her fears have been partly allayed?

There is much we can do in this time, particularly if we enjoy the blessing of good health. We can extend greetings, flowers, or banana bread across a fence or driveway. We can teach our games, songs, and traditions. Today, our little ones took their first shot at Charades. Trust me, there’s a long way to go before they figure out “the bunny rabbit is dancing and eating flowers” is not two words.

And we can, and must, strive to let technology bring blessings to our homes, rather than perpetuate horrors and divisions. May we be strengthened to honor the values and virtues of our spiritual lives—those pillars and foundations that the atheistic and valueless world scoffs at and mocks. These structures cannot be shaken, no matter what happens within the flow of our human experience.

Photo: marleen hengelaar-rookmaaker (CC BY-SA 4.0)