Kerux: a portfolio of Calvin Theological Seminary - Volume 41.14 - 12 March 2007

Sem Eye: Hickory, dickory, dock, the church mouse ran up the clock!

Proverbs 22:6 teaches us to “train a child in the way he should, and when he is old he will not turn from it.” We all know Solomon, above all the rest of Israel's kings, was marked by his God-given wisdom. When he speaks we do well to listen attentively, especially when our children are listening attentively to us in turn. This point, driven home so beautifully in the Proverbs, should guide us from the earliest days to teach our children the stories and values of the Kingdom of heaven over those of this shabby earth.

Think for a moment about the values secular culture would impart to our precious little lambs! Harry Potter would hang a sorcerer's millstone around dear little Janie's neck and her drag straight down into a hell of glue-sniffing and witchcraft. Pokemon promises new and fantastical creatures are just around the genetic corner if Timmy will only reject Genesis and embrace the gospel of Darwin's natural selection and decriminalized marijuana. It is our sacred responsibility as parents and pastors to keep our wee ones from stumbling blindly into such sinful teachings!

Cautious adults can usually find safety from secularism and sacrilege in the comfortable familiarity of yesteryear, but sadly even dear old gramps may have been bamboozled by the forces of darkness while we were still in the crib ourselves. Many of the nursery rhymes children are reared on have a dark side. Chris Roberts, in the opening lines of his book Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: the Reason Behind the Rhyme, says that “…it should come as no surprise that nursery rhymes are full of sex, death and cruelty.” Sex, death and cruelty: are these the values we want to impart on our covenant children?

Into the void steps a heroine of fable proportions! Marjorie Ainsborough Decker has reclaimed every inch of rhyme-dom for God's kingdom with a collection of holy poems for even the littlest believers. Here are a few examples of her vision for turning secular drivel into a holy revival.

“Little Jack Horner” is a thinly veiled recounting of Thomas Horner stealing property from the Roman Catholic Church. Henry VIII had frightened the Abbot of Glastonbury into offering him a land bribe. Thomas Horner, acting as the church's emissary, took the opportunity to take for himself a plum piece of property. He would never have dreamed of stealing had he read the ten commandments in the Scripture, as Decker's version suggests:

Little Jack Horner,
Sat in his corner
Reading his Bible each day;
He learned what it said,
And each night in bed,
The verses he learned he would say.

Which Jack are you trying to raise?

“Goosey, Goosey, Gander” offers no relief for fragile minds. Instead of the tale of a gentle mother bird, the original rhyme describes a prostitute's trade and accuses the church of supporting her harlotry, and even refusing to read from the Church of England's prayer book. There is no doubt about the piety of the gentle goose or the purity of a godly woman's kiss in Decker's account:

Goosey, goosey, gander,
Where do you wander?
Upstairs and downstairs
To watch, and to ponder
All the little children
Saying Good Night Prayers,
And see their mommies kiss them,
Then tip-toe down the stairs.

Finally we come to an old favorite that pushes me near tears to even contemplate. “Ding, dong, bell/pussy's in the well/who put her in?/Little Johnny Flynn! is no allegory, just the sad story of a boy coldly drowning one of God's beloved creatures in a dark well. Johnny must have been listening to Marilyn Manson's foul lyrics instead of Ms. Decker's message of hope. She pulls the kitten out that well and puts the love of her savior in it instead:

Ding, dong, bell,
There's gladness in the well!
Who put it in?
God! It's genuine!
Who can get it out?
Anyone who doesn't doubt.
Ding, dong, bell,
There's gladness in the well!

Raise your children to pull up their own bucketfuls of hope with The Christian Mother Goose Book of Nursery Rhymes by Marjorie Ainsborough Decker, (Sarah Gibb, illustrator), available at amazon.com ($9.99) or at the Hekman Library, and teach older kids about the fine art of discernment through Roberts' Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: the Reason Behind the Rhyme, (amazon.com, $13.60).