Nancy Bo Flood
March 10, 2019
Prayer
Imagine the prayer of a child who has just moved to a new place. Let’s listen in:
“Are you there, God? It’s me, Margaret. I’m in my new bedroom but I still have the same bed. It’s so quiet here at night –nothing like the city. I see shadows on my wall and hear these funny creaking sounds. It’s scary, God!”
Of course, this is from Judy Blume’s revolutionary and controversial, AreYou There God? It’s Me, Margaret, a Richard Jackson Book from Simon and Schuster, published in 1970.
Margaret’s prayer was asking for safety, for protection from the unknown. Her prayers also asked - please listen, please help me understand, myself, being a friend, and please, let me have my period SOON.
Margaret’s understanding of prayer was simple and uncomplicated. Speaking with a god, a personal god, who listens. Who or what is this god? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that this force, this energy, is a being who hopefully has control over life, death, and getting one’s period.
What was revolutionary about that? Isn’t prayer a basic part of being human? Like being scared and asking for help? Being confused or lost in grief and ask, Why, god, why? Or being in awe and celebrating the mystery and beauty of the moment.
Why then is there a silent but strong taboo in children’s literature to having our characters reach out to the spiritual, to try out prayer? We won’t even talk about menstruation (too messy), and one thing even more messy (more political?) - is spirituality.
Are you there, God? It’s me, Margaret is a classic, a book that one reads with passion as a child, with amusement as a teen, and with a smile as an adult. Margaret talks to God at night, alone, personal. And she feels a presence, someone is listening.
Times have greatly changed the rules for writing in children’s literature. Sex is OK but periods are not. Swearing, exploring gender identity, exploring sexuality – go right ahead. But NOT spirituality, yet is there a more basic part of the seeking we do as teens as we ask, “what’s it all about?”
As authors, what scares us away from including the spiritual searches, questions, changes, growth of our characters? What scares away an editor from publishing a book that includes prayer?
Our characters are often challenged with terrible situations and great losses. Children lose parents, friends, identity, their health, their limbs. They are abused, molested, abandoned. How do they find strength, understanding, forgiveness, acceptance?
Our older characters are challenged with “coming of age,” of figuring out “Who am I, what do I believe, who do I want to become?” Adolescence is a time of putting aside childhood beliefs that were taught, were given, and then daring to step away from a childhood faith and search for one’s own, “What do I believe?”
Our young-adult characters search for strength, for meaning, for connections, the safety and comfort of being with people that care about them, people they can trust. They also search for spiritual understanding. They search for a god that listens.
I close with these statements from Einstein: The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical.….That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.
The sensation of the mystical is part of every human, and thus a part of every character that journeys through our stories. But too often the mystical is kept silent. This needs to change.
Are you there, God? It’s me ….
Nancy Bo Flood has written several books including Navajo Year, Walk Through Many Seasons (Arizona Book of the Year), Warriors in the Crossfire (Colorado Book of the Year), No-Name Baby (Top 100 Books of the Year, Bank Street), and Cowboy Up, Ride the Navajo Rodeo (a Junior Library Guild Selection). Winner of the 2016 SCBWI Book Launch Award, Sister Soldier, Fly Home received a starred review from PW and was a Scholastic Book Club Selection. Water Runs Through This Book was a Green Earth qualified book and a Sigurd Olson Best Nature Writing Award Winner. Find out more about her and her work at: https://nancyboflood.com
