Baby Anna Beans

Whim Wham, our brilliant grand, approached the water reverently. She was holding a can of beans and proceeded to baptize that object and give the Beans a name. From henceforth until the End, the Beans would be: Baby Anna. Baby Anna has now joined Baby Gorn and Pi at tea parties where no real tea is spilled because no real tea is served. We cannot eat plastic donuts served there, but we can pretend to do so. Baby Anna is a member of this very exclusive family.

Reader: Baby Anna is not an actual baby.

Nobody over the age of two should need to be told this fact of the matter, but in a highly individualized age where our opining is often take too seriously, it must be said lest mistakes happen. When Whim Wham shouts: “I am the Mighty Gorn!” and smites Poppa Plato with her pillow, her father, the wise Orthodox man that he is, will remind her: “You are imagining being Gorn.”

And so she is imagining appropriately for her age. She is our dear, fully human, created in the image of God granddaughter. With a pang, her Grammy and I recall that, like her mother, she too must grow up. She will leave Baby Anna behind her. One night will be her last night in the nursery. Whim Whim will leave pretending to be mighty and learn to become mighty in God and not in the image of a Gorn!

This motion toward reality through better and better images is part of classical Orthodox education. We head toward the City of God, kept in safety for all time, which awaits us. We know it only through images given to us by prophets, priests, and kings. Humans look forward to what we will see when in the moment of death we slip through the veil and know.

The joy of genuine Orthodox, classical education is that the imagination need not be stifled ever, only directed. We have pretend tea at two and look forward to seeing her grow into mature Christian adulthood. This growth, if her schooling is sound, will not dispense with images, but will leave toys behind. Toys are training for the more serious icons to come.

She will hold Baby Anna because someday she might hold her own baby. This child will be a genuine icon of God and against that image all the iconoclasts rage in vain. Education begins by acknowledging that we, all of us, can only see shadows of reality. God, in God’s essence, is beyond our vision and so even the wisest and oldest souls must take care in describing God.

Tyrant educators would have us be lazy, as if we could stay in the nursery. They would trade proper toys for new adult toys. They would convince us, if they could, that Baby Anna could be traded for something other than the deeper reality she pointed toward in our childhoods. Tyrants would substitute other lesser images for the very image of God: the grown up toys of materialism or consumerism. A toy is by a little child believed, even if just a bit, to be the thing itself. A grown up should be educated enough to leave behind mere toys.

Instead we look to Icons: those windows that push us to a deeper reality. We do not see them, if we have been taught well, as the thing itself. We cannot believe the can of beans is a baby. The greater image is a reflection that turns our gaze from the image to the Source.

The tyrant educator, the guru, would give us new toys that have us puttering about with them. The toy is the thing and we should, as adults, have done with toys. Against this lack of development, the grownup lover of Wisdom looks to the Mother who bore God and so became part of the ultimate icon that points our vision Godward. We look in her arms drawn by her loving gaze and see God in the flesh. This is the best we can do and meditating on that true Icon fills us with wonder. The growing up leaves lesser images, dolls of all sorts, behind us and we wonder.

Science was born from this wonder. We looked forward to truth and then looked back and began to understand the cosmos as it is. Great works of beauty like the Church of the Holy Wisdom have been built in this marveling. They are lesser images in response to the greater Icon. They are a response, not toys. When I stood in the Church of Holy Wisdom to pray with some students, I was drawn forward from the reflection to the original. This was by design in the very shaping of the great church. All the great works of art are not toys, because we are not children. They are signposts that move beyond themselves.

Baby Anna Beans? That can of beans is an image of a deeper reality to Whim Wham. By grace, if all goes well, she will find good guides. She has started well with wonderful parents and good priests. Someday may she find Socratic professors who show her the vision of the True Light and set her free to see for herself. That Light may prevent her from ever mistaking a can of beans for a baby again, but it will show her the value of every one of God’s children. She will feel proper nostalgia for childhood’s toys, but having put away lesser things, be as fierce as the Mother of God in her Magnificat.

God bless Whim Whim.