A gift I treasure.

I recently gave a talk to a literary club here in London reflecting on my development as a voracious reader, and I realized anew how much the habits and potentialities of a lifetime need to be implanted in our very earliest years. Though they never developed the bibliographic fever to anywhere near the same extent as their four sons would, my parents could occasionally be seen reading books for their own pleasure. More importantly, they often set aside the time in the evening to read stories to us. They may have been promoting literature more as a calming narcotic than a tool of intellectual and moral awakening, but the long-term impact of listening to those unfolding tales until sleep snatched us out of their grasp was all to the good.

That regard for books was strongly reinforced at school, of course. But what strikes most jarringly against post-modern sensibilities today was the high religious content in the stories we heard. Although my primary alma mater was part of the normal or secular school system, we were exposed to oodles of child-friendly retellings of the Bible stories by some first rate writers like Walter de la Mare and Pearl S. Buck. This was in the late '50s and early '60s--the last historical moment when educators could still get away with such (by today's standards) heavy-handed cultural indoctrination. And it wasn't just stories, either. We regularly sang hymns in music class, including that gross incitement to take up arms against the infidel, Onward Christian Soldiers.

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, we sang nothing but carols, and the whole school would turn out for a special Christmas pageant in the auditorium, retelling the dramatic story of Christ's birth. And every morning of the school year, we would recite the Lord's Prayer right after singing the national anthem.

Because I was born in time to still be brainwashed in this way, I received something that no graduate of the secular system has been encumbered with for more than 30 years now. This is something that our educators seem to think the rising generations can get by quite adequately without, thank you very much. I allude to a passable grounding in, a more than glancing acquaintance with, the stories of the Old and New Testaments. These are the tales that constitute nothing less than the founding and forming meta-narrative of Judeo-Christian civilization itself. The loss of this influence doesn't just limit the number of people who may someday convert to Christianity or have their faith deepened. It limits their intellectual and aesthetic growth as well. To be unfamiliar with these characters, themes, parables, metaphors and stories is to have many of the most exquisitely outfitted rooms in the mansion of Western art and thought closed off to you.

I was shocked by how quickly and completely that tap at the end of the Biblical storytelling pipeline had been shut off. In my late 20s I was back in a secular high school reading some of my fiction to a senior class. During a question and answer period one of the students wanted to know if writers had to read a lot of books. I acknowledged that it had taken a while for the reading habit to really take hold of me, but I assured my questioner that I now consumed books like Moses consumed manna.

"Like who does what?" this girl asked and I stared back in gob-smacked bewilderment to match her own.

"You've heard of Moses, right?" I asked.

"He's like God--or a son of god. Or maybe he's a father god--or something like that," she replied vaguely. Her bored sense of disconnection with this story was so total it might as well have hailed from some abstruse wing of Mayan mythology.

"I think he was more like a second cousin god," one of her classmates joked and his eye-rolling exasperation suggested he was one of very few people in that room who had any sort of grip on who Moses actually was. That was when the teacher intervened, hoping to nip this humiliating exchange in the bud.

That teacher was older than me and so would have been raised, regardless of what kind of school system she attended, in a culture that prepared its young people with at least a grounding in the stories of the Bible. I wondered if this teacher felt some implication, some blush of tutorial negligence, regarding the part she and her colleagues had played in depriving these students of a workable cultural foothold? Or would she have construed this intellectual and spiritual hobbling as progress?

Herman Goodden is a full time journalist. He writes from London, ON.