The spiritual reading life of children.

To wrestle with serious fiction is to wrestle with God, says acclaimed children's novelist Katherine Paterson. Even children need to know their own depths.

For the past 35 years I have been a writer of novels for children and young people. My graduate school training, however, was not in writing; it was in theology and biblical studies. So when I was asked by this magazine, "How is wrestling with fiction a task in a child's spiritual development?" my mind went immediately to that scene in Genesis beside the ford of Jabbok. A sleepless Jacob is waiting for the morning when he will at last have to face his brother Esau, whom he had tricked years before and who had sworn revenge.

   Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the
   man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip
   socket; and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then
   he said, "Let me go, for the day is breaking." But Jacob said, "I will not
   let you go, unless you bless me. "So he said to him, "What is your name?"
   And he said, "Jacob." Then the man said, "You shall no longer be called
   Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have
   prevailed." Then Jacob asked him, "Please tell me your name." But he said,
   "Why is it that you ask my name?" And there he blessed him. So Jacob called
   the place Peniel, saying, "For I have seen God face to face, and yet my
   life is preserved." The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping
   because of his hip. (Gen. 32:24-31)

In our time, the spiritual life is most often thought of as a journey. In Ephesians Saint Paul speaks of it as warfare. But here in the Book of Genesis we have perhaps the most powerful image for the spiritual life: It is a wrestling match--not a struggle against the self, the world, or the devil, but a wrestling match with God. Then how could wrestling with the stories that I or others have written for them help children in the ultimate wrestling match?

First, I need to make clear that no one, least of all the writer, knows what a reader will take away from a story. The meaning of a story must be entrusted to the reader of whatever age. If we set out to teach a moral or spiritual truth, we are writing propaganda, not a story. There is nothing wrong with good propaganda. When we want to convince others of something we believe in, we will argue as powerfully and persuasively as we can. But we shouldn't confuse this effort with fiction, even if we try to cloak it in story form. We know ahead of time what the answers are, and we write to persuade the reader.

When authors write serious fiction, even if the reader is to be a child, they are struggling to find an answer for themselves. Usually, the book that results does not give a simple answer, but it broadens the way to look at the question. Because a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, it gives shape to something in human life that is chaotic and lacks meaning.

But even if, after reading a story, I feel I have come to understand what it means, I cannot impose my meaning on another person--no matter how old. There's a Sufi parable about a master who has just told his disciples a story, a story that, if properly apprehended, will open their minds to the next level of their training. When he has finished the story, one of the students asks the teacher what the story means.

In answer, the master asks him a question. "Let us say that you have gone to the market, chosen an especially fine peach at a fruit stand, and paid for it, but instead of giving it to you, the peach-seller peels your peach, eats the flesh before your eyes, and then hands you the peeling and the stone, what would you think?"

The baffled student replied, "But Master, I don't understand. Please explain the story."

Whereupon the master patiently repeated the story of the peach.

So what do I think wrestling with fiction may do for children in their wrestling with God?

First of all, it will expand and nourish their imaginations. We cannot see God. Indeed, all the truly important truths are invisible. A person with a stunted imagination cannot deal with the invisible. Books--unlike film, TV, and computer screens that bombard the physical senses--demand the user's inner eye. Perhaps a child can imagine a Creator who brings into being a universe out of nothing because she herself has created a world out of black squiggles on a white page.

Second, serious fiction (even when it's funny) is asking hard questions. When I wrote Bridge to Terabithia, I was asking why my son's best friend had to die. The book gives readers a chance to struggle with that same question. We pay a price for asking the hard questions. Pain is pain, even if it is only in a story. Jacob, we read, goes limping past Penuel. But without the struggle and the wound, we would also miss the blessing.

And finally, fiction allows us to know our own depths. In Eye of the Story, one of our great writers, Eudora Welty, reminds us that a novel "says what people are like. It doesn't know how to describe what they are not like, and it would waste its time if it told us what we ought to be like, since we already know that, don't we? But we may not know nearly so well what we are as when a novel of power reveals this to us. For the first time we may, as we read, see ourselves in our own situation in some curious way reflected. By whatever way the novelist accomplishes it--there are many ways--truth is borne in on us in all its great weight and angelic lightness, and accepted as home truth."

Until we see ourselves as we are, we cannot know our need for God. And if the writer has allowed us to love her characters, we can begin to trust God's love for us without despair.

In the film Shadowlands, C.S. Lewis' most troublesome student says: "We read to know that we are not alone."

Jacob, left alone by the ford of Jabbok, finds himself wrestling with God and knows he is no longer alone.

KATHERINE PATERSON, the author of 13 novels for children and young people, including Bridge to Terabithia and The Great Gilly Hopkins (HarperTrophy). Twice the winner of both the Newbery Medal and the National Book Award, she received the Hans Christian Andersen Medal for the body of her work in 1998.