by Brandon Beck

In 1924, British author AA Milne published a collection of poetry – When We Were Very Young – animal tales for his son Christopher Robin. His friend EH Shepard illustrated them. Number 38, “Teddy Bear,” was about a stuffed animal Milne had bought at Harrod’s as a gift for Christopher Robin after he and his son had visited the London Zoo and been enamored of their bear, Winnie. By 1927, Milne and Shepard had published four volumes of stories about Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends in the 100 Acre Wood. A century later, we have multiple stage plays and musicals, audio recordings and radio shows, comic strips, a Disney franchise and television series, and even a horror film based on Milne’s beloved Pooh Bear.

Psychologists and sociologists have correlated the characters of Winnie-the-Pooh to “personality types” as we are wont to do with our favorite characters in children’s stories. We believe that stories teach us about ourselves. Winnie-the-Pooh, for example, is a bear who is easy-going and tends to get along with everyone. He has been categorized as an Enneagram 9 – The Peacemaker. His pal Piglet, on the other hand, is quite anxious and cautious but is Pooh’s very best friend. He has been categorized as an Enneagram 6 – The Loyalist/Skeptic. We can go through all the characters thusly. We can even look into their Temperaments and MBTI.

Interestingly, some have even suggested that Christopher Robin might represent a mental health condition such as schizophrenia in which each of the animals is a personality within Christopher Robin himself. I disagree, however. I believe that children are infinite creatures of wonder, created in God’s image. The Winnie-the-Pooh stories provide an excellent insight into Christian Formation and Religious Education.

Remember Psalm 139:14 – “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” What if each of us is like one of the Pooh characters, and Milne’s stories teach us how to be God’s family and also teach us how to be leaders in the church by seeing the gifts and strengths in those we are sent to form?

Our classrooms are full of Tiggers and Pooh and Eeyores and Roos; they are each fearfully and wonderfully made. Our job is not to make them “normal”; it is to understand and respect them – to fashion them for their vocation.

Let’s get rid of the word “normal.” Historically, we have been taught to set a “standard” and “expectation” – we have “excluded” those who didn’t “fit” – and taught to the “norm” in the one way that worked for the “normal” learner. When we teach thinking of any student, behavior, or lesson as “normal,” we set ourselves up for classroom “problems.”

“Normal” is an obfuscated word, though. From Latin normā – a carpentry term relating to “carpenter’s rule” and “square,” first used in English to mean “perpendicular.” It wasn’t until the 1800s that statisticians transferred the word to mean “most usual” in groups of measurements and soon sociologists adopted it as a construct for “most healthy.” So let’s delete “normal.”

Comedian-educator Hank Green offers this help in deleting “normal” in his video blog vlogbrothers: “What’s really important is that we trust ourselves, and we understand ourselves, and we love and respect ourselves–and we grant that same understanding and respect to the people around us.”

I don’t think Green meant to describe our Baptismal Covenant, but he does: “strive for justice and peace among all people…respect[ing] the dignity of all human beings.”

He goes on: “The world is one of infinite continuums [NOT] of two shiny boxes. When those two shiny boxes break apart into seven billion shiny boxes, it’s actually pretty beautiful.”

As religious educators committed to justice and dignity, we are called to see every learner as a shiny box full of potential – fearfully and wonderfully made – Pooh or Tigger or Eeyore or Roo – their own unique, gifted part of our 100 Acre Wood of Church.