Dr Seuss, revisited....

In my blog a few weeks ago I started with the quote from The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss ‘Today you are you, that is truer than true.There is no one alive, who is you-er than you.' I did some research on Dr. Seuss and found that he started life out as a cartoonist and illustrator, only beginning to write on 1937 when he published “And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street” my first encounter with his writings at the age of 6 or 7. This was to be followed by all his books that I could get my hands on. It is really only recently that I have realized that these books that I read and loved as a child are also theological in nature - but then again what isn’t!

I remember being so taken in ‘And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street’ with the imagination of the little boy telling the story. I, too, had imaginary friends who played with me. However I now see a deeper meaning in the story. Dr. Seuss, through this small boy was pointing out to all who read it, the mystery, wonder and awe, that is all around us and is so seldom seen.

‘The 500 Hundred Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins’ was probably my favourite. I loved the optics of the Bartholomew pulling off hat after hat after hat until at the end they changed becoming more and more elaborate. I can now see Bartholomew was perhaps the first civil rights protester I knew. Someone small and insignificant who wasn’t really even looking to be confrontational and was no danger to the king ended up being bullied by those in power. It seemed the mighty and powerful king however knew deep down that his power could be all too easily challenged. Does this resonate with anything we see happening around us in today’s culture? And does it perhaps harken back to what happened to that itinerant Jewish preacher 2000 years ago?

In ‘Horton Hears a Who’, Horton, the elephant, while sitting on the egg in Maisie Bird’s nest through wild weather, capture by hunters and even in a circus sideshow, keeps reiterating “I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant’s faithful, One hundred per-cent!” Does anyone else hear the echo of Matthew 5:37[a] Let your word be “Yes, Yes” or “No, No” in this?

And then, of course, we have ‘The Cat in the Hat’ - a retelling of the story of the Garden of Evil with a talking cat instead of a talking serpent.

The closest Dr. Seuss personally ever got to theology was as a left-wing political cartoonist. So was he really underneath a devoutly religious man or do the themes that I have found above in his books, just point out how the stories in the Bible speak to our everyday lives and experiences? You can decide for yourself. But for me, the wisdom we find in those biblical writings is that just that,wisdom. - We need to claim that wisdom and make it part of our story - just as Dr. Seuss did.

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