I was thinking, of late, about of a book I use to teach when I was teaching sixth grade. My highlighted book of the year was always Watership Down. If you have not read this book, I would highly recommend it. The author, Richard Adams, has a way of taking simple creatures, like rabbits and birds, and weaving an exhilarating tale filling them with the human traits of insecurity, unsureness, hope, fear, courage, and confusion. Again, if you have not read the book then this discussion of the reading will not have much meaning to you but might inspire you to pick it up.
As a teacher in a classical, Christian school, I am constantly being challenged to teach everything in light of God’s word and to teach it from a Christian perspective. One of the greatest challenges I faced in teaching this book was identifing the worldview of the author so that I could compare his worldview to God’s word. Well, this book perplexed me. What is Adam’s worldview? What is he teaching us? These questions plagued me for years. I would get online and seek out anyone who had written anything on this book to get a glimpse of Adam’s worldview. I came up empty every time. The only thing I could come up with was that this was a commentary on the various governmental systems seen in our world today – communism, socialism, democracy, etc. I was not satisfied with this until one day in class it hit me like a ton of bricks; a two-by-four across the head. This was a decidedly Christian story, and I can prove it. You may not agree with me when I am done, but I will endeavor to share what I learned - but first a synopsis of the book.
The book takes place in the quiet English countryside and it deals with a group of discontented male rabbits living in a warren controlled by a rather semi-benevolent, rather absent minded dictator who uses his police force (called an owsla) to maintain control of a bulging warren of rabbits. There is one rabbit in particular, Fiver as he is called, who has a rather unusual gift. He has the ability to see the future and in this instance he foresees a serious calamity coming on the warren. He is not sure how, but he does know it will be soon. It scares him and others around him, but his conviction over what he sees is steadfast. He knows what is coming. He and his friend Hazel, the main character of the story, try to convince the warren’s leader to take the warren somewhere else, but their pleading falls on deaf ears. So they decide to leave anyway. They are followed by a number of other males (as females are not allowed to go with them) and they journey to a place called Watership Down. Along the way they are constantly challenged with hardships and danger, but they make it intact.
It doesn’t take long for them to realize, once they get there, that they are missing something – females (does), and that without them, the warren is doomed. No future! So they head to another warren filled with females to seek some that might want to start a new life with them. Little do they realize that they are entering into the most dangerous part of their journey. The leader of this warren, a colossal, dreadful rabbit named Woundwort, has no intention of letting his warren be disbanded in any way and he plans on bringing Hazel’s warren into his. He rules with an iron fist, and he is terrifying to all who come in contact with him.
Hazel’s warren decides to send in one of their own to gather as many of the females as possible and then the rest would assist them in their escape. The one chosen to infiltrate is a large rabbit named Big Wig. He enters the warren and to make a long story short, he and a group of females, with the help of the rest of Hazel's warren, escape. Now, this does not even begin to do the story justice, but that is not my purpose here. My purpose in this article is to show how this is an incredibly Christian story. But that will have to come in the next installment.
