MY TAKE ON POLLYANNA

I'm reading a Christian love story right now. Saw the DVD last night.

Pollyanna.

Christian love story, you ask?

Yes, that's right.

It was refreshing; it made you glad (Pollyanna's favorite word); it made you sad (I cried at certain parts); it was delightful. And it was a Christian love story. In fact, it contained two love stories. And it definitely was a Christian story. The characters were Christians. And there were several scenes in church. And Scripture was quoted.

For example, the minister said he was upset with the Ladies Aid Society because they wanted to move Sunday school to Tuesday--"And what is the point of Sunday school if it's on Tuesday?" he asked them with great chagrin. So he decided to preach a vindictive sermon to get back at them. In a conversation with Pollyanna, he mentioned this, and she exclaimed, "Oh, Reverend, you must rejoice and be glad. Don't you know there are 600 (I think that's the number she quoted) verses in the Bible that begin with, 'Rejoice and be glad?'" So he did just that, and the problem was mitigated. Another time, he asked the congregation to pray for Pollyanna to be healed.

All my life I've heard of the story of Pollyanna. And most of the time, it's been in a negative vein. Pollyanna is too simplistic, people tend to think. Pollyanna is laughable, people say. Pollyanna isn't real.

Not so.

Pollyanna is every bit as good as Anne of Green Gables. And Sarah, Plain and Tall.

When I decided to re-read the book, I went to amazon.com and found not only the book, by Eleanor H. Porter, but the Masterpiece Theatre edition of the DVD (as opposed to the Disney version starring Haley Mills--though I plan to view that one too). I quickly ordered it, and last night, as I viewed it, I wasn't disappointed. As I said earlier, I loved it.

In her foreword of Pollyanna, Newberry author Marion Dane Bauer says when she was asked to write the foreword, she wondered if she had ever read the story as a child. Oh, she knew who Pollyanna was, she writes. She was an "irrepressibly cheerful child." In fact, Bauer says the word Pollyanna is in every standard American dictionary and is defined as "an excessively or blindly optimistic person""--a rather negative definition, she says.

"In a world in which being 'cool' requires that every kind of enthusiasm be carefully hidden away," writes Marion Dane Bauer, "the young girl who played 'the glad game' with everyone in
town seems an odd candidate for resurrection."



But after reading it as an adult, she says she made an interesting discovery:


"Reading it was like opening a window to let in a breath of fresh air."


Like I said earlier, it reminds you of Anne of Green Gables.


"Pollyanna's situation and the way she rose to meet it, again and again, simply captivated me," writes Bauer. Bauer is speaking of Pollyanna's "glad game"--finding something to be glad about when disappointing things happen.


"I noted in particular that Mrs. Porter (the author of Pollyanna) wasn't advocating that we refuse to recognize the disappointments which come our way," Bauer writes. "Nor was she in favor of what Freud came to call repression. She merely suggested that, when handed a disappointment--crutches from the Ladies' Aid box when we had hoped for a doll--we nonethless look for a reason to rejoice in the good of our own lives. An early twentieth-century version of behavior therapy, perhaps?"


"No harm in that," Bauer continues. "And in fact, there might be a whole lot of good in it."


Bauer goes on to say that she has come to be fascinated by Victorian values. "Even in our let-it-all-hang-out days of the early twenty-first century," she writes, "there is something enormously apealing about that quiet gladness (Pollyanna's). Something enormously life affirming too. There is more to life than groveling in our own loudly proclaimed miseries. There is even something beyond cool. There is simple gladness." Then she says, "Read Pollyanna and rejoice!"


Why did I read and view Pollyanna? What got me interested in resurrecting her story in my mind? And heart?


That's for Monday's post.