My friend took me into the basement of the house he’d recently purchased, pointed to the beams above us, and said, “It’s an older home, but it has good bones.” The wood looked solid without any signs of discoloration or deterioration.
The next day, I went skiing with his kids, which had been the purpose of the visit. Riding up the chairlift with his ten-year-old son, I asked him if he had read any good books lately.
“The Giver,” he said.
That was a book I remembered well—one I had bought from the book fair in the library when I was his age.
“I liked the book, but it also made me feel weird,” my friend’s son said.
Twenty-some-odd years ago, that is what I had felt too, and I wondered if rereading it would have the same effect.
The Giver by Lois Lowry has received many accolades, including the Newbery Medal; it has sold over twelve million copies and has faced numerous bans due to its controversial content.
It is the story of the boy, Jonas, who lives in an ordered, modern society called the Community, where every decision is outsourced to experts, speech is policed, and safety is paramount. Marriages are arranged, children are assigned to parental units, and a committee of Elders selects careers.
Everything outside the Community is termed Elsewhere, and the citizens are forbidden from going there. Rudeness, lying, and privacy are also banned. Infants who do not meet development standards, those who make too many mistakes, and the elderly are all released to Elsewhere.
When Jonas is eleven, he describes a dream to his parents during the morning ritual about his friend Fiona. Mother tells him that these are the Stirrings. According to the Book of Rules, the Stirrings must be treated with a daily pill until he enters the House of the Old; it is a sterility drug that stunts his natural sexual development.
Each year, at the Ceremonies, children are given responsibility based on age until they turn twelve. At the Ceremony of the Twelves, children are assigned a career. Jonas is chosen to be the Receiver of Memory. He begins meeting with an old man called The Giver, who is the repository for all memories. The Community has been memory-holed; they only know a world of safety and sameness. Citizens are no longer able to bear memories because they are judged to be too painful.
The first memory Jonas receives is sledding down a hill. This would never happen in the Community because all the ground is level, the climate is controlled, and risks of any kind are averted.
Jonas begins to experience scenes of sunny beaches and sailing, but with the good comes the bad. There are also memories of war and death, two topics sanitized from the community.
Jonas asks the old man to give him his favorite memory, and without hesitating, the Giver imparts a scene to him. A large family is gathered in a large house instead of a dwelling. Children, adults, and the elderly are not secluded from one another. There are lights and decorations, all kinds of food Jonas has never tasted. The people sing songs and give one another boxes wrapped in colorful paper.
After receiving the memory, Jonas asks the Giver what the feeling was he experienced in the memory.
“Love.”
Jonas begins to learn that not only is the Community devoid of risk and death, but it is also devoid of color and love.
As the receiver of memories, Jonas is allowed access to all books, recordings, and information. He asks to view the release ceremony his father, a Nurturer, had for the smaller of two identical twins. He watches his father commit infanticide by plunging a needle into the baby’s forehead. (As I mentioned, the book has been banned many times). Realizing that being released is a euphemism and Elsewhere means death is a breaking point for the boy Jonas.
Jonas escapes the community and travels for weeks until he finds hills, and it begins to snow. Near starvation and hypothermia, he stumbles into a village, where little lights adorn the trees and buildings, and music and warmth beckon him from within.
The Community worships conformity and security. They have obtained a secret knowledge that allows them to control the environment and themselves.
The antidote Lowry offers to this, in both the Giver’s favorite memory and Jonas’s rescue at the end, is Christmas.
While Christmas has become secular and corrupted in many ways, if you were to walk down into the basement, you would see that even though it is an old house, it still has good bones. Those bones tell a story - for God so loved the world that the Logos was born of a virgin, in a manger, under a star, while shepherds watched their flocks by night.
Thirty-one years on The Giver reminds us that the stories we tell ourselves matter and that memories, even painful ones, should not be forgotten.
The old man on the cover is from Lowry's photo of Carl Nelson, a painter who lost his sight, similar to how the Giver loses the ability to see color after transferring it to Jonas.
Of all the things out there that you could be spending your time on, thank you for choosing to read my posts. Next Sunday, I will post another true story. I hope to see you then.
I love the giver growing up! Keep it up Nate 💜