Giving Up Weakness

With quotes from "The Monster in the Hollows" book 3 of the Wingfeather Saga by Andrew Peterson

In book 3 of the children’s series Wingfeather Saga, “The Monster in the Hollows”, author Andrew Peterson uses the imagery of an exterior transformation from human to beast to represent an internal surrender to our own weakness. A young boy named Kalmar is taken by a group of transformed humans called Fangs and allows a fear of failure, inadequacy, and weakness lead him to singing a magical song of submission, changing him into a small wolf-like creature. His family is able to rescue him, but the transformation sticks because it wasn’t forced on Kalmar, it was willed into being. His brother Janner thinks about the magical music and compares it to the power of good music his sister Leeli was able to make:

“Kalmar hadn’t just made an incorrect judgement, he had willed something very dark into his heart. He had meant to do it… [Janner] had seen power before in music, in Leeli’s power to still the dragons, to speak to the dogs in the houndry, and strangest of all to awaken whatever magic bound the Wingfeather children together, and allowed Janner to hear the strange voices. It made sense then, that there could also be music that carried dark power. Music dark enough, and powerful enough, to change a boy into a Fang. If that was true, it meant that every Fang had been a regular person once, and those people hadn’t had it forced upon them either, they had chosen it. Kalmar said that the Stonekeeper told him that it only worked if he wanted it to. So the Fangs were people who had welcomed it in.”

Kalmar doesn’t choose to wholly give himself over to his weakness though, and he is able to maintain control over his bestial nature, mostly. Later in the book, they find a bear of a creature, a cloven, which is wounded and largely mindless. Where others try to kill the bear, Kalmar sees something within it that leads him to hide it and nurse it back to health. The bear is able to sing the same song of despair that transformed him from a human into his current form, but with an important difference. He sings not to save himself from his weakness and pain, not to surrender his will to be free of difficult trials, but instead sings to protect the children; Janner, Kalmar, and Leeli. The bear is Esbon their father, presumed dead, tortured to the point of breaking and giving up, but redeemed in his desire to protect his children. This time when he sings he doesn’t turn back into a human, but instead is transformed into a brilliant golden bear now with a clear mind and enormous strength.

Esbon is able to protect the children, but is fatally wounded in the process. As he lays dying he speaks to his son Kalmar who has suffered a similar fate:

“Janner watched with wonder, as the two of them looked at each other. The great bear and the little wolf. The high king and his heir. The lost father and his outcast son. “Have they done to you what they did to me?” Esben asked. Kalmar nodded, “I’m sorry Papa, I wasn’t strong enough.”

“None of us are lad, me least of all.” Esben smiled and took a rattling breath, “But it’s weakness that the Maker turns to strength. Your fur is why you alone loved a dying cloven. You alone in all the world knew my need and ministered to my wounds.” Esben pulled Kalmar closer and kissed him on the head. “And in my weakness, I alone know your needs. Hear me son, I loved you when you were born, I loved you when I wept in the deeps of Throg, I loved you even as you sang the song that broke you, and I love you now in the glory of your humility.”

I cannot reproduce in a few paragraphs what Peterson paints beautifully through a whole novel and series, but the meaning is there all the same. None of us can overcome our inherent weakness alone. We all know deep down that we are meant to be something better than we are at this moment. But if we surrender ourselves to that weakness in a desire to no longer feel the pain of failure, it instead brings us to a pitiable state. When we give ourselves to the Maker, when we accept the grace of Jesus Christ, he doesn’t turn us back into what we were, but takes our weakness and sanctifies it into strength. There is no going back to some imagined previously clean state, instead we move forward into something better than we were even before our weakness and our failure. We can remember our past with peace as biblical scholar Dr. Jan Martin puts it. Not wallowing in the failings as we all are prone to do at times. With the healing power of the atonement all of us can glance back to learn from our past, and press forward into the beauty of the beings God created us to become.