While I Was an Ugly Duckling

H.P. Paull's 1872 English translation of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Ugly Duckling" concludes with the now beautiful swan saying,

"I never dreamed of such happiness as this, 

while I was an ugly duckling."

The loneliness and heartbreak of before was gone once this creature came to know who and what he really was. I've been thinking about this today as I began a literature unit with my children on the works of Hans Christian Andersen. I can't help but correlate it to the happiness, healing, and purpose that comes when one knows, above all else, that he or she is a beloved and eternal Child of God, created in the image of Heavenly Parents, possessing a divine nature and enormous potential. That knowledge changes everything. 

I've also been considering this phrase in relation to the realm of education. "The Ugly Duckling" is in many ways autobiographical. Hans Christian was very different from those around him and was often rejected in his personal life. No one today would say that he wasn't born to write stories, yet he was miserable as a student and had difficulties in his education:  he was a poor speller, was treated badly, and educators actually discouraged him from writing. Not surprisingly, however, it was exactly those things that he was not--stiff and artificially formal in his writing like the Victorians would have demanded--that made his stories so universal and wonderful. His was a unique voice and genius. He was not the ugly duckling his educators might have believed, but a beautiful creature who, thankfully, discovered who he was, spread his wings, and soared through the stories he gave the world. How often in today's approach to children and education do we confuse ducks and swans (and hens, robins, chickadees) and shame them for what they are not and hold them back from discovering who they are? How often do we work against them instead of with them?

Of course, I can't discuss "The Ugly Duckling" without also stopping to think of how I treat others. Was there a time that I labeled someone, made assumptions at first glance? Was there a time that I only saw what was on the outside, or didn't value someone for who they are? And that brings me to a most profound quote by C.S. Lewis from The Weight of Glory that I return to again and again to remind myself to be careful, because no one should ever feel like an ugly duckling.

"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no 'ordinary' people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations -- these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit -- immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously -- no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner -- no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment."