At Saturday morning at eleven, we open an old door again.
Fr. Robert Griffin, C.S.C. — “Griff” — once filled this hour on WSND-FM at Notre Dame with his beloved Children’s Hour. And he had a wonderfully simple name for one of the strangest and most beautiful chapters in children’s literature.
He called Kenneth Grahame’s “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” “the animals’ God experience.”
In this Chesterton Radio Deep Dive, we follow Rat and Mole into the darkness as they search for Otter’s missing son, Portly. Somewhere along the river, Rat begins to hear music. Dawn approaches. The familiar world of The Wind in the Willows gives way to awe, fear, beauty and worship — and an encounter with the mysterious “Friend and Helper.”
Why did Grahame place this extraordinary mystical episode in the middle of a children’s book? Why Pan? What is the meaning of the animals’ worship — and why, afterward, are they given the merciful gift of forgetting what they have seen?
It is a story about childhood, creation, wonder and the possibility of encountering something too beautiful to explain.
And decades after Griff shared such stories on WSND, we return to Saturday morning at eleven.
Chesterton Radio — The Little Station on Commercial Street in Atchison, Kansas.
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