Of Little Boys and Dragons

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. (1 Corinthians 13 v. 11)

A strange thing happened to me this week. I’d been talking with someone about the song ‘Puff, the Magic Dragon’ and then caught up with the news headlines only to find that Peter Yarrow (of ‘Peter, Paul and Mary’ fame) had died. Peter Yarrow wrote the music for Puff and Peter, Paul, and Mary made it famous.

I have to confess that I have always bought into the idea of the song being a barely concealed reference to smoking marijuana but, apparently, this is not so. Lennie Lipton wrote the original poem in 1958 as a student but claims to have known nothing about marijuana at that time. In his words: “Puff, the Magic Dragon has been interpreted – usually misinterpreted – time and again by many people.  When a work is ‘out there’ people are free to interpret it any way they want.  I think Puff, the Magic Dragon is about a little boy and a dragon.  I think there are strong parallels between the story told in the song and Peter Pan.  …  Peter Pan is a boy who won’t grow up and, believe me, I don’t blame him.  Jackie Paper, though, does grow up and so leaves Puff.”    

So, in Lennie Lipton’s mind at least, the song is about growing up and putting an end to childish ways.

Paul writes in similar vein to the church in Corinth. The things we see and experience now, he says, real as they may seem, are only temporary. They will not last. Reaching Heaven, he says, will mirror the difference between childhood and maturity; between incompleteness and completion; between seeing dimly and seeing clearly. His argument is that we should, therefore, focus most on those things that will endure between the two and, in particular, focus on love.

What Lennie Lipton’s words also teach us is that sometimes the simplest reading can be the correct one. Jesus did not over-complicate things for his disciples. He commanded them (and us) to love one another and said that as a result people would know them (and us!) to be his disciples. Not by belief, or doctrine, or ritual, or denominational affiliation but simply by love.

Finally, there is a sadness in the lyrics of Puff the Magic Dragon at what is lost in moving beyond childhood. How can you not feel for the dragon pining away in his cave? Yet that is not true of Paul’s words. We are not pointed towards what is lost but at what continues. Love carries us now and love will carry us for ever. We love now in the strength of the one who loves us. Let us do so for all eternity.

Prayer:

Jesus, I look forward to that time when I will move beyond this present life and whenI shall know fully, even as I am fully known’. May I be focused not so much on the present things, exciting and worthwhile though they might seem, but on the things that will last. Help me to love more and more deeply, that others might see my love and in it find you. Amen.