The moral imagination and the Christmas Rose

If you read my Morning Basket note today, you know I’ve been thinking about the moral imagination and the quiet power of story to shape our hearts. The Legend of the Christmas Rose gives us a beautiful way into this idea.

When Selma Lagerlöf wrote The Legend of the Christmas Rose, she gave us more than a beautiful Scandinavian tale. She gave us a window into the inner life of a family whose hearts are slowly awakened—first by beauty, then by goodness, and finally by something like grace.

That is the secret of a great story.
It does not preach.
It does not prod.
It does not hammer at the will.

Instead, it illumines the soul from within.

Charlotte Mason understood this deeply. She wrote:

“Imagination does not stir at the suggestion of the vile or the trivial, but she is ready to bestir herself at the touch of the noble.”
— Parents and Children

This stirring of the imagination — especially toward the noble — is what the writer Russell Kirk later named the moral imagination: the capacity to envision the world as it ought to be. It is a kind of inner sight, formed not by rules or lectures, but by encountering goodness in living form.

Stories do this better than anything else.

They give children pictures of courage, mercy, sacrifice, and beauty that lodge quietly in the heart. These are not merely ideas but affections — seeds that grow toward the light.

And The Christmas Rose is one of these seeds.

In it we see a family hardened by lack and fear, living on the margins of society. Their lives are ruled not by virtue but by survival. Yet when they glimpse the hidden garden — the one that blooms only on Christmas Eve — something in them softens. Beauty cracks open the possibility that the world is more generous than they believed. Grace enters through the side-door of wonder.

This is moral imagination at work.
This is formation through story.

And it is, I think, one of the deepest currents running beneath the kind of education many of us long to give our children: an education shaped not by pressure, but by Wonder and Wisdom.

Wonder is the child’s first language — the openness that allows beauty, truth, and goodness to reach them.
Wisdom is what grows when wonder is nourished by what is noble.

These two belong together.

They form the soil in which a child’s moral imagination takes root, helping them grow toward what is right not because they have been scolded into it, but because they have seen goodness and found it beautiful.

So if you read The Christmas Rose this Advent — with your children or alone — let it remind you that goodness often comes disguised as beauty. That the heart is shaped by what it loves. And that stories have a quiet power to lead us into the world we cannot yet see, but long for.

This is the work of nourishing imagination.
This is the work of mothering.
This is the work of Wonder and Wisdom.

If you’d like to read the story, I shared a beautifully formatted version here:

👉 Download The Legend of the Christmas Rose

And if this reflection stirs something in you — a memory, a question, a story of your own — I would love to hear it. Your words shape where this path of Wonder and Wisdom will go next.

 

With warmth this Advent,
Sheila Carroll