At work on his plane after surviving a crash landing in the Sahara Desert, the pilot, alone and exhausted, with just enough water to survive eight more days, is confronted by a small voice that says, “Please, draw me a sheep.”

So begins Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s classic, The Little Prince—a mysterious and often-mischaracterized fable. Most everyone has heard of it: after The Bible it’s the most frequently translated book of the twentieth century. I first chose to read it sometime during college, uncertain if what appeared to be a kid’s book was serious enough for my developing English-teacher chops. The author’s illustrations were compelling, colorful, and frequent, and helped make a book of only 83 pages a small commitment. I knew then that I didn’t really understand it, but I was glad to be able to tuck another classic under my belt before facing all those fearsome high school students who lived in my head.

It wasn’t until I was in my forties, a veteran English teacher, that I read it again—this time at the prompting of a student named Emese, who was visiting from Hungary for the school year and taking my senior English class; she was also part of a monthly student book club I led. Emese was smart, curious, unusually wise, and eager to speak about her beloved homeland. I remember one day when, at her request, she delighted our class with a presentation she’d prepared of Hungarian history and culture, even singing for us “Himnusz,” the profoundly moving Hungarian national anthem.

What I remember most about Emese, though, was her insistence that our book club read the “greatest book” she’d ever read, The Little Prince. After being cajoled by her for weeks for not thinking as highly of it as I should, I agreed that we would read it. One evening a month later, our book club had a lively discussion, all cozied into a student’s family room, munching on popcorn and brownies as we together unlocked the beauty and wisdom of Saint-Exupery’s classic story.

Emese was right: it is a truly great book.

It’s also extremely relevant today.  

Antoine de Saint-Exupery was a French writer and pilot who in 1940, after the Nazi invasion of France, came to live in the United States, renting various homes from New York to Hollywood. Besides writing two books while living here—Flight to Arras, a war story based on his own reconnaissance missions as a pilot, and The Little Prince­­­­—he advocated for the United States to enter the war against Hitler. Later, he rejoined the French Air Force and, even though he was banned from flying due to multiple injuries from plane crashes over the years, he somehow managed one last reconnaissance flight from the island of Corsica in 1944, heading for the French mainland. He was never heard from again and his death remains a mystery.  

The Little Prince, known as a children’s fable, wasn’t directed at only children, just as The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien was intended for mature readers of all ages. Tolkien had seen the horror of battle during WWI, and Saint-Exupery had also seen the worst humanity had to offer in the quest for power. As lovers of the human race, both authors used their gifts of writing to redirect humanity onto a better path.

The pilot character in The Little Prince had been an artist as a child but grew discouraged by the lack of imagination in the adults to whom he showed his pictures. Still, after being asked, the pilot draws several sheep for the demanding little prince, who quickly rejects each one. Finally, the impatient pilot draws a three-dimensional box with holes in its side and tells the prince, “This is just the crate. The sheep you want is inside.”

“That’s just the kind I wanted!” the delighted prince replies.

Saint-Exupery is making the point that adults often lack the imagination to see beyond what is visible to what lies beneath the surface. Einstein famously stated that “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” and Saint-Exupery, too, sees imagination as vital to our understanding of others. I can’t help but see that crate with the holes in it and wonder if the image came to the author during one of his night flights as he gazed down on the cities and villages below, their crate-like homes lit up from within. He knew what really mattered in the landscape below lay hidden inside those homes, full as they were of human lives—the mothers and fathers and children of the world getting ready for bed, saying their good nights and their prayers, trusting in the security of Shakespeare’s “sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,” the sleep that every human being needs no matter how dark or dangerous the world may be.

The little prince has come from a planet he inhabits alone, except for one very special rose, three volcanoes, and the terrible baobab trees: a voracious strain of tree, which, untended, “overgrows the whole planet. Its roots pierce right through. And if the planet is too small, and if there are too many baobabs, they make it burst into pieces.” Saint-Exupery likely had Hitler and the Nazis in mind with the baobabs, who were slowly taking over Europe. “It’s a question of discipline,” the precocious prince informs the pilot. “When you’ve finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend your planet.”

Saint-Exupery’s point rings especially true for American citizens today, many of whom have forgotten the importance of deliberately tending to our planet—politically, socially, environmentally. It’s painful to watch as our power-crazed, baobab leaders split our country and our world apart: hard-won treaties and alliances broken, innocent people deported without attention to human rights or due process, judges’ rulings contested, civil servants mercilessly fired en masse, environmental protections revoked, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid threatened, tariffs imposed on enemies and allies alike, constitutional norms defied. The shameful list of wreckage grows with each new day. 

We learn that prior to coming to earth the prince visited six other planets, each inhabited by only one man, possessing a singular bad trait. Three of these men are especially relevant today. One is a pompous king who absurdly sees everyone as his subject, commanding these subjects–who don’t even exist, except for when the little prince arrives–respect his every whim and tolerating no dissent. Another planet is inhabited by a vain man who sees the little prince as a potential admirer and demands he clap for him. Yet another planet is inhabited by a businessman so obsessed with numbers and ownership that he not only wastes his time counting the stars (the bigger the numbers, “Five-hundred-and-one million, six-hundred-twenty-two thousand, seven-hundred thirty-one,” the better), he also believes he owns them. When the prince asks him how he can possibly own the stars, the businessman replies, “When you find a diamond that belongs to nobody in particular, then it’s yours. When you find an island that belongs to nobody in particular, it’s yours. When you’re the first person to have an idea, you patent it and it’s yours. Now I own the stars, since no one before me ever thought of owning them.”

One of Saint-Exupery’s biographers, Curtis Cate, says in Antoine de Saint-Exupery: His Life and Times that the central message of The Little Prince comes from Mark 8:36: “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?” Indeed, each planet-dweller has lost his soul and appears as a shallow fool to the little prince.

Raised Catholic, Saint-Exupery understood that soulless, power-hungry men inhabit our planet as well. We’ve seen leaders then and now who think that the will of others simply doesn’t matter; leaders so self-obsessed they have no ability to imagine what it’s like to be someone else; leaders so lacking in empathy that they don’t care about the pain they inflict upon millions of human beings.

Men who think and talk and act as though they alone own the planet.

Sound familiar?

Yet the heart of Saint-Exupery’s message is a hopeful one about mitigating the damage of such men. It comes near the end of the story, when the prince is still searching for a friend. Even more lonely now, for he dearly misses his lovely rose back on his own planet and has made no new friends on earth, he meets a fox. The lonely prince wants the fox to come and play with him, but the fox demurs, saying, “I can’t play with you…I’m not tamed.” After asking several times what “tamed” means, the fox finally tells the little prince, “It’s something that has been too often neglected. It means ‘to create ties.’’’ Saint-Exupery’s point is that just as we too often neglect our duty to tend the planet, we neglect as well our duty to create ties with others, to form relationships with those who seem as different from us as a wild fox is from a lonely child.  As un-tame and self-sufficient as the fox appears, in the end he is just as lonely as the prince and cherishes their time together, saying just before the prince departs, “Ah!…I shall weep.”

Saint-Exupery is suggesting neglected relationships not only lead to loneliness but to world wars. Relationships are critical to counteracting the destructive work of the baobabs. What’s more, when we take the time to create ties between ourselves and others, life itself is enriched and takes on new meaning: “Wheat fields say nothing to me,” the fox tells his new friend, “Which is sad. But you have hair the color of gold. So, it will be wonderful, once you’ve tamed me! The wheat, which is golden, will remind me of you.”

Before the little prince returns to his planet, the fox shares two more truths. First, “Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.” Invisible essentials like our souls, love, and justice are like sheep hidden inside a box—visible to anyone with imagination and vital to our life together. Obsessed as we can become with visible things—fences, weapons, stock market numbers, rare earth minerals, oil, cars, vacations, and the price of eggs—what does it matter, to pose Jesus’ question again, if after we’ve gained them we lose the very things essential to our communal life as image bearers of God?

The fox then reveals the second truth, which is equally important: “You become responsible for what you’ve tamed.” I believe that is Saint-Exupery’s definition of love. In his autobiographical Wind, Sand and Stars, he writes, “We forget that there is no hope of joy except in relationships.” Such responsibility is lifelong, and, ultimately, loss is inevitable, a reality which makes our ties more precious. “To love is to be vulnerable,” C.S. Lewis wrote, and anyone who has ever loved knows that truth. This side of heaven, the love between us is also “ephemeral,” a word the little prince learns in one of his planetary visits. According to the scholarly geographer he meets, ephemeral means “threatened by imminent disappearance.”

***

The nation of Hungary meant little to me as an English teacher living in Holland, Michigan, until a proud student from there sang her national anthem and taught me to care about her country and its people. That’s how ties work: they link us together. We neglect them at our personal and national peril.

Back in 2004, when it was time for Emese to return to Hungary, she handed me a small, framed mirror, on which she had carefully etched the final drawing from The Little Prince: a simple, two-lined desert landscape with a single star above it. The pilot says: “For me, this is the loveliest and the saddest landscape in the world…. It’s here that the little prince appeared on earth, then disappeared.” Wise as she was, Emese identified with the emotional complexity of that landscape: longing to return to her family, friends, and home, she was also sad to be leaving the many lasting ties she’d created in our little Michigan town.

That mirror sits on a bookshelf in my study, its simple landscape and star reminding me of a distant nation—now, sadly, controlled by a power-thirsty authoritarian leader similar to our own—and of a student from there who once visited my town and created ties with us. It reminds me, too, of a little prince who once visited earth and learned what is essential to nurturing the soul. 

It also serves to remind me of one brave author-pilot, who in 1944 flew away forever into the darkness of war, leaving behind this last, urgent message for a world splitting apart from the damage that one cruel man in his insatiable hunger for power caused. Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s fable shines today like a guiding star for navigating this still-lovely, still-sad landscape we inhabit together.  

It’s a star whose light reminds us, finally, of another prince who visited our planet long ago, one who died to show us that real power has nothing to do with splitting people apart in hatred, but everything to do with creating ties, with binding people together in love. 

The Prince of Peace he is, God’s love made flesh, whose sure return we all await.