MY HAND TO GOD

Talking to our kids about religion

When my daughter was four she had an interesting theological theory which she shared with us one bedtime: “God lives on top of our roof. He has very sharp teeth and wings, and He scares all the bad things away from our family.” When she told us this, I looked at her mom and said, “Well, she didn’t get it from me!”

I have to confess that we haven’t been a very religious family. When we were kids, Ellen’s mom and I did live in religious families—at least we went to church every Sunday. But after we each grew up left home, we just stopped going-- except when we were visiting our parents and on Christmas Eve. It wasn’t out of any sanctimonious (irony intended) aversion to religion per se; it was mostly just from laziness. I sense that many of you out there know what I’m talking about.

I also think many of you out there who have children might have felt the pressure from your own parents and society to give your kids a religious grounding. There seems to be some universal belief in a need to believe in something, even if it’s only atheism. Left to themselves, your children may develop their own religion based on a chupacabra-like deity with sharp teeth that lives on your roof. And who knows where that kind of free-thinking will lead.

Occasionally, Ellen's mom and I discussed the idea of going back to church and taking our daughter; you know, to expose her to religion. Unfortunately, that subject also made us face our personal attitudes about religion. Being a parent does that to you; it makes you wonder about God and all. I guess we could have just started drinking the Koolaid of organized religion again, letting someone else do the thinking for us. Or we could have dealt with the notion of faith directly ourselves. The first course was tempting, especially to two people as lazy as we were. It’s so comforting to be told what to think and what to believe. But the second had its appeal, too; do-it-yourself religious training. If home-schooling has become a widely accepted practice, why not home-churching?

Home-Churching

Of course this is not something I would advise for everyone. For one thing, our family has a direct line to God. It’s kind of cool, actually. We ask and God answers. Not everybody enjoys this access, so this gives us an advantage. For another thing, home-churching, like home-schooling takes an awful lot of attention. It’s hard enough just trying to balance work, parenting, sports, homework, robotics, swing-dancing, and all the other extra-curricular activities you’ve over-extended your child with. But to worry about the spiritual evolution of your children, too? Come on! There have to be some priorities! You have to save time for your kids to be kids.

But if you do have the time and you do enjoy a direct line to God, then why not home-church your kids? You have an unbelievable amount of power over their thinking. You can raise them as Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Mormons, Nondenominationists, Atheists, Scientologists, Zoroastrians, Animists, Shintoists, Pastafarians, or even Episcopalians. It’s your choice. Your have powers that are almost--dare I say it--God-like. You can even make up your own religion; there’s lots of precedent. God doesn’t care. How do I know that? See paragraph 5.

Here’s how it works: My daughter and I talk about God frequently. We don’t need to do it in a church or a temple. We can start talking about God in the checkout line at Home Depot, or in a Starbucks, or in the living room during The Simpsons. They are all hallowed places. Ellen usually brings it up by proposing her own, current view of what she thinks the nature of God is. Then I counter with my own current view. And we compare them. I have an advantage, of course, in that I’ve got some years on her and have an anecdotal religious education myself. I’ve also read the Bible all the way through (twice—both Testaments), as well as Thomas Aquinas, Milton, Augustine, the Koran, the complete works of Thomas Moore and Joseph Campbell, and the DK Big Book of World Religions. But I don’t bludgeon her with this weighty bibliography (well, I guess sometimes I do). The nature of our discourse is between equals, weighing theological hypotheses and testing them against logic and personal experience. It’s all so civilized--especially over hot chocolate. But well-endowed as I am with years of religious dilittantery, my daughter has come up with some remarkably original ways to think about God, ways that would have undoubtedly have got her burned as a heretic in sixteenth century Europe.

The result of all this daddy-daughter discourse is interesting. Having moved beyond her saber-toothed conception of God from when she was four, my daughter has developed a quite complex and sophisticated way of thinking about the Deity, even to the point of being able to carry two contradictory notions in her head at the same time; something it takes seminary students four years to accomplish. She’s done a lot more thinking about it than I had at her age, and so she is far more along in her spiritual evolution than I was. And she’s done it all through home-churching.

Be nice to each other, or I’ll stop this car!

I’m not worried about my daughter’s immortal soul. (Her mother may be worried, but I’m not.) I doubt very seriously if her religious auto-didacticism will lead down the road to idol worship and human sacrifice. And if I sense tendencies in that direction, I’m confident I can gently nudge her away from that slippery slope. The thing is, you don’t need to go to church or temple or mosque to instill a strong moral code in your children. All cultures, with or without religions, have clearly defined moral imperatives. And the amazing coincidence is that most of those imperatives are identical, even when separated by time and impassable oceans. And the most common imperative of all is, be nice to each other.

One of the most spiritually evolved and morally good men I knew was my grandfather, who was ironically a militant agnostic; he only went to church twice in his life (to his own wedding and then his daughter’s). But his favorite intellectual pastime was to argue about the existence of God. The funny thing is, I learned more about what I myself believe by talking to him than by all the other formal religious education I got during the rest of my life. In fact, I’ve known many spiritually evolved agnostics over the years. And all of them have, in varying ways, strengthened my own faith where my more devout friends have not. I know that drives all of them crazy.

So taking my own experience into consideration, it occurred to me that maybe this wasn’t a bad way to introduce my own child to her spiritual side. We didn’t need to take her to church. We didn’t need to give her strict religious catechism. We didn’t need to make sure that her beliefs were in accordance with some Federally recognized orthodox doctrine. We just needed to talk to her in a Socratic dialog, with give and take. If she herself eventually arrived at a relationship with God--or even a conclusion that she didn’t believe in God--then it would be with stronger conviction than just taking somebody’s word for it. And she’d be able to talk directly to God without an intermediary. Or not. If she wanted.

I’m just saying…

Of course, this isn’t to say that taking your kids to church or temple or mosque is not a good way, too. It’s obviously up to the individual family. As I grew up, I actually enjoyed the theater of the Episcopal Mass; the poetic Elizabethan language of the liturgy, the smell of incense, the plainsong, and the vaulting church architecture with its clerestories naves, apses, and narthexes (narthices?). It was all so medieval. Sitting there in church, kicking the pew in front of me, I used to daydream about knights, snorting warhorses, clanging swords, spurting blood, siege engines, and castles--all the while my dad assuming I was contemplating the beatific mysteries of the Holy Trinity. (Ha! Fooled him!) Church was thumping great entertainment and put you in a salvation mood.

But, as my mother so cynically put it, “Now, what’s all this got to do with Jesus?”

So, I’m just saying, however you introduce your kids to the spiritual realm, you should do it consciously, deliberately. It’s important. It’s important even if it’s ultimately for them to reject religion (as is their God-given right as Americans), so when and if they do reject religion, they’ll know what it is they are rejecting. And when and if they do accept [deity-of-your-choice-here] as their personal savior, they’ll know who it is they are accepting. It’s also important to do this for your kids so you can refresh your own attitude toward God. You know; the teacher being the taught, and all that.

It’s worked for me. In conversations with my daughter and my family, through reading, and overthinking, this is what I’ve gleaned so far:

1. God does not micromanage the universe.
2. God wants us to be nice to each other.
3. God is not a magician or a trickster.
4. Whenever you express love through an act of kindness, or receive love through someone else’s act of kindness, you are feeling the hand of God caressing your face.

Metaphorically, of course.

That’s it. At least for me. It isn’t any more complicated than that. How do I know? God told me.

Here endeth the epistle.