Mouths of Babes

The other night we took the kids out to look at the neighborhood Christmas lights. Every time we came within three blocks of an outdoor yard display nativity scene, Quinn's head would snap around instantly, neck craning, chest pressed with all his might against the seatbelt straps, saying with frantic energy, "I WANNA SEE THE BABY JESUS, I CAN'T SEE THE BABY JESUS!" At first we didn't think anything about it; he attends pre-school at a church where they've been busy explaining the Christian Christmas Story and he's familiar with the traditional manger scene. But it became a little ridiculous when he could pick out a nativity scene on a street littered with holiday displays that included giant blow-up snowglobes, Santas, snowmen, and light post-sized candy canes. Quinn has always had a knack for finding small details among clutter; his favorite books are the I Spy books (I haven't introduced him to Where's Waldo? yet - I need to mentally prepare for the nightly ritual of "reading" those). During our Christmas Light Tour, whenever he yelled to see the baby Jesus, we had to stop the car and let him gaze out the window, studying every detail of the nativity scene, but primarily baby Jesus; apparently, it's his newest obsession.

I don't identify myself as a Christian, but most of my extended family does, and we live in a region where the majority of the population does, too. I want the kids to have as well-rounded a world view as possible, which doesn't mean that I want to exclude any and all aspects of Christianity from their lives, but it does mean that I also want them to be exposed to other belief systems and traditions. As the years have gone by, John and I haven't exactly written a detailed plan for how we'll accomplish this, and I certainly wasn't planning on doing it in a discussion with a five-year-old, but after all the baby Jesus talk during the Christmas Light Tour, Bryce cornered me last night at bedtime. He lay there on his pillow looking from me to the ceiling to the top of his eyelids, and as always he used his hands to emphasize his deep curiosity and sense of confusion: "How could he be born a baby and then grow up to be a spirit?"

This is exactly how he started the conversation, so I was understandably confused, myself: "Who? What are you talking about?"

He sighed. He gets so tired of always having to explain everything to me. "The baby Jesus! I am asking how he could have been born a little baby and then grown up into a spirit! I just don't understand how that could happen. How did he do that? (Oh, sorry I hit you with my hand when I said that.)"

"Oh. Hmm. Well, let me see. He didn't grow up into a 'spirit,' per se. He was a human, which is why he was born a baby. Christians believe he was the son of God."

"Yeah, God is the same thing as Jesus."

"That's what Christians believe."

"What is a Christian, anyway? Oh, I know! Christians are people in churches who read the bible." and he held his hands up together in front of his face, palms facing him, creating an open book.

"Yes, some of them go to churches. There are also other people who aren't Christians who go to different types of churches and read different books, and believe different things."

"Like who?"

"A couple of them off the top of my head are Muslims and Buddhists. But there are a LOT more in the world than that."

"What do they believe?"

"Uh. That's complicated. And I don't know all the details, but Muslims call God 'Allah' and they don't believe Jesus was the son of God. They believe in a prophet named Mohammed, who taught people how to love God."

"What about the other people you said?"

"Buddhists?"

"Yeah, Buddhists. What do they believe? And I STILL don't know how Jesus grew up into a spirit!"

"I told you he didn't 'grow up into a spirit.' He taught people about God and about how to love each other, and Christians believe he's the son of God, which is probably why you're thinking of him that way."

"But that's not really true."

"Well, that depends on what you believe--"

"Well we don't know if it's true! We don't know what God looks like, or how big he is."

"And we don't know if God is a 'he.'"

"Or a 'she.' Or if God has lips or a crown....well of course he doesn't have lips or a crown!"

Lips or a crown? This is what happens when you have a religious discussion with a five-year-old. I nodded and prepared to leave his room, but on my way out the door, he stopped me again: "How come spirits never die? I mean, I know PEOPLE die, but how do spirits live forever? I don't understand."

"Dude, I have no. Idea. How to answer you."

"Well I know. Spirits are bigger than the sun, which is very big, very bright, and very hot. So that is how they live forever. Right?"

"Can't we just discuss how Santa fits down the chimney like other five-year-olds do with their normal, sane moms? Please?"

Thanksgiving, Ritual, Mystery: Family

The following is the first ever guest post, written by my dad. We roped him in and then tortured him with Blogger's penchant for losing hours and hours of effort and energy poured out onto the computer screen. We all seem to thrive on the extra pressure of NaBloPoMo, because even after days of complying with my kids' incessant demands, and now this "great idea of doing a guest post" for us, he hasn't kicked us out yet. Give him a round of applause, or offer him sainthood. One of the two, definitely.
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Sometimes, seemingly unrelated stories actually have significant relationships to one another. Recently, my experience has attested to this truism again.

This Thanksgiving, my daughter, son-in-law, and two youngest grandchildren visited us for the first time in our new home since my spouse and I moved almost eight-hundred miles away from them three and a half years ago. I currently supervise a chaplaincy program at a small Christian college. A couple of years ago, in order to allow a group of pagan students to have an opportunity to meet officially on campus, and therefore to exist as a group at all on a purportedly religiously-inclusive campus, and because no other member of the staff or faculty had the courage to assume this role, I agreed to serve as the faculty advisor for this group. As one might expect, though, many of the conservative and fundamentalist Christians on campus (students, staff, and faculty) genuinely opposed, and even now continue to challenge, my action—often questioning whether or not I am Christian at all. Despite the difficulties that I have experienced for that decision, I possess and have communicated solid theological and institutional rationales to support my position and justify my actions in this regard.

Other members of our staff, however, recently invited my wife and I to a costume party at Halloween. We decided to attend the party: my wife dressed as a beautiful witch and I dressed as Edgar Allen Poe’s Raven. We had a wonderful time.

During the Thanksgiving visit from my first child and her precious family, we have had many enjoyable experiences. Among those experiences, we built a campfire late yesterday afternoon, on which after dark I later roasted marshmallows with my grandsons.

Having a healthy (not necessarily good) sense of humor and having a history of teasing my own children (including my daughter, of course) during their childhoods, I had a mischievous thought as we waited for the campfire to burn to coals for roasting marshmallows. I told my son-in-law, as we watched his sons and my grandsons play in the yard, that it would be funny, if I wore my raven costume and emerged from the forest behind our home into the yard as the boys played. He told me that he would give me twenty dollars if I would do it. Needing only the encouragement, however, I went inside the house and put on the costume, while he and my daughter maneuvered my grandsons so that they would not see me run into the forest for this event. As I waited in the forest, he told my grandsons a story about a magical raven who would appear if they would call to him: “caw, caw, caw.” As my son-in-law told the story, I hid in the forest, just out of sight, behind some trees and bushes, dressed in a long black robe, wearing wings made of black feathers, a black beak, and a mask of black feathers.

Squatting behind the trees, gradually emerging from the forest, watching my grandsons’ reactions of surprise, wonder, and tense joy, I wondered about the relationships of the exaggerated stories about pagans to people dressed in black robes, fires in the night, and small children. I thought about how much mystery, beauty, joy, and wonder humans have lost because of the intolerance of various religions for those who discover the sacred in the natural world, but especially the intolerance and marginalization of divergent perspectives by Christianity itself. (I also briefly considered the potential proliferation of effects that might occur, if news of this minor mythic ritual reached the ears of those who already question my support for the pagan students on my campus!)

I can only offer gratitude again for the innocence and wonder of my grandsons, the sense of mystery that they carry, a comportment toward the world that invites all of us to explore the interconnectedness of all things: people, stones, sky, trees, ravens, fire, the sacred. This Thanksgiving, I give thanks for them and for my daughter and my son-in-law who gave us the gift of their presence, their mystery for several beautiful days.

Celebrating Eostre

When John posted the picture of the Jesus feet in the photo column on Good Friday, I flinched: "You need to take that down. People are going to make one of two incorrect assumptions: you're either being sarcastic and sacreligious, or we've misrepresented ourselves on the blog so far and we're actually 'religious'." Then I realized that 1.) this was our blog and we could post whatever random thing we felt like posting, and 2.) if anyone had a question or comment about the intention with the photo, they could comment or e-mail us. (Actually, they couldn't e-mail us since we have no contact information currently available on the site. As a side note, we can be reached at kristenandjohn at homeonthefringe dot com - we'll have that added to one of the side columns soon.) John will be posting a brief comment on the Jesus feet later, because he has something to say about that picture...even though after some reflection, I told him I feel conflicted about putting any sort of "justification" or "explanation" about what is another example of his artistic talent. There is no commentary on the pictures of the tulips, the shark, the shoes, or the buildings at night. Discussing the Jesus feet makes me feel like we're apologizing for something, and those of you who know me well know that that COULD NEVER BE. Apologizing is not my strong suit.

Having both grown up in Christian households (albeit different sects of Christianity), and living in a region where the assumption is that if you are white and middle class, you attend a Christian church and identify yourself unquestionably as a Christian, we are well aware of the social ramifications of any deviation from traditional Christian thought. We are also aware, though, of the lack of education most Christians have about their religion and its history, and the very foundation on which the religion is based. For all of the Sunday school classes and "small groups" and bible "studies" made available to Western Christians, there is a severe lack of understanding about the actual facts surrounding Christian belief. If, rather than quietly accepting this fact, you were to point this out to (the average) Christian, you would be scoffed at and told "it's simply a matter of faith." Translation: I don't feel the need to have facts and historical information, and if you do, there is obviously something wrong with you, you lazy, sinful, dirty infidel.

Luckily I grew up with parents who encouraged me to question and challenge belief systems. Today I'm sure they feel like they shouldn't have pushed this virtue so hard on me; I've probably taken it to a point they aren't completely comfortable with, considering the fact that they each still identify themselves as Christians in at least some sense of the word. John grew up with Catholicism, which, in my brief two-year experience attending Catholic services and even classes on how to shed my disgusting Protestant shell so that I could be considered worthy of eating cardboard-like wafers and drinking free wine from a community cup every week during communion, does not lend itself to questioning much of anything. So it wasn't until John had been exposed to several different Protestant churches and a few years of my own rambling, exploring rebel talk that he could clearly articulate his stance on religion in general and Christianity in particular. Neither of us have much opportunity to DO this, mind you; just the ability to do it. And it's been a very gradual approach to get us to this point; this is the first year we haven't attended a church service on Easter Sunday - even if our attendance in the past was merely the result of respectful acceptance at the request of another family member. We've educated ourselves and reflected over the years to a point that we could now be clear and logical if pressed by our family about why we don't attend a church, and why we wouldn't at least go to church on the major Chrisitan holidays. But it is only recently that we've felt confident enough in our stance that we could comfortably have this conversation if the opportunity were to arise.

None of this is to say that John and I have all the answers, particularly about parenting our young kids, in matters of religion and Christianity. We still observe the cultural and secular aspects of Christmas and Easter, and we talk with our kids about the Christian teachings surrounding these holidays, since the rest of their family is Christian and they are presenting us with questions about Jesus' birth and death stories. (And also because I believe that if they aren't exposed to a basic education about both the current prevailing religious beliefs and the lesser known ones, they will have no ability to do what John and I have done over the past seven years - mull over all the information and come to their own conclusions of what truth means to them when their brains are capable of doing so.) As they age, we'll also give them the historical context for these stories and how that context is so significant to the rituals accepted by Christians and non-Christians alike in our Western culture today. Wreaths, trees, eggs, bunnies, Christmas in winter, Easter in spring: all completely unrelated to the actual biblical stories given as foundational by the Christian church, yet accepted within the mainstream Christian circles as a natural part of the holiday. In reality, as I'm sure most people now realize, these aspects of the holidays that are considered purely "commercial" or "secular" have ancient pagan rituals at their root, and aren't technically "secular" at all. Similarly, the death, resurrection, and ascension story of Jesus in the bible has multiple look-alikes that, surprise! were circulating through more than one pagan community hundreds, even thousands of years before the preacher potentially named Jesus potentially lived in Galilee and potentially died during the reign of Pilate.

Yesterday we took the kids to an Easter egg hunt at a friend's house. She has a huge party every year where she invites the entire neighborhood and anyone she knows with kids. She provides a feast and invests in substantial amounts of candy, eggs, and Easter toys. She even has her front and back yards sectioned off for different age groups to allow the youngest children enough space and time to gather their plastic, sugar-filled treats without having the older kids knock them over in their mad dash for jelly beans. She carefully monitors her RSVP list and ensures that all the kids are present before starting the hunt. Once all the kids are accounted for, she gathers them around her, explains the age group sections, and then gives the "ready set go" okay before they all scatter wildly in search of their Easter loot. It's quite a sight, all those young kids in their fresh spring clothes listening intently to the hostess, the expressions on their faces exposing the most complex thoughts they have in their heads at the time - we want candy, and we get to go find some! Their faces aren't like their parents', whose tired, worried eyes can't be disguised even by the undoubtedly genuine smiles generated by watching the kids anticipate something so simple. Age and Responsibility and Life In The Western World has made disguise virtually impossible. But the kids have time on their side; they have a lack of experience with the constraints the world will place on them as they grow; they have appreciation for things their parents so easily take for granted - like the sun, the grass, and going on an expedition for bright blue and yellow plastic eggs.

For a brief moment yesterday, I understood what Bryce meant when he said he felt like we'd been here long enough already. He's getting old and mature enough to begin to experience the very first twinges of what I would ultimately call jadedness or discontent. The notion of springtime as a rebirth after the death of winter has something universally appealing to those human, age-constrained emotions. Whether you think of this time of year as Eostre's celebration or a remembrance of the Christian story of Jesus' resurrection, the universality of youth's newness and possibility is what the ancient holiday was originally intended to celebrate and to remember. Ultimately none of the specifics -- religious, secular, pagan, or commercial ones -- really matter all that much.