Spiritual growth

Edith knows her Bible stories often better than I do by now and can be counted on to insert details that I forget: the name of Ruth and Boaz's son, in which order Jesus' followers came to the tomb on Easter morning, who owned the tomb, etc.

Given that kids like the details so much, why do Sunday school curricula for little kids simplify things to the point of forgettable blandness? Last week the lesson was about Noah's ark, and almost all the kids in the 3/4-year-old class already knew plenty of details that they were trying to share. The teacher in charge for the day was trying to stick with the printed version of the story in the little newsprint storybooks. It was not unlike the version in Edith's bath book once upon a time: There was a good man. God wanted to save him and all the animals. The good man built a boat and brought on board two of every kind of animal. It rained and rained, and there was a flood. Then the flood went away, the man and the animals got off the boat, and God sent a rainbow.

Take home lesson: God made all the animals, and they are all good, because God made them.

Argh.

***

Today I was trying to parent while fighting sleep, and Edith of course picked this moment to bring up big topics.

"I don't really want to die," she said. "Jesus came back to life, but that was kind of...magic."

In the past Edith has been confident in the concept of eternal life after death. I think she's starting to realize that for most of us, it won't be quite like rising from the tomb three days later.

"I wish the people who have died could come back," she said. I wondered who she was missing.

***

A few minutes later she said that we can't hear God, but God is there. I agreed. She said that God was kind of like a light. With my Quaker sympathies, I agreed that that could be a useful way of thinking about God.

Figuring that she was experimenting with her image of the divine, a moment later I referred to God with a feminine pronoun.

"No, he. God is a boy," she told me firmly.

I said that people talk as if God were a boy lots of the time but that God isn't actually a person and therefore isn't a boy. I said it was okay to talk about God as either "he" or "she" because we don't really have the right words to explain what God is like.

"No, God is a boy," she repeated firmly.

At this point I was drifting out of consciousness, so I suggested she go ask Daddy. She liked that idea. She ran into the next room and I heard her say,

"Dad, I was thinking that God was a boy but Mommy was saying he isn't, so we were thinking that since you're a minister, it would be a good idea to ask you."

I fell asleep before I could hear the rest.

***

Earlier today, as she sat on the potty at church, she asked, "Mom, how did God make all the people and the houses?"

I said that people build the houses because God gives them the skills to do that, but that God makes the people.

She asked again how God made all the people. I suggested that God made the first people and made them so that their bodies could make more people--just like there was a baby growing in my belly right now.

She asked me to tell her about the first people.

I reminded her that there were two stories. One was about Adam and Eve. "Oh yeah, tell me that whole story," she said. And then she proceeded to tell most of it to me. One part that interested me was when she recalled that God cursed the snake to a lifetime spent crawling on its belly in the dust. "So it didn't live up in the tree anymore," she said. In the tree? She was certain. I had always assumed the pre-curse snake was a legged creature moving along the ground. Edith was certain the snake lived up in the Tree of Knowledge. Which was interesting.

So we got through banishment from Eden, and then she wanted to know the other story. The other one, I reminded her, was that first there were other kinds of animals on the earth and that the people came into being very slowly, over a long, long time, as God made some of the monkeys slowly turn into people. Animals and people continue to change all the time, but very very slowly.

"Oh yeah," she said brightly, "I remember you told me all about that." The narrative arc is rather more extended and lacking in high-drama details, but Edith was no less enthusiastic. Unlike many adults, she seems happy to hold both creation accounts together in her mind in all their incongruity. Her only concern was clarifying that God didn't change all the monkeys into people--that there are still some monkeys who are monkeys. Edith doesn't want all the monkeys to disappear.