Seditious Faith

The Things We Teach Our Children

"Some people never grow up." As often as we hear that repeated, I doubt that most people give it any real thought. When we watch TV shows like "Bert the Conqueror" we are amused—to some degree or other—at the ways in which people don't grow up, but again, we merely assume that it's just for our amusement. After all, a little fun is good for us, isn't it?

Yes, fun is a part of having complex human feelings in a scary world. Without the "escape" of humor, for example, we'd all probably go nuts. But there's a sinister side to this, as well. It has less to do with the fact that we try to relive parts of our lives that were pleasant than it does with how we spent those times in the first place. Childhood is probably the most important part of that. In a very real sense, our world today is—and always has been—driven by our childhoods. Look around you. Especially, look around you at work. Our families, workplaces, and governments (not to mention religions) are run by adults who are really still acting as children, because they are still using the lessons learned as children by other: peers, elders, role models, hero figures, you name it. When you begin to study it, this aspect is actually pretty frightening. As children, we learn about honor and shame, about winning and losing, about good and bad, about "us and them", and a host of other things. We learn our prejudices there as well. We see movies with violence (and especially with violence as the proper means to address injustice), play violent games: playing games that enforce gender roles and expectations, and such as that. In Sunday School (or other such religious education settings) we also learn the stories that later make no sense, that are truly black-and-white, devoid of human nuance, that reinforce the belief in miracle over mystery (I've written about that earlier). We teach our children patriotism and that war can be "good," and that we (that is, those on "Our Side") have many enemies that are "bad."

There are, often, positive things that we teach our children, but it's vital to pay attention to the negative, divisive, judgmentalizing lessons as well. Patriotism and war are a good example. If you ask foot soldiers of WWII about their experiences, sometimes you find that the hopeful youth went off to wage war against a bunch of evil foreigners, only to find that childhood fantasies lasted minutes at most when fear and death became all too real. Some actually say that they aged many years in many minutes in the heat of battle. And yet we still speak of valor, honor, duty, and patriotism as though they mean the same things to us as adults as they do to little children. If we do actually grow up, we find our black and white world full of gray. If those in power want to influence us, they have to make things black-and-white again by supplying enemies and fostering distrust and hatred, just as we experienced as children. And, because we learned such things as children, we follow them. And, because they need to have power over us, the enemies are defined as the cause of many problems, and often to great effect. Our world sinks into the abyss just a little bit more… We are, it would seem, at the mercy of children wielding great power and influence. It is as though, now as adults, they are turning the world on its axis opposite to the direction it really must turn. What we learn as children helps it move backwards, toward the very things we know are wrong, counterproductive, and just plain evil.

But most of us know children, and we can teach them positive lessons that will, at the very least, I hope, confuse them, offering alternative views that might just take root over the years and begin to slow our backwards turning toward our own self-made doom. If we keep it up…and if we all try to take part in it, what we learn as children will not have to be what we escape "to" to avoid the problems of this world. We can live there all our lives just as happily…as children.

Miracle… or Mystery?

Easter has come and gone now…thankfully. It's a time of year when I get to spend a lot of time doing interesting—and sometimes wonderful—liturgical sorts of things. It always leaves all clergy exhausted. We're all glad it's over. But this year, I struggled a bit more than usual.

You see, I have begun to feel uneasy when someone tells me of a "miracle" that has happened to them or to someone they know. I mean, if miracles are real, then why are they so seemingly random? Why, in that case, is there so much suffering, punctuated randomly by "miracles?" Is it because God has a sense of humor that we don't understand, or if it's because of angels, then why are they so capricious? Why do people pray for a miracle to happen to one person, when so many others need them too?

Let me just say right here that, while I believe in our need to believe that our thoughts—and therefore our prayers—have some real meaning or power in this life, I do not actually believe in miracles.

But, then, having said that, let me point out that I am a big believer in mystery. You see, miracles are one-off events. They come from a source that can do these things and all we do is say thank you, accept the "miracle" and move on. If we want to, we can "celebrate" miracles, as do many religions. In order to do that we must relive the past, and retell the stories of the miracles. If the "miracles" were in the form of salvation—and they almost always are—then they saved our ancestors, and maybe they are the reason we are here to celebrate the miracles at all. But they are simply idols to our past. They teach us nothing, save the possible notion that a benevolent God smiled on our ancestors one day. And, it would seem, the really big miracles, the Charleton Heston sized miracles, are no longer on the menu for anyone. We are left with rituals that service the miracles of the past, as though they are idols to be worshiped. That is, of course, if we learn to accept them as merely…"miracles."

But let me offer things up differently. Because of the randomness of life, the almost infinite possibilities of nature, our limited acuity for perception, and the possibility that there actually are other potential sides or parts or facets to this universe that we can't (or won't admit to) seeing…because of things like that, the unexpected is always possible. Always. Even in the realm of what we consider—perhaps even scientifically—normal, there are always outliers, things that beat the odds but are still possible. People actually do recover from serious illness, even when the odds are stacked heavily against them. Once in a while, someone will survive a catastrophe that claims the life of many others. But for every one who survives a disaster or makes a completely unanticipated recovery from an illness death still waits. You see, these miracles may extend life, but they never cheat death. Death still wins…always. But what really is exciting about these occurrences is what we learn from them.

We never really get to "learn" anything from a miracle. Once it occurs we can be grateful and ritualize our celebration of it, but there's really nothing there to interact with, nothing to learn from. That's why it's so incredibly important to understand the importance of mystery. Once we treat an occurrence as a mystery we are allowed to ask questions about it, to interact with everything that surrounds it, to ponder all the hidden facts and meanings that are always part of it. Mysteries engage us—on personal and spiritual levels—in ways that mere miracles never can.

Easter is one of the very best examples. The "miracle" of Easter actually sets the whole story of Christianity up as a religious entity. But there is little of historical value to back it up, apart from what was written in scriptural texts (i.e., not historical) that themselves were written relying on a miracle to give them validity. People really "want to believe" in that miracle, perhaps because they were taught about it by people they look up to, perhaps because the Judeo-Christian ethic is such an important part of Western life. But let me give Easter a break for a moment. Just for a moment, let's say that "Nobody actually knows" what happened. What we do know is that whatever Jesus of Nazareth taught was somehow important enough that his followers overcame their abject fear of their own personal crucifixions to begin to pick up his work where he left off. Why? Well, it's been so long, and so much has happened in between, that we can never know. We are left with a mystery. And as a mystery, all of this is far more demanding, engaging, and compelling. Easter is a fantastic mystery…not a miracle. As such we get to allow it to "get under our skin," to teach us things about ourselves and whatever spiritual world we believe in. As a mystery, it demands that we study it—and ourselves—to look for clues, to try to figure it out, so to speak, even if that takes a lifetime. Easter is one of those incredibly BIG mysteries that actually will demand a lifetime's work.