further theological adventures with children

Bedtime the other night:

My seven year old: "Why did the snake tell Adam and Eve that they'd be like God?"
(Note: this is completely out of the blue--we've just finished praying a completely standard bedtime prayer along the lines of thank-you-for-a-good-day-and-give-us-good-dreams).
Me: Well, the snake was trying to get them to disobey. He had reasons of his own.
7YO: I don't like him.
Me: Good. You're not supposed to.
7YO: But the Bible says that we're supposed to love our enemies.
Me: Oh. It means our human enemies. The people we think are our enemies. Satan's a different category altogether.
7YO: So we're supposed to . . .
Me: Well, God loves us even though we sin. And those people that we think are our enemies, God loves them, even when they sin, and they're being mean to us, and God wants us to remember to see each other the way he sees us and to love each other.
7YO: (considers) So does God love Satan?
Me: um . . . Rob!

(gotta love being married to the pastor)

I really didn't mean to drop off the face of the earth

I've been busy with a great variety of good summer craziness, and then my computer got this Trojan Horse . . . will be without regular internet (or computer at all--I can't even log in) for the forseeable future . . .

Mongreloid: Happy Birthday, USA!

No, I'm not Dutch, English, Scottish, German or Swedish--though I can trace ancestors back from all those places. I'm not knowingly descending from any former slaves--but I know I wouldn't be the first white girl to be surprised on that score, and I'd be proud to have that stream represented in my blood lines. I can trace my ancestry back to 1640 and New Amsterdam, before it became New York. I need to go at least four generations back in any direction to get a first genration anything; all of my great grandparents were natural born US citizens. I'm married to a man who can trace his descent through a US president and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. This is the land of my heritage. I'm proud to be American.

And if our country doesn't get everything right, I'm proud that we get it a long sight better than most anywhere else on the face of the planet. I'm thankful to God that I live in a country that is committed to the principles of freedom and rule of law, however much we may squabble about the best way to carry them out.

I love the Fourth of July. I love bright colors and loud booms. I'm not so fond of the marches of John Philip Sousa, but that probably has more to do with a high school band director who was over fond of them than with the marches themselves.

This is the place I belong to. Me and my children and parents and grandparents and generations dead now. This is the land whose history I know, whose faults and accomplishments I can claim a piece of. This is my family, my country, my ground, my birthright, my responsibility. Happy 232nd birthday, United States. May God bless America.

Now for something completely different . . .

some thoughts on the differences between what we think we're saying and what other people actually hear. I'm actually posting this for an old college friend I was talking with recently . . . by way of making a point, I referenced a poem I'd written in college . . . she'd read it then, but of course didn't have it now. The poem, in both versions, is titled "After Jeremy's Wedding." Note: I judge the first version to be an utter failure, and the second mostly a failure. Taken together, they were an interesting learning experience for me though . . . the only reason I'm posting the thing is to give context to what I want to say about it afterwards. :P (Note: these had to be scanned in and posted as images because Blogger wouldn't handle the formatting. Click on the image to get a larger, readable, version.)

Version 1:

Version 2:

The story is this. When my brother married, my parents moved his twin bed (black iron) to my room and my double bed (white wood) to his room, which had become, of course, the spare room. My grey cat, Chester, didn't like it. And the white cat we had when I was little, Kitty-kitty, figures in there too.

Now here's the thing. When I wrote that first version of the poem, I thought I was saying something. I thought I was communicating something. Turns out the only thing I was communicating was confusion. I over-reacted against my natural tendency to run on by trying to clean the idea down to the bare bone . . . and ended up with bone powder. Or something. When I expanded on the idea for the second version, I felt like I was explaining the idea in excruciating and over-obvious detail. Frankly, I felt exposed. But in retrospect, the second version isn't all that clear either. It's possible at least to get an idea of what's going on, but I did not succed in loading in the paralells, the emotion and the history that I was shooting for.

But I learned (let's not get too obvious here) that in order to say something, you have to actually say it. What a startling insight! I realized the degree to which I think that I'm saying something, but what actually comes from my mouth or fingers is only decipherable within the massive amount of context that's rattling around in my skull. Often what I end up speaking is some sort of code . . . or something that seems obvious to me . . . and I forget all the internal conversation with myself that made that conclusion meaningful . . .

Taken a step further, I wonder how often we blame each other for not listening or not being interested, when the real problem is that we're not actually communicating what we think we are.

What if?

Among the various theological wranglings that float around Christian circles is this one--why would God create people if he knows that they're not going to choose him? Or more extreme--why would God create people ultimately simply to damn them? These sorts of questions get tossed around in Calvinist/Arminian debates, exclusivist/inclusivist wranglings and other places . . .

It recently occurred to me to wonder if part of the answer is this: what if God just doesn't want to rob all of us of the good that so many of these people bring to our collective existence? There are great works of music written by pagans, writings by agnostics, great works of architecture by atheists. The world would be a poorer place the spiritism driven art of Native American cultures, the slave-built aqueducts and Colosseum of Ancient Rome, Faulkner's "Sound and Fury." God seeks to give us all good things--first of all, himself, of course. But next in line, each other . . .

Swimming lesson

Tonight was the first swim lesson for our four year old. She loved it. She got to practice kicking while holding on to marshmallow sticks (a floating aid). The teacher held her up while she practiced paddling with her arms. She lay on her back and managed to float for a few seconds. It was splashy, fun, a great thirty minute exercise in water confidence.

After the lesson was done, the pool was open for a while for free swim. I slipped in with her. "Is there anything you'd like me to help you practice?"
"Oh, no thanks, Mom. I can do it. They taught me everything."

There are a lot of people out there a lot smarter than me

This post is in response to Jeff at the Atheocracy, via Jennifer at Et tu?. The question concerns how those of us with an intellectual bent interact with Christianity on an intellectual answer.

I had the advantage of growing up an intellectual (T) kid in an intellectual church. The church I grew up in was a plant to a university community. It was riddled with academics in all fields. We had professors of entomology, engineering, foreign languages, and veterinary medicine. Doctoral candiates in philosophy, business . . . etc. . . . The pastor preached sermons I half understood, during which I occupied myself listing all the words he used that I didn't have a clue about so I could look them up later. And there was my father who seemed to have an answer or a source for any question I could dream up.

What I learned as a child at an intuitive level was that for any question that I tried to engage, I was likely to get more of answer than I could handle. I wasn't the first person to tackle . . . well, pretty much anything. And for all that I was pretty impressed with my own intelligence, there were a lot of people who I loved and respected who were smarter and more educated on all these things than I was. Orthodox Christians who were not trying to hide or ignore anything had found answers that they found to be sufficient. Frankly, I found it a relief to know that it wasn't up to me to come up with all the answers on my own--if ever any of these things bothered me too much, I could catch up on the arguments and join the fray, but in the meantime I didn't need to reinvent the wheel.

As Jennifer noted, of course, knowing God isn't just a matter of thinking about him. It's a matter of loving and being loved. I had that from early on--from before I can remember. And part of the experience of knowing that I'm loved is being able to rest in the comfortable assurance that however deep I want to go . . . God is bigger. He's not afraid of my challenges or questions, and there are answers. Just knowing that the answers are out there is often enough for me.

As an adult, this has really continued to be my experience. I've yet to run across a new concern or question about "life, the universe, and everything."

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said,“See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us. (Ecc 1:9 & 10)

So intellectually, you might say that nothing has led me away from Christianity . . . I have found the answers that I have found and been given to be sufficient. And I don't presume that thousands of years of Christian and Hebrew theology and philosophy has done purely by idiots and naifs. After all, I'm not starting this convesation--I'm only continuing it.