Tell It, Don’t Read It

The world a child lives in runs on binary thinking. Yes or no. Black or white. Good and bad. Right and wrong. Pick up the nearest children’t book and these elements are within. J.K. Rowlings wrote a well known children’s book for her own children that became incredibly popularized in culture - Harry Potter. Like it or love it, the tale has a main protagonist and antagonist that sets up a binary tale of good verses evil. We truly never doubt the goodness of Harry. We truly never doubt the evil of Voldemort. This helps to solidify a child’s understanding of the world in binary terms.

Now consider a child’s Sunday school class and the lessons therein. We tell a tale of Noah and a massive boat called an ark. The way we teach our young is that Noah is good and no one else is. The story of Moses sets up Moses as the good guy cast out of Egypt and Pharaoh as the bad guy who controls Egypt. Even the stories that we tell of Jesus place a binary light upon Jesus and the Pharisee’s. Or the Jews and the Romans.

As children graduate into the world of the teenager the binary thinking is expanded into something more complex . Consider classic young adult tales like Twilight - instead of an immediate good verses bad there is a famous love triangle. And while each of the protagonists in this triangle have their good traits they also have their poor ones. It’s as a teenager that I first experienced Shakespeare and some of the more classic Greek tales that have a more complex understanding of the workings of the world.

Now consider a child’s time in youth group. The lessons are no longer binary and deeper, harder and more philosophical in their nature as does reflect the questions that are being raised by our children at this stage of life. They no longer ask if sex is right or wrong as they were instructed early on. Now they view sex as an inevitable by themselves and (or, perhaps) their peers. The question now is “how far is too far?” And for most, the binary of right and wrong is no longer the guiding factor. Something more complex is. And as they engage in these more complex questions, pursuits and choices they begin to rationalize decisions and regard outcomes as subjective in nature rather than objectively good or bad.

Perplexity. The luckiest teenager may encounter this is high school but most have to wait until college to begin recognizing that while it is immediately obvious that everyone has an opinion it is less observable which opinion is correct. In fact, its in this stage of life that we begin to question whether something is right or wrong is even the correct question to be asking. My best friend in high school was a little more than a full year older than me. I remember that he was asking questions that I never considered, regarding God and faith. In fact, I didn’t even have the tools to truly answer the questions when he asked me for my opinion of them. I wasn’t in the same stage, yet. I wouldn’t truly enter the stage until my first undergraduate Philosophy class.

Brian McClaren authored a book called Faith After Doubt where he outlines four stages of faith: Simplicity, Complexity, Perplexity and Harmony. Not only do these stages describe the journey that we take in faith but they also describe the journey that we take in life. McClaren makes clear that some people get stuck in the earliest of the four stages and never transition beyond them. While the author doesn’t propose this I would suggest that the longer we prolong these transitions the harder they become and the less likely we are to push through them. When the stages of faith line up with the stages of life we are more likely to make the transitions through faith more naturally as we make similar transitions in the other areas of our life.

What I’ve come to observe and understand about children from the reflection of my own childhood and various faith transitions if that we spend quite a bit of time and effort pushing the binary concepts of of simplicity into our children and fearing the questions that accompany the stage of complexity. Instead we need to be the ones that safely and lovingly assist the entrance that our children will take from simplicy into complexity. But how?

My approach, thus far, its to attempt to teach my children as little as possible that they will have to later unlearn.

The stage of simplicity is a necessary gift to children to begin to categorize positives and negatives and differentiate between threats and things benign. The world a child lives in will teach them these things. We do not need to perpetuate such categories, in the mind and heart of children, as it comes to their introduction to faith and scripture. Many of the formative lessons of faith for a child read the scriptures and tell the stories in such ways that a child cannot help but to categorize them within the stages of simplicity. May we allow such a thing to happen within the confines of the Sunday school room or the private Christian school that helps to teach them the black and white words of scripture. However, I advocate for the parent to approach it in an entirely different way. Rather than being locked into the black and white words of the page, may we rise, quite literally, do a view of the story that does not lock us into the binary of literalism but instead allows us to explore a big idea on the page in front of us.

And of course, the most natural place to start telling the story of God that scripture offers us is at the beginning. If we look at the scripture of Genesis 1-2 it would be easy to join many others and get locked into a battle of literalism and debate young earth topics or literal six day creation. Perhaps, though, that is because of the way we tell the story. And if we’re honest what is the point of emphasizing the literal details of a passage of scripture that both conservative and liberal scholars agree is poetry. Poetry is not meant to be read literally but instead it is meant to be read with the understanding that it is communicating something by the whole of its prose. This is an important reasons, then, that we read literately and not literally. The literature informs its intended literalness. Which means that based on the literature there are many other reasons to look at the passage of Genesis 1 & 2. It could inform us as to creation care. It could counter mythology claiming the world was created in violence. It could inform help us answer whether people are good or bad. It could inform us as to relationship with one another. It could inform as to the nature of our very soul. Honestly, what Genesis 1 & 2 can inform us of is only limited by our imagination.

Sounds good, Nick. But I don’t really understand what you mean. I don’t understand how to give a more literary telling rather than a literal one. If I read the scriptural story of creation and my child is in the stage of simplicity, will they not simply take it as literal? Yes. For this is essentially what the church does when it teaches a Sunday school class on the matter. It is what we have given the church permission to do. As parents our permission far exceeds that of the church. And instead of reading the scripture verse by verse I suggest that you commit the story to memory and retell it in your own words. In doing so you pass the tale from one generation to the next in the way that our Hebrew predecessors did - through oral tradition. I also suggest telling it this way to answer a specific question or to communicate a specific lesson. Let me give you an example:

Each night before bed I ask my kids, “Who made you?” They respond by saying “God.” I follow up by asking, “And how did God make you?” They respond by saying, “Perfect the way I am.” It’s our own family liturgy. It was the first thing I felt comfortable teaching my children about God. And you may say - but Nick, haven’t we all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God? I’ll simply remind you that the story of God begins in Genesis 1 and not in Genesis 3. In Genesis 1 after God has completed His creation he looks upon it all and calls it “Very good.” Indeed this world and the life within it was created as very good. One might even call the creation of God in those early moments, perfect. I cannot help but look upon children as the early moments of man and in those early moments, being theologically grounded, call them anything but perfect.

One night after the liturgy I looked at my daughter, J (who is four), and I said to her, “Do you know why I tell you that God made you perfect the way you are?” Her response was as I thought it would be, “No, daddy.”

I told her this story: Long ago before all that you know was here and all that you can touch was touchable the world needed to be made. There was just darkness and emptiness before the world was made but God looked into the darkness and emptiness like an artist looks at a blank canvas. He could see nothing except all that could be. So God looked at the dark and the empty and he created light. He created a great and wonderful light just by saying that he wanted to create it. Now there was dark and there was light. Then God made the Sun, the moon, the stars and the sky. He made the earth. He made morning and evening, daytime and nighttime. Then, while the world was empty God made the oceans and the land. And he filled the oceans and the land with life. The fish and whales and turtles and crabs of the sea and the bunnies and horses and lions and giraffes of the world. He gave them food. He made them grow. And all of this was good but something was missing: people. Of all the things God created none was like Him. So God gathered the dust and dirt of the ground and shaped it like play dough. He made people in His image and they were called Adam and Eve. Then God does something He didn’t do anywhere else in his crreation. God took the person He shaped from the dirt and He breathed His breath into it. And that is why you are perfect the way you are, J. Because deep inside of you is that same breath as the first person. God breathed into you when he made you. You have the breath and spirit of God in you.

J smiled as I told her this story. I bent down and kissed her and told her that I loved her and turned to walk out of her room. “Daddy?” she called.
I turned towards her and she looked at me and asked, “Were Adam and Eve real?”
“Some people believe so, J. But what really matters is what you think. What do you think?”
“I think so, Daddy.”

The telling of the story in Genesis 1 & 2, in this way allows me to create deeper meaning in our family liturgy. It is absent the details that allow us to get caught up in the literal arguments of binary thinking. Yet, still it communicates the deeper truth present in the scripture itself. It harkens back to a Bronze Age people sharing a similar telling of the story around a campfire as they pass it from generation to generation. And at the end of the story itself my little daughter is still going to as the binary question - is it true or false? Is it real or just a story. And here, rather than put forty years of life, faith, theology and deconstruction upon her I can simply ask her to tell me what she thinks. I can invite her to know that her opinion is just as important as her fathers.