Christmas snuck up on me this year. It often does, and I know I’m not alone. The older I get, the faster time accelerates. I fully expect to wake up any day and find out it’s 2025. Which will be cool, because surely by then we’ll be able to teleport.
But Christmas snuck up on me in a new way this year. It snuck up on me in the form of Owen, almost four and 1/2, asking questions about God. Pesky Christmas carols.
Lisa and I are both singers, so when the holiday season rolls around, you’ll find us humming, whistling, and often belting out one Christmas carol or another. We even sing the occasional Hanukkah song, and I’m told I do a pretty decent Grinch. So there we were, innocently trading verses of Joy To The World, and I get to the part about “He rules the world, with truth and grace.”
Owen: “Who?”
Me: “Who what?”
Owen: “Who rules the world?”
Me: “He does.”
Owen: “He who?”
Me: “He God.”
Owen: “Hegod?”
Me: “No, God. Just God.”
Owen: “Who’s God?”
Me (inside my head): “Fuck. Really? Have we actually not covered this? Shit, I guess we haven’t. Crap, crap, crap. What do I say? I totally should have rehearsed this.”
Me (out loud, nodding head and looking thoughtful): ” … ”
Owen: “Who’s God?”
Me (still looking thoughtful): “Uh.”
Owen: “Can I watch TV?”
Me: “Totally! What do you want to watch?”
Ha! Dodged that bullet. Barely. And clearly we can’t leave this question unanswered. The kid needs to know who/what God is, but here’s the rub: I’m not sure I know who/what God is. More to the point, I don’t believe there is a God. At least, not in the Judeo-Christian, monotheistic, omnipotent, personified sense of the word.
I suppose this makes me an atheist. I have a hard time calling myself an atheist, because in modern American culture, calling yourself an atheist is a like proclaiming yourself as some kind of activist. It implies advocacy. Membership in a club. Part of the reason I’m an atheist is because I don’t really want to be in any of the clubs. I just don’t believe there’s a God. Which, by definition, means I’m an atheist. So there you are.
My wife and I are in different places about this. As I mentioned in my anniversary post, I basically excised Jesus from our wedding. Lisa didn’t fight me on this, but if it were left to her she wouldn’t have done it. We don’t go to church or actively practice religion, but if you ask her, she’ll tell you she believes in God. She was raised Christian. She went to Sunday school and attended church with her parents. I wasn’t, and didn’t. My family celebrated Christmas and Easter in our secular-humanist/consumerist way, but God didn’t much factor in.
So we come from different angles, but we’re not THAT far apart. My moral and ethical sense is basically in line with Christianity. Love thy neighbor, do unto others, have a few hundred wives, and live to be 350. All this stuff sounds OK to me. And as I said, I’m not an activist atheist. If you believe in God, that’s cool. I’m not going to try and talk you out of that belief. Unless you try and talk me in to something, in which case we may have a problem. A friend of mine who actually is Christian has a great bumper sticker on his refrigerator door (because there’s no way he’s sticking it on his Audi). It’s attributed to Gandhi and says “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.” This isn’t why I don’t believe in God, but it goes a long way toward why I don’t spend much time in church. That, and the whole don’t-believe-in-God thing. That tends to get in the way for the Christians. Apparently it’s not a requirement for the Jews, though, so there’s always that route. But I’m getting off track.
So, back to the issue at hand. What to tell my son about God? God is an important concept to understand, regardless what you believe. You can’t live in the world and not know what God is. So, like saying please and thank you, crossing the street, and the Beatles, I need to teach my son about God. And at some point he’ll need to make up his own mind about whether he thinks there is such a thing. But that’s for later. For starters, he needs to know what it means.
As you might expect, my escape from this discussion was short-lived. It wasn’t long before Owen brought it up again, likely in response to some other Christmas carol–related incident. But this time, I was slightly more prepared.
Owen: “Who is God?”
Me: “OK. You know that episode of The Backyardigans where Pablo and Tyrone go up above the clouds to see the goddess of weather to ask her to make it stop raining so they can play basketball?
Owen: “Yeah.”
Me: “And while they’re there they meet the goddess of naps and the god of laughter?”
Owen: “Yeah.”
Me: “Well, some people believe there’s just one God in charge of everything.”
Owen: “Oh. OK. Is there?”
Me (inside my head): “Fuck.”
Me (out loud): “Some people think so. Some people believe … different things.”
Owen: “Do you think so, or do you believe … different things?”
Me: “Well, I guess I believe … different things.”
And he basically let it go at that. For now. I’m sure this won’t be the last conversation we have about it, so I’m sorting out how to help him understand, so when it does come up again, I’m more prepared. I can’t fake this. I need an honest, true answer for my son about God. I think I’ll tell him I don’t believe there is such a being, but a lot of people do, and the truth is, I don’t really know.
I mentioned this to my friend Becky, who has three girls and has been my friend since junior high.
Becky: “Hm. That’s a tough one. Wait till he asks where you go when you die. I like, ‘When you die, you go back to where you were before you were born.’”
Me (channeling Owen): “In mommy’s tummy?”
Becky: “Before that.”
Me (still channeling Owen): “In daddy’s penis?”
She’s gonna need to flesh out this line of reasoning, I think. For my part, I’m open to any and all suggestions or advice.
For the first time today, I really missed my old job. I got an email from a friend and former coworker about her visit to the office where we used to work, to have lunch with people we used to work with. Reading her note, the pang of remorse I felt came as a complete surprise to me. Remorse? Or is it grief? Wishing I still had the comfortable job, comfortable income, comfortable perception of stability. Obviously the comfort I felt wasn’t real, but you don’t know what you don’t know.
