The morning was interesting. I seemed to get thumbs up from the older kids, but I think I completely went over the heads of the preschoolers. That's the problem with being intellectually theistic. Oh, and one of the 7-yo kids hit me with a whopper. “Is that a TRUE story?” I betrayed myself by saying, “Oh, it's true in the Bible.” That is, it's true as you read the bible as truth, but I'm not sure that it's true as you read the bible as fact. But that is just going to confuse the little ones and I am still getting a read for the theology that surrounds me, so I quickly drew out the bible and explained that it was part of a larger story about Paul and his travels.
But that's a question I never can answer. I am not of the “literally true” camp of Biblical adherents. Inasmuch as fables have morals, so the moral of this story is that you do not need to be afraid, ever, even when you're getting roughed up, locked up, and verbally abused. Nor do you need to be afraid when the walls are falling down around you. Believe in the truth, and the truth shall set you free. Did an earthquake really bust Paul and Silas out of jail? It's quite possible. It's not likely. But then again, nothing that happens that results in great accidents ever is likely, yet—these things happen all the time.
Have you ever had a great accident? Some vast cosmological aligning of good fortune that resulted in improbable blessings? A perfect coincidence? To what do you attribute it? Fate? Divine Providence? Or mere chance?
At any rate, the Bible is an interesting literary and historical document. More than that, however, it's as useful a spiritual guide as the dhammapada–but with *much* more action and adventure. I don't know how I feel about Paul and Silas being portrayed in cartoon-like goofiness while God's benevolence shines as a ray of smiley sunshine (do we really think they had tooth bleach back in those days, for that matter?). I think fully half my discomfiture at religion as a child was that it was made too familiar and saccharine. It is only as an adult that I could discern the artifice that surrounded these child-renditions, dumbed down and cartoonified, was a factor in sterilizing my ability to approach faith.
That said, I was extraordinarily happy when the reviews came in from the fourth graders. “Okay, that was funny,” one of them admitted after one of my punch lines. SCORE. Irony noted, but score nonetheless.
But that's part of the problem. It's hard to package religion for smart people en masse. We either float to the top of the right-wing hierarchy because we see the benefits of being there, or we watch it skeptically from the left, distrusting the institution by the rote force of ennui. By the time we wander back, we've done that whole “got married, settled down, sowed our oats, time to go back to church thing,” but I'm not sure whether that's transformational or still the same inertia.
Posted in Random by: Helen
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