another thought

My previous post just sparked a remembrance.

As I was thinking about how adults communicate right and wrong, good and evil, good choices and bad choices to children, I remembered an incident that happened during my job.

I am part of group that does a presentation for 4th grade students about bullying, stereotyping, and prejudice. It's a puppet show performance that I introduce and then help perform. There is also a third grade program about physical and sexual abuse.

The students I see each day have almost always seen the previous year's performance, and sometimes have a question about it or related to it. They usually don't ask those kinds of questions until after the performance, while they are getting up and informally chatting with us. If a question or comment seems to indicate that there might be some issue going on at home or in the child's life, we take their name and speak to the school counselor to make them aware of it. Our boss follows up to make sure that happens.

During the intro to our performance at a particular school, a girl raised her hand as high as possible and for as long as possible. I don't normally take questions in the intro, but was confident enough in my ability to improvise and redirect things that I figured I would see what she was so excited about.

I pointed to her and said,"Yes...did you have something you'd like to ask?"

"Um yeah. If someone is a sex offender...does that mean they're a bad person?"

I gulped and took a moment before responding. I realized that she wouldn't be asking that question unless there was someone in her life who was a sex offender, and with whom she was unsure about what to feel towards them.

"Well....sometimes people make bad choices, but that doesn't mean that they always will, " I said, trying to find a way to reassure her and yet not endorse a sex offense.

"My mom's a sex offender. She did something bad."

OK...mental note. No more questions before the performance.

"You know, we have to start the show now, but I think that when we're done you should ask the counselor more about what you're thinking. I think he could really help you and would be happy to answer your questions. Will you go over to him when the show's over....as soon as we're done?" He was sitting in on the performance.

"Yeah."

"Great. I know counselors love to answer questions and talk to students."

I extricated myself from the situation and started the show. Oh...and she did speak to the counselor right afterward.

That moment popped into my mind as I mulled over what to tell children about views, choices and beliefs.

We can try and explain things in an even-handed fashion, but children don't usually see things in such a light. That girl felt she had to decide whether her mother was "good" or "bad". In her mind there was no middle ground. If I said sex offenders were "bad" that would have created conflict within her about how to relate to a "bad" person in her family.

And yet...don't we all have to do that. We all have people in our lives who we have difficulty with because it is hard to label them simply as "bad", because they aren't always bad. They can also be loving, funny, kind....and still have poor judgement, or addictions, or a never-ending need to cause drama.

As we get older, we learn how to hold those competing concepts of a person in our minds, separating out a person's choices from the actual person....but it's still hard and confusing.

So....explaining how God loves sinners...or how people can simultaneously be "bad" and "good" isn't a problem exclusive to childhood.

I'm still learning it myself.

Pop Quiz

On my blog I refer to my youngest son as Intuitive Monkey. Monkey...because he never stops moving and is quite silly. Intuitive because he has a grasp on abstract ideas and the consequences of them in a way that The Rationalist does not.

Both of my boys are incredibly smart for their ages, but in completely different ways.

The Rationalist is black and white all the time, without fail, inexhaustibly so. Rules and facts are hard and fast, never flexible. If someone is wrong, they need to be corrected. If something's unfair, it needs to be remedied. It's tough living with such a concrete person all of the time. Everything is always up for debate.

Monkey also absorbs facts and will correct others if he thinks he's right, but not nearly with the same passion and vehemence. Where The Rationalist never keeps a thought to himself, but opens his mouth and lets it all pour out, Intuitive Monkey is much more guarded and will actually say that he doesn't want to tell us something that he's thinking. As a result, when his thoughts do break out into speech, they often amaze us with their poignancy and insight. I always catch myself thinking, "Wow, there's a lot going on in there."

Sitting with him while he's learning is a wondrous experience. During a viewing of the Nova special about the colony collapse of honeybees, he would stop every few seconds and ask me to clarify a word or term. He had to be sure he completely understood what was happening.

Narration about the theories for the decline in bee population.

Intuitive Monkey:"...ep-i-dem-ic.......Mom..what's an epidemic?"

Me: "It's when sickness spreads quickly through most of a group , like people....or bees, and is hard to stop."

IM: "OK"

more narration

IM: "D...N....A......Mom....what's DNA?"

Me: "DNA are the instructions in our body that tell it how to work the right way."

IM: "Oh...OK"

and it goes on and on until he is satisfied that he understands.

A couple of days ago, in the midst of conversation about his upcoming Kindergarten Holiday Special, he plunged into another set of questions.

IM:"What's Hanukkah?"

Me: "It's a holiday that some people celebrate. They believe that, a long time ago, God made a day's worth of oil last for eight days in His Temple."

IM: "Why don't we celebrate Hanukkah?"

Me: "Well...usually only Jewish people celebrate Hanukkah."

IM: "Jewish...what's jewish?"

Me: "Jewish people are people who have different religious beliefs than we do."

IM: "Religious beliefs........what's religious beliefs?"

Me: "Religious beliefs are things that people believe about God."

IM: "Oh....so they believe different things about Jesus?"

pause

Me:"Well....they don't really believe in Jesus."

IM: "They don't?"

Me: "Uh...no."

IM: "Oh...so that means they must be bad people."

choking on my water

Me: "What?!...No...that's not what it means...." I backpedaled for a moment as I tried to figure out how to explain a complicated theology to a five-year-old boy.

"Remember how we talked about how God loves everybody, and how nobody's perfect...everyone's made mistakes?"

IM: "Uh huh."

Me: "Well, just because people don't believe the same thing we do doesn't make them bad people, or any different than us. We believe that God wants people to know about Jesus, so we tell people about Him who don't know about Him, but we always remember that God loves them. Do you understand?" I asked, unsure if I even fully understood what I was saying.

IM:"yeah....Hey...can we eat out tonight?"

end of theological conversation.

Trying to encapsulate the finer points of theology and culture into language a Kindergartner can comprehend has proved challenging. It makes me rethink the things I say and how I communicate them.

It wouldn't be so bad if I had some kind of warning, but these conversations crop up spontaneously, spurred on by the inner goings-on of a private thinker. It's like constantly being 30 seconds away from a Pop Quiz and you don't even know what the subject will be.

These kids definitely keep my brain cells hopping.

Unabated Curiosity

In my childhood home, staunchly standing in the living room, were two cherry-stained, Ethan Allen bookshelves. A mish-mash of books co-habitated on the shelves, except for two sections of chocolate-brown, leather-bound World Book Encyclopedias with gold lettering, which resided in their own shelves, high and lofty in the shelf hierarchy.

I would sit down and leaf through the volumes one letter at a time, learning all kinds of interesting things. I learned what the state capitals, trees and birds were. I taught myself the alphabet in sign language. I read up on astrology, learning that I was a Capricorn, my older brother was a Sagittarius, my mom was a Leo, and my younger brother a Gemini. OK...so not everything I learned was of the utmost importance, but I still was fascinated by everything I could read about.

Here I am, soon to be 34, and I am no different. I can chase down intellectual rabbit trails for hours, getting lost in Wikipedia, science blogs, and history articles as I cross reference terms I don't know and thinkers whose names appear together, trying to see the connections and understand how concepts take root.

I love it. I really should have been a researcher of some sort. Maybe in my next phase of life.

Last night I spent at least an hour and half following a trail from an article about crows, to an 18th century British philosopher, to an environmental belief/policy, and finally to a theologian. I guess all questions eventually wind up at God's feet.

Here's my stream of consciousness web track:

First I was here reading about crows and their life spans in the city compared to crows in the wild. I came across the term Malthusian Earth, which I didn't know, leading to the Google Altar of Knowledge. Not finding an exact reference to it, I clicked on a link to Thomas Malthus, confident that he probably had something to do with it.

Reading through that article made me realize that Darwin's concept of evolution had been greatly influenced and formed by Malthus, who was his senior by 43 years. Malthus proposed that the humans had to necessarily be wiped out by famine, war, and disease in order to have a balanced population and not overpopulate the land. He fought against poor laws in England as a way to reduce poverty. If poor people can't feed themselves and perish, then there is no poverty.

I know...it makes me wince to even think about it.

While reading through the article, a familiar thought occurred to me about the number of British thinkers, philosophers, and scientific atheists there are . What is it about Britain that produces these types of thinkers? Wondering if it was all in my head, I searched for the term "British rationalists" hoping to come across an article or news story.

I encountered this site, which didn't really address my point, but gave a list of important philosophers and movements. I spied the name Karl Barth and remembered that I had meant to look up more information about him based on a comment I had encountered a while back. I was off on another tangent.

Reading about Barth, and appreciating where he was coming from, led me to follow the links to neo-Orthodoxy and Soren Kierkegaard so that I could more fully understand the issues raised in the article.

I finally realized that it was late and I had to get to bed.

I was tired, but satisfied.

Now I want to buy a set of encyclopedias for the boys in the hopes that they'll satisfy their curiosity in the same way I always did.

Of course, once I visited World Book's site and realized that a set costs about $750, that hope was somewhat diminished.