heaven, hell, and screaming latkes
As anyone who’s read my blog for long knows, I am trying to raise my son without religion, while also being religiously literate and tolerant. The teaching-moments come up at odd times, or meet with resistance, or are forced upon us by religious relatives. They are full of significant baggage for me, but refreshingly free of it for him (so far). I’m basically going by the seat of my pants here, and it’s been going fine for the most part.
I had a couple teaching moments recently:
Listening to the radio in the car, my son heard the singer mention both heaven and hell.
“What’s heaven?” he asked.
I decided to go with a simple answer first, and see if he would be satisfied with it. “It’s the best place you could possibly imagine.”
“Oh,” he replied. That was easy enough.
“It’s the worst place you could imagine,” I said.
“So…in hell, I would have no toys at all.”
“That’s what your hell would be like, huh?”
“Well, can you imagine having nothing? Nothing!?”
Earlier, at a bookstore, I was reading Little FTA a variety of children’s books. I saw one that explained the traditional Joseph, Mary, and Jesus Christmas story. I avoided it at first, but then picked it up. I thought if I read it to my son, I could expose him to the Baby Jesus story on my own terms, and we could talk about it, before he hears it from grandparents on Christmas Eve. But to my surprise, he refused to hear it. Just wasn’t interested. I tried to explain that it’s important to know what his grandparents think about Christmas, but he would have none of it. So instead, we read The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming and Knuffle Bunny Too and Wacky Wednesday and enjoyed ourselves thoroughly.
4 comments:
My two have been asking for wacky wednesday a lot recently! I'm sorry to say, in some of the frames, I can't tell what's really wacky. In one, I think it's that a broom is in the hallway. But in my life, brooms and cleaning supplies are out and about all the time!
My son thought it was the broom, too, but there's something else. A portrait upside down...can't remember the rest.
This doesn't really have to do with your post, but I thought you might appreciate it. My friend is a nanny for a 7-year-old boy who said, "Know why Santa brings the presents? Because Jesus is DEAD."
rebecca- LMAO! That's hilarious. Sounds exactly something like my DS would say. He's rather anti-Jesus right now (I swear I didn't give that to him) and refuses to hear any Christmas stories that are at all Christian. I actually wish he would--he will hear them and have to interact with Christianity eventually and I'd like to talk to him about it. Sigh. Maybe next year.
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