So yesterday I'm at my church dropping off some books for the upcoming used book sale, and I run into the lady who runs the religious education department. "How are the girls?" she wants to know. "I haven't seen them in Sunday School lately."
"Yeah," I say. "Well, they've decided they don't want to go."
Her face takes on an expression of extreme concern.
"Oh, my goodness," she says. "Why is that?"--and I think, Well, you asked, and so I draw a deep breath and I say, "They said they thought it was boring." Her face looks, if this is possible, even more concerned, and she launches into a series of questions: Have they tried it lately? Have they been this year? What grade are they in now? What tactics have I tried to make them go? Am I familiar with the work of John Rosemond, the "traditional parenting" child care expert? Because sometimes, you know, children shouldn't be given a choice about these things.
And the whole time, I feel myself stiffening, growing more defensive, feeling more and more ill at ease--until, finally, our conversation ends and I get in the car and drive to the grocery store and sit in the parking lot for 10 minutes, stewing, while little puffs of steam escape (metaphorically) from my ears and my heart pounds. Somewhere in my head I am 10 years old again, getting dragged to church by my mother, who has enrolled me in a Remedial Education Class for Hellbound Children because I can't, I won't, troop down to the front of the church and confess my sins (which are what, anyway?--I was the original Good Doo-Bee) and get dunked in a tank of water to signal my acceptance of Jesus as my own personal Saviour in recognition of his atonement on the cross as payment for my sins, which was a transaction which made no sense to me then and doesn't to this day.
It took me a good 15 minutes to calm down. And now, a day later, here's what I wish I'd said.
My kids think Sunday School is boring because Sunday School is boring. I've looked at the materials, I've seen what they give them to do, and my eyes glaze over, too, just thinking about it. Does this mean I think church is total crap? No. I brought my kids to church because of what I value about it: Community. Caring. Support. Music they won't hear anywhere else. A chance to think about how we behave in the world, what's the moral aspect of that spat we're having with the neighbor, what are our obligations to this planet we live on, how can we help people around us instead of staying lost in our own itty bitty world and watching "American Idol." I thought maybe Sunday School would interest them long enough for them to realize there is this piece of literature called the Bible which might someday be worth a second look....and that it sits on a shelf with other pieces of literature important to other cultures, like, say, the Koran. Unfortunately, they got tired of it before they glommed on to any of those things, but that doesn't mean it wasn't worth the effort. And I suspect there will be plenty of chances for us to have some conversations in the future about some of these things, which I will be interested in having because I haven't figured everything out myself and I keep thinking about them, too. Ideally, I'd have loved it if they had stuck around long enough to realize that there are treasures of art and music to be found in church, or which can only be fully understood by knowing the religious context they were created in--but hey: my oldest daughter thinks Hillary Duff is the greatest singer on the planet. It'll be a while before we get to Beethoven, and fortunately church is not the only place you can find Beethoven.
And yeah, I'm passingly familiar with John Rosemond, and he has a lot of worthwhile things to say about child-rearing. Unfortunately, he also has this to say (a quote I took from his website just now):"You can't teach a child how to act without also teaching the child what you want him to think."
I have no intention whatsoever of teaching my children what to think, other than the obvious, like, say, that cutting in line is wrong and belching in public is gross. Teaching them how to think--yes, absolutely. Teaching them to work through their positions on questions, defend those positions, spot inconsistencies in their own logic and own up to them, learn to live with the consequences of what they believe--you bet. But if I had simply wanted a creature who would follow me around and slavishly follow my orders, I'd have bought a dog. And it doesn't matter, anyway, because I have two high-spirited and strong-willed little girls who have so far shown very few signs of slavish obedience, and while some days they drive me crazy this is for the most part one of the things I love the most about them.
So, no, my kids don't go to Sunday School. Maybe this will change. Maybe my oldest daughter will get to be a teenager and develop a crush on some boy she only sees at church, and suddenly develop a consuming interest in all things Methodist--but I doubt it. And I'm okay with that. Because, really, church is a really just man-made institution and a huge bureaucracy which happens to provide a framework for many worthwhile things to happen, but which is not, by any means, the only place those things can happen. And in closing, I offer this quote from Prince Siddhartha Gautama (563-483 B.C.), which I was not familiar with before this morning but which was passed along to me by (get this) a Methodist minister friend of mine:
"Do not believe in tradition because it has been handed down for many generations...Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, UNLESS it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense. After careful observation and analysis, when it agrees with reason and it will benefit one and all, then accept it and live by it."
I've thought it over, and I can live with that. And someday, when they're ready, I plan to offer this to my girls, too. And we'll see what they think.