Of course, I should note that the twins more or less went to church every weekday: their daycare/preschool was a "ministry" of a large Baptist church and was unabashedly, evangelically Christian. Prayers were said before lunch or snack, the children colored pages of Bible scenes, and every note from the director mentioned Jesus. Once when I "helped out," the twins' teacher included me in the prayer: "We thank God for A and B's mom who helped us with snack today." Daycare was also the source of this lovely magnet, which still has pride of place on our refrigerator (it's just too weird to throw away):
I basically closed my eyes to what was going on at daycare for four years, because I needed the twins to go away for a while every day, and really, I thought, how bad could it be for them to say prayers at lunchtime?
OK, so here we are back in LIBERAL BOULDER and the twins have made friends with our next-door neighbor, who is 97, and her daughter. A couple of weeks ago the daughter, who I like very much, spoke to me on a sensitive subject. "I'm a follower of Jesus," she said sweetly, "and I would so love to take your children with me to church."
"Oh no," I said, caught completely off-guard. "No. No."
And then in order not to sound so harsh I told her that we were planning to take the children to church ourselves, as soon as we settled on one. This is sort of true, but only sort of. We've talked about going to church, and we've also talked about not going to church.
Rocket Boy would be happy never to set foot in a church again in this lifetime (he was raised Lutheran), though he has some residual feelings that all children should have a religious upbringing.
I, on the other hand, raised a heathen, actually like going to church (preferably a traditional Protestant church of the sort my grandparents attended), but I'm not a believer. I've thought about this long and hard, and I've finally accepted who I am: I don't believe Jesus was the son of God and I don't believe there are such things as "gods" for people to be the sons of. I like going to church because it's a nice quiet space in life and I always feel better after going, as long as it's not a conservative nutso church where the sermon is a veiled attack on Obama. When people in church talk about "God," I think about concepts like "Humanity" and "the World" and "Life." It works for me.
But I'm not sure if it makes sense to take the kids to church if neither of us believe. What are we conveying to them by doing this? What exactly is the point?
Then last week the twins came home from a visit to our neighbors saying, "She read us the book about Moses again."
"What? Who? What?"
After a bit more questioning we figured out that the daughter has been reading some sort of religious book to the twins every time they stop by. Great. Just great. Now how am I supposed to handle that? By stomping next door and yelling? I hate conflict. And I like the fact that we have a nice neighbor for the twins to visit. So instead, I taught them the nursery rhyme about Moses: "Moses supposes his toeses are roses, but Moses supposes erroneously," which they enjoyed.
I also decided that it was time to visit a church. I'd been thinking about doing it for myself: my life isn't very quiet and peaceful right now, and an hour of serenity on Sunday morning might really help me out the rest of the week. But maybe, I thought, it's time to take the kids too, as a defense against our nice neighbor. The church our neighbor attends is called Vinelife. It's a mega-monster church north of town, and I could write several more pages about the bad associations I have with it, but I'll just say: over my dead body my children will go to Vinelife. I needed to take them somewhere else, somewhere safe.
I asked Baby B: "would you like to go to church with Mommy?" and he said yes, he would. "I want to see what it's like," he said. Baby A said he would like to see what it was like too, but I said I could only take one boy at a time. I'm not crazy. I told Baby A he could go with me next week, if he wanted.
So this morning Baby B and I paid a visit to Boulder's First Congregational Church, which is a traditional but liberal church. According to their website: "Everyone is welcome here: believers and agnostics, conventional Christians and questioning skeptics, people of all sexual orientations, the despairing and the hopeful, those of all races and cultures, and those of all classes and abilities. Jesus didn’t turn anyone away—neither do we."
Of course, there's no mention of five-year-olds.
But we went. We sat fairly far back, and off to the side, in case we needed to leave early. I showed Baby B the program and gave him a rough rundown of what was going to happen. He was particularly interested in the offertory, because I said he could put the money in the collection plate. And in fact the promise of that was what kept him going, since the service was not at all kid-friendly. There were numerous prayers, rather desultory hymns, and even a "Time of Quiet," which worried me a little. Five-year-olds are not big on silent meditation. But he did fine. I rubbed his back and he leaned into me, and we were quiet and happy together.
Finally it was time for the offertory, and he made a great production of putting the dollar in the plate, which everyone around us seemed to find adorable. Just a few more prayers and hymns after that and then we could go. I was so proud of him and I told him so. Such a big boy!
But you know, I think it would have been OK if he had made a fuss and we'd had to leave early too. I think the fact that I had decided it was OK for that to happen is why it didn't happen, if that makes sense. I wasn't sitting there tensely waiting for a disaster to happen. I was sitting there loving my child.
I still don't know what we're going to do about church. Should we visit other churches? Should I sign the kids up for Sunday school? Should I tell our neighbors to cut out the Moses crap? I have no idea. But all day long I've been peaceful and contemplative and full of love for my family.
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