Comforting by prayer and Spiderman

By Joan Barton

My parent’s religion was a toolkit. It gave them the tools they used for dealing with the big stuff. Fear. Death. Evil. It was a framework that explained the existence of these things. It gave a set of rules that could be followed to reduce the chances of bad things happening and it explained why they happened, if they did.

By the time I got to know my parents, I think they were ambivalent about their faith. They may even have rejected it completely. But, like most of their generation, they had a pretty clear grasp of what they had been "brought up as," and they used explanations and concepts from their religious background when I raised the hard questions for the first time.

Nowadays, the young children in my life are being raised religion free. There are a number of good reasons for this. In all honesty, their parents do not have a religious faith, and in fact view organized religion as the source of much of the conflict in the world. So, they have decided not to mislead their children with stories they do not themselves believe. I can follow that reasoning and respect it, but I feel a lack of consistency, still.

The kids do believe in Santa Claus. They also believe in the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and I’m pretty sure that the four year old "believes" in Spiderman, which is why the lamp on his windowsill is lit every night, so that Spiderman will see it. The children believe at this point that an assortment of mystical and powerful figures watch over them. This is how the universe appears to work when you are four, or seven. Unfortunately for them, the powers in their universe confine themselves to pocket change, chocolates, and battery-powered toys. They are no help at all, when the shit goes down.

When bad things happen we need help. From the beginning of history, most of us, in crisis, have found support within a faith that we impose on our trouble so that we can make sense of it, and through prayer, which is a safe place to say anything, whatever we need to say, directly to the source of it all.

If I teach my child how to write a letter to Santa, but don’t teach him how to pray, I am sending him out in the boat, short one paddle. We all spend our entire lives, including childhood, in our own boats, in deep water. Like me, my child is exposed every day to everything life can throw. I can’t prevent that. Family members die; pets go missing; children can be cruel to each other. There are no "children’s portions" of sadness. Kids struggle, just as I do, with losses and anxieties, and search, just as I do, for ways to get through them. From time to time I, like many other people, have gotten through a long dark night on a simple prayer. If prayer can sometimes help, can sometimes bring calm in a storm, then my child needs to know how to do it. Otherwise I’ve taught him how to cross the road, but left out a lesson on how to cross the hard places in his life.

It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t fully "get it". It probably doesn’t matter if he doesn’t make it part of his routine, and it certainly doesn’t matter if at some point around puberty he emphatically rejects everything he was taught on this subject, and berates me for hypocritical idiocy. In the teenager years, when all answers are clear, and everything is possible, any kind of spiritual safety net I may try to provide will likely be tossed in the back of the closet with the knee pads, the bike helmet, and the virtues of moderation. This is normal, and necessary to the extent that I want my child to be adventurous when he sets out in his own life.

Ultimately, his life is his journey. I’ll show him all the safety gear I can find. He’ll pick what he takes with him in the boat.

Joan Barton is a former family lawyer and current rural entrepreneur. She can be reached via the Women’s Portal.

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