My son asks the most awkward questions. For example, this afternoon as we were heading home from school he says "Mom, if the baby's name was Jesus, why do people call him "Christ"?"
"That's his middle name" was the first thing that popped into my head but fortunately I had sense enough to keep that one to myself and simply admit that although it was a good question, I had no idea why Jesus is also known as Christ (and, if you were listening to Diane Rhem today, Buddha, Mohammed, and the Star of Bethlehem but those are things for another post by a religious scholar of some sort. I'm just a mom trying to answer an awkward question).
The Christmas holiday brings a lot of awkward questions. Some of them (what's a manger?), I can answer based on a childhood spent in church. Others (re: above) leave me clueless because the belief system that governs our household doesn't come with automatic answers. I can explain why we hang lights, have trees and give gifts, but the magic of light isn't quite what our cultura celebrates these days.
Also, I guess I'm a contrarian, because it doesn't bother me that they sing carols in my son's music class, and those carols include religious references.
I realized, earlier this season, that my kiddo has a completely different frame of reference than I did; that the nativity is not a story he knows forward and backward. He's never been a sheep, or listened to a high school Mary's plaintive "there's no room at the inn" or beheld a star in the night. And this makes me a little sad because, belief or no belief, there is a distinct cultural reference in the nativity story. When a friend invited us to see her choir perform in a church, the first thing my boy asked was "can we go there?" meaning into the church because somehow he has gotten it into his head that only the righteous are allowed inside.
On our very snowy drive home, he peppered me with more questions, like, "what's that about 3 wiseguys?" and "what was that one wo wo wo song?" ("Angels We Have Heard on High") and "Why didn't they just go to a different hotel?"
And I was inexorably sad because he genuinely didn't know the answers, and because I don't know how to thread the needle between explanation and acceptance, between narrative and doctrine.
On the plus side, however, this morning we discussed the Solstice and he did a classic 8-year-old boy raised-fist salute and said "Sun's back! Woo Hoo!!" Sounds to me like the beginning of a tradition.
"that's his middle name".
ReplyDeleteI think that's the best answer I've ever heard.
I went to Catholic school and couldn't come up with a better answer. :)