Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, God…

Our granddaughters are wild.  They’re awful.  Let me explain.  They are 6 and 10, home-schooled as a continuation of a home that is centered on their development.  The day our daughter brought her first child home, she kind of warned us.  She was determined to be wrapped up in this child, totally dedicated to this child’s becoming.  We watched as the child was fed on demand, in virtually constant contact skin to skin, whether in a sling or in a co-sleeping bed.   We had raised our kids with a love that required them to tolerate distance from us.  They would be fed on schedule, by and large, not on demand.  (This was, I know, more my idea than Kathy’s, and perhaps my son-in-law is more deferent than I was, letting the mother mother as she is called to mother.)

The girls are, in the best sense, wild.  For ten years we have watched this constant relationship and feeding on demand develop into home schooling and readiness teaching.  The girls do what they desire.  Our daughter and son-in-law respond to their natural instincts and provide opportunities for them to explore them more deeply.  They grow as they naturally would without television, media, and the pressure of politics and society.  They need not manipulate; they need only to ask.  They need not throw tantrums or act out.  They simply express.  Now, I must say that watching them these ten years was sometimes tough.  I would have expected them to be spoiled, to be self-centered.  But they are kind, warm and purposeful in communication, and have long attention spans.  They are seen by adults and their friends as enjoyable to be with.

This home culture has also made them awful – in the original sense of the word – to have a sense of awe, of things bigger than themselves, beyond them.  Fairies have been a big part of a sense of mystery in their house.   When the ten year old was about three, her parents saw how enraptured she was with the big girls who were fairies in the Nutcracker.  So on her next birthday

, a “fairy door” appeared mysteriously on the night before her birthday, and she deduced that the fairies must have come.  The tooth fairy was, by the time her first tooth came out, logical, a subset of that larger mystery of “fairies”.  And of course Santa Claus operated from within that same mystery, that same unknowing believing.

God is not gossamer tutus or a red suit, though.  To stand leads to walking.  Walking leads to dancing, or running, or fleeing, depending on what moves us.  The sense of awe is a wonder-ful starting point, a still point in the turning world from which we come to know that there is more than we see.  Fairies can leave a gossamer curtain hanging in a doorway.  Santa Claus can leave presents and the tooth fairy a coin.  But what does an infinitely complex God leave as a simple, certain sign? 

 As the ten year old moves into puberty, what happens to those simple beliefs – the fairies and Santa Claus and such?  We watch her protecting her little sister’s belief, hiding her own doubt, the buds of her knowing.  We watch her joining, with surreptitious glances at her parents, the world of knowing adults…and our lost innocence.  And we wonder what she will do with the loss of this belief.  Will she seek a larger unknown or fall into a life on this lower plane of certainty?

And where are we?  Have we lost God, along with the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus? 

Next: agnosticism and the cost to love.