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No Mummy, I want you to tell me all about God One rainy Thursday evening in November I drove with my 5 year old daughter Kiera to my boyfriend’s house for a sleepover. It had been my Grandmother’s funeral that day; a long, difficult and draining day. I told Kiera ‘I’m going to put some music on for a while, ok?’ Her reply was ‘No Mummy. I want you to tell me all about God’. I nearly crashed the car. Kiera’s home educated you see. So the car is often our classroom. We do practical learning on the road such as motorway junction numbers, road signs and things we see. We often count or do a few words in Spanish. Or, often Kiera says ‘I want to hear all about a, b or c’. Usually the topic is ‘the olden days’. That day she’d gone for the slightly bigger topic of ‘God’. In a way I was glad that she’d asked. She’d not been force-fed the Christian idea of God, like I was at school, so I could tell her a more open idea of what God might mean. Mainly; I panicked. Where exactly does one begin?! It’d be easier if I had a fixed idea of what God is. Simpler if I wanted to pass that idea, and only that idea, onto my child while she’s under my control and open to my indoctrination. Instead, I want to try and communicate something to her that’s essentially un-knowable. A concept that I struggle to make sense of for myself, let alone be capable of communicating it to anyone; least of all in the simplistic terms that a five year old child requires. We had the ‘who is Jesus’ conversation a few days later. That one’s so much easier. I don’t believe that he was a ‘special’ son of God anymore than the rest of us are. He was just a man, doing things of which we are all capable. I was able to be positive about what he did without it getting over-complicated. On that cold, miserable, November night I realised that the ‘God’ conversation is a just like the ‘sex’ conversation. I didn’t have to worry about giving all of the information in one go; only a brief introduction to the subject was required. Just so that you know, we’re still on the part where the sperm meets the egg with little-to-no explanation of how it got there. My non-denominational introduction to God went something like this. Lots of different people have a wide variety of idea of what God is and so they all talk about it in different ways. I said that I thought that God is a beautiful place where we all come from and where we go when we die. Kiera asked ‘is that where Grandma is?’ As I replied yes I realised, to my great relief, that Kiera was happy enough with that answer for now, as was I. |