Pater Familias … because I'm your FATHER!

God For Godless

November 3, 2009 · Behavior | Influences

Do you do religion for sake of kid(s)?

Defaulting To Faith Of Our Great-Great-Great-Grandfathers

“But I am Jewish!”

That was our sobbing Girl Child, age almost three, after I mentioned in passing that we were not what her beloved Jewish Community Center preschool was, i.e. Jewish.

A couple years later, we had dinner in the delicatessen closest to the Hollywood sign in LA, our home city until last year. GC looked up from her chicken soup and said, out of the blue, “Who was that baby?”

“What baby?”

“That baby at Christmas.”

She was thinking back to the living nativity scene at a Christmas Eve service, for us an annual concert and meaningful holiday pageant but not, you know, church.

The two incidents show a need for a family religion, without which our child would…

• Suffer for lack of tribal identity.
• Know zilch about our common morality, culture, and folkways. She should at least be able to ID Jesus, right?

Over her three JCC years, GC got some goyishkeit and declared herself only part Jewish. And she brooded over death and the afterlife and, all on her own, worked out a belief in reincarnation.

Weird in preschool, but she comes by it naturally. She’s got Religious Seeker DNA, big time, at least from my side. Among aunts, uncles, and first cousins alone, there are converts to Judaism, Sikhs, a Christian Scientist, spiritual Nudists, a former Scientologist now Russian Orthodox, and “Praise Jesus” born-agains.

It goes back. We middle-named GC after a grandfather who was a Methodist minister, like his father and mother before him. Two summers back we all attended the ordination of her Grandma B, now a Deacon of the Anglican Church.

Minerva and I are not particularly religious, especially compared to God-crazy rels. Still, we did some tepid experimentation. By background and early exposure, we leaned Methodist and tried it. Turned out to be limp and lifeless. No sale.

Then an ancestral faith from way back – talking 148 years here – nudged.  Quakers, that’s what direct lineage forebears once were. 

So I took in a Meeting (Sunday service) and then, here in the Unsuburb, more Meetings with Minerva and Girl Child.

Damned if we didn’t find our family spiritual home. Peace, comfort, sense of connectedness and sanctuary, nah, nah, nah. All there. 

We know almost zero about Quakerism, go one Sunday in six, tops, remain way iffy about God (at least I do), but it’s ours.

GC really likes it. We haven’t been to a Meeting for a while, and she wants to go back and even, Good God, officially join.

Join or not, she loves saying what she is.

And I will never, ever have to make her cry by saying she's not Quaker.

So do you do religion for the sake of your offspring?

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