Little minds ask surprisingly big questions. Miryam often springs them on me at bedtime, during our snuggle time at the very end of her routine. I’m sure it’s partially a stalling technique, but also partially because when we say bedtime prayers, she gets to thinking about this kind of thing.
Ever since my great grandpa died earlier this year, Miryam has been curious and pretty casual about death. She asks me a lot of questions about Heaven, when we’re going, who and what will be there, etc.
Recently, she asked if I was going to pack up our house when we go.
“When we go where?”
“To Heaven.”
“No, sweetie, I’m not going to pack up our house. In Heaven, Jesus will already have everything ready for us; we don’t need to bring anything.”
“Well, can I take my jammies there? I really love my Santa jammies.”
“I don’t know. You will have to ask Jesus about that. I haven’t been to Heaven, so I don’t really know exactly what it will be like there.”
“Will there be food there?”
“Hmm. I think so. Jesus says he’s having a big feast in Heaven!”
“Is there toys in Heaven for kids?”
“I don’t know…I think Jesus is so fun that you don’t even need toys!”
I have to tell her “I don’t know” in response to so many of her questions. Many of them I simply cannot answer. “I haven’t been there…I don’t know.”
But when she asks me questions that I can answer, I want to have good answers for her.
When I was a teenager, a friend of a friend and I were lightly discussing Catholicism over ice cream after a tennis match. He was telling me that he left the Church a few years before, because his parents responded to his big questions with watered down answers. The conversation affected me enough that I remember it pretty clearly.
He’d asked his parents what he had to do to get to Heaven, and they said something along the lines of, “Go to church and try to be a good person.” His personal study of the Bible had told him there was more to it, and he took his parents’ watered down theology as a microcosm of Church teaching: immature, incomplete, and totally unsatisfactory; in short, un-believable.
I didn’t have time over ice cream to convince him to revisit the Church to find out what she actually teaches, instead of allowing the stamp his parents left to remain his only impression of her. But now, as a parent, I do have the chance (and plenty of time, too; my kids are stuck with me for a while) to make a concerted effort to teach my children accurate theology, or in other words, Truth.
Of course I will have to bring some things down to their level. However, I do hope, at appropriate intervals, to work up from “Jesus is so fun that you don’t need toys,” to, “Union with God is the ultimate joy—a different, more fulfilling, and everlasting kind of ‘fun’ from the kind you have when playing with toys.”
But if I’m to have any success teaching theology to my kids—even the basics—I need to understand it myself.
Time to study up.
Lately, I’ve been working on reviving my habit from college of reading the Bible daily. And these days for leisure reading, I alternate my novels with non-fiction, much of it spiritual. My latest read was a booklet about St. Zelie Martin, which made me even more anxious to teach my kids about God, and emphasize His love, every single day.
And to answer their questions about His ways as accurately as possible.
So, when God comes up at bedtime, instead of insisting that, “It’s bedtime! We’ll talk about that tomorrow,” and then forgetting and never actually talking about it, which definitely conveys nonverbally that it’s not important…I tell her it’s even more important than a few extra minutes of sleep by doing my best to answer.
(To a point. More than 15 minutes of conversation does encroach too much on bed time. She’s three, after all.)
I ask my favorite Saint moms to pray for me as I attempt to instill theological truths on toddler and preschool level, and as I struggle to set an example of consistent study and fellowship with Jesus myself:
St. Zelie Martin, pray for us.
St. Monica, pray for us.
Sts. Felicity and Perpetua, pray for us.
Mary, Mother of God, pray for us.