teacher_mark
20th January 2005, 08:10 AM
It's my first post here. I've posted this elsewhere. So it's not that I needed the place to say it. It's more like a test, if you'll forgive me that. I suppose I brought this post to see how it would sound in this room, to see how the room would hear it. But you don't need to know any of that.
My daughter and I ran across a beautiful book of Hindu mythology. In text and brightly colored oil paintings, it told many stories of the life of Krisna. They were good stories and sometimes I wished I'd payed the $60 they wanted for the book so we could get to know them all.
The one that most caught my attention was of Krishna as a boy, teaming up with a friend to steal butter from the household kitchen. Here was childhood mischief presented in the same way-- in the same sacred frame-- as the other stories of defeating evil enemies and such.
In reflecting on how refreshing it was to see a story about a deity as a child, I realized that Christianity lacks this. There is Christmas, with the celebration of Jesus as a baby, then there's a little mention of a young (pre-teen?) Jesus questioning the priests when his parents take him to town, and then he's 30.
How the story ended up this way is pretty clear. No one knew who Jesus was until he started preaching at age 30, then after his death the stories of his birth and the questioning of the priests were added to his tale to fill it out. In both, but especially, the case of the birth story, the main purpose seems to be to establish that Jesus was special from the beginning, that he was born to be who he became.
This is a little like the story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, which I believe was invented when he became a politician. It is not a historical story, but says something about the character of the man which people believed to be true and important nonetheless.
But we can't treat a story like the life of Jesus as an historical account, not even as a slightly embellished one. This story (or set of stories) is taken by many to be the authoritative guide to life. My father (a liberal Presbyterian minister) explained to me years ago that the story of Jesus serves as a more functional guide to behavior than the ten commandments or even the golden rule. People, according to theories he'd read and accepted, reason better with stories than they do with lists of rules. Stories tell us in some elemental way what are the differences between heroes and cads. When the "What would Jesus do?" movement came along, I recognized it as an efficient characterization of what my father had been saying. To know the story of Jesus (and accept it as a guide) is to know how to act.
So now we return to the fact that this guide to life has little to say about how to be a boy or girl, a teenager, or even a young adult. Of course one can apply some of Jesus' teachings to children, and tell them to be guided by love and generosity, but that's relying on the rules approach. If we buy into the notion that we need a character in a story with whom we can identify in order to make use of moral lessons, then Chrisitianity fails to provide this.
One final note: Christmas doesn't really tell babies how to act, since after all they can't understand the story. It does function, however, as a celebration of the miracle of birth and the beauty of babies. I did not heard this addressed explicitly in my years of growing up in the church, but I don't think one has to acknowledge this function to be doing it. As people say they're "celebrating the birth of our Lord", they can simultaneously be celebrating babies in general. And as a moral guide the story perhaps calls on adults to treat babies with a certain kind of love and respect.
The toddler, the 7-year-old, the pre-teen, and the adolescent are not similarly honored. Christianity does not offer stories that glory in the beauty of the five-year-old stealing sugar and what his parents do to keep him under control (I think they tied a bell to Krisna). These common facets of life should also be exalted through sacred stories-- not only to tell children how they should act, but to celebrate them.
My daughter and I ran across a beautiful book of Hindu mythology. In text and brightly colored oil paintings, it told many stories of the life of Krisna. They were good stories and sometimes I wished I'd payed the $60 they wanted for the book so we could get to know them all.
The one that most caught my attention was of Krishna as a boy, teaming up with a friend to steal butter from the household kitchen. Here was childhood mischief presented in the same way-- in the same sacred frame-- as the other stories of defeating evil enemies and such.
In reflecting on how refreshing it was to see a story about a deity as a child, I realized that Christianity lacks this. There is Christmas, with the celebration of Jesus as a baby, then there's a little mention of a young (pre-teen?) Jesus questioning the priests when his parents take him to town, and then he's 30.
How the story ended up this way is pretty clear. No one knew who Jesus was until he started preaching at age 30, then after his death the stories of his birth and the questioning of the priests were added to his tale to fill it out. In both, but especially, the case of the birth story, the main purpose seems to be to establish that Jesus was special from the beginning, that he was born to be who he became.
This is a little like the story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, which I believe was invented when he became a politician. It is not a historical story, but says something about the character of the man which people believed to be true and important nonetheless.
But we can't treat a story like the life of Jesus as an historical account, not even as a slightly embellished one. This story (or set of stories) is taken by many to be the authoritative guide to life. My father (a liberal Presbyterian minister) explained to me years ago that the story of Jesus serves as a more functional guide to behavior than the ten commandments or even the golden rule. People, according to theories he'd read and accepted, reason better with stories than they do with lists of rules. Stories tell us in some elemental way what are the differences between heroes and cads. When the "What would Jesus do?" movement came along, I recognized it as an efficient characterization of what my father had been saying. To know the story of Jesus (and accept it as a guide) is to know how to act.
So now we return to the fact that this guide to life has little to say about how to be a boy or girl, a teenager, or even a young adult. Of course one can apply some of Jesus' teachings to children, and tell them to be guided by love and generosity, but that's relying on the rules approach. If we buy into the notion that we need a character in a story with whom we can identify in order to make use of moral lessons, then Chrisitianity fails to provide this.
One final note: Christmas doesn't really tell babies how to act, since after all they can't understand the story. It does function, however, as a celebration of the miracle of birth and the beauty of babies. I did not heard this addressed explicitly in my years of growing up in the church, but I don't think one has to acknowledge this function to be doing it. As people say they're "celebrating the birth of our Lord", they can simultaneously be celebrating babies in general. And as a moral guide the story perhaps calls on adults to treat babies with a certain kind of love and respect.
The toddler, the 7-year-old, the pre-teen, and the adolescent are not similarly honored. Christianity does not offer stories that glory in the beauty of the five-year-old stealing sugar and what his parents do to keep him under control (I think they tied a bell to Krisna). These common facets of life should also be exalted through sacred stories-- not only to tell children how they should act, but to celebrate them.