• Hallow Your Speech Or Hollow Your Home

    Rid your heart of all deceit.  Never give a hollow greeting of peace or turn away when someone needs your love.  Bind yourself to no oath lest it prove false, but speak the truth with heart and tongue.  (Rule of St. Benedict 4. 24-28)

    Do not lie to your children.

    What about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy?

    When my first child asked me if Santa Claus was real, I told her quite frankly, “No.” She didn’t believe me. She argued with me. On Christmas morning she said, “See, Mommy! Look at all these presents. Where do you think these presents came from, if Santa isn’t real?”

    With the second child, I explained patiently that Santa is based on a real person, Saint Nicholas, who lived a long time ago and started the tradition of giving presents to poor children at Christmas. Then I got a phone call from my mother: “Do you realize that Anthony is going around telling people that Santa Claus is dead?”

    With the third child, I decided to let my husband handle this issue. He shamelessly played along with the whole charade. Not only Santa but the Tooth Fairy was real. He snuck presents under the tree and put excessive amounts of money under her pillow, inflating the value of teeth and provoking competition.

    With the fourth child, I avoided the whole problem. I told her the Tooth Fairy forgot about her tooth, but she might try selling it to her dad instead. I told her to ask her siblings about Santa.

    It seems to me that if children can’t trust you to tell the truth about something as inane as the Tooth Fairy, how can they trust you on more important topics? However, I realize that many people feel very strongly that a happy childhood includes belief in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and other specialized proxies.

    It’s one thing to let Santa live on in everyone’s imagination. It’s another thing to lie to your children in order to manipulate them into doing something quickly and without protest. Ten years later, the little-white-lie parents are the ones complaining about how their teenagers (shock, horror) deceive and manipulate them. How nasty those teenagers are, and how sweet they were, back in the days when they still believed everything we told them….

    The difference between the tall-tale-teller and the deceitful-manipulator is that the tale-teller wants the children to grow up and learn to distinguish reality from fiction. Nothing tickles a tale-teller so much as the efforts of a knee-high pipsqueak to put one over on him. And sometimes the pipsqueak wins this game, to everyone’s delight. It’s a game that develops the wits just like pitching softballs in the back yard develops athletic skills. It’s quite different from the morbid nostalgia of adults who hate to see the children maturing, for murky reasons of their own.

    But what really harms children is that worst form of deceit, “the hollow greeting of peace.” This corresponds to the pretense of love on the part of a parent who is essentially selfish. The friendly father who abandons his family is hollow. The effusive mother who neglects her children is hollow.

    There’s no point in glancing around to see if other people are affected. It’s in the nature of the thing to be invisible from the outside. Right now everyone looks fine. It’s all good! But when the relationships collapse, and the hollow family splays out into the open, you get a sickening glimpse inside.

    What is the opposite of hollow? The opposite of hollow is to be truly, through and through, what you appear to be on the outside. It means actually taking care of your children. That job includes teaching them to distinguish truth from falsehood, in whatever way you do best. You aim for their ultimate good, not your immediate convenience. It’s possible that no one around you will acknowledge that you’re doing anything worthwhile at all. But in the long run, integrity stands.

     

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  • King Once And King To Be

    It is love that impels them to pursue everlasting life; therefore, they are eager to take the narrow road of which the Lord says: Narrow is the road that leads to life Matthew 7:14. (Rule of St. Benedict 5.10-11)

    When my son was not yet six years old, he asked me at Christmas: “How can God be both everywhere AND a baby in a manger?”

    I said, “Yes, and he’s also a Spirit who is present to each of us at every moment.”

    He said, “That’s CRAZY.”

    So I said, “One day you’ll learn that the really dangerous crazy people make perfect sense.  Everything fits together neatly for them.”

    Fortunately, at that point he dashed off to something else, so I didn’t have to explain that the baby is an exiled king who will one day return, and we’ve given him our allegiance, which involves us in all sorts of struggles while we wait for him to reclaim his inheritance.

    Or maybe that’s not theologically correct.  Maybe he is already King of everything.  It’s just that his enemy usurps his territory and seduces the allegiance of his citizens—usually the easy way, with inducements.  For those who don’t respond to inducements, there are threats.  For those who disregard threats, there are punishments.  Some of these are worse than being condescended to at cocktail parties.

    Sell out?

    In other words, there’s a romantic loyalty in the Christian call.  Something about love.

    The Christian does not obey a set of laws, a system of ideas, an abstract principle or an impersonal force.  The Christian has committed to obey a person.  That person is Christ.  So, Christian faith is not an exercise of the imagination.  Nor is faith an intellectual assent to a set of propositions.  Still less is it membership in a club.  You do have both an imagination and an intellect, and you are free to join clubs, but faith is something else.  Faith in God is trust in a person.

    It’s exactly at the point of obedience that you start to wonder if you really believe in this guy.  Why should you put yourself out for someone you neither know nor trust?

    You shouldn’t.  If it strikes you that God asks far too much, proceed with caution.  Take a step in the direction of what he seems to want, and see what comes of it.  And begin to claim his promises for yourself.  It’s only as you begin to experience God making good on his word that you’ll begin to feel confident in him.  If you never expect anything of him, you’ll never know him.

    Also realize that if you are yourself untrustworthy, you will never know God.  “Faithless” means treacherous, fickle, false.  This sort of person is incompatible with God.  If you want to experience a relationship with God, be faithful in your dealings with other human beings.

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