Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [134]
For better or worse, I have to play it straight with the kids. When Amy was four she woke up three nights in a row screaming that monkeys were flying in her window. That third evening she was being watched by a babysitter, and the following morning Amy said the babysitter told her Jesus would make the monkeys go away. That night the monkeys were back. How do you finesse that one?
Despite the depth of my parents’ faith, they never oversold the church. Two years ago I asked Dad about the origins of the Truth. “The workers will tell you it comes directly from God,” he said. “Actually it came from Scotland. Sometime around 1900.” After a lifetime of watching him walk so faithfully, the honesty of his answer floored me. Later Mom confided that after years of being assured by the workers that the Truth could be traced straight to the twelve apostles, the discovery that the sect was actually the offshoot of a group formed in 1897 by an itinerant Scottish evangelist named William Irvine did indeed leave them feeling deeply betrayed, but the one issue that nearly drove them out was their refusal to condemn people of other faiths. “We did not, do not, and will not,” says Dad, before going on to list friends, neighbors and acquaintances whose spirit he admires. When Mom and Dad were confronted by a worker over their dissent, Dad invited the man to throw them out. It didn’t happen.
I have only recently (and mainly because I am now responsible for two children) begun discussing many of these issues with my parents. My hesitancy is rooted mainly in simple respect. Having watched how my parents have lived their lives, I have no appetite for spiritual fencing matches. And although I doubt that I could, I have no interest in derailing gentle people. I do not discount Romans 14:13: “Let us not therefore judge one another any more: but judge this rather, that no man put a stumbling block or an occasion to fall in his brother’s way.” The lapsed believer does not shed the vestiges of doctrine.
But I’m glad we’re talking. During one recent exchange I said Mom and Dad’s refusal to condemn “outsiders” (Dad avoids the term, saying it has a ring of arrogance) made them to some extent skeptics within their own church. No, Dad said. Mother and I have misgivings about the church. We have no skepticism about God and His Son. And it struck me then that if none of us followed our parents in the church, perhaps it is because they refused to follow it blindly themselves. Their actions signaled to us that as important as it was to live in “the Truth,” it was more important to live truthfully. Before their children above all.
Because of their example, I am slowly turning the corner on why even some skeptics stick with church. “Men are better than their theology,” said Emerson, and while I can’t see going back, I will be perfectly happy—perhaps even relieved—if my girls become Quakers or Catholics or sister workers—as long as they treat themselves and others with care.
Amy still asks me for stories from my childhood. She’s done it often enough now that it sometimes it takes me a while to generate one she hasn’t heard before. There is the sensation of opening a dented recipe box to riffle through dog-eared index cards. But I dredge one up every time, because I know the inexorable hour approaches when the star power of the yammering bald guy will wane and sputter to nothing. Tonight when she asks, we are tooling down the darkened highway in our dilapidated fambulance, so I tell her about the time our second secondhand Volkswagen bus broke down on a winter night when we were on our way home from gospel meeting, leaving our double-digit family with no ride but the farm pickup. The next time we went to church Mom, Dad, and the toddlers crammed into the truck cab while the rest of us wrapped ourselves in sleeping bags and rode in the back. Dad bolted plywood sheeting over the bed to shelter us from the wind. Unable to sit upright beneath the plywood, we lined the crawl