Thanks for that! Brightened my morning.
...As I fell asleep last night, I wondered if the universal "good people" would have been appropriate. But in my rather jaundiced opinion, the word "good" is a treacherous and moving semantic target. The Jester would hear it and retort, "good at what, exactly?"
And "good" is fraught with a certain religious weight (especially in this country), and as one of this loose-knit community's declared agnostics I understandably am not attracted to all taht.
Helen has lately become fascinated by Jesus and God and death and souls and heaven. She loves to ask me questions on this topic, especially at bedtime. That puts me in a bind: it is an article of my own honor that folks should believe as they see fit. So I try to give answers that are compatible with what she hears at Sunday school and in the house of her devout grandmother ... leavened with what common sense I possess, biasing the answers as much as easily possible toward forgiveness and gentleness and good humor. One day she will have to come to terms with the axiom that the world is not a simple place, and especially that the rules aren't the same thing as the game. All that considered, I am fascinated and privileged to be present (and placed in a consulting position) as Helen, a young person of powerful mind and heart, begins to come to grips with that most wonderful and perplexing element of being human: spirit-awareness, a sense of the mystical.
I see my role in her spiritual development as being remarkably Zen: an unteacher. I strive to be there for her as she bumps up against the really big questions; the best I can do is show by example that one can lead a morally elegant life without resorting to one of the blister-packed dogmata being marketed as The Key to nailing the whole meaningoflife dealie.
And for me, an intensely verbal sort, the koan-within-the-koan is that this example is best conveyed without words, cuz putting the Big Questions into words invariably strips them of much of their size.
Oo. Time to Rinse. |
