When Your Children Do Not Share Your Faith

This past Christmas, my two 20-something sons were "home", but not in one of the houses where they had grown up.  It was our new place in Lancaster, where Ann and I have lived for the past year and a half.  Though they both knew the place and seemed perfectly comfortable in it, I was keenly aware that it represented a kind of break for the two of them, and for us as well.  Gone were the rooms they had made their personal bunkers, retreats that each reflected their unique personalities, filled with books and posters and gadgets.  Instead, they bunked in a guest room and a study.  While there were a few tokens of their past lying about the house--Michael's cub scout badge display, a medal of achievement for his work in a national competition; Alex's college diploma and graduation cap--it was clear to anyone who might come by that they were, indeed, guests and that they lived their lives elsewhere, apart.

While I know full well that Ann and I both went through the same break with our parents at the same age, I found it more painful than I expected, not only because it represents the loss of treasured time and a particular way of relating, as it does for all parents, but also because I was keenly aware of how different their worldviews had become from my own.  This, too, is on some level, inevitable, but I found it particularly acute because I am an Episcopal priest, someone who has spent his life devoted to the Christian vision of the world, but neither of my sons consider themselves believers.  They have respect for Christianity, to be sure, but they have yet to find faith.  Though Alex remained active in our church youth group in his teens, neither he nor his brother took communion after the age of 14 or so.

There is a certain irony here, because I, too, diverged radically from my parents' worldview, as they did from that of their parents.  Growing up, I darkened the door of a church but twice, once for a Lessons and Carols service at age 8 and once in Germany with my dad at age 6.  Sunday morning at our house was for bacon and eggs, the Sunday Boston Globe, and the New York Times.  Church was not even an afterthought.  My dad was raised Roman Catholic and served as an altar boy, but developed an antipathy for the Church after watching his priest bring down a breviary on his brother's head for failing to learn his catechism correctly.  He went on to become a full-blown skeptic in college.  My mother grew up in a family of Scandinavian pietists who worshiped in a Congregationalist church.  Though she taught Sunday school in her teens, she had a myriad of questions her parents told her she should not ask.  Eventually, she grew defiant and rebellious, rejecting Christianity for an angry atheism.  While my dad has continued to show interest in philosophical questions touching upon religion, mom has absolutely no interest in discussing the subject and little other than contempt for religious thinkers.

But I, of course, had my own life, which took a different course.  At the age of 14, I had a revelation of sorts on a Cape Cod beach, watching the sun set with my dog.  I was suddenly enveloped in a sure and certain sense that God existed, and that he loved me and had created all the beauty I was seeing for me and for all the rest of us to enjoy from the inside out, in a way that he couldn't.  Suddenly I found myself haunted by religious questions, longing to know what truth lay behind the Christmas carols I had always loved.  I remained a seeker until my senior year in high school, when an invitation to a prayer meeting changed my life.  I kept going to that prayer meeting, in the hope I would discover something.  One night I left the meeting to ask God to reveal the truth to me and felt as if the spirit of Jesus had followed me home to confront me.  The tearful confession of faith I made that night would one day, after a long, meandering trek, lead me to the door of an Episcopal church in New York City, where I was confirmed... and which would eventually sponsor me for ordination to the priesthood.

For me, Christianity is a beautiful vision.  It helps me make sense of suffering.  It gives me a sense of belonging: I do not feel alone in the universe, but cared for by its very author.  It fills everything with mystery, longing, and hope.  It gives me courage to move beyond my fears and anxieties, to grow and to risk.  As St. Augustine once said, I believe in it "as I believe in the rising sun; not because I see it, but [because] by it I can see all else." It pains me to think my sons (not to mention my parents) do not share it.  I find myself asking how I failed, wondering aloud why I could not find the words or live the life that would reveal to them this marvelous truth.  It is true that, aside from reading them occasional Bible stories, singing them to sleep with "Amazing Grace" or "Be Thou My Vision," and saying grace at meals, I did not take a very proactive approach to their Christian formation.  They attended church, they went to Sunday school, to be sure, but it seems to have had little effect, beyond giving them a rudimentary knowledge of Christian doctrine.  The joy, the vision, was not contagious.  I could not pass it on.  And for that, I am inclined to blame myself.

But neither my parents nor theirs before them were able to "pass on" their vision either.  Perhaps it is not something you can teach; perhaps it must be experienced.  While we baptize our children, it remains to them to adopt the baptismal covenant as their own and make a mature affirmation of faith.  It is something they must discover for themselves.  They too have their own lives, their own journeys.  It is not for us to say whom they will meet upon the road.

It is a mystery to me why God corners some of us, falling upon us suddenly and unexpectedly, to claim us for his own, while seemingly not others... and why one vision of who and what he is, and not another, takes hold of our hearts.  While we can learn church doctrine the way we learn history or English grammar, the knowledge of God is different.  It is gleaned through inference and extrapolation.  We take our experience, which is often difficult to describe, and shape it with the accumulated wisdom of those who have experienced it before.  We look for revelation and apply it to our encounter, trying to give it a more definitive form and substance, so as to make sense of it.  If I had grown up in Iran or Thailand, and had somehow experienced in tone and emotion exactly what I had experienced on the Cape Cod beach or in my room after the prayer meeting, I suspect I would have become a Muslim or a Buddhist instead, simply because the understanding of God whirling around me would have been Muslim or Buddhist.  This is not to say that the reality of God is subjective, only that our experience of him (her? it?) is.  But for all that, John Donne and Rumi seem to speak an eerily similar language.  The observations and expressions of the great mystics of the major faith traditions possess a striking similarity, a mutual resonance that tells me what they have experienced is that same ineffable Something we call God.

I hope and pray that one day my sons will experience that Something themselves.  Perhaps they have already and have not known what to name him, despite all my efforts to give them a vocabulary by which to do so.  Be that as it may, I know it is not something I can give them.  They must encounter it themselves.  Perhaps one day, once they have, the words that I have spoken about it, the efforts I have made to live into it, will begin to make sense to them.

I can only hope.  It would be such a sad thing, to live without the vision it brings.