ARE YOU THERE GOD? IT’S ME, MOMMY

When your four-year-old is more spiritual than you are

There are so many questions I would rather be asked at 6: 30 a. m., when I am just limping into the kitchen, one striped sock trailing like a flaccid snake, baby crawling behind me, with my other sock in her mouth: “Mommy, what is God?” This is Bea. She is four. Here, a sampling of questions I would gladly take over that one, first thing in the morning:

“Mommy, how are babies made with pipis?”

“Mommy, can we listen to the music from Frozen again?”

“Mommy, how was the Poincaré Conjecture solved?”

And it’s not solely because I don’t have the answer, but because in our home, Bea and God is a hot-button issue. Bea’s school, which I chose, and Mike went along with, against many of his strongest instincts, is more religious than we are. He is an atheist, and I am the sort who spends what little time she spends in synagogue silently replacing every utterance of the word God with the words “organizing energy.” But I wanted Bea to know Hebrew, and the holidays, and her history. I went to a religious school myself, I told Mike. If there is any indoctrination, any narrow thinking, I will see it; I will know how to undo it.

It was the broad thinking I wasn’t prepared for:

“Did God make everything, Mommy? And i f God made everything, then who made God?”

When we moved to Toronto this year, I decided we should join a synagogue. It was something we’d never done before, and I suppose, part of a project of setting roots. I shopped diligently, I found a place so pluralistic, so non-orthodox and open- minded it nearly has no walls, and dressed up my family for the high holidays. We went for the New Year, we went for the Day of Atonement. I sat there, entertaining notions of observing the Sabbath; of placidly going to temple for enlightened Sabbaths. And I have not returned since.

“Mommy, remember when we went to synagogue, before the winter?” “For the high holidays, yes.” “When can we go back?” With kids, I feel like parents today are often missing the mark, in terms of age- appropriate treatment. We are either palling around with our toddlers, taking them for sophisticated lunches and playing them our latest favourite downloads, as if they are miniature adults (“my five year old son eats mussels and knows all the words to “Hotline Bling”!”), or infantilizing them too much, thinking that every pair of undies and mini yogurt container had better have a character from Frozen or Toy Story on it, or it will somehow malfunction.

And with all these contradictions, it’s sometimes hard to see the places where children might have their own ideas, their own, self- sprouted emotions and intelligence.

The spiritual realm might be one of those areas where we give the capacities of children short shrift. That was not the first time Bea has asked me when we might return to a house of worship. When she was barely three we went to a circumcision ceremony, and when we left that honestly not-very-fun occasion, in an echoing orthodox shul, she wanted to know when we could go to another.

For so long mainstream psych- ologists believed that young children simply did not have the cognitive breadth needed to experience significant religious feeling. Things have now shifted, but only so much, and to me that seems nuts, because in this day of people signing up for pranayama, or ecstatic dance, or hymnal singing, or whatever, hoping to touch some tiny edge of transcendence, how could we think that kids are anything but more basically spiritually gifted than the average adult?

So much of our own wonder, our ability to connect disparate dots, our awareness of miracles in plain sight, is plastered over by our decades. We need to slough and slough to get back to our original skin. But kids are always right there, in awe (“Mommy, look at the sparkles in the snow!”). It’s just sitting there, on the surface, along with Bubble Guppies and Nutella sandwiches and skating class.

“Mommy, Zaidy is dead, right?”

“Yes. That is right. He was 104, very old, when he died.”

“OK, so does that mean that he is in outer space?”

“You mean in the clouds? I don’t know.”

“Do you think Zaidy became something else?”

“After he died? I guess I do think that.”

“Like this strawberry I am eating?” “Maybe.” “Oh! So, like, I am eating Zaidy right now? HALLO ZAIDY! HOW ARE YOU? NOW YOU ARE IN ME FOREVER!”

One day, when Bea is 45 years old, she might have to take an intensive mindfulness or Sufi poetry workshop to return to that type of thinking. In the meantime, I tell Mike, I see our job as not getting in the way.

Because, while Mike has happily taken himself off the hook of belief, I have not, even though I am more or less a failure at religion, a spiritual lazybones. I see those who really do go to mosque or church or synagogue, or who take refuge in the Buddhist precepts, as people who have a diligence and talent I do not possess. No matter what I try, no matter what happens in my life, I always rebound into this beige zone of arm’s length, cultural religion — a person who reads a lot of books from the Religion & Spirituality section, who listens to a lot of dharma podcasts. More doesn’t seem to be in my constitution.

But I wonder if Bea wasn’t born with something I lack. We catch her singing prayers all the time. She’s blessing the wine in the bathtub; she’s welcoming the sabbath on the john. Is that indoctrination? Or has she just naturally taken to this material?

“What are you cutting out there, Bea? A circle?”

“I’m making a kippa. Do you want one too, Mommy?”

“Do any girls at your school wear skullcaps?”

“No but boys wear them, so it’s no fair if girls don’t wear them too.”

It’s taken Judaism nearly its entire history to get to the place this child has reached in 50 months on planet earth. So who am I to argue? Now here’s Mike:

“Hey what are you guys wearing on your heads?” “Little hats!” “Mommy, why do you say to Daddy LITTLE HATS? They are not hats, Daddy! They are KIPPAS. Do you want to wear one too, Daddy? It will keep the thinking in your head nice and warm.”