As we make our way through Holy Week, I’ve been considering how best to discuss Easter with my daughter. The apparently graphic lesson she heard at MOPS last week left her confused and fairly freaked out about death (gotta love the compulsion to evangelize toddlers…). I want to connect her to the story, but to help her make it her own. So I am liking the idea of exploring the Passover meal with her – especially the traditional aspects of the Seder that have the children asking questions about their faith. The purpose of these question isn’t to receive some prescribed answer as in a catechism, but simply to ask questions of one’s faith.
I like this approach to learning about the faith. I like that the children are encouraged to speak up and explore what they believe and the rituals of the faith. They aren’t told to just be quiet and learn what the teacher wants them to know. In the Seder tradition, there are no bad or wrong questions. The child who asks the tricky or even the silly questions is not looked down upon, what is worrisome is the child who asks no questions. Wrestling with faith or even attacking the faith are preferred to passively and unthinkingly going through the motions of faith.
My daughter is four, and is a chatterbox incessantly asking “why?”. One of her favorite shows is Sid the Science Kid, a show about a preschool boy who each morning runs into a question he has about the world and then asks that question at preschool where the day is then spent answering his question. She finds that fascinating, and loves the experimental approach they take to figuring out the answers. I watch the show with her with chagrin. No school (or Sunday school) is truly like that – allowing the inquisitive nature of kids guide the learning process. While I understand the impracticalities of such a method, I wonder at what stage kids learn that questioning is bad. Where absorbing facts, memorizing concepts, and reproducing them when asked replaces wondering about the world and wrestling with truth? Even in Seminary my husband says the professors play the poor pedagogical game of having students parrot back the answer they want to hear. Education has become about amassing information instead of learning to think.
So I want to tell the stories to my daughter and to enact the rituals of the faith with her, but I want her to know that those too can (and must) be questioned. She shouldn’t just learn about her faith, she needs to live it.