God, Jesus and the Tooth Fairy
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My first conversation with my granddaughter Phoenix regarding the tooth fairy happened in a larger conversation about religion in general. She was five-and-a-half and had already lost three baby teeth, the first during a vacation to Trinidad with her mother.
In the months just prior to this conversation, I had been passively curious about her parents’ decision that she could attend a Lutheran Bible School throughout most of the year with her maternal grandmother, a conservative Christian. This seemed to me to be at odds with the religious sentiments of her parents, who were, I perceived, at least agnostic and at most Unitarian Universalist.
Phoenix and I were out for lunch and she was chatting matter-of-factly about the large refrigerator box that her father had rescued and made into a playhouse. “It is,” she said, “a perfect place to play Jesus, Mary and Joseph.”
I took a big breath.
“Are you still going to Bible school with Grandma Mamma?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “but this fall I will go to real school. I will like that better because at Bible School we only learn about God and Jesus, God and Jesus. And besides, Grandma Mamma doesn’t believe in the tooth fairy.”
“Really?” I said, trying to sound more incredulous than relieved.
“Yup,” she said. “But I know there’s a tooth fairy. When I lost my first tooth in Trinidad I put it under my pillow and I got a note from the tooth fairy saying that she did not have my gift because of the crowds at Carnival but she would be back in three days. And in three days, there was a ring and five dollars in Trinidad money under my pillow.”
More, I thought, than she might expect from God or Jesus.
Her parents, with elegant ease, allowed her to sort out this little trinity of mythical figures (God, Jesus and the Tooth Fairy), which I found to be an interesting beginning for her own free and responsible search for truth and meaning that figures so prominently as the fourth principle of this Grandma’s faith tradition.
A few years later, I commented on her little ring she always wore. She explained (a little impatiently, I thought) “I told you, Grandma, that this came from the tooth fairy when she came to me in Trinidad!”
I have mulled these interactions over and over.
Had I shamelessly cooperated in a lie? I mean, I don’t really believe in the tooth fairy. But why, I wondered, was I so willing to engage this child in extending an illusion that will ultimately be disproven or denied? I suppose I believed that when the literal reality of the tooth fairy’s existence came to Phoenix, that belief would have served its purpose and its literal truth would simply be irrelevant.
And yet I cannot help but wonder how I would respond if the pull of the Bible stories and Grandma Mamma’s denial had been stronger than the pull of the tooth fairy. Would I have been able to let those miracles stand without question? “Raised from the dead, you say. Wow, that’s amazing.”
But what’s the difference, really?
Some reconciliation of this distinction came to me in a quotation from scientist and writer Gary Bauslaugh: “Rational people temporarily suspend critical judgment in order to imagine that fictional stories are real. Creationists permanently suspend critical judgment in order to believe their fictional stories did happen.”
In this sense, it is not the particularity of the story that is of note, but more the lens through which we view it. For thousands of years now, many have viewed the miracles in the Bible as proof texts pointing, as Episcopal Bishop Spong says, to the supernatural power of God, which is the “foundation of our security system.” In rejecting that version of God, Spong—and many of us—summarily reject the idea of miracles at all. If the mere use of the word immediately conjures up Spong’s definition of miracles as the “supernatural setting aside of natural causes,” then we might well have grounds for skepticism or outright rejection of the notion of miracle.
But I confess that this definition leaves me feeling more than a little resentful. Where do the literalists on either side of the Christian miracle debate get off forcing a clear line between what is real and what is not? What of those deeply human experiences that somehow defy reason and logic and proof?
Anyone who reads fiction, or goes to the theater or the cinema, understands that we don’t need to know the whole story behind every character, or every minute detail of the setting. We can still be in relationship with those characters or embrace the unfolding drama of their lives within a context that is clearly not real in the literal sense, but is a reflection of some greater reality.
What’s important is the willingness to temporarily set aside the literal, the rational; to disarm judgment for the purpose of opening up some other part of our being.
I have watched a thousand sunsets, each one of them different. I am certain that there is a scientific explanation for every nuance of light and color, but I don’t think that knowing all of that would enhance my experience. I hear birdsongs from birds whose names someone knows, and I choose to remain unschooled in ornithology. I know that if I take apart a butterfly to try to understand it I will end up with a pile of butterfly parts.
Please understand that I am in no way questioning the value of taxonomy and physics and the explainable wonders of the known universe. But sometimes I want to simply watch from the darkened theater, engaged and amazed by a world I cannot explain.
It is not my desire to turn us away from reason but rather to encourage us toward wonder, toward the miracles we find beneath our pillow should we be willing to look.
Thinking that she could do better than that, (which was, of course wrong) she was naturally drawn to participate in a number of Christian churches and value based institutions like the Girl Scouts and the Jobs Daughters. She continued her preparation during 11 years as a public school educator, a wife and mother of three and ultimately claimed and integrated all of the above as a whole when she attended the Starr King School, class of ’85.
She served for 21 years as the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Duluth, Minnesota; 6 years as Associate Minister at the First Unitarian Society of Madison, Wisconsin. After serving a two year interim in Fridley, Minnesota she returned to home in Knife River, Minnesota, which she shares with her husband John Gustafsonand where she guides individual Life Review retreats.(uulifereview.org). She has four partnered adult children and six grandchildren. She now knows that preparation for ministry never ends and that the greatest teacher is grace itself.
- God, Jesus and the Tooth Fairy - April 1, 2018
- Bestowers of Grace - June 1, 2015
