Learning About God

January 2013 PROMPT: Tell us what you learned about GOD during your childhood years..


When I was little, my father had several artifacts around the house which he had brought back from his travels to Latin America. One was a picture of a dwarfish man with an ugly face and a sort of semi-circular hat. "It's a Colombian god," said my father carelessly.

Later, my mother would explain it to me. "You know how nobody knows what God looks like," she said. "Well, this is what some Indians think he looks like.

That was interesting, and for a while, I thought of that as what God looked like. In fact, when I turned six, and started Sunday School, the teacher started the class by asking us to draw a picture of what we thought God looked like. I gave it my best shot. I sketched out that Colombian god (as well as a six-year-old who wasn't artistically inclined could sketch it from memory with a green crayon). I don't remember what any of my classmates drew; some probably drew old men with beards, a few others simply drew crosses, but I think my teacher looked at mine with some bafflement and tried to figure it out before simply giving up and moving on to the next student.

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Nevertheless, I really liked Sunday school. Much more then I liked regular school or even Mass. I think part of it was my teacher. She was college age volunteer that I think was studying to be a teacher. And at six years old, I thought that she was nicer than most girls. (I'm sorry to say that I can't remember her name. She deserves to be given more credit in this story.) Aside from that, she was a great storyteller and I loved stories then as much as I do now. She was telling us stories about cool things like guardian angels, devils, and men who could change water into wine. Then there was the delightfully gory climax when Jesus was killed by being nailed to a cross and rose from the dead three days later. It was pretty heavy stuff.

Moreover, she taught us about Holy Communion and how Jesus turned bread into his body and wine into his blood, plus the priest did the same thing every Sunday in the mass, and next year, we would start eating some of Jesus' body too when we had our First Communion. Regular school was downright boring compared to that.

There were some awkward moments. At roughly the same time, I had become interested in prehistoric things. First dinosaurs and then early man. One day my teacher asked if anyone knew who the first people were.

I proudly raised my hand.

"Yes, Alex."

"Australopithecus", I said.

My teacher frowned. "That isn't what I meant," she murmured. "The first people were named Adam and Eve."

I didn't know it, but I had stepped into a rather controversial matter. Neither my parents nor the church that we attended were Creationist, and I think that's just as well. I later asked my mother, who had been helping me read those books about Early Man, what was going on with Adam and Eve. She was a little bit more articulate then my Sunday school teacher had been. She said that nobody knew the whole story, but she rattled off some different theories, most of which I've forgotten now. Still learning about Early Man hasn't hurt my faith, at least not in the long run. I simply learned to look at the Bible in a slightly different way.

Another interesting situation occurred when at the end of the year, when we were reviewing the years' worth of material.

"Remember Adam and Eve?" said the teacher. "Did God love Adam and Eve?"

The question unintentionally puzzled most of my classmates. A murmur of, "Yes. . .No," and uncertainty passed through the classroom. But I knew the answer. I had mastered a level of subtlety that my classmates still had not figured out. "At first," I said.

"What do you mean, 'At first'?" said the teacher. "He just stopped loving them?"

I nodded.

"Why would he do that?"

"Because they ate apples."

That caused her to shake her head with amusement. Eventually, she pointed out that we'd be in trouble if that were the case, and not just because we all eat apples. "Everyone sins, right?" She couldn't resist looking at one of the naughtier boys in the class. "So does that mean that God doesn't love anyone?"

She had me there.

"No," she said clarifying a point that had somehow not been made the first time around, "God loves you no matter what you do."

Well, somehow of all the things we had learned that year, that seemed like the least likely, but I accepted it.

Anyway, I could tell you more like how I first started reading Bible stories on my own, and how I learned all about the Ark of the Covenant from a movie that I saw when I was eight (Yes, that movie) and how delighted I was when I learned that it was a real thing in my Bible, but I think that I will stop here, and say that all in all, I'm glad that I learned so much when I was a child. It's been very helpful.

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