Do we believe in God?

It was a beautiful late spring evening. She was preparing dinner in the kitchen when her eldest daughter rushed in from playing outside.

“Mama!” 

“Yes, darling.”

“*Jane wants to know if we believe in God?”

Jane was their next-door neighbor. She was smart and pretty in a Wes Anderson movie kind of way. 7 going on 67. Always coming over in search of someone to play with, she routinely struck fear into their hearts, those tiny fists knocking aggressively on the door with the same force as a 6ft wide policeman serving a warrant! Jane's family were very religious, they attended a church that strictly followed the rules of the Bible. Mom home-schooled the 3 kids while their dad went to work. They were a nice family, a little awkward and weird, the social Q’s of their kids a bit off, but she liked that about them.

“ Why are you asking?”

“Jane just asked me and I said I didn’t know, let me go ask my Mom.” 

They didn’t talk much about religion in their house. Growing up she had gone to a school that mandated they go to church twice a day. She had enjoyed the sermons and loved singing the hymns but it was humans who destroyed it for her. Having abused the name of God so profoundly and completely over the centuries she imagined he probably no long wanted anything to do with religion either. Her husband meanwhile thought it was all just fairytales. Choosing her words carefully she said.

“We are not religious.”

Satisfied with the answer her daughter ran out to pass on this message and carry on playing. Half an hour later she called the girls in for dinner. They sat around the table talking about their days. She watched her eldest twirl her fork in her spaghetti trying to pick it up in a perfect bite-size ball, smiling as it slithered off leaving one straggler for her to wrestle with.

“Mama?” she said putting the fork down.

“ Yes.”

“ So I told Jane that we were not religious and we didn’t go to church and she told me that she would pray for me because I was going to hell ……..! What is hell?” 

The only outward sign her mind exploded with instinctual motherly rage was the slight widening of her eyes and a flare of nostril as she breathed in. Hell hath no fury like a mama bear protecting her babies but her daughter gets anxious about a lot of things, death being high up on that list. She didn’t want the unnecessary fear of hell to join it. Not reacting to this damnation hurled at her little one she told her that Jane didn’t really understand what she was saying and was just repeating what adults would have been drilling into her since she was born. Realizing this was probably a good opportunity to talk about God and religion in general she went on to tell her that she thought God was bigger than any shackles or confines that humans put on him in organized religion. God was in everything. Her daughter seemed to get it, telling her what she thought God might be in, the flowers and the sky, especially the galaxy because it is so big. They stayed away from too much hell chitchat, brushing it off as it being a religious people problem and wasn’t relevant to them. By all accounts, a crisis seemed to have been averted and the conversation moved on naturally to other things. 

But silence, she learned, does not necessarily mean things are not ruminating. Later that night when her husband went upstairs to kiss the girls good night, their daughter pointed to the open window and asked him to close it.

“Why?” He asked, “ you always have it open.”

“In case God swoops in, papa, and takes me away.”

* names have been changed. Jane is also a character from a Wes Anderson movie.