Fifth grade all over again

As my daughter grows, I see her experiences through the lens of my childhood memories. No matter what she does, she is accompanied by a chorus of stories. Now she is confidently navigating the complicated year before middle school, and I am transported back to my fifth grade year, when I was bound and determined to act like Jesus.

It was a renegade project for me. My parents weren’t church goers, and aside from the Christmas story, I didn’t know much about Jesus until my mother had me watch a play called Cotton Patch Gospel while she worked in the theater’s back office. The play depicted Jesus’ life as it might have been if he’d lived in the American South. Sitting alone in the audience, I decided matter-of-factly that I wanted this riveting story to be part of each day of my life. I was in fourth grade.

From that play, I understood that I had the opportunity to take part in a love that was so deep it could transform anything I might experience, even violent death. I had access to a peace so profound that it turned the regular rules of life upside down and gave me a chance to do something beautiful, no matter what was happening. To the best of my limited understanding, my main job in life should be to imitate Jesus, so that’s what I tried to do.
Fourth and fifth grades were difficult. There was a lot of teasing, and I usually responded by asking, as earnestly and lovingly as I could, whether the person teasing me thought they were being kind. I often asked them while trying not to cry. Then I went home and secretly prayed for them. This seemed like turning the other cheek, but it did not seem to discouraging bullying, and I felt wildly alone in trying to be like Jesus.

As I watch my fifth grade daughter and her friends, I see that I was not alone. There are plenty of fifth graders doing their imperfect best to live out the beautiful stories of their faiths, but it sometimes looks different than it did for me. It didn’t even look that way all the time for Jesus. In the Gospels, He doesn’t just calmly ask people if they are being kind. He wades into the fray of conflicts and calls people vipers if the name seems to fit. (Of course, He also says that if you call someone a fool then your soul is in danger, so I guess I wasn’t totally off base.)

The chorus of stories that surrounds my fifth-grade daughter tells me that I can learn a great deal from the child that I used to be. As a mother who wants her children to be nourished by deep faith, I am also reminded that not all religious experience looks like my own and that I must walk a delicate line between teaching and learning.