I am pleased to announce that Youngest Granddaughter, Elizabeth, has won the ‘Christian Vision and Values’ award at her school for this week. What does this mean, one might ask? Is she destined to become clergy of some parish, a hip and trendy lady vicar, with her big pink glasses, crazy curly hair and penchant for all things unicorn and mermaid?
Sheesh, I hope not. I mean, I am glad she has won the award because it shows she has displayed the qualities of kindness, helpfulness, caring for others and being an all-round good egg of a human being. No mean feat for a six year old, especially in this day and age. And I shall forgive her that she didn’t want to talk to me yesterday on the FaceTime because she was in a bit of a grump. All vicars-in-waiting have their off days. In fact, in my experience, some of them have more off days than your average lay person, but that is another story. However, I’m not sure being a vicar is her true destiny.
Christian values are, I think, something to be encouraged, even if, like me, you grow up to be an atheist. I believe those values stay with you for life and inform your personal morals and ethics, even if you eventually decide that the idea of ‘God’ is nothing more than a myth. And you learn a sense of history, too, and the support a likeminded community can give to each of its members and often beyond.
I was christened as a baby. I still have the little bracelet given to me by my godmothers. I went to Sunday School and enjoyed collecting my weekly attendance stamp, and making Easter Gardens from a variety of garden debris and Christingles from often determinedly solid oranges. I went on to teach Sunday School, and had a phase in my late teens of attending church, staggering down Church Hill in a pair of strappy white high heeled sandals, goodness knows why but it might have had something to do with the eldest son of the vicar being a bit of a dish. I belonged to 1st Nettlestead Girls’ Brigade - happy times indeed. Both of my children have been christened. Second time around, I married a vicar’s son!
In fact, it was all going swimmingly on the living as a Christian front until some point in my early forties when I was earnestly questioning the sanity of believing in an omnipotent being in the sky. Actually, I think my doubts started earlier than that, ironically when I was coerced into attending an Alpha Course before the incumbent vicar would allow Andy and I to marry in my parish church, the same church whose Sunday School and services I attended regularly as a child and a teen. Andy was exempt from the Alpha Course because he was a vicar’s son, another irony because Andy was atheist in persuasion way before I.
Anyway, my lovely friend, Jane, volunteered to attend with me and all I remember is that we ate a lot of aubergine based meals and were in the ‘naughty’ discussion group who were based in the village hall side room after the initial ‘big talk’ of the evening. And it was those small group discussions that planted the seed of God belief lunacy in my mind. By the time I was early 40 something, I was confirmed atheist and have been ever since, although I am a) fully behind the idea of a Universal energy b) a believer in spiritual life beyond physical death, and c) continue to uphold the Christian values with which I was raised.
I bemuses me how much death and violence in the world starts in the name of ‘God’ or whatever you want to call it. But then a lot of love and good stems from it, too. It is all too complex, too contradictory for me. And that is why I choose atheism, although really I would prefer to have no label at all.
Bravo Elizabeth, though. It’s always rather special when a grandchild wins an award of any kind, isn’t it?
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KJ
KJ