Dear Phantom 8 - Trust Yourself

Dear Temple,

All right, I have problems.  But why do I have a responsibility to myself?  Isn’t it selfish to want good things for myself?  I remember in Sunday School, when I was younger, singing ‘Make Me a Channel of Thy Peace’.  I liked the words, but the chorus worried me:

 

Oh master, grant that I may never seek
So much to be consoled as to console
To be understood as to understand
To be loved as to love with all my soul

 

I thought, ‘But we’re children!  How can we learn to love, if it’s selfish to want to be loved?  How can we give what we haven’t received?’  But I knew that if the Sunday School teacher thought it was a good hymn for us to sing, then it must be the way we should pray, even if it didn’t make sense to us, because the teacher had been a Christian for longer than we had been alive, so she knew best.

Phantom of the Library

 

Dear Phantom,

This is what I meant in my last letter by not trusting your own thoughts and feelings.  We could go into the question of what St Francis of Assisi meant by writing that prayer, and what Sebastian Temple meant by adapting it into a hymn, and what your Sunday School teacher meant by asking a group of young children to sing it, and whether these were the same as the message you took from it.  But I think the question we need to answer first is whether, if it meant what you thought it meant, you had to accept it even when you could see that it didn’t make sense.

When you were little, you didn’t mind arguing and stating your own preferences.  When mum said, ‘Would you like to put your toys away?’ you knew she really meant, ‘Please put your toys away,’ but you weren’t afraid to say, ‘No,’ sometimes, and even, if necessary, ‘You can smack me, but it won’t make me put my toys away,’ just to see what would happen.

You weren’t frightened by the idea that grown-ups weren’t always right.  When you asked dad to buy you a toy Hereford bull for your collection of plastic animals, and he hurriedly grabbed one on the way home from work, you played happily with Johnny the Bull for a couple of days until you happened to turn him over and notice that he had a full udder and was, unmistakably, Janet the Cow. 

You thought it was funny that Daddy had made a mistake, but it didn’t make you respect Daddy any less.  After all, it probably hadn’t occurred to him that toy companies made anatomically correct toy animals for pre-schoolers.  Anyway, the manufacturer did mould many of their cattle – the Friesians, Jerseys, and Charolais – with the bulls raising their heads in challenge, and most of the cows either grazing or lying down.  Just not Janet. 

It certainly didn’t make you like Janet any less – if anything, you liked her more because she was different, and because being a cow meant she fitted Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem about ‘The friendly cow, all red and white’.  You knew you could trust dad to find an actual Johnny to keep Janet company, because dad always kept his promises, even if he did sometimes make mistakes.

But as you grew older, you started to worry.  So many things you thought you could depend on had changed or gone away.  You’d gone from being an only child to a lonely older sister.  Grampy had died, and you missed him.  Your cat had died, and that had been devastating, because while Grampy seemed quite old from a four-year-old’s point of view, the cat had been barely out of kittenhood, and should have had a lifetime of playing and hunting and exploring ahead of him.  You’d had to move from your old house and the Shropshire village where you’d lived for your first six years, to Southampton, which never felt like home – and when you’d come back to Shropshire to visit, a year or two later, you’d found that someone had sawn some of the branches off the dead tree that you and dad used to play was a dragon!  If you couldn’t rely on the Dragon Field to have a tree that looked properly like a dragon, what could you rely on?

Some of these losses seem quite minor from a grown-up’s – or even a teenager’s – point of view.  But autistic people, especially autistic children, aren’t good at dealing with change, and you know that you cried for the Dragon Tree.  You cried when mum, trying to get the house and garden marginally more respectable-looking before moving out, paid the well-meaning, not-very-bright local odd-job man to weed the rockery, and he did this by ripping out all the plants.  You were frightened that the new owners of the house, being landscape gardeners, might finish the job of getting the garden all tamed and tidy, so that it no longer looked like the jungle where you had prowled around pretending to be a cat.  (Don’t worry; that garden defeats even the most determined professionals!)

I think you were frightened by all this change, and even more frightened by the prospect of growing up and one day having to be independent and leave home.  So you tried to be a ‘good’ child who could win your parents’ approval by always doing and saying the right thing, so that they wouldn’t leave you or make you leave them.  If mum or dad corrected anything you said, or if they even expressed surprise at your choices – like getting out a book from the school library that was a bit babyish for you because the title reminded you of a song you liked, or a bilingual book in English and Swahili when you couldn’t read Swahili because it looked an interesting fairy-tale – you felt ashamed, and hid in your room.

Even when you knew you were right, you felt ashamed if a grown-up you respected, like a parent or a teacher, said you were wrong.  When you were six, you told mum that there was a story by Beatrix Potter in the school library about a pair of grey squirrels and a pair of chipmunks, and mum said that couldn’t be by Beatrix Potter because she only wrote stories about British animals, not American animals.  You could simply have brought The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes home to show her.  But instead, you felt ashamed of having mentioned anything so silly.

Of course, you realised that grown-ups didn’t always agree with each other.  For example, you knew that in the Bible it said, ‘He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is careful to discipline him,’ but that most modern psychologists agree that beating children isn’t the best way to discipline them, and only teaches them to be violent.  You couldn’t accept that the Bible writers could be fallible (especially when you went to an Evangelical church), and you knew that being a Christian meant challenging many of the values of secular culture.  But you weren’t going to go against scientific findings either. 

So you concluded that God must have reasons for wanting children to be beaten, and if it isn’t because being beaten teaches them to be better people, it must because God enjoys children’s pain for its own sake.  You didn’t ask why God might be like that.  You were used to not understanding why most grown-ups said or did the things they did, so you didn’t expect to understand God, either.

Well, okay, it’s true that we can’t understand everything about God.  After all, we can’t even understand ourselves.  As a saying I love puts it, ‘If the human brain were simple enough for us to understand, we’d be so simple we couldn’t understand it.’  So if we can’t fully understand ourselves, how much less can we understand the Creator of the universe!

However, that is not the same as saying, ‘If something I get told in a religious context – whether in the Bible, or something someone at church or a Christian book tells me – sounds nonsensical, I have to accept it anyway.’  Remember, at the very least, God is not worse than the best idea you can have of Him.  He is certainly not limited to your understanding as a young child of things you got taught in Sunday School.

You are an intelligent person and you don’t stop thinking about things.  This is a wonderful ability, if you use it rightly.  However, when you panic, you stop thinking rationally, and instead just obsess over ideas that drive you deeper and deeper into panic.

Bear in mind that most Sunday School teachers don’t expect children to think much about what they are told – and many people carry the lessons they were taught in Sunday School into adulthood without ever thinking about their implications.  For example, in church fairly recently – in an adult service – I heard the preacher quote the rather trite acronym that ‘JOY is what happens when you put Jesus first, Others second, and Yourself last.  Wouldn’t it be a wonderful world if instead of putting ourselves first, we all tried to put ourselves last?’

After the service, I tried to explain to other members of the congregation why, in practice, a world where everyone competed to be last would be just as dysfunctional as a world in which everyone competed to be first.  How could we even serve the after-service coffee, I asked, if everyone refused to be given a drink until everyone else already had a drink?

The other members of the church responded in various ways, from, ‘Well, I always do wait until everyone else has a drink,’ (yes, but what would happen if everyone behaved like that?) to ‘Well, we don’t always manage it in practice, because we’re not perfect, but it’s a good ideal to aim for,’ (no, it’s not, because it is self-contradictory – your ‘other’ is someone else’s ‘self’, so if we’re all trying to put yourselves last, we are working against each other), to, ‘Well, okay, it doesn’t work if you take it literally, but it’s a nice simple message that children can understand.’

I don’t know why adults assume that the way to make children understand what they mean (in this case, probably what they really mean is ‘Don’t think only of yourself, but consider others as well,’) is to say something that they don’t mean, and hope that children will somehow guess from this what they actually mean.  They just seem to assume that if it’s a nice catchy acronym that sticks in the mind, this must make it a helpful message.

Most children survive this because either they do manage to guess what the teacher means, or they don’t listen or don’t remember, or they think about the implications, conclude that religion is a load of rubbish, and stop going to church.  Only a few people, like you, are intelligent enough to notice that what you are being told doesn’t make sense, but so lacking in self-confidence that you try to believe it anyway.

In your earlier letters, you worried that growing up means losing the ability to think.  But this is really a mark of a failure to grow up mentally.  Truly growing up means learning that it’s all right to think for yourself, and that you can weigh up different kinds of evidence, ask yourself, ‘What might this mean?’ and balance different kinds of evidence, such as, ‘Other people tell me that in their experience, A is so,’ and, ‘My own experience tells me that B is so,’ and decide for yourself how these fit together.

You have worried before that some grown-ups seem to regard teenagers as monsters.  If it comes to that, some grown-ups refer to toddlerhood as ‘the Terrible Twos’.  The fact is that both growing from a baby to a toddler, and growing from a child to a teenager, mean becoming more fully yourself, learning that you can make your own decisions, and becoming less dependent on your parents.  Authoritarian parents may resent this, because they fear losing total control.  Most parents will feel sad to some extent, just because change makes them sad (in the same way that seeing rotten branches sawn off the Dragon Tree made you feel sad), and it reminds them that they themselves are growing older.  But intelligent parents know that their child’s growing up and learning to question everything and everyone – including parents – is something to be proud of, because it means their child is developing as a person in their own right, and not just a yes-man saying what they think their parents want to hear.

Maybe you will find an idea of God that makes sense to you.  Maybe you will conclude that God doesn’t exist.  But if God does exist, then He loves you enough to want you to develop as much as you can, physically, mentally and morally.  He isn’t going to stop loving you if you question whether He exists, but He probably does feel sad if you refuse to use the brain He has given you.

Love from

Temple Cloud