The other day, in our evening prayer time, our youngest daughter prayed that the Tooth Fairy is real. She has her first “wiggle tooth”, and she has that beautiful combination of anxiety and joy at something new that children have about most things. And so, as we’ve taught her, she brought her feelings to prayer.

My first reaction was delight. What a sweet thing to pray for. My second reaction was more jaded. As I said sarcastically to my wife later on, “that’s a prayer that’s not going to be answered.” I thought it was a nasty thing to think and to say even as I was saying it. I feel even now a bit of shame in having said it, and not just because it really is a sweet prayer, but because she was doing something very important for a young child: she was playing with belief.

“Lord, I believe; help my unbelief,” as Mark has it. Or, from the more contemporary source of the 90s TV show X-Files, “I want to believe.” There is a desire in my daughter to believe, but also a doubt, which is a place where most human beings find themselves concerning most things. We believe something, but we stand enough away from our belief that we can see it and consider it. This distance allows us to reflect but also to doubt, both potentially healthy, one potentially troubling.

I doubt my five year old daughter is going through a crisis of faith or a dark night of the soul, of course, but she is dealing with her own longing, which surprises me. ‘Longing’ is something that I thought began in early adulthood, either in a sense of nostalgia for the days of one’s youth or a critical desire to see a world that is not so burdened by sin and evil. We humans know innately that there is more out there in the universe and within ourselves that we are told exist in our culture. The secular world is not enough for us. Apparently this sense of longing is not just found in heady teenagers but also is present even in kindergarteners.

“Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.” “I want to believe.” It’s an uncomfortable place to be, but I think it’s also an important place to be. Maybe kids are just more honest than adults in that they go to God, when given the chance, with their discomfort. And I don’t mean that we should just give ourselves, or give others, more chances to sit in our own doubts. I think ‘honest doubt’ and what my daughter is going through about the Tooth Fairy are two different things. Both are important, but they’re not the same. They’re similar, but different. 

Struggling with honest doubt is often intellectual. We turn our hearts over, examine our relationship with God, others, and the world, and we reflect on how we have changed and how our very understanding of God has changed through what has happened to us in our lives. In longing, however, there is a hope. The directionality or orientation is different. Honest doubt circles around a faith that has been deepened but not yet understood. Longing is directed outward, toward a faith that we do not yet have and may never have, and through that faith to the God of our deepest desires. In honest doubt, our hearts and the center around which we circle are eventually integrated into one thing; in longing, we are drawn outward from ourselves into a life that is not our own and which fully exists beyond the boundaries of this world. For my daughter, a part of that longing is a world in which fairies give quarters when little children lose their baby teeth. What does that longing look like for us adults? What does that longing look like for you?

I think it’s important that we don’t put down or criticize this longing, especially if the shape it takes cannot be realized. As a gamer and a reader of sci-fi and fantasy literature, I’ve seen what can happen when one’s imagination is belittled. I’ve seen unhealthy attachment to fantastic worlds, of course, but I’ve also met people for whom a sense of the holy is found in the imagination and nowhere else. Human beings have found God in cathedrals and magnificent works of visual and musical art, so why bring someone to task if they’ve found God in literary or narrative art, even if that art is found in a game? Our job isn’t to limit God’s ability to speak to the hearts of others but to broaden and nurture the inborn ability to discern God’s wisdom wherever it is found.

I’m not particularly married to the idea of the Tooth Fairy. If my children didn’t go in for it, I wouldn’t be particularly disappointed. I am happy, however, to see how they act towards and within this little, cultural story. This morning, both of my daughters told me about what happens when you lose a tooth at school. The nurse, apparently, puts the tooth in a little box that (I think they said) you wear around your neck. It’s taped up, and “if you open it to see the tooth, then you might lose it, so you should keep it closed.” This was a delightful thing to learn, that my children’s school tries to honor this story of enchantment and mystery. It’s a small thing, but again, it’s an important thing. It gives me hope that our culture isn’t doing too bad a job after all.