The other day, I asked my daughters if they had any tough questions about God. I was doing this to help me brainstorm questions for our “Coffee and Theology” group at church. This group meets every two weeks or so, and we try and tackle some difficult questions, like “Why was Jesus silent at his trial” and “Can war be just”, so I wasn’t expected to get many questions from the girls. I just wanted to try mixing up the grey stuff so I could come up with more ideas.

I was surprised, however, with the depth of answers my daughters gave me. I listened to question after question for about ten minutes, then another ten of them thinking aloud about how to answer these questions. Children’s theology is a fascinating thing. They’re not bound by any of our adult hang-ups, but they also don’t have those things that we often start from, like the Creeds, a good reading of the Gospels, or the weekly reception of the Eucharist for years upon years. There’s a freedom to children’s theology, though at the same time there is a very seriousness to it as well.

Two themes came up often with my daughters. First, heaven; second, ethics. Often, they were joined together in one question, such as “Do bad people turn good in heaven so that I can talk to them and they won’t say rude things to me?” This is a great question that different denominations have answered in, sometimes, widely different ways. My children don’t have a very developed concept of Hell, and that’s probably because I’m an Episcopalian and lean towards universalism. I also think that Heaven is a much more interesting concept inherently. They’re curious about it and what it might be like.

But at the beginning of their lives, why are they thinking so much about what will happen after death? I often ask myself this question. I don’t think that their questions are morose, or that they’re bored with life and just can’t wait to get to heaven. I also don’t think that my kids (even as privileged as they are) have lived lives free from grief and sorrow. They know that things aren’t the way they should be, whether that lesson was learned when their sister stole their Halloween candy or when they asked “why is that man standing with a sign by the side of the road.” In a way, it seem that (at least for my girls), they project perfection to a place after death.

That’s a pretty heavy concept, I think. Why haven’t they projected perfection to some other part of the world? Or to some other time of their lives? Or to some edenic state in some mythical past? Well, partially, my wife and I don’t tell stories about a Shangri-La somewhere in Tibet or say much about Eden (without also attaching such stories to the Temptation and the Fall). Our culture’s “otherworld” is after death, not under the ocean like for many medieval Celtic tribes, or up in the mountains as is traditional for the Japanese (and for many other cultures besides). We in the West have a place for our imagination to run wild – outer space – but when it comes to perfection, we have to wait until we die.

Is that fair? Should we be teaching our children differently? In a way yes, but also in a way no. We should definitely teach our children that things in this world can improve. The things that hurt them, be they their sibling stealing their Halloween candy or glimpses into poverty and grief, do not have to remain as they are. Justice can prevail. We can better the world that we live in. The realizations of our hopes do not have to wait until some time after we die; we can live in peace now, if we choose to do so and work for that peace.

That said, there will always be grief in this world. We cannot parlay with a hurricane or an earthquake, and no matter how well we make our buildings, humans will continue to live in places where tragedy can strike. People will still die, we’ll lose our pets, our family will move, friends will fade away, and things won’t be perfect. I think that we’ll eventually achieve some kind of universal peace with our fellow humans, but it wont be any time soon (especially with the way things are going these days). Perhaps the only surety we have for ultimate peace, comfort, and safety is after we are raised from the dead to find our place beside God in heaven. This is what the Church teaches in the doctrine that we are people “on the way”, pilgrims with no true home, as Jesus says in Matthew 8:20 (“Foxes have their dens, and birds of the air their nest, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”)

So what should we teach our children? Well, all of this, I think. We should teach them about the eternal peace of heaven and also the potential peace that we can find in this life, even if it isn’t eternal. I think, though, that kids are already doing all this. If we are reading them Bible stories and bringing them to Sunday school and inviting them up to the Altar to receive the Eucharist (or be blessed, as per the parents’ wants), then these questions will arise naturally. Our job as parents and as church leaders is to find a way to those questions (some of which may be unconscious) and explore them with our kids. And, as a church community, to discuss these questions with our fellow church-goer’s children, whether we’re their parents or grandparents or not.