The One True Church
Believe it or not: My five year old daughter has the following conversation with me today.
"Daddy, Simon at school says he goes to the true church."
"Oh really?" I said.
"Yeah," she says matter-of-factly, "he says when you turn eight you get baptized and after that you can get a toy called the holy ghost as a gift."
At this point my wife interjected, trying to explain that we know the Holy Ghost as the Holy Spirit and that He is most assuridly NOT a toy. Meanwhile I was left pondering what I ought to tell her and to what extent she and Simon understood the claim he was making.
For the time being we simply reviewed her own Baptism (and her Chrismation) and briefly talked about our understanding of those sacraments. Though I was profoundly tempted to send her back to school with questions like: "Hey Simon, who founded your church and when?"
I shall endeavor to have her and Simon become friends...maybe have their family over for dinner.
:)
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When I was a kid one of my cousins fell away from the Orthodox faith and married a woman who belonged to some sort of "born again" evangelical church. One time one of his daughters (who was close to the same age as my brother and I) told us we were going to hell because we didn't belong to their church.
Needless to say my brother and I were pretty upset by that and my father was quite angry. We didn't see that cousin or his family for a couple years...
But at least, as far as I know, my kids aren't going to school laying out ecumenical council anathemas upon the heretics who reject icons and such. Give them some time to get up to speed with me and Simon's Dad.
:)
Heck I was just happy to hear that they were talking about church at school.
My eight year old mentioned that his Ycare teacher told him that God didn't live in our dimension. Which is actually a very Orthodox thing to say, but I suspect it wasn't an Orthodox comment.
Reading, writing, and theology. Oh my!
In Christ,
Michelle
I suspect the child was mistaking the "gift of the Holy Spirit" as some osrt of toy that he was going to get.
After all, gifts are always toys!
:)