True lies, grandparents and mysteries
As a kid growing up in Sunday school class, I thought very literally about dishonesty …but I wasn’t prepared for the really dangerous lies; the lies we tell ourselves. Katie Green
Picture a group of adults in a room. Half of them are whispering about a secret they know and the other half do not. An inequality exists; a kind of moral tension.
“Secrets are lies, bad manners besides,” we used to chant as children on the playground. Not all secrets are lies. Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Christ Child traditions, or various stories explaining the birds and the bees served useful purposes satisfying childhood questions.
I vaguely remember “Lies My Father Told Me” in The Saturday Evening Post. A six-year-old boy in a Jewish ghetto of Montreal in the 1920s overhears his father making false claims about creaseless trousers he wants to market.
The bulges in the knees give the truth away, and Grandfather won’t invest. David’s attachment to Zaida (Grandfather) gets him to confide that his father tells “terrible lies.”
A literature around lies told by parents and grandparents includes Robbie Yates’ poem, “ My Grandpa tells me stories”
And lots of them aren’t true…
He told me he’s a ninja
And saves the world from crime
He said “I’d give more details—
But oops! We’re out of time!”
A line from “The Blessings of Grandfather’s Beautiful Lies” helps explain the literature surrounding these lies: For in the telling of such blessed little lies / A remembrance of grandfather will never die. Good stories respect the innocence of the heart. There is a grace at work in the stories our grandparents told.
At the heart of the child lies innocence and humility. “Unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the Kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3).
Children look to their parents for guidance, and they instinctively know their parents love them. We need to approach God with the same trust. Then God will reveal greater mysteries to us in love and mercy.
The greatest mystery in humankind came about in the incarnation – God became man as a baby in Bethlehem. The deepest truths about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Christ Child grow in us as we mature. Therein lies love that is the answer to the problems and sufferings in the world.
“The cross of Christ is a mystery that requires enlightenment by the Holy Spirit through the Word of God. It is God’s way of dealing finally and fully with the problem of human sin and brings about full access to God and pardon and remission from all transgressions. The crucified Jesus is the antidote to the poison of sin, sickness, and death, and makes possible the resurrection to new life.” (Marilyn Lloyd Jones).
In “The Blessings of Grandfather’s Beautiful Lies” we hear:
So sleep little one- dream the telling’s of funny grandfathers beloved
For their little lies to you are meant to not make you a worried
But make you believe in the impossibilities of grandeur and extravagance
There is a Santa Clause
The fish really was so big it couldn’t fit in the boat
I wrestled a grizzly when I was just about your age
For in the telling of such blessed little lies
A remembrance of grandfather will never die
The wisdom and laughter thus remembered in each time’s telling
Will warm you over and over, as little lies do you begin the telling.
(581 words)
