When you’re growing up, there are loads of awkward moments. When you’re in school, it’s when you get in trouble for throwing water at your friends and desperately don’t want Mum to find out or she’ll stop you playing on the computer. As you get older, it’s the fear of seeing sex on television when with your parents- when you break out into cold sweats the moment Daenerys Targaryen turns up in Game of Thrones, through fear that she may take her top off. And then, there’s the rebellious teen years, the moment you come home still a little drunk from the previous night and proceed to cower over the downstairs toilet as your whole family awkwardly try to finish their Coco Pops, taking mouthfuls in between the intermittent retches.
But there is one area that sticks out for so many people. It’s a cause of awkwardness that has persisted since time immemorial: religion. Religion has been making things awkward for thousands of years, from the second century Carthaginian student coming out to his parents as a Gnostic, to the sixteenth century Swiss girl telling her Mum that she thinks Calvin raises some valid points, to the angry existential teenager reading Nietzsche and angrily shouting ‘God is dead’ at every available moment.
Now, my family aren’t exactly super religious: my Mum for example doesn’t believe Jesus was God, just that he was a great bloke who said some pretty nifty things. But they go to church every Sunday, and my younger siblings go to Sunday School, making papier mache crucifixes and watching videos where cartoon vegetables explain Bible stories. So, it wasn’t that controversial when I told my Mum I didn’t believe in God- she coped well with it. But when I broke it to my younger siblings, it was a little more awkward.
Like so many awkward family stories, it happened on Christmas Day. We’d just finished Christmas dinner, and I had just finished my Christmas Pudding: literally a whole Christmas pudding. Nobody else in my family likes it, so I had the arduous task of fighting through the Tesco Finest clump of dried fruits, nuts and brandy. But, once I was suitably full, giddy with the shear bulk of calories I’d worked my way through, I decided to go to the park with my younger brother and sister. And so we left the house, singing carols, shouting “Merry Christmas” to random strangers as we encountered them on the streets and basking in the merriment of the season.
But I ran on ahead, eager to reach the swings before my siblings because I wanted to get to the swings before them, as that’s all any intelligent person wants to do at the park. As I ran ahead of my siblings, they started talking about Jesus and his birthday. Nothing exciting of course, but the kind of pseudo-Theology you’d expect from primary school children. “Would Jesus get both birthday and Christmas presents?” “Why was Jesus not born in a hospital?” “Is there a messianic secret motif in Mark’s Gospel?” Basic stuff, really. But then, my brother asked me “Sam, why did you not come to church today? It makes Jesus sad.”
“I don’t believe in Jesus”. I said, not really paying attention. Silence. “What?” my brother whimpered. “I don’t believe in God. I’m not a Christian”. My brother let out a noise like a slowly deflating air-bed, while a solitary tear ran down my sister’s cheek. “But if you’d believe in God, you won’t go to heaven, and if you won’t go to heaven it won’t be heaven because you’re not there”. His reasoning was impressive, although I didn’t have time to appreciate it through the tears and whimpering.
I couldn’t respond. Explaining why I’m an advocate of a Universalism view of salvation didn’t stop the barrage of wails and tears. Short of finding God right then and there, I don’t think anything could have consoled them. It was so awkward, they just stood there looking at me, not sure what to do. They were just sad. This had never happened before; whenever we’d talked about God or death or any big questions, they would always shrug it off. Maybe they would be sad for a moment, but they’d forget, somehow getting distracted by a pigeon they saw, or giving up on sadness so they could get back to the task of being happy. They just didn’t seem to care or understand. But now, something had changed. Now they cared about these issues. It was painful to watch them so utterly, utterly depressed.
I guess I just never considered them people who could think and reason. They were just my younger brother and sister. I just saw them as these little children who I played pretend sword fights with, as people who I am meant to look after and who can’t think on meaningful, difficult topics like death and religion. That’s the way they had always been as they had been growing up. But these awkward moments that come from the collision of my image with their reality was powerful; the awkwardness came from me expecting something different, from me viewing them as simple human beings, forgetting that they grow, evolve and change. As awkward as that Christmas walk was, I’m glad it happened. I feel I see them differently now, I understand them a bit more. And I welcome the next awkward moment, the next moment I realise that they’re changing, becoming themselves and growing up. So, next time it gets awkward, remember, it might be for the best.
