CAR TALK ON THE WAY TO SECOND GRADE

DECEMBER 7, 2023 – Late last night after a pleasant day filled with numerous wonders, I watched 20 minutes worth of the fourth Republican Presidential Debate (so called). DeSantis and Ramaswamy managed to set my hair on fire, while two or three times Chris Christie made me cheer out loud when calling out his colleagues about ignoring their prinicipal competitor—the naked emperor who’s so far in the lead he was nowhere in sight.

Blog post material! I thought. This morning over morning joe while watching Morning Joe, the wheels were churning and burning inside my head. Do I take a serious approach or a satirical one? Do I go with long passes or do I stick to a grinding ground game and take no prisoners in excoriating Republican apologists and enthusiasts of authoritarianism?

I was still mulling things over when Beth asked me if I could drive Illiana to school. Of course I jumped at the opportunity. For the sake of transport efficiency our granddaughter had stayed with us overnight. With no time to spare, she and I bolted out the back doorway—I in my baseball cap, she wearing her leopard-ears-headband (“What a fine example of self-expression, Illiana!” I told her).

With sunshine bursting through the windshield, we headed east down Larpenteur Avenue. “So, kiddo, I said,” as I signaled my intent to change lanes to get around someone texting (surely) while driving, “what are we going to talk about? Your choice.”

“Did God come from Jesus or did Jesus come from God?” she asked, without missing a beat.

My first reaction: what on earth had prompted that question?

My second reaction: wherever this leads, it trumps—pun fully intended—a huff-and-puff post about the lousy debate.

By way of background, we’re not a religious household. We’ve been unchurched for nearly two decades. Sure, we celebrate Christmas but in a wholly secular fashion. No religious symbols adorn our walls or shelves. The closest we come to anything close to religious belief is a framed version of a table grace—in Norwegian—bordered with rosmåling hanging among lots of other stuff on a wall of our kitchen. The grace is a throwback to Beth’s childhood visits to her grandparents’ home and memories of her grandfather saying that very same grace—in Norwegian—not a word of which anyone but the grandparents understood.

Illiana’s other grandmother is a super-devout conservative Catholic hell-bent on proselytizing, but that wouldn’t explain this morning’s question from the back seat on the way to school: for reasons far beyond the ambit of this post, Illiana has had no connection with her maternal grandmother for at least a year, and only rare interactions prior to that.

Nor was the question influenced by Illiana’s parents, who are as unchurched and otherwise “non-godly” as are Beth and I. What might have prompted the question is anyone’s guess—a conversation on the playground, perhaps.

Whatever the inspiration for Illiana’s question, I relished her inquiry. It reminded me of the day I was teaching her father’s fourth-grade Sunday school class back in my active church-centric life. In a segment about Genesis, Cory raised his hand. “Yes Cory?” I said.

“Dad, I have a question . . . Who made God?”

“Hmmm,” I said, fumbling for words. “Excellent question. I think they address that in seventh grade, so hang in there.”

“Okay.”

In the moment, the punt had worked, but for the rest of the day and beyond I was tantalized by our son’s remarkable question. For the record, if not at all religious (neither baptism nor confirmation “took”), Cory remains to this day highly philosophical; he thinks about things so intently that he is often constrained by “analysis paralysis.”

Thus, to explain Illiana’s question this morning, perhaps I needed to look no further than, “like father, like daughter.”

I switched back to the righthand lane to let a tailgater pass. “Well,” I said, “God came first, then Jesus, who’s called the Son of God. That’s the Christian version, anyway, Illiana. But if you want to know, I have a different take on the whole subject and nature of God.”

“Like what?”

“Some people have what I think is a very narrow concept of God. Whether you believe in God or don’t believe in God . . . and often that’s how the matter is presented . . . ‘Do you believe in God?’ . . . but that question begs a much bigger and more important question.”

“What’s that?” asked Illiana.

“The more critical question is, what definition of God are you working with when you ask or answer the question?”

“Uh-huh. Maybe it’s a spirit sitting on a big gold throne.”

I suddenly felt a need to pull over, but the shoulder was only about a foot wide and traffic was moving along at 50 in a 40 MPH zone.

“You know what I think?”

“What.”

“I think God is far bigger than glowing white robes on a throne; God—whatever God truly might be—is intangible; you can’t exactly see it, kinda like gravity. You can’t see gravity by itself, but it’s hugely powerful and we can see its effects all around us. Same with God. In fact, you can think of gravity as God and God as gravity, except God is a whole lot more. God is all the goodness that’s among human beings, which granted, avoids grappling with the origin and nature of evil, unless we go with free will . . .”

I caught myself. I was skating on ice heavily skated by others but with no horizons. If I risked going through or over the edge, the more immediate concern was skating beyond Illiana’s view and attention span. I checked the rearview mirror and saw her looking pensively out the window.

“Grandpa, is Santa Claus a spirit?” she said.

Upon hearing the Nick-name, I switched mental gears. “You could certainly say that, yes.”

“He lives forever, right?”

“Uh huh,” I said, “as long as we let him live, Illiana.”

“But he’s a spirit person too, isn’t he?”

“You could say that. I mean, he has two eyes, a beard, two ears, a hearty laugh—at least according to all the pictures of him—but his essence is spiritual, which is why unlike us humans, he can live indefinitely.” I realized that I hadn’t switched mental gears after all.

“Why don’t we live forever?”

“Because of our biological make-up. Our cells—the things of which we’re made—simply have a limited capacity to live and regenerate. It’s the way we’re made.”

When school came within view, our conversation was compressed by the collapse of time. For a nano-second I felt as though we’d been riding a spacecraft among distant stars. But no, back down to earth, our travels had been a 10-minute drive among commuters on our way to second grade.

“Smile, be kind, and pay attention!” I said, as Illiana scrambled out of the car.

Before driving off, I lowered the passenger side window and yelled out, “Love you, Sweetie Pie!”

“I love you too, Grandpa.”

I soon wound my way back to the curb cut onto the byway. A theologian could agree, I thought, and if not, perhaps a philosopher could, that depending on one’s definition, God was somewhere, somehow, someway with us on our drive to school. By the same definition, whether God might’ve been at the debate is anyone’s guess.

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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson