Chapter 5 question 2

2. As an unchurched unbeliever, I was taught my Simplicity ideas by the culture. God and Santa Claus both watched over me to catch me doing something wrong. If I did wrong, I would be unrewarded: no presents/ no heaven. My folks taught me right and wrong in a secular way. I feared God because my mom sometimes said “Now I lay me down to sleep” with me. That rhyme hopes that God will come and take my soul (whatever that is). Scary, evil. My complacent atheism got a shaking in the delivery room when Amy was born. Later, we started going to Episcopal church to baptize our daughters. That’s when Complexity set in. I knew very little of the Bible, so we hired a babysitter and went every Wednesday night for Bible class. I also took a Kerygma course on the book of Revelation. Any and every formation class offered I took. I even got confirmed. Prayer still eluded me, but I said the creed and learned a lot of the hymns. Once in a while our highly educated priest would drop a small bomb, like when he said “You know ‘veiled in flesh the godhead see’ is heresy.” I thought, then why do we sing it? Why? Tradition. Tradition makes for complexity—lots of rules to learn, lots of customs that no one understands, lots of resistance to change. But little comments like that hinted that there was a conspiracy of silence in the church. The educated clergy knew the truth, but they weren’t giving it away to the plebeians. It would just confuse us and might lead us to perplexity—not a good thing.