Wolf Cub Dilemma

From the Wiki: A dilemma (Greek: δί-λημμα "double proposition") is a problem offering at least two solutions or possibilities, of which none is practically acceptable. One in this position has been traditionally described as "being on the horns of a dilemma", neither horn being comfortable, "between Scylla and Charybdis"; or "being between a rock and a hard place", since both objects or metaphorical choices are rough.

So you’re born into a family that isn’t what you’d call spiritually deep inside country-Protestant territory. Somewhere between fundamentalist wildlings and Episcopal restraint…you know, anywhere BFE. Church is a place, a social construct, but god(s) doesn’t actually live there. You’re not forced to go (much), cause you’re the boy and you follow the masculine script of the family. The father wasn’t church’d…he grew up on a farm under a sadistic male lineage that probably didn’t feel comfortable with moral yardsticks (unless they were beating the kids with them). So on Sunday mornings you fish, you shoot, you explore, you read…a lot (the big break with the family tradition…danger Will Robinson!). You grow up comfortably independent in the physical world, spiritually feral and open-minded; about a half a normal local product and…something else. You socialize like a native, but one of these things is not like the others.

Flash forward to now and you’re driving home from the capstone performance of your little one’s vacation bible school experience; lots of kids singin' and dancin' in a space-themed program, periodically screaming out “Praise God!” It’s your sister’s church, a laid-back loving place with lots of family, and you expose the daughter to it for socialization and the fun kids have together no matter what adults are about. Apparently no one there has any sense of stage direction or child-friendly tempo, but the songs were catchy. The science included was actually closer to mainstream instruction than you would have expected until it was suddenly and inexplicably linked to some biblical precept; not bad but there is much correction to do.

Much correction…you’re multi-culturally mythic in the house, and ensure that everyone under the roof puts the same weight on most of the vehicles of moral and ethical instruction that are exposed, though perhaps not on the instructions themselves (extremes are out). You’re consciously growing an adult here, and tolerance and cultural respect are high up on the list of capabilities being funded. There were elements in that kid's program that you don’t agree with, and you are pretty sure they apply a myopic lens that once on is hard to take off. It’s indoctrination, which you understand and accept as part of the reason you let the girl go; she needs to have common cultural reference with the folks she's going to be around, but you want a bias-neutral posture, strength, and unassailable independence in the focal fundamentals of the tyke. Today you’re concerned. Concerned that even though you plan to parse the lessons learned with her and to unwrap the motive, creed, doctrine, and rhetoric, she's getting mixed signals about the sacred (or no signal, an ambush), about the cost of submission to dogma.

Kid gloves off? Some of what she learned this week seems slavish, hubristic, and anti-empirical (not non-empirical, I mean against reason) to me, all anathema. It exposes a real dilemma: How can you be certain to engender faith, community, and a sense of connection to the divine that will serve to protect and comfort when the decisions matter and the hard rain falls, without hobbling the mind? The wolfling road I trod is fraught, and I don’t wish it on my progeny.

Not sure.