Bedtime Parables

The boys are in a wholesome mode, these days, where they actually want to hear Christ's parables as bedtime stories - particularly the lights-out spoken bedtime stories, as distinct from the pre-lights-out stories that I read to them. This is a vast improvement on almost anything, but especially "Nice and Ferocious", two equal and opposite New Hampshire delivery trucks who starred in traffic-etiquette morality plays along Interstate 93. The boys have figured out that I'm not very good at making up stories, and Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen were "spent" a long time ago. [Plus, I don't tell them half the stories in the Canon - most of them aren't really good for the tender imagination of small children.]

So now they explicity ask for "Jesus Stories" - which can be any stories pertaining to the spiritual life, including Saints, miracles, and Old and New Testament accounts. But more specifically, now they want to hear "the stories that Jesus told". Of course, I'm happy to oblige.

The only limitation in all of this is that they seem quite fixated on the specific details of each story, often at the expense of its lessons. I don't expect anything more from four- and six-year-olds, but it's rather entertaining.

Tonight I told them the Parable of the Talents. At the end of it, Ian said something like "That was really a neat one!" Needless to say, his entrepreneurial young mind readily understood that talents, or any other currency, loaned to a person can readily be converted into profit-margin.

Then I told them about the dinner which all the invitees declined to attend, such that the final guest list consisted of spontaneously selected people in the streets. I actually decided to add a point of etiquette to the story, for future reference, and told the boys that it's very, very bad to fail to attend an event for which you have accepted an invitation, unless you have an excellent excuse, such as illness. Ian, with his legal mind, wanted to know whether the no-show guests in the parable had actually accepted their invitations. Daniel had a more specific question: "Did he icvite any bullies?"

["Icvite" is Daniel's word for "invite"; I think Ian taught him that one, but I suspect that Ian has outgrown it by now. There is a handful of words the boys use that are just-a-little-"off", like that.]

Eventually, Ian asked for the story about "the nuns." I truly didn't know what he meant. The only "nun" story I ever told was a highly superficial, sketch of "The Sound of Music." After a short time, it became clear that the story of the nuns was the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins. I did use the word "virgins", but I interspersed it, occasionally, with "young ladies" -which until very recently in social history were generally one-and-the-same. Part of the point of my calling them "young ladies" was so that I wouldn't be asked by the all-inquiring one exactly what a virgin is... So I don't know why Ian was thinking of them as nuns, per se.

But he seemed to capture the contrast between the seven wise virgins and the seven foolish virgins. He identified the parable as the one "about the really dumb nuns and the smart ones."

(February 11, 2010)