Mommy, is God dead?

Perfect. My 4 year old is having an existential crisis.

"Why do you ask that love?"
"Because He's in the sky, where the dead people are."

Crisis averted (or at least delayed).

"Can he see us?"

Aah. An opportunity to make the-God-I'm-not-sure-I-believe-in my powerful ally in the development of my child's conscience.

"Yes. He sees everything we do. The good choices and the bad choices we make..." (not an easy speech to make, given that my notion of 'God' is way more eclectic than that professed by the Good Books)

"But how can He see everything?"
"Well Liam, (I'm smug now, because I have the perfect analogy) God's kind of like a Super Super Hero, so He has special vision that ...."
"No mom. I mean how can He see us on such a cloudy day?"

Now that's a bloody good question.

It's interesting how imaginative 4 year olds are, given that they reside almost completely in The Land of all Things Literal. Creativity, Liam has taught me, has little to do with abstraction, existentialism, anything metaphorical or, alarmingly, honesty. In Liam's World, things fall into 3 clear-cut categories:

1. True
2. A story
3. A joke

That's it. No lies. No exaggerated accounts of things. No points of view. No perspectives.

What is True (and absolutely no Joke) is the fact that Aubrey, our traumatised hamster mentioned in a previous post, will die. Probably sooner than we hope. And then, I will have to rework my answer about Death and God and the Sweet Hereafter.

Best I figure it all out first. Hold on Aubrey. For fuck's sake. Hold on.