“Cheers, God!”

I don’t want this blog to be a collection of cute things my kids say with vague churchy musings to follow. But, because I live with children, and occasionally listen to them, and because my brain chugs along theological tracks, anecdotes will happen. I’ll try not to include them frequently. And you can heckle, if you like.

Recently, my daughter has been toasting God. And I don’t like it.

We begin each meal with grace. Not quite each meal. Somehow breakfast tends to be fuzzy. I’m not sure how that happens. It was like that when I was growing up, too. Grace lunch and dinner, but breakfast tends to slip by unblessed. Strange.

Anyways, grace is a constant two thirds of the time, but still a fairly rugged tradition. No memorized poems or anything fancy. Usually Spouse or I will talk to God about what we’ve been up to and then about our gratefulness for the fact that we are now sitting down together to reenergize with food and conversation. Sometimes Beangirl asks to pray. I’m pretty sure she prays with her eyes wide open, because she is always very careful to include everything that’s on her plate. Including ketchup.

After that, when we’ve amened (Blue chiming in loudly now) and we’re poised to start eating, there’s frequently a clinking of glasses. I don’t remember when this bit of ritual started, and it isn’t at every meal, but it’s getting to be fairly regular. It’s nice—makes the meal feel a bit celebratory and it’s a way of marking the small events of the day: To Blue’s new tooth! To springtime! To travel!

Now, we’ve wrapped up the road trip for a while and arrived in Nanaimo, B.C., where the paternal grandparents live, and Beangirl is trying out a new custom of toasting God. “Cheers, God!” I don’t quite know why this bugs me. Maybe it’s the way she looks skyward out the window as she does it. Maybe it’s the overly jovial tone. I know it’s just something she’s trying on as a bit of performance art at the table, but it makes me feel strange. It makes God feel imaginary.

I want to encourage play, and I want my kids to feel free to experiment with forms of prayer and expressions of love. It’s just the act of toasting God feels strange to me. I don’t want to feel that God is imaginary. I want to feel that God is imagined. The imaginary is invented; the imagined is dreamed. When I imagine, I use my whole being, the reasoned intellectualism and the gut-felt longing together, to reach for something bigger than I yet know. I search for true ways of shouting what I don’t even know how to whisper. Imagining is expressing the real, and there’s got to be awe in that.

Now, I know that I am making this more complicated than it needs to be. Beangirl is almost four and awe doesn’t stick around long when there are fish sticks on the table. And just as I don’t want my overly bookish theology to confuse my small daughter’s experiments with faith, I shouldn’t let her experiments jar me.

It does make me think, though. About performance and play. About how we receive others’ practices. About my own rituals and regiments, and about how we can and might and even should address God, the Almighty, the Creator of all. I suppose toasting God is closer the calling God “Abba” than we might usually come up with on a Presbyterian Sunday.

And if we come right down to it, “cheers” isn’t a bad thing to say to God. Colloquially at least, we’ll be saying thank you.