Jesus-Struck

Our eldest daughter has been born again. A mere six years of age, she has seen the error of her ways and is now choosing the path of the righteous, leaving us, her bewildered parents, shaking our heads in the direction of the sky.

Personally, I blame this all on her visit to her grandparents church, one of those humongous modern ones that resemble monolithic shopping malls more than houses of God. She spent one measly morning in a youth group singing songs/doing crafts/eating pretzels for Jesus, and now she thinks he is quite special.

I learned over discussion at the dinner table that she had decided "Jesus was her boyfriend" and theat she "had crush on him." Um, come again? I mean, not that I want to squelch her heartfelt yearnings for indoctrination into the Christian Church (merely on resepct for her autonomy, mind you), but this borders on the ridiculous. Boyfriend? Crush? Need I even mention her comment that in his picture on the church walls he was kind of "cute"?

Okay, I will concede, Jesus is portrayed as a bit, well, attractive. Those deep blue eyes gazing liquidly out, beckoning us in to his embrace. Long flowing hair wisping over his shoulders....and that jawline! It would stand to reason (in my anthropological rationalizing, anyhow) that he is depicted that way in order to increase female turn-out to services, because after all, churches need people to attend to stay in business. Ditto for the reason why the anglicized churches make him out to be fair-skinned and blue-eyed, even though he was born in the middle east.

Far be it from me to criticize her blossoming religious views. If she thinks Jesus is hot, that is her business. I am having horrible visions of her becoming a "bride of Christ" in the future, but I will try to limit my mockery to laughing behind my hands with my husband as we listen to her spin fluffy sugar-coated dreams of what her babies with Jesus (grandsons of God, don't you know?) would look like as she writes his name in pink gel-pen on her notebooks.

Maybe we should be a TV dinner family. These family discussions are getting a bit hairy.