Non-terrifying spirituality for children – Mr. Market

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Non-terrifying spirituality for children

19 Jun, 2026

I grew up in a Catholic family in Boston. As you can imagine, this was an especially Catholic upbringing.

I loved being religious. For my first communion, my grandmother gave me a gold cross on a gold chain. I would kiss the cross before walking up to the plate at my little league baseball games, feeling the grooves of the gum I’d packed in my lip with my tongue to settle my nerves against a familiar texture.

At night, in the room I shared with my two brothers, I’d sit crosslegged on the gray carpet next to my bed and say an Our Father. I’d ask for stuff. I’d ask for a good grade on a test or that a certain girl would talk to me the next day at school, and that when I talked back, I’d be funny and I’d say exactly the right thing. I’d pray that there would be no more hunger or pain or other bad things in the world. I felt like someone cared about me, and was looking out for me, and that there was an underlying order and justice to the universe.

I liked praying and I liked sitting in the thin wooden pews in church on Sunday mornings. I liked following my mind wherever it wandered, only occasionally interrupted by the priest telling me to stand/sit/kneel. I liked the organ, which sounded scary, and the singer, who had a cartoonishly high-pitched, unsteady, grating voice. I liked how the light came in through the high windows behind the altar, which was covered in a heavy purple sheet. After church, we’d drive through nice neighborhoods with big houses. My parents would ogle and guess at how much each was worth while the four of us kids tried to keep our knees from touching in the backseat.

Our church could loosely be classed as ‘fire and brimstone’, though I’m sure there were more doomer-y ones out there. The priests talked about hell a ton. It kinda seemed like you could be sent there for just about anything. I thought about it all the time. I knew I lied, and I knew I wanted the wrong things. I wanted to be a famous skateboarder. I wanted money and I wanted ten girlfriends. I was not meek and I would not inherit the earth. I liked to fight and I liked to eat as much as I could at dinner, even though there were kids who never had anything for dinner.

My freshman year of college I joined a poetry club. As you can imagine, I arrived incredibly naive and insulated from disparate perspectives. I met a bunch of people there who were quite different from me. These were not the aloof, rough boys of my youth lol. It occurred to me for the first time in a meaningful way that the doctrine I’d been steeping in my entire life was wrong.

I now looked at my religion as punitive, irrationally vindictive, egocentric, naive, deeply prejudicial, and frequently hypocritical about important things. It was suddenly clear to me that many of the tenets of Catholicism were the machinations of mortal men trying to keep women subservient and self-subjugating and the poor delusional with hope, such that neither group would try to change their circumstances in an organized or decisive way.

I functionally abandoned Catholicism, though I didn’t tell my family and so still went to church when I was home from school. I didn’t mind going at all and still enjoyed the ritual.

Until very recently, I’ve thought very little about organized religion apart from generally disliking it for all the unresolvable conflict it tends to generate. I’ve never minded one way or the other if friends of mine are religious, but I’ve always known it ran counter to my own value system.

But now I’m having a kid. I’ve been thinking about the comforts of religion that did serve me at one time, and whether or not I should make those comforts available to him somehow.

I think there are several benefits of being part of some organized spiritual group. You have community, a clear-cut moral code or general design for living, rituals that serve as grounding tentpoles across the long lawn of childhood, and some kind of answer for the hard problem of ‘why’ that is extremely palatable for kids.

That said, there is no way we are going to adopt the Catholicism I grew up in. It would be way too confusing for him. We’d be telling him, on the one hand, every person has innate dignity and deserves compassion and respect, and also God loves all his children, but on the other hand, gay people are on a fast train to hell for some reason, where they’ll burn for all eternity, and so is anyone who doesn’t atone in a very specific way for the inherent sin of being born human at all.

Life is full of contradictions no matter how you look at it, but IMO that’s a bit too contradictory. So I’ve been thinking about other forms of spirituality/community/rituals that could provide a grounding framework for my little growing family.

My wife works in hospice and many of her coworkers/friends are spiritual guides of one kind or another: there are rabbis, chaplains,...