yeh-HI
Yes, with our children it was the Tooth Fairy, but in my family growing up it was the Brownie* in whom we three fervently believed, the Brownie who came while you were asleep, left the dime under your pillow and spirited the tooth away. Faith: as a child it never occurred to me that the Brownie was but a faith object. Sanny Claus too, (Santa was a Yankee term) Sanny Claus left gifts that magic night; even after neighbor kids self-importantly spilled the secret, only a foolish child would jeopardize Christmas morning by voicing doubt, even as it gathered in the mind's dark places. Have faith, believe or no toys; have faith, believe or you're going to Hell. Faith is what your elders, whom you trust because they are all you have, pass along that you believe; and may, as you mature, reconsider, decide and choose for yourself, which is what adult believers baptism (or in our case Confirmation) is theologically, legitimately about.
What if you dare choose not to? Not a good place to be.
Mark Twain keeps surfacing again, innit: "faith is believing what you know damn well ain't so".
Every time I pass by the Massalina Drive house where we grew up, I see the tiny "stoop" of a front porch and remember Easter mornings: in our pajamas, standing anxiously in the living room at the heavy oaken front door with Gina and Walt, waiting for our parents to come open the door, hoping against hope that the Easter Bunny had come again this year, leaving filled Easter baskets on the front porch, had not forgotten us or passed us by.
Taking a break from my book**, yesterday, I was googling hearth gods, household gods, and remembered a seminary professor suggesting that YHWH didn't just appear as a stranger to Abram in Harran with his tempting promises, but was known and "faithed" by Abram, that when Terah and family left Ur years earlier, the family would have taken their household god along as they set out for Harran, doubtless YHWH, his origins with Abraham and his seed having begun as their household god.
Oh, and a couple generations later, Jacob's wife Rachel stole her father's household gods and sat on them while the search went on. An aside: does this train of thought indicate that the carved stone or wooden or cast metal household god is perceived as a symbol (as perhaps our processional cross that we bow to as it goes by, or the Christus Victor hanging in the back of our church sanctuary) or as the very god him/her/itself? In my office I have a Ganesh, the elephant god, and have read and been told that for some the cast metal statue is not just a symbol at all, but the very god, and that if ignored, he/it will react angrily and punishingly.
What ignited this train of thought? Googling and reading, I noticed among named hearth gods of old, the Brownie, an Anglo-Saxon hearth god who, kept honored and pleased, came in the night and did household chores, and it brought to mind that the Brownie was our tooth god when I was a boy.
I'm still in mind of household gods, and mindful that in ancient Palestine every household and tribe and nation had their own god, faithed and trusted to protect them, look after them if reverently placated, take their side in such as sickness or health, poverty or wealth, famine or plenty, traveling mercies or bandits, pregnant or barren, happiness or misery, warring battles against other tribes and nations, and deliver victory. And national gods today, where there is state religion (England, Arabia, &c.).
And also mindful of that recent slideshow of the heavens that begins with Earth and moon and progresses to an unimaginable universe.
It continues to nibble at me, stirring the holy man with uneasy questions that, as a sometime amateur astronomer since Cove School days, are always there anyway: look how vast the place is, how many, two hundred billion galaxies? is it conceivable that, as yesterday I recalled Bryan Green preaching, a higher power cares about me, even me, speck on a speck?
Thinking of F Schleiermacher's notion about "a sense of the Infinite" being implanted in each one, isn't it conceivable that intelligent beings on habitable planets of solar systems in some of those galaxies also have their own gods, planetary gods, or national gods if they have nations such as ours, or family household gods; holdovers, say, from earlier in the development of their civilizations, time before they comprehended, when they were fearful, and needed to explain nature, and death?
Among the eternal, infinite multiverse, in our universe alone, with untold billions of galaxies, how many stars with solar systems of livable planets host civilizations of intelligent Beings who, failing to comprehend the light that shines in the darkness, much less the darkness itself, have true religion and virtue with gods of their own whom they fervently believe to be the One True God, Pantokrator, creator of all that is, seen and unseen, their own god who in the beginning burst the universe into creation with an Impulse, a Notion, a Word, or a Song.
T
* Top picture, household God, the Brownie. "Kind home spirit brings good luck and money to the house" reads the ad for it. Carved Wooden Statue Figure, talisman. (all the statues pinched on line, various household gods from various cultures, for sale on line. I didn't post an image of Ganesha for example, because I don't want to be misunderstood as poking fun at anyone's religion or god)
** Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible, deliberate reading, totally intrigued because in it I recognize so much of the absolutist self-certain salvation or hell Bible Belt South that I grew up in, I'm 2/3 through the book.