One of my favourite “dad blogs” – MetroDad – yet again, features an interesting insight into parenthood that echoes my own sentiments on the subject : 

Sadly, the only times I enter a church these days are when someone dies or gets married.  However, BossLady and I are seriously contemplating attending one again so that the Peanut doesn’t automatically assume that our peculiar brand of Agnostic Secularism is the natural order of things.  If the Peanut chooses to eventually opt out of organized religion, we want it to be HER choice, not ours.  As parents, we feel that, at the very least, we owe it to our daughter to make sure she is exposed to religion (or religions) so that she can eventually make her own decision about the role it’s going to play in her life.

Having married someone from a different community (my wife is Catholic), and being sort of “Agnostic Secular” myself, I often find our family in a similar predicament. 

Very early in our marriage, we decided that we would expose our child – Pumpkin – to a variety of religious beliefs and cultures, so that she does not grow up with a narrow sense of what is God, religion or Life!  And so, we find ourselves in this cauldron that is perhaps unique to us, in our own specific way :

We agreed that Pumpkin would be baptised, but she would also get an Indian name.  We agreed that the family would make it a point to go to Church atleast a couple of times a year, even if it’s only on Christmas and Easter.  But we would also visit some temples of various other faiths, to keep things in perspective. 

We celebrate Christmas and Diwali.  We have pictures of Hindu deities and The Last Supper hanging on our walls.  My daughter communicates to us in English, and to her grandmother in Hindi!  Quite like the richness in the two kinds of food that gets cooked in our house, I think this diversity only adds to the experience of Life.

… As I’ve mentioned, I became disillusioned with organized religion many years ago.  Then, after 9/11 and the loss of one of my best friends, I was convinced that religion was the core root of the world’s problems.  Now, a scant two years after the birth of my daughter, I’m contemplating going to church again for the first time in years.  Who would have ever guessed that?

It’s funny being a parent, isn’t it?  You spend so much time thinking about how you’re affecting your child yet you rarely notice how sometimes your child affects you more.

As it turns out, I too find myself – on some Sundays – attending a discourse on spirituality that ranges from the learnings of the Buddha to the wisdom of the Upanishads!  Like MetroDad’s Peanut, my little Pumpkin may also have affected me, more than the other way around.