As a man reaches a certain age – the age when peers start losing their parents – there are lines of thought that start to recur whether he likes it or not. How many people are left carrying on the family name, and what are the odds it will survive past my nephew’s generation? Is the work I’m doing making any difference at all? If I’d known in the past what I know now, would things have turned out any differently?

Harlan Ellison’s story “One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty” (and a subsequent New Twilight Zone episode from the 1980s) explores the latter question through the device of time travel. An adult man meets his childhood self and gets to impart some wisdom. Mark Waid would later riff on this idea for an issue of DC Comics’ The Flash, now that I think about it. And in a way, the It Gets Better campaign is based on a similar conceit: advice one wishes had been available in youth, minus the temporal paradox.

If multiverse theory is right — and I think every comic book fan out there hopes it is because we got there first — there are probably multiple worlds out there where someone kinda like me has one or more kids. Here’s what I’d tell them, or the younger me, for that matter:

* Follow your heart, and let other people deal with their own prejudices. If you meet and start to fall for someone who’s of a different religious background or ethnicity than yourself, you owe it to yourself to give the relationship a chance to flourish … and to give those whose judgment you fear a chance to rise above their first instincts and learn to love someone outside their normal parameters. Trust me when I say that “What if…?” will keep lead to many more sleepless nights than “Why did I…?”

* Do for the underdog what you would wish a bigger dog to do for you. OK, so that’s an awkward phrasing, but it’s a more proactive form of the Golden Rule. As a school kid in the waning days of the Cold War, I saw classmates who were Jehovah’s Witnesses harassed and called communists because they did not stand for the Pledge of Allegiance; Mormon classmates were ridiculed over their faith, and evangelical Christianity was privileged in ways I realize in hindsight were wildly unconstitutional in my K-12 education. I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t speak up, though I did at least not let others’ ignorance stop me from becoming close to high school teachers who were Jewish and Muslim (and friends to each other). But it wasn’t until I started a Unitarian Universalist student group in college – and was labeled a cult leader by the Southern Baptist campus ministry – that I met the Other and saw my own face.

* You’ll learn some things you wish you didn’t, but there’s no such thing as learning too much. The story of Adam and Eve puts learning in a dim light, of course, raising the issue of who benefits from telling such a story. We recently lost Christian theologian John Hick, whose book Evil and the God of Love put a different spin on the doctrine of the primordial fall – he called it the felix culpa or “fortunate fall,” arguing that free will and a capacity for evil gave the humanity’s good deeds and cleaving to God a moral consequence lacking from automatons. As theodicies go, it’s the one I can most easily swallow, even though I don’t believe in a literal Garden of Eden, Adam, Eve, or talking snake. Similarly:

* Don’t let someone else’s fear stop you from asking questions. Some parents resist having their children learn that other religions, sexual orientations, political ideas, etc., even exist out of a fear that their children will be led astray if that happens; to them I say, if your faith is that weak, perhaps you’re better off without it.

The important thing is to own your journey, to engage it actively and not just remain a bystander to your life. I’ve been an uninformed believer, a somewhat informed seeker, a nihilistic atheist, an accommodating skeptic, and now as a seminarian I sense myself shifting into some other mode yet to be defined; when a friend recently told me she wished I believed in God, my first reaction was to think, “Well, I don’t not believe.”

Has this life been easy? No. To be a freethinker in my native South is to embark upon one of life’s more solitary callings, like being a lighthouse keeper on the world’s most isolated island or an ethicist on Wall Street. But the most lonely moment on that journey has been more fulfilling to me than the alternative: to remain sitting in the pews of my childhood church, hearing a message that the world will be ending in about three weeks, give or take, and you know it’s true because the guest preacher’s sweating and out of breath. That’s not insight; that’s too much fried chicken.

A steady dose of “the end is nigh” religion might be appropriate for a room full of seniors for whom the end really is nigh, but that’s no message for a kid who’s never been on a date or learned to drive. When I was a kid, my family told me I could do anything. The shouting guys in the suits said there was no point in trying to do anything. In that light, it’s no wonder I’m still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up; I was weighed down too long with the notion that I never would.

Religion worthy of the next generation should aim a bit higher, don’t you think? And less rhetorically: What advice would you give to your 12-year-old self?

Image: “Multiverse” by Silver Spoon on Wikimedia Commons