Last night I got out the Play-doh to talk about God.

Play-doh and God had not been part of the evening's plans, but when I picked up my four-and-a-half-year-old son Kai from school and he announced, "I believe God," the night's timetable flew out the car window.

My first panicked move was to stall; I concentrated on syntax. That diversion exhausted, I moved on to whom he'd been discussing God with that day. When he named a teacher, I felt flooded with surprise and anger. He's in a Montessori school, not a parochial one; what in the world was the teacher doing talking about God? But I couldn't keep that ruse up, either. Whether the teacher had acted appropriately or not was immaterial. What I had to face was the fact that my four-and-a-half-year-long sidestepping of spirituality conversations with Kai had come to an end. It was time to discuss my beliefs.

Which is how we all came to be gathered around the kitchen table, a neon-pink lump of Play-doh centered in front of us. I'd asked Marcelle to be present for this crucial discussion with our son, but I needn't have worried; once I told him the topic and the prop, he was not about to miss the spectacle.

It actually went well. I shaped a sun and an earth and a few other planets, pinched off a few stars, and then rolled appropriately-sized balls for Kai, Mommy and Daddy, the dogs and the cat. Then came more little pinches, each carefully named: a tree, a bird, a fish, a table. With this panorama before us, I swept my hand over it all and explained that I believed that all of it, together, was God. That we were all part of God, all made of the same thing. Kai seemed to grasp the concept so easily, I moved on to reincarnation, scooping up our whole family and squishing it into the unused reserve, then rolling out new people. I told him that we believed that when people died, they came back to life as other people, and that sometimes people remembered who they were in the life before. Did he remember who he was before? This question seemed to confuse Kai, who covered his uncertainty by grabbing the reserve and rolling out and naming the other people in his life: Grandma and Grandpa, aunt Coreen, Mima.... Thrilled with my success so far, I pinched out a Jesus to begin the talk about Christmas, but Marcelle pointed out the obvious: I'd lost my audience. Before long, we had all reshaped the God/universe into shocking pink Tyrannosaurus Rexs, Stegosauruses, and prehistoric flora.

The ironic part of these belated discussions is that our family -- as usual -- has reversed the typical parental hang-ups. Kai already understands most of how babies are made, and recently provoked a discussion of body fluids after asking a series of increasingly more detailed questions about AIDS. He also, of course, knows that it was Daddy who carried him in his uterus. He knows that sometimes girls have penises and boys have vulvas (although, he's been repeatedly cautioned, not everyone knows that fact), and he has no hang-ups about using these anatomical terms even in public. I worry that his precocious interest in bodies is going to earn us a visit from Child Protective Services some day, but that, I suppose, is the risk we run as parents determined not to lie, raising a kid determined to understand such things long before he's "supposed to."

But God and spiritual beliefs? Those topics seemed too hard to broach, at least until the school forced my hand and I had my Play-doh brainstorm. Even then, when I rolled a God ball and set it far apart from the universe I'd created and told Kai that some people believe God is a separate being somewhere far away, a voice in my head challenged, "Is that true? Are you sure that's what they believe?"

I'm not sure, which means I'm going to have to embark on another big research project. Goodness knows this kid is going to ask me increasingly detailed questions, and I can't model respect for others' beliefs if I can't even articulate them. But I do sigh just thinking about the task, and all the others like it to come. These linked, simultaneous jobs -- raising a kid who's respectful of others, trying to convince others to be respectful of him (and everyone else), trying to equip him with tools to deal with the inevitable prejudice and ignorance he'll face no matter how much consciousness-raising I do -- is exhausting.

But at least now I have that smile-provoking image of a bright pink Play-doh God/universe as my talisman to remind me: sometimes it's not only possible to meet those challenges, but to do so with a stroke of playful brilliance.

May your holiday season be filled with joyful inspiration. (A carton or two of Play-doh will probably help. Trust me on this.)