I'm Afraid

I humbly acknowledge that what began as an introspective examination of the meaning of “home” digressed into a self-indulgent retrospective of my first five years of life. As a corrective, I need to refocus upon why those first five years are so critical in any human’s life. Fear was a relative unknown. I remember being terrified by water draining from the bathtub (this probably explains more about me than all the words preceding) because I had no idea where it was going or why I would not suffer the same fate. All three synoptic gospels contain passages similar to this one from Mark 10:14: He said to them, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” Young children are innocent, placing their wholehearted faith in their mother, then their father, and so on. Fear is of the unknown, and the unknown is kept at bay by the familiar. But as we mature, a gnawing awareness of the reality of evil begins to corrode the innocence. Research has proven that to deny a newborn the opportunity to bond with its mother in the first moments of life can impact that person for the rest of his or her life. It is one thing to be afraid of the unknown, but it is an altogether different thing to experience the void of evil. With the dawning realization that all is not love and roses comes a kind of cynical resignation that manifests itself as a debate over which is more powerful, good or evil. The challenge of instilling and cultivating hope in such a creature is to communicate that “stronger than the wrong, the right; stronger than the dark, the light.”