words from the past

Fear and guilt… Two words that as a child I knew too well. My fear was mostly of snakes. I remember having dreams as a child where my entire front yard was covered in snakes of all kinds. I had to make some kind of vine to swing across them in order to land on my porch to gain safe entrance into my house. This was probably due to my fascination with Indiana Jones movies. I loved the adventure but was terrified of the scary bugs, snakes, and spooky stuff.

Later in my childhood, my fear became tied to the loss of things around me. Around the age of 10, I noticed my parents (mostly my mom) constantly yelled at everyone. I began to sense that things were some how coming apart. The atmosphere of my house was like a war, a war with raging words like missles and grenades flying through the living room, dining room, and bedrooms. I began to fear that, FAMILY, the only thing that I had known as true and good was tearing a part. And there was nothing I could do about it, as much as I thought I could. My situation was hopeless.

And then at age 12, it happened. My fear turned to guilt. My parents separated. And everything in me said that I was to blame. In my world everything evolved around me. So if my family world was crumbling down on the outside so was my little spirit on the inside.

I share this story because it is real. It is my life. It is how I came to know fear and guilt. Wrong as they are, this is the point of reference at the center of me.

In her recent book, Christ the LORD, Anne Rice captures the atmosphere of the child Jesus growing up in Alexandria, the most prominent city in first century Egypt. In the last two chapters, in which I finished last night, the boy Jesus finds about his past. He comes to realize that because of the situation surrounding his birth, over 200 children were killed by a paranoid Herod. At the age of seven, Jesus was surrounded by war as the Roman Republic fought to become the Roman Empire. In every city, children lived in fear of the soldiers knocking on the door demanding the life of the children in the house. Jesus knew fear and guilt as a child.

Maybe now when I read the “red letters that speak to fear and guilt,” I realize they came from a child who became a man - who became the greatest Rabbi the world has ever known, and I will remember that He struggled though the emotions of strife and even death to find hope. He came that we might find, as he said, “this life.” Hope is alive.