Perfect Love

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by Rose of Sharon O’Donnell

 

She was washed into this world in a rush of light and garbled sound and has been overwhelmed by it ever since. This ball of earth, shaped by God’s fingers and tumultuous with his breath, startled her. Shadows danced and quaked. Music strained her soul. Hunger sank its teeth into her. It was too much. She found her own voice and wailed for comfort. She hid in my neck, nursed in my arms, and slept. But the world around her didn’t change. It kept flying through space and assailing her senses until, slowly, she grew to expect the world to poke and prod her.

She is now three and a half. She faces the wind and spreads her arms wide to see if it will knock her down. Shadows are full of things to be discovered. Music still strains her soul, but now it only asks her to dance. And though the world is dangerous and loud and sometimes smells like cows, she has found that it has much to offer her. So she swings between injury and discovery in almost every given moment. Sometimes, it tires her. And when she is too tired or scared to be curious she relies on the crude filing system ordering her mind.

Therefore the lives of ants rioting in the sidewalk cracks hang in the balance as she tries to figure out if these are good bugs or bad bugs. Good bugs don’t bite. Bad bugs sting or bite or leave itchy red spots. The locks on the file snap shut as one ant pinches her toe. She mashes her heel into the sidewalk. She doesn’t know about the ants and their unseen world of twining tunnels, their winged queen, the sacrifice of their own lives just so other ants can walk across a puddle. They are smaller than her and they bite. This is enough to merit violence. Her filing system replaces her wonder.

Curiosity is the answer to her indiscriminate violence. To stop and wonder at the gray spot in a thundercloud or the aphids on the columbines is a queenly thing for her to do. It is good to assume that there is a reason why and to wonder what it is. When confronted with ants, she must learn to ask, to search out the matter. Sometimes the answer might cause her to go cautiously around the teeming sidewalk crack. But sometimes—say, should she find them in my pantry—massacre would ensue with my blessing. Curiosity is the key to wisdom.

She grows. She dances and sings. She brings wriggling worms to her papa to ask what they are. She is jostled by wind and friends. The world sends her mail to be opened and packages that could hold anything. Where she used to startle in fear at a sound, now she hears a quail and imitates it. Where she used to cry with hunger, she now asks for more jam for her bread, knowing it will be given.

As she stretches the boundaries of her mind, she’ll find that her fears do not always mean that evil is near, nor do her joys always signify righteousness. I want her to know that questions should always be asked, but that the right answers are rarely obvious.

But in the end, the same breath that blows thunderheads is the breath that fills her lungs. The fingers that assembled the ants shaped her. The God who watches over her made her like Himself. He is the Knower and she is part of the known, and like the Knower she will always want to know. And this is good.

Library

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by Amanda Jones

I am on my hands and knees

on the gray carpet between the shelves

searching the spines of the bottom shelf books

But, I know that the skinny shouldered girl

in the front row of the three o’clock class,

who never holds the elevator for me

has found it already, but I still want it

to be waiting for me, its vinyl binding

untouched since the mid eighties,

But, I can hear the squeaking wheels

of the librarian’s cart as he collects

the stacks from the tables and I know

I only have ten minutes before he pulls

the earphones from his ears to tell me

I have to leave. I start on the next shelf,

but I have run out of decimal places.

 

A Fear Observed, by Leta Sundet

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Before I step through the door I steel myself. I flip on the light. I scan walls and ceilings, blessedly white so nothing brown can blend in. I approach smudges gingerly. In the bathroom I check behind towels and under the bathmat. I’ve got a flip-flop in my fist.
C. S. Lewis said that fear of spiders was, like fear of cats, a totally irrational fear. I would have expected a more nuanced perspective from a man of his theological astuteness. Someone with such depth of insight should have taken one look at a spider and realized that they are of the devil. As Adam and Eve shuffled from the Garden, the first arachnids dragged themselves out of crevices in hell.
I, however, am spiritually attuned in ways Lewis was not. Target has remote-control tarantulas beside the Barbies, and I will flee into the next aisle when someone turns one on.
I’ve literally wept watching a chunky one slip under my furniture, and pondered whether I could stuff tissues into all the crevices so that it suffocated or starved to death.
I’ve assured a friend that if she knocked the black giant off the ceiling I would smash it at the bottom, and then hid in the kitchen while she killed it.
I’ve stood in the middle of the bathroom in my bathrobe, hair dripping, shoe in hand, poking the towel on the floor, unable to bring myself to uncover it, to unearth it, to voluntarily subject myself to its discovery.
My biology teacher called it the “creep factor:” their  knees bend above their bodies and they have too many legs. Not thousands too many, like the millipede, but only a couple too many. Only slightly off, only barely wrong, which is the definition of disturbing. Add to that hair and thickness of limb and a poisonous-looking face.

In all honesty, I would conquer this fear if I could. It’s inconvenient, not to mention embarrassing. I live in a basement while I’m at school and every time it rains they leak in through the walls. Sometimes I can’t sleep.
Most of all it’s infuriating, standing there paralyzed with my tissue, to be at the mercy of something the size of a corn flake. Lewis was right, there’s no reasoning with this fear; I’ve tried. So what do I do with it?

“Perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.” John said confidently, like he said most things.
I’ve never understood that. I could make a long list of things I’m afraid of, and judgment isn’t on it, at least most of the time. Hell is abstract and metaphorical and it’s the one thing I’m pretty sure Jesus took care of.  I’m not afraid of punishment, John. What I am afraid of is this here-and-now, flesh-and-blood, soft, hairy arachnid. And I don’t see what spiders have to do with punishment.
Deeper.
What is it really about them that frightens me? When I actually consider it, I’m not afraid of them biting me (I’ve never known any black widows or brown recluses personally). I don’t dread them crawling on me either (that would be short-lived) or even that they’ll get inside my mouth while I’m sleeping (I’d be sleeping). No, what I am really afraid of is the way they make me feel.

It’s an inevitable and irresistible horror, my smothered shriek like a stab driving its way out of my chest, revulsion whirling through my head and stomach so that I want to double over. For a moment I don’t have control over my body. It shudders involuntarily, it shrinks back. “Just pick up the towel!” my brain bellows, but I am obeying someone else now. I’m engulfed, possessed really. Something I don’t understand has me in its grip—something foreign and strong.
I’m getting squeezed in someone’s hand, and it’s not the hand of my rationality; it’s not the Holy Spirit’s hand.
What I’m afraid of when I look at this little beast is of suddenly being alone, a naked soul, strings pulled like a marionette by someone who is laughing at me, and it is just us two in the world, only us two, and this world does not belong to God.
What is this, I wonder, but fear of hell?

Laugh, if you want. I laugh at myself, until I see something black shiver across the floor.
“Get over it,” you can scoff; I scoff too, and scold myself. Maybe I should watch lots of nature documentaries till I’m used to the sight of them? Keep one as a pet beside my bed? Live in the basement for a few more years?
But I could line up all sorts of other anxieties here: not so easy to dismiss, but all, I see now, with this same fear of forsaking at their heart. Burning to death. Losing my family. Rape. Ghosts. What I’m really afraid of, I know now, is not these things, but these things making me insane: making me forget who I am, making me forget who loves me, to the point that I am no one and I am not loved.
So I wonder, will I only stop fearing spiders, will I only stop fearing anything, when I stop being afraid that God is going to forsake me?
Perfect love drives out fear.

Spider, in the Kingdom of God, when you have been resurrected from the dried slime on the bottom of my flip-flop and I rise from a pile of dust, will we look at each other and laugh? You, because you somehow managed to create pure terror in the heart of this being who could crush you with a tiptoe? And I, I will laugh because you were the closest I ever came to going to hell.