Beloved son,
Last spring you discovered what I would call your first real fear. It wasn’t snakes or spiders or a scary-looking person. It wasn’t lightning or heights or getting lost. No, it was that formidable foe formica: the great and terrible ant.
For the record, it wasn’t actually ants that first terrified you. It wasn’t a living creature at all. It was a mix-up, a tilt of your imagination that took a bed of dried pollen pods in the street and transformed them, apparently, into something hideous beyond recognition.
We were out for an evening walk when it happened. When we left the house, you spotted a cluster of ants swarming around a scrap piece of cucumber near the sidewalk. You took great interest in the scene. As we walked on, you kept saying, “More ants! More ants!” like a concertgoer shouting for an encore.
Mom and I are not sure why the shift happened. We cannot say what resemblance you found between the ants on the cucumber and, later in our walk, a bunch of pollen pods in our path, nor what about them turned your scientist’s curiosity into abject terror.
Whatever the case, when your foot crunched onto those pods and you saw those rust-colored half circles spread out behind and before you, our pleasant stroll turned blood red. Your legs seized. Your arms trembled. Your face contorted as you unleashed a scream unlike any sound we’d ever heard. You clamored into Mom’s arms and refused to let go. When we tried to set you down, it was as if we were dropping you into boiling tar. Mom and I were still out in the fresh spring air; you had entered a waking nightmare.
The only word you could form, like the name of the murderer on the accuser’s tongue, was “Ants! Ants!”
Mom and I were stunned. Futilely, we fixated on the rational. Something was wrong with our precious boy, and we needed to get to the bottom of it.
“What’s wrong, baby? What is it? There’s nothing there. It’s just some pods from the tree. Look—there aren’t any ants. You’re safe, you’re safe.”
Powerless.
Your ears were stopped by terror, your eyes blinded by its glare.
Our parental presence, in other times a magical balm for your troubled spirit, had lost its charm. Or if it did retain any power, it had to be administered at full strength. Standing close by, holding hands—this was not enough. You needed to be lifted and held.
For the rest of the walk, I carried you on my shoulders while on your shoulders you carried your fear. If I tried to set you down, your fear would climb down, too. Our unwelcome companion followed us all the way home, where Mom and I thought it would realize it was not welcome. Surely the familiarity of our front yard, the assurance of our front door, would send fear on its way.
We were wrong. Fear poisoned the grass, the front mat, even, to our dismay, the carpet of the living room. We eventually got you to sit in the tub and relax. Afterwards you were still wary of the bathroom floor.
We put you to bed that night wondering if you’d ever be able to play outside again.
In retrospect, this thought of ours was as much an overreaction as your response was to the pollen pods. Of course you were able to play outside again. But that is how fear operates, isn’t it. It amplifies, distorts.
Not long after you had recovered from the ant incident—and yes, you did recover, albeit with a few other mini panics at the sight of actual ants[1]—I experienced this distorting effect myself.
I can’t say why, but I have always had a disproportionate fear of intruders in the house. As a boy and even a teen, I would lie in bed and let every little sound in the house spawn the same scary story in my mind. I would picture a gloved hand punching through the glass of the front window, a shadowy figure slinking through the house while everyone (except bug-eyed me) was fast asleep. In these visions, the intruder would never rummage through our things, would never go for the obvious like the television or wallets.
Instead, he would inevitably creep towards my room, making just enough noise to alert me but no one else. In these mental inventions of mine, I always knew that I would have to get up and confront him, or he would enter my room and confront me. Either way, there would be no avoiding him.
Well, this intruder (“intruder”) came to haunt me recently, maybe a month after our run-in with the ants (“ants”). One night I awoke in the black of night to the sound of your crying from the other room. This was odd. While your sister was itty bitty and would wake us up at all hours from her bedside bassinet, by this age you were a rock-solid sleeper. Something was wrong.
As I approached your door on my right, I heard a noise from the bathroom on my left—the shower curtain rustled.
That was all it took for me to initiate a code-red panic. As quick as a heartbeat, the old visions sprang forward—the quiet breaking and entering, the stalker in the dark, the presence of some unseen figure coming ever closer. Except now it was no vision at all but an absolutely certain knowledge that a person—a man, I somehow knew—was in our house, steps away from my crying son, my sleeping wife, my slumbering newborn daughter.
If fight-or-flight were a switch, I snapped the dial clean off. Swept up in a tidal wave of adrenaline, I slammed open the bathroom door, flicked on the light, flung the shower curtain open, and yelled Mom’s name.
What was my plan? What was my intent? No idea. I was a man in his boxers with nothing to protect himself but a cell phone flashlight. It didn’t matter. In an instant, I had transformed from a sleepy fawn to a wide-eyed buck. I had entered into a rare, untempered mode in which I was prepared to do whatever necessary to attack, maim, or otherwise incapacitate whoever had come to do you harm.
The problem with that plan—if you can call it a plan—was that one cannot incapacitate a shower curtain. For that was all that was in the bathroom. Not only did my “gotcha!” moment reveal that there was in fact no intruder (I realized later that I must have mistaken Mom’s rustling of the bedsheets for the rustling of the shower curtain), but I had also woken up everyone in the house. Your sister was crying. Mom, understandably vexed, called from the bedroom, “What are you doing?” You were standing in your crib in stunned silence, as if thinking, “Geez, Dad, I knew I was crying, but you didn’t have to call in the National Guard.”
I picked you up, helped settle sister, and went about trying to bring my heart rate below 200.
Futilely, I fixated on the rational.
“There is no one in the bathroom,” I told myself. “You saw for yourself. You misheard. There is nowhere for anyone to hide. No one is after your children. They’re safe. You’re safe.”
Powerless.
My self-talk did nothing to extinguish the flame of fear. I had to stamp it out until not a single ember glowed in the dark of night. With you in my arms, I visited every room of the house, checked every closet, looked behind every curtain and piece of furniture. Nothing.
Then and only then did I return to your room and rock you back to sleep. Even as you relaxed and gave in to slumber, I remained alert, my ears tuned, my imagination churning. I heard the house’s every creak and groan. The phantom intruder had retreated to some hidden place inside my mind.
So yeah, I can hardly blame you for having an episode over a pile of pollen when I nearly murdered someone (er, no one) over a rustling sheet.
As I think back and laugh about our horror stories, two similarities strike me. For one, they are both so silly. What better image of overreaction? Tiny stimuli prompted responses so overblown that they hijacked not only our own behavior but the whole situation. Some dead tree parts gather in the street, and now no one can enjoy our evening stroll? Mom turns over in bed, and now the whole neighborhood needs to wake up? Fear has no sense of proportion.
When I first started writing this letter, my preconceived “moral of the story” was just that: the silliness of fear. My spiritual takeaway was going to be that if we only realized the smallness of the ants that make us tremble and the bigness of the Father nearby, we would have nothing to fear.
And yes, sure. Hanging close to our strong, loving God, we have nothing to fear in this world or the next. That is true, and we should hold onto it.
But if that was an easy truth, if statements such as “do not fear” alone were enough to steady us, then fear could never be silly. The second similarity in our stories is the ingredient that makes a silly fear possible: imagination.
In both our experiences, there was no real danger whatsoever. The threat was completely imagined. The situation could have been dangerous had there actually been a swarm of bugs or an intruder in the house. In such a case, fear would have been useful, giving us the adrenaline needed to act.
But even after we had seen clear evidence that there was no danger, our minds enlarged and distorted the environment in just the right way to transfix us. An imagined reality overruled the present reality. It’s like some part of us was prepared, or preparing, to encounter something far bigger than ourselves, something overwhelming, something terrifying.
The Romantics sought out this sensation. They called it the sublime, “the quality of such greatness, magnitude or intensity . . . that our ability to perceive or comprehend it is temporarily overwhelmed.” They’d scale mountains and stand before waterfalls to experience it. They’d paint and write poetry to try to bottle it up.
They philosophized about it, too. “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature,” wrote Edmund Burke, “ . . . is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.” Burke must have come across some pollen pods in his day.
Where does this notion of the sublime come from? And why are we at once drawn to it and paralyzed (or spurred to fits of rage) by it? I believe that our capacity for “astonishment” points to something greater than either nature or our imaginations. I believe it points to a world for which we are made but not yet ready, a place of such scope and depth and substance that we would cower if we took full sight of it.
C.S. Lewis gives a memorable image for this realm of greater substance. In The Great Divorce, Lewis imagines a group of citizens from hell bussed up to heaven to get the grand tour, as it were. What they discover is just the opposite of the clouds of cotton candy that many people picture when they think of heaven. Instead, the visitors find a world that looks much like earth, only realer:
“It was the light, the grass, the trees that were different; made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our country that men were ghosts by comparison. Moved by a sudden thought, I bent down and tried to pluck a daisy which was growing at my feet. The stalk wouldn’t twist. I tugged till the sweat stood out on my forehead and I had lost most of the skin off my hands. The little flower was hard, not like wood or even like iron, but like diamond.” (28)
I find this description simultaneously silly (diamond flowers?), imaginative (clever Clive!), and spooky (ghosts?!).
In another of his masterpieces, Lewis leans into the spooky even further. One of the core arguments of Miracles is that God is a living God, a personal God, not some impersonal force or spiritual mist in the air. Lewis says that coming to terms with God’s personhood, His realness and presence, His utter lack of abstraction, should give us a shock:
“There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (‘Man’s search for God!’) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?” (93-94)
When my ears perked up in panic that dark quiet night months ago, it wasn’t a real footstep I had heard in the hall. And when your face melted in terror that spring evening, it wasn’t a real pit of ants you had stepped into. But that sense of shock, of alarm, of terror—what if it is a metaphor for our encounter with the real and present God, great and terrible, awesome beyond understanding, sublime in the truest sense?
Or perhaps such moments of terror are more than metaphor. Perhaps they are practice, our imaginations like vestigial organs of the bodies we were meant to have, searching for a reality we will one day know.
King Solomon famously instructed, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9.10). Perhaps imagination is the beginning of fear.
[1] My favorite was when we were out for a hike with Grandpa and you got scared of some ants on the trail. Taking a knee beside you, Grandpa gently explained that the ants couldn’t hurt you. He even demonstrated by letting an ant crawl over his hand. When you calmed down and we resumed our walk, Grandpa turned to me and whispered, “That ant on my hand? It bit me!”