Be not afraid!
By Michelle Martin
“I’m not afraid of anything,” Frank likes to declare boldly.
Such declarations usually come in the full light of day, in some bug-free environment, as he holds my hand or nestles into my arms. Not on a spooky night, when tree branches tap at windows and you could almost imagine ghost and goblins about.
Even so, I applaud his courage. Or maybe it’s just bravado.
Sometimes I can’t resist questioning further, though. “What about bees?” I ask the 4-year-old who declared a playground off-limits for weeks because he once saw a yellow jacket there.
“I’m not afraid of bees,” he says. “I just don’t like them. And I stay far away from them so they don’t sting me.”
OK, makes sense to me.
Caroline has never had much of a problem admitting to her fears—ranging from having me let go of her bike as she learned to ride without training wheels to what would happen if she woke up in the middle of an operation.
More than once, she’s stopped in her tracks, looked at me and said, “I’m scared, Mommy.”
More than once, I’ve stopped myself from saying, “Me, too.”
Most of the time, I fall back on the stock phrases: It will be all right. There’s nothing there that will hurt you. I’m here. Don’t be afraid.
But that, of course, is easier said than done.
Don’t be afraid, God told Abraham, Moses and Isaiah, among others. Don’t be afraid, Jesus told his disciples. I wonder if it worked for them.
Often, when my children are scared (even Frank, though he won’t admit it), I remind them not to tease one another, because everyone is scared of something. Then they turn it around and ask me what I am afraid of.
I’m afraid, I tell them, that something bad will happen to one of them. But I can’t put my fears into words any more concrete than that. Any of the catastrophes that I can imagine would seem too real to me if I said them out loud—and too scary for my children to think about.
But those are the kinds of fears that led to a holiday like Halloween, I think. Halloween comes at the dying of the year, at a time when the daylight is gone by dinner and the leaves lie dead in the gutters. The ghost stories and grisly costumes and even the gruesome movies are intended to make light of the fear, help us all whistle past the graveyard, as it were.
And that’s an important lesson. Even the disciples of Jesus could not help feeling fear; what I think he wanted was for them to see past it and do what needed to be done.
That’s what Frank does, when he claims that bees don’t scare him, and what Caroline does when she admits she’s scared and seeks reassurance. That’s what I do when I send them off to school every day, or to visit friends.
The monsters that haunt my fears don’t have six legs and wings and they don’t say “Boo” or ride broomsticks. But confronting the things that go bump in the night by dressing up in costumes and eating too much candy is as good a way as any to learn that fears exist in our minds.
With Jesus’ injunction to “be not afraid,” we can move our minds through the darkness and back into the light.
Martin is a staff writer for The Catholic New World.
