Childhood’s Dark Innocence
The innocence of childhood is never simply pure. Childhood also has a dark innocence. In its unknowing, the child senses the presence of negativity and evil. The fascination with monsters and sinister goblins often grips the little mind. Children are not interested in stories which lack the dimension of fear. This accounts for the subtle depth of fairy tales.
The Red Bush of Ancestry
As individuals, we are cut off from the dense and intricate networks of life within us. A simple instance of this is when you cut your finger, the surprise of seeing your own blood flow. We forget the tree of bone and the bush of blood that flows within us. Blood is one of the most ancient and wisest streams in the universe. It is the stream of ancestry. An ancient bloodline flows from the past generations until it reaches and creates us now. Blood holds and carries life. From mythic times, blood has been at the heart of sacrifice; life was offered both as plea and praise to the deities. The Catholic Eucharist still centres on the transfiguration of the wine of the earth into the divine blood of the Redeemer. This consecration is not merely a memorial of the past event. The divine presence in the Eucharist is understood as an actual participation in the ongoing memory of God.
Superficially, a family might look like an accidental gathering of individuals called together by the chance meeting of a man and a woman who fell in love and wanted to express the depth of their love in procreation. At a deeper level, a family is an incredible intertwining of multiple streams of ancestry, memory, shadow, and light. Each home hosts the arrival of history and assists the departure of new destiny. The walls of the home contain immense happenings that occur gradually under the subtle veil of normality. Though each family is a set of new individuals, ancient relics and residues seep through from past generations. Except for our parents and grandparents, our ancestors have vanished. Yet ultimately and proximately, it is the ancestors who call us here. We belong to their lifeline. While they ground our unknown memory, our continuity bestows on them a certain oblique eternity. In our presence we entwine past and future. Virgil underlines the beautiful value of “pietas.” It means much more than duty; it is prospective as well as retrospective. Though Aenaeas is utterly committed to his huge and painful destiny, he is concerned for his son as well as his father.
The loneliness and creativity of being a parent is the recognition that family is inevitably temporary. Good parenting is unselfish and, to encourage independence in a child that has received unconditional love, acts to reinforce the sense and essence of belonging. Nothing, not even departure, can sever that intrinsic sense of belonging. Children are created to grow and leave the nest. Family provides the original and essential belonging in the world. It is the cradle where identity unfolds and firms. Such belonging outgrows itself. Home becomes too small and too safe. The young adult is called by new longing to leave home and undertake new discovery. The difficulty for parents is letting them go. In a certain sense, parents and children never leave each other; this is a kinship that no distance can sever. However, in a substantial sense, part of the task of maturity is to become free of one’s parents. Clinging to parents causes a destructive imbalance in one’s life. One never achieves an integral sense of self-possession if one’s parents continue to dominate large regions of one’s heart. To grow is to come to know their fragility, vulnerability, and limitation. There is great poignancy and pathos in parents’ difficulty in letting go. Kahlil Gibran says, “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.”
Parents as Memory Holders
Parents have such incredible power to confirm and influence the inner life of the child. Identity is fashioned in the inner life. The child’s sensibility is like a sponge. It absorbs everything. Without knowing it, we drink in the voices of our parents at that stage. We have not yet developed any kind of filter to sift the creative from the destructive. There is no such thing as perfect parents. Without wanting to, and often without knowing it, all parents leave some little trail of negativity for their children; this belongs naturally to life’s ambivalence. There is never anything absolutely pure in the valley of tears, but we still love our parents in their imperfection. As Robert Frost says, “We love the things we love for what they are.”
Children come here without knowing where they are landing. A little child has no power. In these times, terrible stories are emerging. Children have been violently abused both mentally and sexually. Outwardly, the home appeared normal, but it was in fact a quiet torture chamber. Sick and violent parents have turned their innocent little children into targets of their own demented psyches. Such violence marks a person for life. It shakes the inner ground of the psyche. This violation of the innocent is one of the most sinister forms of evil. It is a deeply troubling question. Why would a kind and loving divine power allow the innocent goodness of a child to be delivered into the hands of such twisted violence? It is a massive spiritual task for those who have been abused to love and reclaim themselves. Abuse wants to turn the abused child against itself. To learn to break this inner reflex of violence is a task that can be achieved only with the help of a wise and caring healer and the kindness of grace. The abused child must learn to see himself as lovable by loving himself, and, in time, others. In a home where this love and space exist a child has a wonderful introduction to life. You are encouraged and your gifts are awakened. For years, you will be able to live from the perennial nourishment of this creative, initial belonging. You will be able to embrace and inhabit other styles of belonging demanded by the different stages of your journey.
Styles of Belonging
We have suggested that the sense of belonging ultimately derives from place and persons. Landscape provides location; this makes it possible to know and approach things and persons. If there were no place, there could be no thing. Family sets the focus of belonging during our first longings. We also suggested that the human body is the house of belonging; it is where we live while we are here. If there were no longing in us, we could subsist in listless indifference. We could be neutral about everything. Because we are always in different states and stages of longing, the ways we belong in the world are always diverse and ever changing. From the ways that longing and belonging criss-cross each other we can identify different styles of belonging. Some continue to belong in the place they arrived on the first journey.