Pulse aquí para leer la Introducción a A la luz de Dios.
It is July 13, 1966, and I am fourteen. My sister Gail and I are upstairs in our twin beds, propped up against the pillows reading. The adults—our mom and dad, our grandparents, our Norwegian bachelor farmer uncle—are downstairs watching the CBS nightly news. We can hear them murmuring.
Las cortinas blancas del dormitorio de nuestra vieja granja empiezan a ondear. Puede que haya otra tormenta, una enorme tormenta de Minnesota como las que nunca tenemos en California. Las tormentas de Minnesota nos aterrorizan, pero también nos emocionan.
De repente, los adultos se callan. Alguien sube el volumen de la televisión. Y en el súbito silencio, podemos oír lo que dice Walter Cronkite, o al menos lo suficiente para comprender lo que ha ocurrido.
Ocho jóvenes estudiantes de enfermería que compartían piso en Chicago han sido apuñaladas, estranguladas o degolladas por un agresor desconocido. Una novena consiguió sobrevivir escondiéndose bajo su cama durante la larga noche de terror. El asesino sigue en libertad.
Aunque Waseca, Minnesota, está a siete horas en coche de la escena del crimen, de repente me paraliza el miedo. Nuestra ventana del segundo piso está abierta de par en par. Mis abuelos nunca cierran las puertas de esta vieja granja. El asesino está desesperado y huye. ¿Y si viene aquí?
And thus begin decades of vividly anticipating my own demise at the hands of a nighttime invader. The fear is so deeply ingrained in me that well into my early forties I’m still putting wooden spoons into the metal tracks of sliding windows and blocking locked doors with chairs when it’s time to go to bed. I can’t shake the image that shocked me that night in the old family farmhouse, or the dark message it seemed to convey: you are entirely vulnerable. We are todos vulnerables. Nos pueden pasar cosas terribles en cualquier momento.
I was a teenager when what has been called America’s first mass murder occurred. Since 1966, such horrific events have become common, and since the 1999 Columbine massacre, often take place in schools at the hands of assailants wielding automatic weapons. But for young people today, the specter of sudden violent death extends far beyond school shootings. From terrorist attacks to war to multi-car pileups to giant tsunamis, life can seem a fearful thing—especially when scenes of mayhem can be broadcast instantly via live television and social media.
However, viewing the world through this distorted lens can be harmful in itself. Thanks to violence-laden mass media, many people suffer from “mean world syndrome,” believing the world is more dangerous and cruel than it actually is. Violent video games only make the problem worse, yet nearly 40% of GenZers play them.
Young people exposed to a steady stream of graphically portrayed violence can become chronically fearful, anxious, and pessimistic, and more susceptible to serious psychological issues. According to the Mental Health Foundation, “fear is a feature of nearly all clinical mental health problems and is a root cause of some of the most common ones.” It is strongly associated with anxiety, depression, and suicidal thinking.
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Elizabeth Ann Seton knew just how paralyzing fear can be. In April of 1788, when she is thirteen years old, the swirling rumors about what is happening at the New York Hospital where her physician father does his research suddenly come to a head. The word on the street is that doctors and medical students are robbing graves to obtain corpses for laboratory dissection. Though some researchers will indeed pay for bodies, no questions asked, Elizabeth’s father and most of his colleagues operate within the legal guidelines.
Pero cuando algunas personas creen ver partes de cuerpos humanos colgando de la ventana de un hospital, su indignación se convierte en furia. Incitan a una turba enfurecida, que llega a tener cuatrocientas o quinientas personas, a irrumpir en el hospital, donde efectivamente encuentran cadáveres y esqueletos parcialmente disecados.
Enraged, they start hunting down the researchers themselves. Though most of these doctors have by now been bundled into the city jail to keep them safe, their houses are easily located and the mob proceeds to ransack them in search of evidence. Though they never make it to Elizabeth’s home, she and her family expect the worst. “A night passed in sweat of terror,” she writes decades later, “saying all the while the Our Father.”
Given the ongoing political violence of her day—she is born in the middle of the American Revolution, which doesn’t end until she is nine—Elizabeth understands from an early age how vulnerable she is. And worse, how fragile are the lives of the people she most loves.
Later, when she is married, and Elizabeth’s firstborn child William is three years old, he falls prey to a potentially fatal illness. She is once again nearly done in by terror. As she writes afterward to a friend, “What is there in the uncertainty of human happiness to repay the agonizing convulsion of those twenty-four hours in which I witnessed his sufferings?”
El miedo existencial forma parte del ser humano. En el fondo, es el miedo profundo y primario a la muerte, ya sea de nosotros mismos o de nuestros seres queridos. Pero si esta respuesta emocional perfectamente normal a la realidad de nuestra mortalidad se cierne demasiado sobre nuestras vidas, como lo hizo sobre la mía durante varias décadas, puede bloquearnos. Desarrollamos el hábito de evitar cualquier situación que pueda resultar peligrosa. Dejamos pasar oportunidades de trabajo, nos negamos a asumir compromisos emocionales a largo plazo y elegimos la seguridad por encima de todo lo demás.
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Jesús, que es a la vez plenamente humano y plenamente divino, no se libra del escalofrío del miedo. Mientras reza en el huerto de Getsemaní, ya sabe muy bien la muerte violenta a la que se va a enfrentar. Centuriones romanos con cascos de metal, portando largas picas y espadas, lo apresarán. Le azotarán, se burlarán de él, le escupirán. Y luego le clavarán púas de hierro en las manos y los pies y lo clavarán a una altísima cruz, donde colgará, una silueta negra contra el cielo, hasta que finalmente se asfixie.
Like a child crying out to a parent for help, he implores, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me.” Suffused by dread, he prays so fervently that “his sweat [becomes] like drops of blood falling to the ground.” (Luke 22:41-44). But then, “still not my will but yours be done.” Jesus accepts his utter vulnerability to suffering and death while at the same time placing total trust in his loving Abba.
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Elizabeth learned to deal with her fear through a discipline of constant vigilance over where her mind was leading her. In the monastic tradition, this practice is called “watching the thoughts.” It involves noticing what arises in our consciousness, and then figuring out where it came from: ourselves, the Holy Spirit, or the Evil One. When the thought of fear arises, we ask ourselves whether we are simply thinking in our habitual anxious way, whether the Holy Spirit may be trying to warn us, or whether this sense of dread is coming to us from the dark side.
Elizabeth becomes practiced at the art of watching her thoughts. When she finds herself entertaining the thought of fear, she redirects her thinking. After a grueling transatlantic voyage to Italy with her sick husband Will and daughter Anna Maria, she is weighed down by grief and dread when they are isolated in a cold, stone prison which serves as a quarantine station. She finds herself watching sea gulls and imagining them flying toward the children she had to leave behind in America. The image of the gulls triggers anxiety about her little ones. But “that thought will not do,” she tells herself. Instead, she pictures the graceful white birds “flying towards Heaven—where I tried to send my soul.”
Elizabeth is learning to lean on God’s presence rather than on her bustling, ever-active mind. By carefully watching her thoughts, she is learning to “let Divine Love cast out Fear. Fear nothing so much as not to love enough.”
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Después de pasar por su crisis de miedo en el Huerto, Jesús no se arredra ante lo que viene a continuación. Permanece tranquilo ante el Sanedrín, Pilato y Herodes, sabiendo exactamente la violencia que están tramando. Se mantiene firme, como un joven en la flor de la vida, aceptando lo que está por venir y confiando en que el amor divino vencerá su temor.
In the end, Jesus’ example is what got me past the wound inflicted on my psyche the night I overheard Walter Cronkite describe mass murder on that farmhouse TV. Nearly forty, I was sick of arranging my life to avoid potentially dangerous situations. I hated the way I always held back a part of myself, simply because I feared losing those I loved.
Para enfrentarme a mi miedo, decidí hacer un retiro en la ermita de New Camaldoli, en las tierras salvajes de Big Sur. Allí, en la ladera de una montaña, sola en una pequeña caravana bajo un cielo negro salpicado de estrellas y nerviosa por cada sonido, recé con toda mi alma para que Dios me ayudara a dormir sin las cucharas de madera en los rieles de las ventanas.
Me desperté a la mañana siguiente sintiéndome empapada del amor divino y libre del viejo terror.
Para saber más sobre esta serie de siete reflexiones sobre la Pascua, pulse aquí.
PAULA HUSTON es becaria del Fondo Nacional de las Artes y autora de dos novelas y ocho libros de no ficción espiritual. Sus ensayos y relatos han aparecido en Best American Short Stories y en la antología anual Best Spiritual Writing. Al igual que la Madre Seton, Huston es una conversa al catolicismo. En 1999, se hizo oblata benedictina camaldulense y es miembro laico de la comunidad de monjes de New Camaldoli Hermitage en Big Sur, California. También es ex presidenta de la Sociedad CrisóstomoOrganización nacional de escritores católicos literarios.