Terror

Terror

I have suffered night terrors most of my life. As a young child I often slept on the rug at the foot of my parents’ bed. Even as a teen I used to bribe my little brother to come in my room and sleep with me; then I told my parents he came into my room because he was scared. I peed on the floor because I was afraid to leave my room to go to the bathroom. Many, many nights I have sat or laid there shaking, sweating, heart and mind racing and I have simply given up all hope for the light of the next morning.

A psychiatrist friend of mine tells me that night terrors can be associated with brain activities or dysfunctions that are not unlike epileptic seizures. Today, they might be treated with medication -- a circumstance that might have changed my life significantly.

On the other hand, how could I have ever suspected that the night terrors would, 50 years later, prepare me in some ways for my life events in a culture that has become preoccupied with terror? Considering the information from my psychiatrist, I am also led to speculate about the medication (perhaps like soma) that might vastly reduce the hysteria of today’s world. It is always hard to separate the good breaks from the bad ones in any true circumstance.

There is no real story I can relate in night terrors – no recurring pattern of thought or horror, vision of monsters or demons; I have approached that feeling at times at a scary movie or reading a Stephen King book, in an airplane in stormy weather or on a roller coaster the first second of its first descent; none of that ever really gets there.

For a time, I was afraid that my son, Wes, had inherited my penchant for night terrors. He would wake us up regularly, crying and afraid in his bed. One night as I was walking by his room I discovered the villain, a huge raccoon staring into Wes’ bedroom from the window perch outside his room. Case closed, night terrors abated.

So, you might be able to distinguish my night terror from Wes’ situation (and the purportedly similar experience of thousands or even millions of people evoked by the destruction of the buildings and loss of life in New York on 9/11); at least they had (have) a raccoon and/or Osama to blame. On the other hand, maybe that is no true distinction at all. As my doctor says, I may have a brain dysfunction to blame, or my delusion of being Jesus, or demons, or even God. Under any objective analysis, anyone can find an object of fear; more importantly, regardless of the icons, we all find ourselves simply in the dark, and often anxious and afraid about it.

I read that many of the marines shit their pants as they left the boats to run on the beach at Normandy. A WWII pilot I talked to told me that an aircraft carrier looks like a cigar butt floating on the ocean when you first spot it for a landing. Yet, it does not seem accurate for me to think about them in a state of terror. It seems that terror is something different than fear, and terror may dwell in the comfort of my bedroom more comfortably than in horrific firestorms of war.
Curious is the apparent lack of relationship between terror and courage. History is full of examples of heroic actions by fearful people. Likewise, moments of insight, perception, and/or enlightenment usually are in fits of fearful circumstance, like the presence of an angel, a demon or even God Himself. In contrast, the images of terror run more to the pathetic – fetal positions under the safety of a wool blankets, and airport lobbies full of metal detectors and drug store cops – symbols of those who are “gripped’ in terror.

“Pathetic” is not to be confused with “harmless.” I set my little brother up for derision and scorn almost without remorse to protect my teenage pride; just as my culture sends its kids into rains of fire and bullets for some perceived safety of their ideals. We might say, then, that if fear is often about self-preservation, terror is often about self image-preservation; it is one thing to be afraid and to act in reality (a state of courage), and quite another to act in defense of being or even appearing to be afraid in anticipation or in delusion of a real threat (a state of terror).

Curious also is the almost mysterious power that one can invoke to aid the infliction of terror; one person, or a small group of persons evoke mass terror, even among those who have very little if anything to fear. It is hard to imagine the collapse of our economic system resulting from having no World Trade Centers. Then again, maybe we have something to fear… What if we have something to fear? Is it possible that we have something to fear? Shouldn’t we be prepared as if we have something to fear? Amber alert! Danger! And so it goes.

It is not as if nobody has any legitimate fear. But people deal with fear all the time in courageous ways; people with cancer, people who are hungry, soldiers, doctors, astronauts, mothers, people in the twin towers, drivers who get on the on ramp to the freeway... It is the rest of us who recoil in terror, cast suspicious eyes all around and unleash rage indiscriminately on innocents (the brothers) and random misfits (the raccoons).

Jesus, me or the real one, apparently left the building during my night terrors. Not one of the uplifting words of the sermons I preached to mom and nan dared to cross my lips; nor did I have the slightest inkling of the fervor or conviction of those other times, while I was there in the dark -- when the wind was blowing, the walls creaking, the end was nearing. I could judge that in the crisis I simply lacked faith. Yet, my dad and mom were, without any doubt, present in the very next room and I didn’t cry out to them either. So, it wasn’t merely or even mainly that I didn’t believe in God or that God couldn’t or wouldn’t help me. Indeed part of the grip of my terror was to disable that part of me that could perceive the situation and alleviate it; i.e. pray or call to mom and dad, or, even, get up, walk across the room and turn on the light.
It seems like a lot of what Jesus, the real one, said was simply, “Hey, get up, walk across the room and turn on the light.” It was called healing when people actually did it. As circumstances would have it, however, the ones who didn’t killed him. Again, it wasn’t fear when the nailed him up, he had never hurt anyone. It was terror. Jesus was the brother who had to take the rap for coming in the room and sleeping with us.
For many, even or mainly christians, the terror has not abated. Terror lurks in our religious orthodoxy when we react intolerantly and in rage to unorthodoxy or to other orthodoxies, when we rationalize outrageous and inhumane acts against those “disadvantaged,” against those who are “different” and against our very environment, and when we willingly live in grand delusion to avoid the risk of seeking the real truth of the here and now. We see the same terror in our other orthodoxies – politics, morality and the law.

As I lay there in terror in the dark, the object of my dread was certainly delusional. It wasn’t about the real, mundane risks and fears in that room; it was about the grand drama of the unreal unknown -- the titanic resting point between good and evil. Like judgment day at death – heaven or hell. I may act with courage overcoming the fears of my circumstance, good or bad. But how am I to avoid bowing in terror to such primordial forces of evil? You see, it couldn’t be that I was just a scared little boy laying there in the dark; I am after all, Jesus, and a victim of circumstance. To avoid the demeaning seeming image of me, it was necessary for me to invent evil and the devil himself. I think that most of you do the same thing.

There has been a lot of thought and discussion about the problem of evil. How do we cope with bad circumstance? How do we explain it? How can we keep our faith in good in spite of it? Why must we endure it?

It seems possible that this discussion mostly misses the point -- that the real problem of evil is to prove that it exists at all. Perhaps the very concept of evil is delusional, conjured in those moments when are captured in terror, like when I was locked under the covers in my bedroom in my night terrors – scared of the dark.

When I finally fell asleep and morning came with the light, it wasn’t that the light didn’t illuminate anything scary, it was just that I was no longer terrified by the scary things I could see. When my brother came in, or when there was someone else in the room, it was not that the darkness was gone, it was just that I was no longer there to face the evil alone. It turns out that evil is not so powerful after all, to be so easily and readily dissipated.

Terror and evil are dangerous even if there is no devil and even if they are ephemeral. If we do not wage war against evil, are we destined to be victims?

Jesus, the real one, said that the victims would inherit the earth, the ones who have mere reality, which they cannot own, and not delusions, which do not exist. The ones to whom courage is more useful than self-image. I think that it is important for me to find and join them, when morning dawns.