A Haunting

 

In the time of our innocence, we trusted in good because we had not yet known evil. On this side of Eden and our own experience of the Fall—whatever our own Arrows have been and however the adversary has woven them together into our particular Message of the Arrows—it appears that we are left to find our way to trust in good, having stared evil in the face. Most of us remember the time of our innocence as a Haunting. I (Brent) mean innocence not as being sinless but as that time before our experience with the Arrows crystallized into a way of handling life which is the false self. The Haunting calls to us unexpectedly in the melody and words of certain songs that have become our "life music": the crooked smile of a friend; the laughter of our children (or their tears); the calling to mind of a mischievous face that still believed in joy; the smell of a perfume; the reading of a poem; or the hearing of a story. However the Haunting comes, it often brings with it a bittersweet poignancy of ache, the sense that we stood at a crossroads somewhere in the past and chose a turning that left some shining part of ourselves—perhaps the best part—behind, left it behind with the passion of youthful love, or the calling of a heart vocation, or simply in the sigh of coming to terms with the mundane requirements of life.

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