Yesterday I finished Blankets, a graphic novel by Craig Thompson. The main (autobiographical?) story is an intense and lovely reflection on first love, but the part that’s sticking is a disturbing episode where Craig, the protagonist, and his little brother are molested by a teenage male babysitter. Craig seems to feel helpless to do anything about it.
Craig’s father is a violent and angry man, as demonstrated early in the book when he makes Craig’s little brother sleep in a dark spidery cubbyhole for the offense of not settling down to sleep — another episode where Craig feels helpless. My own experiences with a violent and angry father suggest that it is easy to fall into such passivity, when anything you do or say is likely to make things exponentially worse for everyone. There are times when I think I should have protected my own little brother better than I did (and I suspect he thinks so too); Thompson captured that suffocating feeling of fear and anguish so well that it actually shook me up.
When I first became a Christian, I remember challenging my pastor on the “sins of the fathers” Bible passage (Exodus 20:5-6). Initially, it struck me as another example of the Old Testament God being kind of a jerk. As I understand it now, however, it contains a deep psychological truth: the aftereffects of sin reverberate through the generations. I myself am much angrier and more violent than I would like to be. May God heal what psychological wounds I have inflicted on my children, and let this sin fade away before the next generation.
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