FROM FEAR TO FAITH
Thirty some years ago a baby girl came into a Virginia home. Her birth
was a matter of family indifference; not specially needed, she was not
particularly wanted. Her father, reared in a small town, having
attained only moderate success as combination bookkeeper, cashier and
clerk in a general store, could not enthuse over an arrival which
would increase the burden of family expense. He was a man of good
Virginia stock, not fired by large ambitions. An ubiquitous cud of
fine-cut, flattening his cheek and saturating his veins, possibly
explains his life of semicontent--for tobacco is a sedative. The
mother was a washed-out, frail-looking reminder of youthful
attractions, essentially of the nervous type. She was not without
pride in her Cavalier stock and the dash of Cavalier blood it brought.
The elder sister had none of her mother. Aspiring socially, she was
reserved, pedantic, platitudinizing, thoroughly self-sufficient. She
finished well up in her class in a small, woman's so-called "college"
and lived with such prudence and exercised such foresight that, in
spite of her Methodist rearing, she wedded the young, local, Episcopal
rector, and, childless but still self-sufficient, "lived happy ever
after."
Our little Virginia's home surroundings gave her all material
necessities, many comforts and occasional luxuries, but it was a home
of narrow interests. Its own immediate affairs, including big sister's
successes; critically, the doings of the neighborhood, and
unquestioningly, the happenings of the church circle, comprised the
themes of home discourse. Markedly lacking in beauty was that home--no
music, a few perfunctory pictures, a parlor furnished to suit the
local dealer's taste and stock, a few sets of books--the successful
contribution of unctuous book agents. All converse was lacking in
ideals save the haphazard ones brought home by the children from
school. There was no pretense of unselfishness, the conception was
foreign to that home's atmosphere. The religious teaching was of
formalism and fear. The services of the church were regularly
attended, and from time to time the children's discipline was
augmented by references to the certain wrath of God. Into this home
came Virginia to be reared under most irregular training, dependent on
a combination of her mother's feelings and her sister's conventions--
the father's influence was negative, his was a well-bred nicotine
indifference. In the little girl's life, every home appeal was
emotional. During the mother's more rare, comfortable days, she
exacted few restrictions, but much more often fear methods marked her
use of authority: fear of punishment, fear of the Invisible, and, from
her sister, fear of "what folks will say" were the chief home
influences molding this young life. Such appeals found in her
sensitive nature a rich soil. No single consistent effort was ever
made to substitute reason for emotional supremacy, as she developed.
At times her feelings would run rampant--what was to keep them in
order but disorganizing fear?--while too often her mother weakly
rewarded Virginia's most stormy outbreaks by acceding to her erratic
desires.
In one element did this home take pride. As true Virginians, the good
things of the table were procured at any cost. Good eating was a
pride--and rapid eating became the child's habit. Yet with all the
sacrifices of time and effort, the richness of their table cost, and
in spite of the fact that eating was ever in the forefront of family
plans and efforts, no conception of the true art of dining was ever
theirs.
At sixteen Virginia was attractive, with remarkably clear, olive skin,
with hair, eyes and eyebrows a peculiarly soft chestnut. Fun-loving,
thoughtless, vivacious, spasmodically aggressive, naturally athletic,
capable of many fine intuitions, she finished the local high school
with a good record, for she was mentally alert. Still most of her
thinking was of the emotional type, and smiles were quick and tears
were quick, and upon a feeling-basis rested her decisions. The tender-
heartedness of a child never left her, and when trusted and encouraged
she had always shown an excellent capacity for good work. She was
essentially capable of intense friendships, under the sway of which no
sacrifice was questioned, but her stormy nature made friendships
precarious. Pervading her life was a large conscientiousness. Her
fear-conscience was acute--never an unwholesome impulse but fear-
conscience rebuked and tortured. Few bedtimes were peaceful to her,
because at that quiet hour remorse, entirely disproportionate to the
wrong, lashed her miserably. Her love-conscience, too, was richly
developed, and for love's sake she would have become a martyr. Her
duty-conscience was yet in its infancy and held weak council in her
plans and rarely swayed her from desire.
After a year of normal-school training, she secured a primary grade in
a near town school, and at nineteen, when she became an earner, there
were two Virginias; the beautiful Virginia was a woman of appealing
tenderness--body, heart and soul yearned for some adequate return of
the richness of devotion which she felt herself capable of giving.
Sentiment and capacity for love were unconsciously reaching out for
satisfying expression, and the beauty of this tenderness shone forth
to make appealing even her weaknesses. The other Virginia was a
conglomerate of unhappy and harmful emotions--impatient in the face of
small irregularities, frequently irritable to unpleasantness, and
dominated by the false sensitiveness of unmerited pride. Under
provocation, anger, quick-flaming, unreasonable and unreasoning,
burned itself out in poorly restrained explosions--a quarter-hour of
wrath, a half-hour of tears and a half-day of almost incapacitating
headache. She was ambitious and had rebelled at her limitations,
especially as she grew to realize the smallness and emptiness of the
home-life. She resented her sister's superior attitude, her officious
poise, her college-education authority. But the damning defect was the
remorseless grip of fear on mind, body and spirit. Through ignorant
training, she was afraid in the dark, even afraid of the dark; a
morbid, cringing terror possessed her when she was alone in the night.
Even the protecting safety of her own bed could not save her from the
jangle of false alarms with which her imagination peopled the shadows.
A second gripping dread--one all too common with harmfully taught,
southern girls--was fear of negroes; a horrible, indefinite, haunting
apprehension chilled her veins, not only when associated with them,
but even more viciously when she was alone with her thoughts. And when
added to these was her superstitious fear of the Lord, magnifying the
evil of her ways, threatening, pervading, bringing no hint of Divine
love, the preparation was ample for the forthcoming emotional chaos.
At twenty-eight she was a sick woman. Through devotion to the kindly
principal of her school, a devotion not unmixed with sentiment, she
had worked intensely; quick, interested, almost capable, she had
worked and worried. School-discipline early loomed large as a rock
threatening disaster, dragging into her consciousness a sinister fear
of failure. Thirty little ones, from almost as many different homes,
representing a motley variety of home-training, looked to her to mold
them into an orderly, happy unit. Some of her little tots were as
thorns in her flesh--she couldn't keep her arms from around others;
while some afternoons the natural restlessness of them all set her
head to throbbing wretchedly. Her own emotional life not having found
order or calm, she from the first failed to develop either in her
charges. Visitors became a dread. Her only solace was the short
conferences she had with the principal after school. But to hear his
step approaching during class-time frightened her cruelly. Her order
was poor. He knew it. The visitors saw it. And the more she struggled
to master the problem of school-discipline, the greater grew the
menace of her own unorderly training. Within a few months she was
translating her emotional exhaustion into terms of overwork. The
penalty of unmerited food had produced an autotoxic anaemia, and she
was pale and weepy, easily fatigued, sleeping poorly, with the boggy
thyroid and overactive tendon reflexes so common in subacidosis. She
had to give up her school. After six months' ineffectual resting at
home, she entered a special hospital where, after some weeks of
intensive treatment, her physical restoration was remarkable. The
marriage of her sister and death of her mother closed the home, and
she went to live with a widowed aunt, the aunt who had managed her
household and her ministerial spouse to perfection. It was probably
Paul's injunction alone which kept her from taking her complacent
husband's place in the pulpit and delivering the sermons she had so
literally inspired. Here was an atmosphere of sanctity, but still no
hint of true, personal giving, no expression of willing sacrifice, and
Virginia felt keenly this lack, for in the hospital she had had a
vision. There she had seen suffering softened by gentleness, there
empty lives were filled from generous hearts, and men and women
inspired to make new and better starts. She had visioned the nobleness
of giving--and the unanswered call of her mother-nature had responded.
She was not fully well, she was not deeply living, she had never
fulfilled the best of self, and she hungered for the hospital. Her
aunt's conventional pride was echoed by the laws and the in-laws, and
positive, later peremptory objections were urged against her entering
nursing. Again the headaches returned, the physical expression of her
emotional unhappiness, and finally, almost in recklessness, certainly
in desperation, she cast her lot in the self-effacing demands of a
student-nurse's life in a city hospital, far from family and friends.
How shall we tell of the next three years? Training, reeducation,
evolution?--some of all perhaps. They were years of much travail.
Physical wholeness was won promptly through the wholesome habits of
active, daily effort, routine, regularity and rational diet. There was
suffering--months of suffering, under correction, for rebellion had
long been a habit, and hospital discipline is military in character.
But she had given her pledge, and fear-conscience and love-conscience
were later augmented by duty-conscience, and she never seriously
thought of deserting. Cheer expression is demanded in the nurse's
relations with her patients, and irritability and impatience slowly
faded through hourly touch with greater suffering; and the cheer habit
grew into cheer feeling. The old storms of anger seemed incongruous in
the imperturbable atmosphere of the hospital, moreover her dignity as
a nurse could not be risked. Thus was she helped till the solidity of
self-control made her safe. Her truly formidable battle was with fear
--no one can know what she faced alone on night duty. Her dread of the
dark was overcome painfully when through helpful counsel she gained an
intelligent insight into her defect, and was inspired to apply for
night duty in excess of her regular schedule. Later, at her own
request, she performed alone the last duties for the dead, that she
might put fear under her feet. Her dread of negroes gradually gave
place to a better understanding of the race through the daily
association of ministration on the ward, reenforced by personal
confidence in her own strength and skill, growing out of a wholesome
training in self-defense--a training her love for athletics and her
growing understanding of her fear-weakness moved her to take on her
off-duty time. She became competent; anxious to help, her fineness of
intuition and her capacity for devotion with her vision of service
made her in every way worthy. And finally her fear of the Lord was
lost in a wholesome faith in His "Well-done!"
To-day, hers is a life of peace. Emotional instability and
wretchedness have been displaced by habitual right feeling.
Stabilizing her emotions has not impoverished, but enriched her
nature. She has mastered the art of enjoying, for self-interests have
expanded into love for service. To-day she is a capable, efficient,
cheerful, wholesome, self-forgetting woman, filled with a faith in an
able, worthy self--a God-given faith.