Stage 1 “The day my world fell apart”: losing our innocence forever changes our life



Into everyone’s life drops a bomb.  Seemingly out of nowhere, something happens that forever changes the landscape of what we once called our life. 



I will never forget the day that changed my life forever.  I was in second grade.  I was in art class.  My mom appeared at the door and said I was going to leave school early. I realized when I got in the van and saw all of our stuff jammed in it that we weren’t coming back.  My mom was leaving my dad.  I was leaving my hometown, my friends and family.  The life I knew was gone forever and the life that lay ahead was a complete unknown.  This day marked the beginning of my loss of innocence. 



What was it for you?  Perhaps it too was the divorce of your parents.  Or perhaps it was something else altogether:

a sudden tragedy,

 

abuse,

illness,

injury,

9/11,

being the victim of a bully,

 

the death of a friend, a sibling, or a parent, . . .



Though our experiences will differ in detail, there is a common bond nearly every person holds with one another over the loss of our innocence.  Whether it happened when we were very young or somewhat older, each of us can tell a story that goes something like this:

 

“There was my life before that happened and then there is my life ever since then.”

 

It was that common bond that grabbed me the first time I picked up a Batman comic book and read the story of the murder of young Bruce Wayne’s parents.  Though my parents are both alive and well even to this day, nearly 30 years after the “loss of my innocence,” I instantly connected to the story of Bruce when I read it a couple of years after their divorce.  Here was someone who had lived through his own kind of fateful day.  Here was someone who also was forced to grow up before he was really ready to.  Here was someone who also struggled to deal with his fears and redeem his life by transforming his personal pain into something that could help ease the pain of others. 

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And along the way, we hold on to a hope that in healing the pain of others we will find a way to heal our own.



This is the genius of the story of Batman: in a deep sense it is also our story – yours and mine.  Though we may have never met, I’m willing to bet you have your own version of Bruce’s story.  Maybe you are a teenager and the pain of that day is still very raw and fresh.  Or maybe you are a bit older and that wound has healed a bit - but every now and then something tugs at that old scar and the pain is felt anew.  Either way, we hold a sacred bond, a kinship that knows nothing of time or space, fact or fiction. 

We are the brotherhood and sisterhood of survivors.



For Bruce, it started one fateful night when his parents were murdered in the alley behind a theatre right before his eyes.  In the movie Batman Begins, the story is told that the play inside was frightening young Bruce who had recently been traumatized when he fell down a well and was overcome by a flight of bats.  The play was giving him flashbacks and so he asked his father if they could leave.  Having ducked out the back door, Bruce and his parents began to make their way home when they were mugged and both parents were shot dead.  Seeing your own parents die in front of you must be a unique form of terror for anyone.  It certainly was for Bruce. 



Though their death was not his fault, he began to blame himself.​​

 

 

Everyone I have met on one level or another has blamed themselves for the loss of their innocence, even when they were the victim.  Some people become trapped in this stage and the loss of innocence becomes a sad and perpetually arresting state.  Luckily for most of us, at some point we are able to accept that this likely would have happened no matter what we had done.



Luckily for Bruce, there was someone who remained in his life who could comfort him, continue to care for him, and walk with him as he sought to make sense of his new world.  A clip from the movie Batman Begins illustrates this relationship young Bruce had with his family’s butler, Alfred.  View it here.





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Did you have an Alfred?  Not a butler necessarily, but rather someone in your life who also helped you get through it all?  Perhaps you were lucky enough to have a supportive parent or friend who continued to love you and reassure you that life would go on.  For me it was my paternal grandparents, my Granny and Paw.  They were the rock throughout my childhood that I returned to time and again for shelter from life’s storm.  After the divorce, they would drive 30 miles on Wednesday nights to pick up my sister and me and take us out to eat at the local Furr’s Cafeteria.  And every other weekend we would go to visit my dad, spending much of our time at my grandparents’ farm.  The unconditional love we received from them was a blessing from God.  Other kids in the new town we’d moved to bullied me.  Without any friends, I felt very lost and alone.  I gained weight and, being a country kid in the city, became known as a “hick” by my classmates.  Both of my parents loved me well despite their own deep personal pain.  But it was my grandparents who were my rock.



If our “loss of innocence” is the time in our life we first feel the pain of our world falling apart, it also has the opportunity (almost always in retrospect) of being the first time in our life we realize the possibility of transforming pain into hope.  If nothing else, going through this phase of our spiritual journey will teach us something of our own strength to endure and overcome.  And if we are very fortunate, we will come to see, sooner rather than later, that:



Even the most difficult passages in life can become doors to wonderful possibilities that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. 



 

We will meet new people, go new places, and have an ability to understand other people’s pain in a way we never could have otherwise.  There is a kinship between people who have survived cancer.  There is a recognition in people who come from divorced households.  Al Anon brings together people who live with the pain of a loved one bound by alcoholism. 



Whatever your trial, there are people who know at least something of your pain.



 

The good news for us is that we are not the first to walk this path and we do not walk it alone.  Each of us comes to this point at some time in our lives. Jesus of Nazareth had his own “coming of age” moment when, at the age of 12, his parents unknowingly left him behind in Jerusalem as they began the long walk home to Nazareth.  For many of us this is a childhood nightmare come true and I suspect at some point Jesus did panic.  But by the time his parents found him a couple of days later, Jesus was already able to see this experience in a different light.  In the process of being left behind, it appears young Jesus found himself: 



When his parents saw him they were astonished; and his mother said to him, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” He said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”  Luke 2:48-49​



And this is the power of this first stage in the spiritual journey: When we lose our sense of all that was, and when the world we knew falls apart, it begins the long process of sorting out what of that world was true and what of it was an illusion all along.  Even more poignant, we begin to figure out what of who we are is real and what of it is a mask that we wear.



The separating out of male from mask, of female from façade, is the required first step on the path to wholeness.



When I realized what was going on, I chose to stay in the van that day rather than run away.  It was a decision made more out of fear than faith.  But in the end, it was the right choice.  I sometimes wonder what life would have been like if I’d chosen the other option and ran away from the van.  When I do I usually see that that life isn’t one I should long for.  I would not trade my life now for that one, or any other for that matter.  It made me who I am and without it I would not exist as the me that I am.  I don’t know if you have come to that same conclusion or not.  Perhaps your loss of innocence was more painful than mine and those wounds haven’t healed much at all. I’m not sure they ever really “heal,” but at times they just don’t hurt as much anymore.



At some point, most of us are able to pick up the pieces and move forward.  Oftentimes we do so with a determination to not only put together our own world and make it right again, but to help put the whole world back together.  We see that everyone else is broken like us. 



 

A recurring theme throughout the Batman trilogy is Bruce’s father, Thomas, saying to him:

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“Why do we fall, Bruce?  So we can learn to pick ourselves up.” 

 

We long for a better life, a world that doesn’t kill people’s dreams when they are too young to bear it.  We commit to making the world a better place. And this commitment leads us to the next step on the journey: Stage 2: Determining to set things right . . . 



​Discuss: Who has been your rock through a difficult time in your life?