Thinking Like A Child: The Monsters

Many times, little children will fear the monsters in their closets and under their beds. Those of us who have grown past that age just write it off as the child’s vivid imagination at work. But, what if it goes much deeper than that? What if their imagination only gives a recognizable form to the “monster”?

Children are innocent. That much is clear. Up until a certain age, they haven’t got an evil bone in their body. Innocence. Complete and total innocence. The physical representation of the Heart of G-d. But pure and total innocence doesn’t have a form, does it? Enter one of the greatest writers on the planet, the man who gave a form to both pure good (innocence) and pure evil. He offers these two forms in a story about a man. We’ll call him Jack. Jack is a man who grew up in a home where his aunt creates a world she believes is free from evil. Throughout his life with his aunt, he faced psychological abuse. That is, until he met a girl we’ll call Sandra. They were eleven when they met. Not long after they meet, Jack sneaks out one night and goes to her house. When he arrives, he sees something that horrifies him. A boy of maybe thirteen or fourteen with a dagger tattooed on his forehead is LICKING Sandra’s window!

The boy discovers Jack and smacks him around a little, then threatens to kill Jack and Sandra. Jack runs. Sometime later, about a month or so, Jack sees the boy again. This time, Jack runs and leads the boy to the city’s warehouse district. Inside one of the abandoned warehouses. Down some stairs. Into a room. It’s dark. “Hello, puke!” The boy is there! He and Jack fight, Jack bolts out of the room and shuts the door, locking it behind him. Four months later, Jack believes the boy to be dead.

Fast-forward twenty years. Sandra is now an accomplished agent with the California Bureau of Investigation (CBI). Jack is going through seminary and is quite the philosopher. Then, Jack gets a call from a man we’ll call Rick Darige. Darige tells Jack he has three minutes to confess his sins or his car will blow up. Jack hangs up and drives off the road. Sure enough, his car explodes. This puts him and Sandra on a turbulent race against Darige. In the end, Jack discovers that Sandra and Darige are not real – Sandra is Jack’s creation to represent (embody) pure goodness and innocence while Darige is Jack’s creation to represent (embody) pure evil and wickedness. Neither Sandra or Darige exist physically, yet Jack saw them both physically.

Let’s step out of that story now. This, I believe, is an excellent representation of my point. See, children are very much like Jack, and it is their innocence that makes them so. Those monsters they fear at night, the ones they see in their closets and under their beds? Those children are seeing the physical (to them) embodiment of evil – but they don’t know what evil looks like, so they give it a familiar form – a monster.

Alternatively, the imaginary friends they create when they are alone and afraid. These imaginary friends are the child’s physical embodiment of pure good. Together, the child and his/her imaginary friend fight off the “monster”, just as Jack and his imaginary friend, Sandra, fought off the monster, Darige.