Hiding Place

 

As part of my work at Roy Maas’ Youth Alternatives in Boerne, Texas, I received training in Trust Based Relational Intervention, in which psychologist Karyn Purvis explains that a person’s capacity to venture confidently out into the world is based upon lessons of trust and security properly learned in the first years of life.

 

This makes perfect sense to me, and brings to my mind the vivid image of the fortress formed by my father’s crossed legs – left foot on floor, right ankle atop left knee, so as to produce, in the imagination of a very small boy, the outlines of a castle stronghold, the opening in the ceiling of which (formed by the bent right leg) afforded access to the larger world, with all its dangers and fascinations.

 

Judging by my own crossed legs now, I expect normal growth would have required me to forego residence there after not much more than three years of age, but as a grown man I retreat to that castle often* and the extent to which I have lived the subsequent decades out of the security and confidence established there would be difficult to overstate.

 

* One of my favorite notions of God comes from Psalm 32:7:

 

            “You [o God] are my hiding place;

            you will protect me from trouble

            and surround me with songs of deliverance.”

 

Rare are the days that do not provide plenty of reason to retreat, like a very small boy, to God my hiding place. The crossed-legged castle of my infancy provides the illustration for that retreat.