It is true that--tragically--all too often such supports do not exist to a proper extent in a child's life. This is the lamentable backdrop to the scriptural reassurance that the love of God is as a parent's--or, rather, as a parent's should be. As the child grows to adulthood, it is ever more important that faith in the ultimate beneficence of the Creator is retained. It is almost insulting, of course, to contend that the individual human being is required to conjure up a contention that existence as experienced is ultimately or objectively good--sometimes life is just lousy,
If the teachings of Jesus are to be adhered to, then the initial experience of earthly existence--the child's first confrontation with existence--must be recalled by the believer to an increasing--and increasingly more acute--extent. This is the primordial experience of the individual locating himself or herself in the indiscernible mist--as indicated in John Chapter Three. This "primordial experience" is to be contrasted with the unfortunate conceptualization so often abroad among humanity: that the "faith journey" (when viewed in terms of overt considerations) is something launched into at adolescence, when the individual can no longer assign the responsibility of religion to his or her parents.
However, with adulthood comes increasing weight to the considerations applicable to reiterations of the primordial experience. Rather than becoming more and more assured of salvation, the adult in comparison to the child is better able to conceptualize damnation (and better able to view damnation as a lamentable end rather than as a set of scary phantasms)--to say nothing of the fact that death is getting nearer and nearer.
All this might seem rather harsh, but certainly no more harsh than the condemnations that Jesus leveled even at his closest companions in the space of an instant. The glory of one's continual rebirth and the horror of one's continual defiling of the original purity of the newborn should clash in fruitful dialog in the mind of the believer. And it is a necessary corollary to this that the teachings of Jesus do not, in fact, include the assurances attached to the sacraments or the conversion experiences that the denominations sell.
The Gospel of John is the perfect example of this. Evangelists have differed vastly over the years about whether John is the proper gospel with which to first confront the prospective convert. It is true that John begins with a sort of Creation Story (particularly enticing to the evangelist to use when the prospect seems passably familiar with Genesis), but there is one thing the Gospel of John lacks when employed by the evangelist who must sell the prospect on a denomination's take on the "salvation economy"--John has no salvation economy.
In the Gospel of John all Jesus promises the individual is the opportunity of service. The only assurance Jesus gives to the awestruck Doubting Thomas is the opportunity to believe. The only assurance Jesus gives to the grieving Peter who has shirked his duty is the opportunity to perform his duties. The Gospel of John is shot through with Jesus telling people to do things. Doing things is what Jesus requires of us, and if Jesus is really who we claim he is, then even the most basic conceptualizations we have about ourselves must melt away as we subsume ourselves to those duties.
Asking Jesus to give us perfect assurances (or asking Jesus' purported ministers to give us sacerdotal assurances, which is the same thing) is as foolish as asking our parents to be perfect for us. "For us" is the important element in the above equation, because even if we substitute the perfect God for our parents in the equation, still we exist ourselves as the other calculated element--and we likely will not even know what we want, or what we should want.
The only salvation economy is for us to empty the purses of our conceits.
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