How can we feel safe?

“When I have kids one day,” my twenty-something son said to me, “how will I ever feel safe dropping them off at school when it seems as if every school is vulnerable to gun violence?”

His question wasn’t about what protections could be put in place to ensure public safety. What he and many others are yearning for, I realized, is relief from fear—from the swirling, anxious concern that the world is an unsafe place and that there appears to be nothing we can do about it. This climate of fear is so prevalent that even a young man sitting on the porch with his parents on a spring evening in a quiet neighborhood was struggling with it. 

While laws and other measures are typical in a civilized society seeking to protect its citizens, it’s worth asking whether these measures alone will ever be enough, individually or collectively, to reassure us completely and silence our fears. Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered a timeless law of divine care that has proved effective in freeing people from fear and protecting them from danger, posed a similar question in her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “Are material means the only refuge from fatal chances? Is there no divine permission to conquer discord of every kind with harmony, with Truth and Love?” (p. 394).