Disney's Rescuing Hand

I was very little, still in first grade. My Catholic school demanded faith. But faith can only happen from within. Faith in God is faith that God especially wants something from you, that there is a particular “living right,” a wanted path of action, as opposed to arbitrariness, especially designed for you. It was like the prince killing the dragon, or Aurora singing in the woods. It was like the searched-for inevitability with which Sleeping Beauty’s numbered stickers should follow one another to completion, in the album that was launched right after the movie. Like charms created by the Disney industry, those stickers were swapped between my younger brother and I, passing from one avid set of little fingers to the other as a transcendental mission behind the torrential, shield-like rain that had my dreaded school providentially called off on that unforgettable morning.