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He thought of the dead, said a silent prayer. And as he did so, he asked his God for a word of protection against the souls of the damned, for such things did prowl the world, though encounters with them were rare.
We have finite length lives in which to figure out what the Truth is, and all the while have to fear death. Death is scary.
Is death the end, or just the beginning?1 And if it’s a beginning, what kind of beginning? The beginning of Heaven? The beginning of Hell? Or just another beginning in an infinite chain of beginnings and endings?
I’m confused. I don’t know what’s true and what isn’t. I have a mystical outlook on life. I know we exist in this world for a reason, and I strongly expect that we are loved, supported and protected in profound ways that we couldn’t even begin to imagine.
What is this life all about? Everything to us is surface and appearance. Most of life is but the thinnest of veneers, stretched taut and thin. That veneer breaks sometimes, stretches too thin and tears like paper. And what lies beneath the surface, what we hover over everyday without seeing, that great and terrible waging war between good and evil, it would freeze the blood in our veins, make the hairs on our arms and legs stand tall and rigid and erect.
Good and evil2. Evil and good. What is good? What is evil? They transcend definition. They just are.
Good is love. Good is kindness. Good is patience, support and gentle understanding.
Evil is a baby left on the street to die. Evil is a baby punctured in the hollow of the womb and left to die. Evil is pain and wickedness and suffering.
Yet, what is evil but a counterfeit good? All that is evil has its origins in something good, because evil is nothing more than the great imitator. What is a lie but a modified truth?
Footnotes
1. This paragraph I actually edited and posted on my Tumblr as a writing fragment. You can find it here. If you’ve read this before, now you get to experience the broader context in which it was written.
2. This and the remaining paragraphs were what lead me to write the blog Does Reading About Evil Make You Evil?
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