The evil that grows inside us
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We are not immune to the horrors of this world. It will live in us until we cast it out and then rein in carefully with love. This morning I woke to a world that had the breath of valued human beings taken out yet again. They were ripped, targeted and snuffed out in the terrible minutes and span of a hot June Florida night.
Stories of grown men are trickling out, stories of them texting their moms, pleading for help ironically from the stalls of a bathroom, the terror building as the communication was cut short and they were gone. Lives taken away by someone who deemed them unworthy to live.
I mourn with those who mourn. My murmurings felt dry as my mouth is a burning desert sent into the stratosphere with a tongue that has uttered the same laments over the years in alarming fashion. It’s another massacre, another shooting, another day.
On cue my social media feeds blew up: talk of gun control, the targeting of the LGBTQ community, radicalized Muslims and how our immigration system has failed because this man was of Afghan descent, but he was born in the U.S.A.
In reading the words typed by others in the immediate hours after this happened, I gleaned that I was to do this: wake up, blame our president, buy a gun, stockpile guns and ready myself for war. I saw words of lament as well, the beauty of empathy, sadness and mourning pouring out like a waterfall. What I didn’t see was the immediate change of temporary profile pictures that happened after the Paris attacks, the support coming in droves as the French flag flew over hundreds of my friends’ faces.
I puzzled a bit, wondering why this was any different, something that had happened in our very country. We just had 50 beautiful souls murdered, just as the Parisians had been, out and about in their town eating, drinking and living, and as the blood was still drying on the floor of a nightclub, I felt a terrible rumble through my soul.
Instead of dining on a continuous meal of online words and commentary of which I’m wont to do we slipped away to the cinema to lose ourselves for precious minutes inside a movie. I shut my phone off, my lifeline to the outside world.
Highly anticipated, we took in a movie called The Conjuring 2. It was a famous case about a family who were menaced by evil spirits, a true story, and the people who helped them claimed freedom from what was happening.
I relish horror movies, and I admit that readily. I sat in tense moments, riveted by every second of this feature, my skin crawling with goose bumps. If you haven’t seen this particular set of movies, know that they are some of the scariest you will see. You might say, I don’t ever watch scary movies. Why would I subject myself to that? They’re evil, but you see evil exists in this world. We mustn’t hide from it.
It’s in the mind of a young man who murdered tiny grade school children in Connecticut. It exists inside the brain of a shooter who shot moviegoers in a Colorado theater, and it lived and grew inside a boy who murdered churchgoers that welcomed him in with open arms. It dwells inside the minds of people who believe religion calls them to murder for their faith as well as the people who have shot their friends and classmates in a myriad of schools across this country. It lives within those who target a community, and it also lives within us the moment we decide that fear will reside in our hearts.
In the end of the movie the evil is banished in highly tense moments after many endless days of terror. I felt electric surges course through my body in response to what good film-making can make you feel, and I walked out of the theater alive and well. My brain was thrumming with thoughts.
What do we deem evil? Darkness can be defeated, but not always how we think it should. It doesn’t reside in all the brown faces that have immigrated here, nor does it reside in all the faces that look like our own. It does, however, reside in us when we become fearful, intentionally choosing to see only what is in front of us instead of investigating and probing to see what might be involved.
I won’t hide, nor blame, nor live in fear. I want to live amongst and show love the only way I can. I want to take root and grow branches that cover those who are targeted by hate, try to help instead of run away from those who are lost inside a religious frenzy. I want to believe in redemption and be a shelter from unfiltered words, which in the end are more powerful than taken-up arms on either side.
We are not immune to the horrors of this world. It will live in us until we cast it out and then rein in carefully with love. This morning I woke to a world that had the breath of valued human beings taken out yet again. They were ripped, targeted and snuffed out in the terrible minutes and span of a hot June Florida night.
Stories of grown men are trickling out, stories of them texting their moms, pleading for help ironically from the stalls of a bathroom, the terror building as the communication was cut short and they were gone. Lives taken away by someone who deemed them unworthy to live.
I mourn with those who mourn. My murmurings felt dry as my mouth is a burning desert sent into the stratosphere with a tongue that has uttered the same laments over the years in alarming fashion. It’s another massacre, another shooting, another day.
On cue my social media feeds blew up: talk of gun control, the targeting of the LGBTQ community, radicalized Muslims and how our immigration system has failed because this man was of Afghan descent, but he was born in the U.S.A.
In reading the words typed by others in the immediate hours after this happened, I gleaned that I was to do this: wake up, blame our president, buy a gun, stockpile guns and ready myself for war. I saw words of lament as well, the beauty of empathy, sadness and mourning pouring out like a waterfall. What I didn’t see was the immediate change of temporary profile pictures that happened after the Paris attacks, the support coming in droves as the French flag flew over hundreds of my friends’ faces.
I puzzled a bit, wondering why this was any different, something that had happened in our very country. We just had 50 beautiful souls murdered, just as the Parisians had been, out and about in their town eating, drinking and living, and as the blood was still drying on the floor of a nightclub, I felt a terrible rumble through my soul.
Instead of dining on a continuous meal of online words and commentary of which I’m wont to do we slipped away to the cinema to lose ourselves for precious minutes inside a movie. I shut my phone off, my lifeline to the outside world.
Highly anticipated, we took in a movie called The Conjuring 2. It was a famous case about a family who were menaced by evil spirits, a true story, and the people who helped them claimed freedom from what was happening.
I relish horror movies, and I admit that readily. I sat in tense moments, riveted by every second of this feature, my skin crawling with goose bumps. If you haven’t seen this particular set of movies, know that they are some of the scariest you will see. You might say, I don’t ever watch scary movies. Why would I subject myself to that? They’re evil, but you see evil exists in this world. We mustn’t hide from it.
It’s in the mind of a young man who murdered tiny grade school children in Connecticut. It exists inside the brain of a shooter who shot moviegoers in a Colorado theater, and it lived and grew inside a boy who murdered churchgoers that welcomed him in with open arms. It dwells inside the minds of people who believe religion calls them to murder for their faith as well as the people who have shot their friends and classmates in a myriad of schools across this country. It lives within those who target a community, and it also lives within us the moment we decide that fear will reside in our hearts.
In the end of the movie the evil is banished in highly tense moments after many endless days of terror. I felt electric surges course through my body in response to what good film-making can make you feel, and I walked out of the theater alive and well. My brain was thrumming with thoughts.
What do we deem evil? Darkness can be defeated, but not always how we think it should. It doesn’t reside in all the brown faces that have immigrated here, nor does it reside in all the faces that look like our own. It does, however, reside in us when we become fearful, intentionally choosing to see only what is in front of us instead of investigating and probing to see what might be involved.
I won’t hide, nor blame, nor live in fear. I want to live amongst and show love the only way I can. I want to take root and grow branches that cover those who are targeted by hate, try to help instead of run away from those who are lost inside a religious frenzy. I want to believe in redemption and be a shelter from unfiltered words, which in the end are more powerful than taken-up arms on either side.
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