There are times life feels so very much like a house of cards, each card leaning against the other in off-square corners, layer after layer stacked up on the feeble walls of belief or hope or assumption. Trying to believe the best about people leaves faith a rather fragile construction when you get right down to it. Let hope bring an error into a wall and the entire creation can collapse. No earth shaking revelation, that, pretty much everyone has seen that one way or another. Just one of those unhappier facts of life.
Even knowing it could happen it still happened to me just the other day. I tried to believe the best, and got shown the worst. My mistake. This isn’t the first time I’ve had a bent card, a deformed and badly weakened card get way to deep in the pile, this isn’t the first time I’ve watched a house of cards fall. Nope, not at all. But this time it’s more than just fallen walls easily restored with a stronger straighter card in place of the weak one. When things fell apart to some innocent error or random accident it isn’t so hard to forgive and forget. But such wasn’t the case this time, there was no accident or error, no puff of breeze, no bump to the table. I watched it shaping up, watched it forming, hoped I was wrong and had my hope betrayed. What could have been noble proved out as deliberate and premeditated malice with greed for a motive. If it had only been greed for money it would have been bad enough, but no, the truth goes far deeper than that. I said I got shown the worst, and I wasn’t joking. What the falling cards revealed was a lustful greed for power, a cold greed black and evil as any vampire villain from fiction exploiting the living to linger in the shadows of anti-life, the kind of evil that requires a continuous stream of victims. What I saw was truly the ugliest side of what passes for humanity.
Which brings me to the point of this post. Exposure to that kind of evil is like exposure to a great many other toxins, the toxin will often linger in concealed forms to poison later times and places and peoples. Such evil leaves anger and bitterness and vanity in its’ victims, the toxins of the soul that create the very weaknesses that open the way for evil to jump from life to life like a contagious disease. Those contagions are the deepest damage done by even a brief encounter with genuine evil, the contagions left behind what must be guarded against most closely after exposure to such a carrier. Failing to guard yourself against what the evil left behind is to invite the evil to make you its’ new host. Such a carrier is what the falling house of cards revealed to me, I’m having to keep a very close watch indeed on the state of my soul, the state of my inner defenses. The degree of evil I encountered demands acute vigilance to limit the damage done to no more than the superficial things of money and a fallen house of cards once built on the hopes of what might have been.
Oh, well. Since the house has fallen might as well play some poker. Folks, the game is seven card stud with nothing wild being as how the jokers just burned themselves.
Evil is. The hard part, as you said, is to ensure that it doesn't warp your soul; and to avoid that, we must purge it. We must forgive and, not forget (that way lies continuing the evil), but set it in a museumlike, climate-controlled, hermetically sealed part of our soul and put a sign up saying "Never Again."
ReplyDeleteJochanaan, you are correct. But this one is a challenge for me to forgive, because the event in question has put in question the driving motive behind a great many other events. If (IF) the most vile of the possible scenarios proves true then the evil has been attacking my life and home for year... you'd have to know my full story (and the full story of my wife) to fully understand. But, I can't really tell those stories until I'm reasonably confident I have the story correctly understood. I don't want to join in the evil's game of slander and manipulate, even by accident. Like so many nasty fights this one is all in the family. I've never lost a fight that someone else started, and I'm not going to lose this one. But to avoid winning the battle and losing the war (for the state of my soul) I must tread very carefully, and play my cards very close to the vest indeed ;-)
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