Letter #240: Darkness Into Light

Evil Helplessly Points to the Sacred

Just a reminder that we’ll be doing another livestream tomorrow, Tuesday the 13^th, at 6PM Eastern.

Sproing.

Since this month’s essay is from my new book The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness, we’ve been getting pretty dark ourselves. So I think we ought to point to what it is about darkness that leads us to the light, what it is about evil that helplessly points to the good.

In the book, I pay what you might call a backhanded compliment to murder itself:

“Give the devil his due: what murder does it does right well. On earth, there is no justice for the dead. Their blood cries out, but only God can hear it. Murder, like the black shadow of creation, obliterates an infinite inner world of experience. Joys and sorrows, fears and yearnings, gone: an unlived life that will never be. No one will ever experience the victim’s spring, or dream his dreams, or love his loves, or suffer his losses. Her children will not be born. Her generations will be an ever-flowing stream of nothingness. A million years of light and life will not put out a murder’s darkness.”

If life were not so beautiful, murder would not be so horrifying. If each mind were not a unique fountain of creation, continuing the Genesis work of God by bringing a consciousness to fruition, the interruption of that work would not fill us with such revulsion.

I remember a cartoon I saw once. A couple is leaving a funeral service. The man turns to the woman and says, “I really should start living a better life.” In eulogies, we become the miracle of personality we never quite realized we were. Had we known we had inspired such love — had those who loved us known how much they had — had the days of our lives felt as precious when we lived them as they do when they’re remembered by the people we left behind — then, we would have understood what living is, and the abundance of life God is seeking to give us.

This abundance is what we have talked ourselves out of — blinded ourselves to — in our efforts to justify abortion so we can have the pleasure of sex without the consequences of love. This awareness is what we are forgetting when we elevate money or fame or likes over the still center of existence. If there were no evil — if there were no death — we would never know the value of this moment right now.

In a previous letter, I said I believed that, even in Eden, death was there. I think there is also sorrow in heaven, although it may be a sorrow so illuminated as to be without pain. But surely it must take forever to become one with an infinite God, and the rising upward must include a dying to the thing we were.

Likewise, here on earth, this gift we’re given can only be illuminated by the darkness at its end.

Love, Dad