Night of the Soul

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  I have known some dark nights of the soul.  There was the time I sat on a man's porch waiting for him to come home.  I had every intention of wrecking violence upon him.  He had betrayed me in one of the worst ways a friend can betray another friend.  

The adjective "wrecking" is intentional for it points to the ideas of collision and its woeful aftermath.

I found myself feeling like Montresor in Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" who said:  "The thousand and one injuries of Fortunato I had born as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge."

Montresor served his dish of revenge coldly.  He planned revenge that would escape God and man's punishment.  I had been seized by a deadly seventh sin.  My soup roiled with heat.  

I fully intended to be my own avenging angel: wrecking, reckless, without impunity, impetuous, and without the wisdom that stays the hand of self immolation.  I would have lost everything, my job and self respect and my right to number myself among others who love in this world.

I remember the wooden porch where I sat and pondered as I cooled off was painted the color of dolphins. A concrete walkway extended from the stairs to the public sidewalk where pinched grass squeezed between long cracks.  Nature had broken the walkway in places so that deep fault lines raised the concrete and pushed it against the sections where they had been seamless.  A morning mist rose from wet, hot grass from the lawn.  

I thought about the great men I knew from history whom I sought to emulate:  Socrates, St. Francis, Gandhi, Clarence Jordan, Dr. King...and Jesus of Nazareth...always.  

Just planning violence, even thinking it had caused me to fall short of God's way.  I must have gone through all the stages of good sense.  I pondered jail.  I felt in my heart the terrible rip in my life that would never heal.  A long time passed and I transformed back into myself.  I departed a lucky, wiser man.

Today, I am yet ashamed for having held such thoughts in my heart. We fancy ourselves such great and holy men and women of God yet in a moment find ourselves in need of forgiveness, healing, and time.

Of course anything could have happened.  I was no spring chicken then nor was I a winter rooster. Had I been injured, thinking pragmatically here, who knows what scars I might have carried through life, scars that might have ached in the mornings and evenings of my days along with the spiritual scar of being a monumental weakling before God. 

God was silent and invisible that morning.  But I walked away.  I am glad of it.  My life did not convulse that day.  Now, I am merely ashamed to have entertained that old demonic temper I have struggled so long and hard to incapacitate.  I am embarrassed for having acted like a jackass towards my friend who really had not done me the wrong I imagined.  In fact, what he did revealed to me that so many of life's best surprises emanate from those paths directed by the worst surprises.

Blessings...