In the smothering blackness of night, I look into my heart and see the abyss. I hear the anguished, hopeless cries of millions of lost souls, agonized by their sins, irretrievable now, and calling out admonishments, vainly pleading to us still living but unhearing.
In these moments, when I hear them, I ponder what sort of God would allow this. I do not allow myself to follow this thought too far before shaking it off. I take refuge in repeating the familiar prayers of my youth, but with a renewed conciousness, weighing every word, holding each phrase in my mind in order to dust off the cobwebs of familiarity and consider their meaning more thoroughly. Standing on an irrational faith, like a sailor lost at sea, clinging to a lonely rock barely thrust through the waves, miles from shore, desparately hanging on to something — anything — because, what else is there to do?
I look to my own actions, and even as I know sometimes I behave badly, I am thoroughly married to my sins. In my heart I know them to be weaknesses, but cannot believe them deserving of a fate like this.
But I can no more break free from them than the moth frantically fluttering against the glass, sensing the sunlight on his wings, perhaps even seeing his brothers and sisters or somehow sensing the flowers outside, trapped helplessly in this solarium, with no escape.
He may have been here for days, exhausted, lonely, starving, desparate.
As I approach to set him free, he flies away from me, mad with fright, I imagine, terrified at the monster approaching him. Not knowing that I see his plight, and seek to capture him only in order to set him free.
Not everyone I know has such compassion, and I sometimes do see people pitilessly squash any bug they find, so I do not blame the little fellow for eschewing me. But I am driven to follow him, climbing on chairs, and along the solarium wall, cupping my hands over him, but gingerly, for fear of hurting him in his attempt to escape.
So he does succeed in escaping me once or twice, but I am determined. I think: perhaps this is how God feels towards us. We madly beat ourselves against the glass, trying to find our own personal paradise seemingly so close before us, yet impossible to reach.
And as He reaches out to us, lovingly, empathetically, we do not perceive him at all, except perhaps as something terrifying, maybe the baffling creator of this trap we find ourselves in — this world.
And as I finally catch him, enclosing him in the darkenss of my cupped hands, I reflect on other times I have done this, with hummingbirds, and mockingbirds, owls, bullfrogs and snakes, I always notice something like a resignation, I imagine maybe even a trust vaguely forming in their simple creature minds, as they wonder if this may be their last living moments before being devoured.
I’m sure they rarely appreciate what it is that I am actually trying to do for them, just as we cannot conceive of what God is trying to do for us, even as we resist him, until I step over to the door and open up my cupped hands and my heart lifts with the little creature, as he flies away from me with all his might, toward the treetops, toward the sun, away from this prison — and this terrifying monster — me.
And if God loves us half as much as the love I feel for these creatures, similarly pities us from His perfect superiority, and does not blame us for our sins, due as they are to our own limited perceptions, instead seeing what is in our hearts, knowing us in ways we cannot even know ourselves, then we have nothing at all to fear from the infinite deep black heart of the night, nor from any monster which we may imagine lurking there.