21 December 2019
Solstice Saturday
Light in the Darkness
I am thinking today of a girl whom I knew, or thought I knew, as a child. She was perhaps the first person about whom I cared, deeply, after the death of my father when I was ten. Her name is not important, though it is one I can and shall never forget. Her ghastly fate more or less erased the name given her at birth. You see, she was a child who sought evil; and I was a child who tried, in vain, to steer her away from it. By the age of fifteen, I was forced to abandon the fight, for she betrayed me, and herself, in ways that only God can fully forgive.
Her mother had whored her own pre-pubescent daughter to attract husband number three. By twelve years of age, I’d not yet become fully aware of all of the ways that a woman can destroy innocence around her, innocence in any form, because such a wretched soul hates purity, and what is more pure than a child? Perhaps it was my purity that this girl craved, as a last-gasp attempt to fight demons she would all too soon, and willingly, embrace.
Her mother claimed that I was the sister this daughter of hers had never known. In some ways, I was. This classmate had reached out to me to befriend her, and befriend her I did, for I was alone and she too was alone, except I comprehended my aloneness in my childhood world; she did not. She knew not who her father was, or had been. She was fatherless. Even though I was without a father because of death, I was rich in his love and sustained by his memory, by countless memories which still sustain me.
It took me years, many years, to both come to, and part from, the truths of her life, and how and why my life had intersected with her life. I believe it was the hand of God that led me to those lessons in friendship. Those lessons taught me the true meaning of selfless concern for another human being, and the beginnings of the infinite sense of a noble surrender to destiny.
Decades of experience and emotion have clarified for me the salient truth that it was always going to be that way for this girl: she’d lusted after sin more than anything. It was, and is, always difficult for me to comprehend that type of wish or desire or distortion of the human will. It remains a problem for me, as I look at the hatred that controls the actions of people in my nation to destroy goodness in the name of “justice” or whatever the latest buzz-word is for the buzzing bees of maleficence.
I resolutely believe in free will. I passionately hold dear the power of the individual to take action in the face of savagery and cruel fate. It is therefore against the very grain of my nature to think:
It was always going to be that way.
Regarding certain impulses of a corroded soul, you’d more easily be able to defy gravity or fight the whirlwind than to alter the course upon which a demonic spirit sets itself. Hatred is real and evil is even more real. In the end, the cursedly spiteful person destroys only herself. You’d be wise to stay out of her way, and to put between you and the bitter wretch as much distance as possible. Hosea 8:7 states: For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. Yes, indeed, they shall.
Never in my life have I seen the level of hatred that has been enacted and foisted upon people of good will by the vicious and vile in this nation. The whirlwind of foul deeds presently swirls through other free nations as well. I, however, speak as an American on this day. It is, and has been, humbling and inspirational for me to watch our First Lady rise above all of the venom and cowardly bile with grace and dignity.
Her sincere response to spleen being vented at her, and at her husband, and even at her child is a rare serenity — with a smile that lights up, much like the shining light of a candle amidst the darkness of a solstice night, especially whenever this proud ambassadrice for patriotic Americans is in the presence of a child.
What is more pure than a child? The smile that child elicits from a woman who is teaching Americans the true meaning of service to country.
If it was always going to be that way for some people, then it is always going to be this way for others:
fortitude, faith, perseverance, devotion to truth and dedication to overcome darkness with light.
Such valor defines the winter solstice.