White and Black Hats

When I read fiction, I'm comfortable with guys in white and black hats.  I understand clear good and evil.  I even think, or have thought, that that's the way things should be.  The guy on the white horse with the tin badge shoots the leader of the colloquially-named gang that has been terrorizing the village, and order is restored.  There's probably even a smooch in it for him at the end from his lady love.  But there's one problem with the way I like fiction to be.  Life isn't like that.

Years ago, I joined a book club in my neighborhood.  Each lady chose a book for a month and then hosted the discussion of that book in her home.  One lady, I honestly don't remember who, chose Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult.  I hated that book with a passion because it blurred lines between good and evil that I didn't think ought to be blurred.  I wanted the villain to be the villain, no matter how sorry I secretly felt for him.

Years passed, and I changed.  Then my beloved Jo came out with a new book, and with fear and trepidation for her, I began to read.  (Don't laugh at me calling her Jo.  In my head, we're on a first-name basis, and she loves Dawn Hyperdrive.)  You know how you watch a scene in a movie you kind of want to see and don't want to have seen?  That's how I read her book.  And the very quality that made me hate Jodi Picoult made me love Jo even more than I already did.  Jo loved everybody, even the people who were supposed to be villains.  She understood them with a perfect and charitable empathy.

What if everyone is like Alice's looking glass?  What if there is an alternate reality inside everyone, one we don't see just by knocking on the front door?  What if we never really understand what makes a saint a saint or a villain a villain until we stand in front of the mirror of his soul and see ourselves?

I think I owe Jodi Picoult an apology.

Us versus Them

When I was growing up in Christian school, I regularly attended chapel assemblies.  Most of the time, our headmaster or one of the school teachers or pastors on staff at the church tied to the school would speak on some spiritual issue or other.  We'd sing a song or two and then sit back and listen.  For a long while, I even took notes; it was a good habit for me that helped me in school.  But occasionally, maybe once every year or so, we'd get a slide show.

The slide show would introduce us to the Evils of Rock Music and Pop Culture in General, and they were usually interesting in the way that live war footage on the news is interesting.  The shock of learning what was really out there terrified me.  Because I accepted the teaching that my teachers and pastors were in a straight down-line from God Almighty and that questioning them was tantamount to questioning the Big Guy Himself, I accepted as true all of the presentations on backward masking (messages from Satan hidden in rock records played backwards), occult symbols on album covers, and ritual abuse and sacrifice done by hard-core Satanist fans.

I lived a lot of my childhood and young adult years believing that the world was bad and that the people in it were all bad, too, except for the people from my denomination and a slim selection of other denominations with acceptable doctrine.  I peered at the world outside from behind a fence of prejudice, determined to be horrified at what I saw.  So I was.  But some stubborn part of me still liked part of what I saw.  I loved U2 and Star Trek and novels by atheists like Steinbeck and Hemingway.  I just thought that liking those things was, if not strictly a sin (listening to U2 definitely was), then a dangerous, slippery path to sin.

As I've grown older, I've stepped outside the bounds of my denomination, which I left.  I thought that I had left those prejudices behind, but every time I think I'm completely free, I realize I have another door in front of me to open.  Recently, a series of books and shows and songs and personal encounters have showed me another locked door that I'm beginning to open.  I'm beginning to realize that the people around me are just like me.  Being a part of my denomination didn't make me safe; it made me scared.  And in truth, the world isn't us versus them.  The world is just us.