Now and then I become aware that some child has suffered an unspeakable horror. Most of the time I cannot bear this truth. I quickly turn my mind elsewhere, because I’m too busy or too tired to deal with the reality of evil. My shadow self files this knowledge away in a secret drawer while the conscious part of me sings, “La, la, la, la, la; I can’t hear you.”

But sometimes I allow myself to hold the knowledge of terrible evil in my mind. I can feel the raging, voracious appetite of evil, the consuming black hatred in it. Evil puts its snarling face right before my own, a leather-clad drill sergeant from hell who spews black flecks of spit all over my face. His breath smells like gas bursting from a swollen carcass.

Usually this is as much as I can handle. I can stand before evil for a few moments with my eyes screwed shut and my face turned away. My mind searches frantically for anything else to think about. Anything else. I mumble panicked baby prayers. “Dear Jesus, sweet Jesus, make it go away!”

But evil is also like a deep, sore place inside my tongue. I cannot leave evil alone. Something keeps me gnawing at it, discovering over and over again that yes, this sore spot still hurts like hell.

In these moments of extreme masochism, I manage to push past the drill sergeant and move deeper into the domain of evil. I allow myself to imagine that this horrible thing was done to my middle daughter, my Shelby, my Sharmy, my Sobee, my Tubby Lumpkin. She of the tender heart and loving ways, the one whose brown eyes are as cautious and tender as a woman’s palm.

I can see the fear in Shelby’s eyes and her panicked thrashing. Sometimes I can hear her scream for me. “Daddy,” she cries, but I am not there for her.

This is an infinite evil. Thinking of it is like trying to comprehend the size of the universe. It is beyond the capacity of my mind. My defense mechanisms begin to kick in, and I am numbed. Benumbed to evil. I can only shake my head and wonder at any mind that could comprehend this reality.

I turn and run. I run from evil as fast as I can, but some impish part of me looks back, like Lot’s wife, to see the fire raining down from the sky. In this moment, one final thought makes it through my defenses. And here is that final thought: When any child suffers, it is as tragic and horrible as my own child suffering. And many children suffer in our world. Their screams fill the heavens and surround our planet with a haze of sorrow, a beacon to the universe. “Stay away! This world is broken. These people hurt each other. They always have, and they always will.”

This is all I can do, and this I have done. I have gazed into the gaping maw of the devil and smelled his rancid breath. I will not go closer, unless of course, some other person exercises his terrible gift of freedom and makes me enter therein. But for now, yes, this is all I can do.

If only for this I need God. If only to think that somewhere there is a mind that can comprehend evil and will comprehend it, that can count evil and will count it, that can know evil and will know it for what it is. I want evil to be known, and goodness too. I want someone to bear the awful knowledge of good and evil.

But more than that, I want to believe that no child’s scream goes unheard.

rlp