the welcome mat

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I am too lazy and feeble-minded to create credible parameters, so I'll just shoot from the hip and write about of "good" and "evil."

Aside from any desire to call it commendable, there is a completely understandable desire in spiritual life to underscore what is good or better or best. Individuals may struggle mightily to correct and revise and rein in and promote and ... do whatever it takes to assert and actualize what is good. All of this is understandable: After all, no one ever took up a spiritual persuasion in order to become so much worse.

But the effort to be good frequently comes at a price: In constructing the walls of goodness, evil is kept at bay. Evil lies outside the golden walls of effort and hope and belief. The good stuff is in here and the evil stuff is out there and there is an unending battle to keep this equation in good repair. Goodness is the good sibling. Evil is the sinister sister.

And so it goes for as long as it goes: Nourish the good; choke off the evil.

Goes for as long as it goes ... perhaps for a lifetime.

The only problem with this effort and scenario is that the same walls that keep things at bay invariably hem in and distort and smother.

There is the fact that life has no walls.

Bit by bit, the grand and well-intentioned effort that creates such walls needs to be disassembled and the welcome mat put out. The good sibling and the evil sister are, after all, one family.

Having been released from a Nazi concentration camp, a Catholic priest was asked what he thought of his captors. He replied, "I might have done the same." Whatever his reality, still his words are adult words, not words camouflaged with any imagined goodness.

I am the the very atrocity and vileness against which I defend.

It may be tricky and it may be dangerous, but without the welcome mat, how could this joyful party proceed?
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