one of my deepest fears

A certain literary type has begun to fascinate me. She unsettles me, because I can see so vividly in her character tendencies that I have, tendencies that could eventually shape me into her. She tends to be the despised foil for the heroinne. She is Mary Piper of "Fall On Your Knees," Charlotte Bartlett of "A Room With A View," and Aunt Elizabeth of Lucy Maud Montgomery's "Emily of New Moon" series. Dorethea Brookes of "Middlemarch" and Lucy Honeychurch of "A Room With A View" narrowly escape evolving into her. Her male counterpart is Javert of "Les Miserables," Cecil Vyse of "A Room With A View," and Dr. Casaubum of "Middlemarch." Repressed, severe, and inflexibly moral, she refuses to acknowledge her own lostness, and thereby divorces herself from our sympathies.

The tragedy of her life is that she begins with the high hopes and ideals that we all begin with. Offered a glimpse of her future self, she would shudder and reject the image with the same distaste with which we regard it. But gradually her reactions to the forces of life corrupt the freshness and recklessness right out of her. And it usually all begins with religious devotion run amok: the belief that to avoid sin one must eschew all earthly pleasures, and even if compelled to partake, must do so with a spirit of self-mortification. She is a Judge. She finds both herself and others worthy of condemnation, and if she does not mete this out herself, she does mete out disapproval in a way that alienates her from its objects. And one of those objects is herself.

We loathe her because in all her righteousness she is so utterly in error. Despite her ascetism, she cannot find ecstasy. Without love, grace, compassion, she is nothing. In the end, her pride evolves into bitterness and at last into despair. She is the good girl who becomes the ultimate instrument of evil.

I am so afraid of becoming her. I am afraid that my love for purity and truth will lead me into a hypocrisy so dense and strangling that I will inflict horrible injury on others (and myself) while believing myself to be enacting God's will. I am afraid that the god in my head will resemble the God of the Universe only in His aspect of Judge and Executioner of Justice. I am afraid of forgetting that His death is the deepest magic of all, because it is both pure and loving and it compells me to be gracious to others and to myself in ways that defy rigid justice.

Oh Love that will not let me go...never ever let me go there.