after reading "Night"

A friend of mine has been urging me to read "Night" by Elie Wiesel since freshman year of college--five years later, having finally complied, I understand why. It's the sort of book that compels you to write about it, if only to process it, to exorcise some of the horror that soaks into your heart during the brief hour and a half that elapses as you read through it. After I finished it and sat in my living room with a cup of tea, enfolded in the creature comforts of my happy golden life, I sought to come to grips with the truth that those pages had revealed: that to be a human being means to have within me the hideous potential that created Auschwitz. Somewhere amidst the qualities in my heart that Christians label "the image of God"--creativity, rationality, volitionality, morality, community--is this nightmare, this evil, waiting to be unleashed. It's chilling indeed to come to grips with the fact that I also, in my fallen humanity, have Satanic likeness, a resemblance to that brightest star of the morning whose fall introduced evil into the cosmos.

It is important for me to reflect on this, from time to time, because it's so easy otherwise for me to think that life is about being comfortable and on good terms with everyone, or achieving certain goals. It is too easy for me to forget that there is a deeper narrative beneath the surface and seeming of things, that each ostensibly minor choice I make has powerful implications in that supernatural realm, which is more real and true than the one that I so often delude myself into regarding as "reality."

"Night" took my hand and led me through the world as I so rarely allow myself to look at it: a wasteland of sin and despair and torment and night. It left my heart gasping for Light, and made me realize that, were it not for the presence of that Light pouring through me, igniting my heart, being breathed to flame by the wind of the Spirit, my existence would be that hell.

I am about to make some coffee this morning, about to venture into another routine day of three square meals, of familiar tasks and familiar faces, of comfortable comforts and comfortable discomforts. But I know that, at least for a time, I will be conscious of how precarious my little world is as I do these things. And I hope that this change in perspective will bolster my faith and remind me of how great my salvation is...and will help me be a light no matter my circumstances.