Here’s another way of thinking about good and evil. When yellowtail hawk chicks reach a certain age, the mom begins lining the nest with thorns and sharp sticks as a way of making the nest uncomfortable, so the chicks will spread their wings and fly. Could it be that what we call ‘evil’ serves a similar function as the thorns and sharp sticks in our lives? We get very comfortable in our habitual rut [the only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth and width] on the continuum, even learning to tolerate the anger, fear and pain we experience.
Evil’s thorns and sharp sticks jolt us awake, make us take stock, and, because only the spiritual realm is a true antidote for evil, can push us to become more aware of our spiritual option. If we always do what we always did, we’ll always get what we always got. By shifting to the spiritual realm on the continuum where there is no ‘good’ or ‘evil’, only life and love [God makes the rain fall on the just and the unjust alike] we are doing what we don’t always do, and can be inspired to envision something we hadn’t before, and thus do something we hadn’t done before.
Viewed this way, ‘evil’ can be seen as having a neutral, non-evil role to play, perhaps even a benign role to play. By allowing for this neutrality, this potentially benign place in the scheme of things, not reacting negatively, and allowing that life is a mystery beyond our tiny intelligence to fully comprehend, we are able to appreciate life’s grace, take advantage of it and live more fully and benignly, taking advantage of the entire continuum. When we become hung up on the absolute ‘evil’ of Nazi Germany and Cancer and child abuse, we need to recognize the thorns in our nest, and take them as our cue to shift along the continuum to our spiritual reality and from their be guided to how to feel and what to do, now.
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