Dream Your Enemy.

I’ve just woken up from a quite horrible dream. I was being taunted by my American wife and her friends. Please note neither my wife, who’s not American, or Americans are in my experience nasty taunty people, but it was such a wonderful example of evil I feel moved to write it down. Simply put it was the finest judo in the realms of emotion. This fictional coterie was bound together in pure intellect; they had no emotions, just their ersatz equivalents of mild disgust, consummate sarcasm, of self indulgent pity with the rank valour of dishonest virtue. At every turn my own emotion was used against me like a judo throw. The more I became emotional, the more I called for love, the more they deftly turned it to their advantage. It was a currency they knew only as a wealthy man might know sprouts, of no value except for eating un-joyously. Compassion, yearning, exasperation, desperation and anger were all eaten and turned to dung whilst I travelled inexorably along that curve towards obliteration. I’m writing this because this frightening experience seems to identify the nature and mechanism of evil, not as a dangerous emotion but as utterly lacking in love, that those lacking this facility will always have the capacity to absorb our common emotional world and turn it into dry boned lifelessness. Maybe in some deep forgotten recess they want our currency but without the facility to turn water into wine they will swallow the sea and stay sober. There is nothing to do but ignore, to cut one’s own need to connect and walk away. This seems a strange little Christmas tale but maybe it was reminding me of the importance of defeating the enemies of Jesus as well as embracing his message of love.