Most first-year humanities students will have heard this famous, perhaps infamous, utterance by the British poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892). It first registered in my soul during my first year of college in an introductory humanities course. The lecturer took some evident pleasure in describing what I was later to learn to refer to as “natural evil.” This was evidently because he had assumed that the more his students would encounter both natural and human evil, the more they would realize how “primitive” was the faith in which they had been reared. A good God? In face of all the evil in the world? You’ve got to be kidding!
Such thoughts began to stir in my conscious mind recently, when my daughter (and her daughter) and my son (and his two sons) were visiting us in our old farmhouse in southwestern rural Maine. One of the boys had been wandering in a field behind our house, beyond which the forest began its spread for its many surly miles. When he returned to the house, he told how he had seen, within a stone’s throw of our house, the carcass of a dead deer, it must have been. The whole family, myself excluded for some reason, trekked out to see that carcass.
Why did I stay in the kitchen, alone, continuing to wash the dishes? I’m not sure. Maybe I should bring this up with my therapist, whom I don’t have. If I were to engage in some introspection, a process which isn’t my strongest suit, I would say something like this. I’ve had it with Death. Begone Grim Reaper, I say.
I have written more than one spiritual autobiography in my time, and they all differ. But there’s at least one constant: the challenge of confronting what Christians of the apostolic era thought of “the principalities and powers of death.” I encountered that dark world for the first time when I was a sophomore in college and I began to look at the evils of the Holocaust, part of my life-story that has never gone away. Six million Jews murdered! There, human forces that were demonic carried the day.
It doesn’t take much to set such thoughts stirring in my interiority. Even reports about a carcass in a field in southwestern rural Maine.
I urgently look forward to that Day promised in the Scriptures, the coming and everlasting world of the New Heavens and the New Earth, when the deer will lie down with the wildcats. And all mass human murders will be over, once and for all. Come Lord Jesus, Lord of the living, I pray. Come!
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