[reposted]
Have you ever felt dread?
I’m not talking about fear. Fear is immediate; fear kicks in when you’re faced with imminent danger. A mugger with a gun; a stranger in your house. I’m talking about dread. Dread is persistent. It gnaws at you. It consumes feelings with its irrational sense of doom. You can’t ignore it. It just won’t go away. Dread has a long game. I think dread is, in its simplest form, worrying about the outcomes of that which you can’t possibly control.
And I think that’s the thing of it.
Every home-invasion victim… every wide-eyed, fear-gripped man on the wrong end of a gun… every rape victim pressed facedown against a floor… every person who has ever felt their world shrink under the widening menace of a stalker… every mother who has watched in horror as floodwaters washed away her babies… every driver of every car which has skidded off of any number of steep embankments….
One could argue that lives lived in specific debauchery can invite specific consequences – violence as a byproduct of criminal life, illness and bankruptcy as a result of heroin addiction, that sort of thing. But no matter how they lived their lives, I can’t ever believe that a single one of those aforementioned people deserve, invite, or otherwise attract the kind of blitzkrieg decimation that seems to fall out of the sky on the criminal or the soccer moms, the students or the strung-out dealers.
Every one of those aforementioned people, in their own ways, in their own dialects – all of them uttered the same bargaining chips in the heat of the moment. Every single one of them considered themselves, in the moment, worthy of begging for the sudden, crushing weight of chaos to be lifted off of them. Every single one of them thought that their moment of trauma – that moment when your body goes numb, when it seems everything lifts and dulls except for the shrill hold of a single note, the summation of everything you know of life, balanced on the tip of a knife, the pen-pointed scrawlings of a crazy person, shoved under your windshield wiper, the sour breath in your ear, the blind craze in wide eyes – was dire enough that, in those moments, there was nothing but the blade, and the God who hears the frenzied pleas of those whose lives pivot on an edge.
Every one of those people considered themselves strong or capable enough to alter the ending. The mother who tries to swim out into the floodwaters; the mugging victim who grabs for the gun; the father sidling around dark hallways corners wielding a baseball bat at 2 am. They can change the outcome. They’re strong. They’re good people. They can abort evil. God’s on their side. God gives them strength.
Sometimes, they prove themselves right. And sometimes, their world falls into blinding change. Sometimes, they’re shot, instead. Or drowned. Or raped. Or their screams of God, help me! turn unintelligible as their car somersaults toward the bottom of the ravine.
There is nothing so special or extraordinary about any one of us that we should expect anything other than what's waiting for us on that edge. There is no strength of character, or level of determination, or amount of personal insight, that matters. And I cannot help but find God's intent in tragedy totally capricious.
God's not against you, but when your number comes up, nothing will save you.
Blasphemous words? I don't know. I never thought I'd write them. But no matter what you believe, they're true. I don't say them flippantly. I say them hesitantly, with the reverence they deserve. I'm aware of what I'm tiptoeing around. I don't like being here, either. So don't jump my case.
I just want to know: Why is the question of why such a totally different question this time around?
I used to think that dread comes unannounced. And now, I think it’s the predictable, surmountable part of an unannounced terror. Dread is the hope, somehow. Because dread is anticipation, and anticipation is the first spark of a game plan. And because hope, like dread, often comes unannounced, and innoculates our darkness with a bit of irrational optimism.
Somehow, unexpectedly, dread is a small comfort.
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