I recently caught a surprisingly good television show about a friendly vampire.
The show is called Moonlight and the vampire is seen in a sympathetic light since he restrains himself from biting people - he gets his blood at the local blood bank. He didn’t ask to be a vampire after all; he fell in love with someone whom he didn’t know was a vampire. Could happen to anyone. In a sense he’s in the same place as all of us. We didn’t ask to be tainted by original sin and to have the vampiristic instincts of concupiscence. We, too, are asked to restrain ourselves.
It seems to me that great blood-lust on the show could also be seen as simply the more old-fashioned type of lust. One feral vampire, who didn’t have a mentor and thus didn’t learn the ways of self-control, was killed by another: the feral vampire was told not to kill even though he could, and his response was laughter, for power unused is folly to man (and apparently vampires) but wisdom to God!
I often think of the crowning of thorns and how for Him there could well have been the very human urge to show them he was king, he did have power. Not power for power’s sake but merely power used to correct a wrong, for he was innocent and spoke only the truth. To be mocked went beyond mere crucifixion; the other criminals weren’t mocked as kings. But Jesus was given the robe and the fake scepter and the big audience. Christ, despite being clothed with power, didn’t exercise it, just as we are clothed with the power to speak out and lacerate our enemies and to exercise our sexuality in immoral ways, but we must relinquish and let that power be unexploited.
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Seems this year I’ve eschewed my little “how far thru winter?” Excel spreadsheet; apparently I think I should've outgrown such frivolities as being so pervious to weather. Which, of course, is proof you haven’t outgrown it. Looking out the window the sky pinks behind laborious tree limbs which writhe frozenly. Clouds diffuse the colored cast of the moon. The eye fixates on the bare maples instead of the pines since the eye seeks novelty and it’s the maples who have changed. I can see their veins, the black capillaries that thread and fan from the major arteries.
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I’m oddly cheered by the occasional side-long glance at the heading: “Divine Mercy in My Soul” which matter-of-factly sits atop the mass-market paperback “Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska”. The pages have that familiar aromatic smell of mass paperbacks, the kind you could lose yourself in. There are seven-hundred jam-packed pages for $7.99, just over a penny a page, the best deal this side of five-dollar King James bibles at the local Christian bookstore. One longs for Lent merely to get to Divine Mercy Sunday. Everyone from Aquinas on down agrees that mercy is God’s greatest attribute, and so it’s surprising that Divine Mercy Sunday, just after Easter, isn’t a bigger feast day given that it celebrates God in His most praise-worth dimension!
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