Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.
- Dr. Reid on Criminal Minds quoting Stephen King
I happen to think it's really cool when a character in a book or show I enjoy quotes an author or musician that I like. This is one of those instances. Reid is one of my two favorite, kill them off and I quit watching the show forever, characters on Criminal Minds (Penelope is the other, by the way), and I think that Stephen King has an amazing insight into the minds and motives of average people with an unique ability to express what would happen when Average Joe finds himself in a not so average situation. I think King has also learned that it's much easier to write believable characters and ideas that are scary, sad and screwed up, because it's easier for most of us to identify and associate with that trio than the happy, joyous and free one.
We may not like to admit it, but it's true. Heartbreaking poetry is real and deep, while happy poetry is gift card cheese. Why? Because we don't believe it through and through. Because it is easier to believe in fear and sadness and everything being and going wrong. When I first began to feel good and happy after getting clean and sober I didn't know what to do with myself. I didn't know how to handle good feelings, and I surely didn't know how to express it without sounding silly and sappy. And even when we do feel happy, joyous and free, there is all too often that underlying expectation for the rug to be pulled out, for the other shoe to drop, for a million other cliches we have to express the idea of life returning to its normal state of misery and chaos.
Why is it that when things are rough we don't wait for the other shoe to drop something good into our life? Because evil is easier to believe in, even when it reaches unbelievable and unthinkable expressions, than goodness, hope and love that never ends. It's easier to see. I think it's at least partly because we all have criminal minds.
We all have monsters that live in our minds who sometimes team up with the ghosts that dwell there as well. Monsters made up of fear, scars and hurt. Monsters that tell us to grab what we can while we can because everyone else will. Monsters that say hurt them before they hurt us or at least hurt them back. Monsters that say that person's monster is worse and different than mine so they deserve pain and death while I should get mercy and understanding. Monsters that don't bother hiding under the bed or in closets anymore and that try so hard to drown out the still small voice telling us that the monster in our heads is a lying, puffed-up, broken mess of self.
The answer, the small voice tells us, is another, a better way. A way that is not ours and is not natural to us. The way of love will light up and defeat the darkness, within and without. Our minds can be renewed and transformed, incapacitating the monsters and making the ghosts insubstantial. There is freedom from addictions and behavior patterns available, joy that doesn't depend on circumstances and happiness that doesn't live in fear of raining sneakers available to all of us. Criminal minds can become new minds of love, kindness and mercy when we surrender and kill the monster of self on the altar and freely receive the mind off Christ in its place.
Today's Unshackled Echo was previously published on
May 11, 2016.
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