[PinkPiranha]

My mother sat by and listened as I told her about the Army Rangers when they liberated a camp that had held the mangled survivors of the infamous Bataan Death March. One Ranger spoke of an emaciated prisoner who'd begun walking toward the camp's gate only to collapse and lie unmoving on the ground. The Ranger came back for him, picked him up -- remarking later with fresh horror that the prisoner weighed no more than a child -- and carried him through the gates. The Ranger knew the man was dying, so he knelt down with him on the freedom side and held him in his arms until the man passed. There was a look of mute relief on the prisoner's face.

When I first read that story, I felt myself shattering.

It grieved me -- this poor man had endured for so long, his spirit had stayed with his body instead of abandoning it in the middle of indescribable horror, only to have him die at the very moment of his liberation -- but also twisted me with the gentle tragedy of it all -- he died in the arms of 11th hour kindness.

I was so grateful that he met his end with someone who'd come to save him, and yet where was this anger coming from?

I spoke to my ENTJ best friend Athena.

"I wanted him to live," I snapped into the phone.

"I know," she said. "If I were there with him, I would have wanted that too. I would've been like 'Dude, you're gonna live if I have to give you CPR for 100 years!', but think about this -- maybe to die on the other side of the gate was all he really wanted. Maybe, after everything he'd suffered, what mattered to him most was that someone came for him in the end."

Bitterly, I wondered aloud if relief itself had killed him.

I told her about a certain priest, a Father Englemar Unzeitig, who'd been newly-ordained at the outset of WW2 and who'd been almost immediately imprisoned by the SS for speaking against the abuses aimed at the Jews. Father Englemar was thrown into Dachau, which he called the "largest church on earth" because scores upon scores of priests, church workers, and clergy had been sent there.

At some point, toward the end of the war, an outbreak of typhoid at the camp had decimated the population. Victims were sequestered off alone, left to die. But 20 men volunteered to go take care of them, knowing that they were signing their death warrants. One of them was Father Englemar.

He contracted typhoid and died a day after his 34th birthday, and only weeks shy of the camp's liberation by US troops.

In a letter smuggled out to his sister, written just before he died, he said, "The Good is undying and victory must remain with God, even if it sometimes seems useless for us to spread love in the world. Nevertheless, one sees again and again that the human heart is attuned to love, and it cannot withstand its power in the long run... we want to continue to do and offer everything so that love and peace may soon reign again."

His graciousness tore me to pieces. No thing looks so enduring or noble anymore. All people care about is how white their teeth are or who they know.

Here's where my conflict begins...

While I'm struck speechless by such a brilliant flash in the darkness, I resent the darkness for closing in again. I told my mother that a great deal of my sadness was due to the fact that I believed that the darkness got the last word. I don't mean that in an end times sense.

I mean it in the sense of the eschatology of the every day.

Evil breaks my heart because it gets the last word. The brilliance dies out and darkness sets in once more. I feel the loss of having been understood or accepted or loved, and that the source is gone. Darkness can't stomp out greatness, but I feel the effects of it's grasping hands, when it seizes on a beautiful person and drags them into it's own death.

"Compassion" means to 'suffer with' -- voluntarily entering into the suffering of another's torment and taking part of the load.

Why can't grace of that magnitude survive here? Why can't it kick the door in?!

I hate feeling so strongly about something I can't see or feel, but I know is there. Hell may not be pits of fire, but an even more awful separation from God, from the good of the universe. If we limited human beings can create such horrors in our tiny brains, surely Hell must be the collective of all evil malign things.

God is holy in ways we are not. I believe He's benevolent and kind, but there's another aspect of Him that makes Hell necessary? I grapple with this.