Frankenstein's Lie

While wallowing in anger can provide such a decadent hedonism, I have never been very good at self-deceit. Only the self-deceived can believe in Frankenstein’s monster, an innocent beast wrongly brought to life, the horror of his acts tempered by the injustice of his creation. No thing and no one can create a monster out of us. We are our own monsters, airbrushed by propriety and fettered by good intent. I say that I “become someone else” when I lose control, but that is no more than poetic pleasantry. Naked without my affectations, the only thing that I can claim to have “become” is a truer version of myself.

It is that monster, deprived of his Sunday best and dispossessed of his public works, who will stand before the white throne. Were we to be honest, we would not be content with greater control or better coping mechanisms, because we would know them to be what they are: steps on the way to something better, phantasmal visions of what could be. As I read my prior entry, shame begins to replace my rage. But it is a shame tinted in the hope that things will not always be this way, because I serve a redemptive God. I struggle to imagine that a change of heart could be so accomplished, and feel a hope more temerarious than secure that I would be such a beneficiary. But for now, imagination and hope will have to do, because they are all I have.