40 Days in the Wilderness (conclusion)

Fool! Is your pride more important to you than they are? I see tears in your eyes when you look at them, when you see their sicknesses and hungers. But I offer to give them back, to release them from all their suffering; and you won’t do it, simply because you’re the best and I should just acknowledge that? What in Hell are you thinking? I can’t stand to look at you anymore, humiliating yourself by becoming one of these vermin in the vain hope that you can get them to love you the way you love them. You know how this will end, don’t you? In a few years they’ll kill you, and serve you right.

What’s so important about suffering, that you not only let them go through it, but are prepared to go through it yourself? I’ve inflicted everything I can think of upon them, and it hasn’t made them any nobler or better, just whinier. You really think this body of yours can do any better, or inspire them to do better, just because it’s You in there?

Well, the game continues, then. See you soon. And when they’re torturing you to death, tell me then that you’re right, that they can be anything but a mindlessly destructive disease.

After the Wilderness: The Tempter’s Doubts

He CAN’T be right, can he? What IS his plan? He doesn’t think of it as a game, he thinks he’s really doing something worth doing. Can it be he really sees something in these insects that I can’t? Will they learn something from his suffering after all? And what does he think HE will learn from it? And – is he just using me here? Am I just playing into his hands, being a pawn in the game he’s really playing, by fighting against him and making the mud-men’s little lives so miserable? Is he that devious? Am I really helping him turn them into something worthy of the attention he lavishes upon them? What DOES he see? He was wise once – what IS this madness that’s overtaken him, this thing he calls love? Can it be it’s not madness after all? When at last I break him, will he somehow have won?

© John M. Munzer