Evil is surprisingly commonplace. A family friend of James Rennie, convicted this week of running one of Scotland’s largest paedophile rings, said she had no qualms about using him as a baby-sitter because, ‘he seemed just like a regular guy’. Similarly, singer Kathryn Jenkins recounted in an interview her experience of being attacked as a student. The most memorable, and chilling, thing, she said, was that she was able to look straight at her attacker and her overriding thought was that ‘he looked just like anyone else’.
John Eldredge, in his little booklet ‘Epic’, speaks about how surprising it is that so many people live the story of their lives as if we have no enemies, while all the evidence around us suggests the world is a difficult and dangerous place:
“I am staggered by the level of naïveté that most people live with regarding evil. They don’t take it seriously. They don’t live as though the Story has a Villain. Not the devil prancing around in red tights, carrying a pitchfork, but the incarnation of the very worst of every enemy you’ve ever met in every other story. Dear God – the Holocaust, child prostitution, terrorist bombings, genocidal governments. What is it going to take for us to take evil seriously? Life is very confusing if you do not take into account that there is a Villain…”
He says this not to make us paranoid or anxious, but to enable us to resist the temptation to think that evil is invariably ‘other’, special and distinct, easily and obviously recognisable from the norm. It’s not, it’s everywhere, even in the heart of each one of us. It just rarely wears silly hats.
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