God Plays With Knives

I ask you to recall the last time you held a knife in your hands.  Perhaps this experience may be somewhat different for some people, for example those who do a lot of cooking, or door-to-door purveyors of knives, or those of the masochistic bent (for whom a knife is something of a friend and confidant than anything else, or so I’ve been told).  But irregardless, think back.  I suspect it was a fairly innocuous event, nothing worth remembering (as I am now asking you to do).  You held the blade, you chopped, cut, sliced, diced, separated, or spread whatever it was that required which ever of the aforementioned actions I just listed.

But what of the first time? 

Particularly the first time you held any blade of significant size; a butcher knife most readily enters my mind.  Perhaps your first hunting knife you held as a child, presented by your father (or mother: I’m not one to presume gender assignments) just before your first trip into the woods.  Others of you, those with a more medieval mindset (I speak of persons who frequent renaissance festivals, wear long wool or leather trench coats in the summer, and can readily identify the historical flaws in Braveheart), they may now recall the first time they gripped the hilt of an actual sword, the maiden swings they took through the empty air. 

Tis the first time you held something in your hands that is most readily known for its ability to end human life that I ask your think back on.

While the rest of us think about that, I’ll take a moment to address our friends with the NRA.  The only reason I specify knives, swords, daggers, and the like and not guns is that, for the most part, firearms do not require the physical intimacy that stabbing someone does.  Furthermore, often is the case where a person, when given the choice, prefers the presumably swift end of a bullet to the invading, searing pain that only a large intrusive object can bring.  There are also others who say that guns are for pussies, but I am not one of them.

Now then, do you have that time called up in your mind?  If you can’t recall such a time, or if you simply have never held a knife, sword, what have you, consider yourself among the extremely sheltered.  Or the extremely blessed.  Never having held a weapon could be interpreted as either.

Please ask yourself the following question:  Why didn’t I kill anyone?  Yes, I am perfectly aware that this is a somewhat offbeat thing to question, but the inquiry stands: why did you not take the blade and use it to end human life?  What force compelled you not reach out to an enemy, a friend, a loved one, or some random person coming across your path: to bury the steel down to the hilt in another’s flesh? 

Why do we not hear of massacres in the streets as housewives worldwide rise up and proceed to flay their neighbors with the cooking knives they use to cut the crusts off your peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? 

Where are the breaking news stories of chaos and woe wrought by hordes of cub and eagle scouts, descending upon society with their pocket knife-spork utility tools?

Again, why didn’t you? 

Many reasons have popped into your head by now, or at least into any functional member of modern society’s head.  I may presently be graced with the readership of several deranged minds, psyches on the fringes of lunatic logic.  If that is your case, I thank you for your attention, but I ask why you aren’t out making tonight’s headline news? 

As for the rest of you, the desire not to go to jail must be a motivating force (also known as the desire not to have someone’s Inner Greatness thrust within you while interned in a crowded and urine-stained holding cell), though I hazard the guess that this is the lesser of your reasons.  Morality, I presume, is your primary motivation.  The inner voice inside yourself quietly reminding you that wanton death and destruction is not in your best interest.  Your little angel upon your right shoulder (since we all know left is the province of evil, after all). 

I will next speak on the desire to do use that blade, the reasons pro for death by reason of a large, sharp piece of metal to the sternum.  There are those of you reading this who have at one point or another (most frequently another) thought on lashing out at someone else with great anger and terrible vengeance.  There are those of you (though probably of fewer number) who have further contemplated on ending the life of another, for whatever reason was prevalent at that moment.  For we all know it takes but a moment for the fire of life to be unceremoniously snuffed out.  Now, there may even be one or two of you who have actually gone and used the blade for this purpose, not necessarily killing someone, but to split the skin and cleave the flesh of those you hate. 

Why did you do that?  What force silenced the angel upon your shoulder, what temptation overrode the inner voice pleading with you to stop?  Anger, rage?  Hate, or possibly love in its most brutal yet pure form?  Or was it evil?

Was it the devil made you do it?  And for that matter, is it God that prevents the rest of you from bringing the knives and swords of your world down upon thine foes?  Surely not all of you reading this are religious, but I’m certainly certain some of you are.  Perhaps those of you with faith envision human morality as the perpetual battle between good and evil, the eternal campaign to win the hearts and minds of humanity.  If that is the case, such a struggle could be represented by any means, from mortal combat (with knives, naturally) to a friendly game.  A game of chess even. 

Even those of you who find the overarching religious construct known as God to be a load of crap probably find the image of God and Satan engaged in a game of chess easy to picture.  I dare say it’s cliché in fact.  I further dare say it makes for an easily imagined concept for representing the moral dilemma within the human soul (assuming of course that you believe in such a thing; if you’d like, substitute soul with “evolutionary mish-mash of arteries, veins, and years of sucrose-induced fatty tissue“). 

Think on it like this: those who have gone to the grave having never taken the life of another represent a match that God has won, or at least stalemated, while those fellows who frequent the nightly news offer the reverse: that the Devil has emerged victorious.  Of course, this does not take into account those matches whose outcomes are still undecided…such as ours.

So take a moment to conjure up the scene in your theatre of the mind: God and the Devil playing chess, in a sunny park, in some castle built of clouds, whatever you imagine an appropriate setting for such an encounter.  I won’t insult you with attempting to describe The Creator of Existence and He Who is Most Unclean (the later referring of course to Satan, though some may find this a more fitting title for God, as your opinion suits you), as it would be wasted: you already know what you think these two look like.  Envision them moving their pieces as you gaze upon the clean, metallic blade of the next knife you touch.  That the sudden urge to see the blood of another can be attributed to Satan’s capture of God’s first pawn.  That the equally sudden decision against such as act is God taking Satan’s first piece. 

And so on.  So, given this dynamic, what would you say is the current score of your personal game of chess, the next time you play with knives?  Has Satan taken God’s queen yet?  Or has God firmly boxed The Dark One’s king into a corner, simply waiting for the inevitable end?