Pass me some of that puss...

Have you ever been around a person that is oozing the most infected puss out of their heart you have ever felt, heard or seen?  The are excreting a rancid, rotten substance that has gathered under their skin for months, years, sometimes decades.  For some, it's been such a slow poisoning that they are only half aware of half of it.  They live as if this is normative human experience, standard fare for the mass of men.  They are "dead" wrong.

Death is spread wherever they go.  A toxin is released into the air of whatever environment they occupy.  The "genius loci" (the spirit of place) gets swallowed up with death, and all that is deadly.  They are deadly in a marriage, deadly in a business, deadly in a ministry.  

People are "deathly" afraid to confront them for fear that the puss will burst and its white film will squirt all over their being, their heart.  So most who encounter them just "leave them be" as the saying goes.  They just "leave them to themselves", "leave them to their own devices and vices".  They are dead men walking.  Living corpses of contamination and condemnation.  They can't help but infect everything they touch, they are leprous.  They are cancerous.  Worse then that, they are dangerous.

They threaten the life in others.  They come to steal, kill and destroy.  They want to make everyone as miserable as they are.  They want to normalize their condition by spreading it to others.  They want to siphon every last drip of fuel out of you so that you're left limp, lifeless and eventually leprous yourself.  They are the bad apple in the bushel that rots anything that happens to be touching it.  

They love attention, so they spurn anyone's attempt to help them in their healing.  Their own heart's healing would remove the dramatic, traumatic attention that they've become addicted to.  They would rather have bad attention than no attention, so that peddle their pain like a slick soap salesman.  When one person catches on to their schemes and calls them on it, they simply move to the next unsuspecting victim who is a stranger to their story, using them and violating them like a rapist until they incrementally become aware of the vacuuming vortex they are being sucked into.  They think they are being original in reaching out to this needy soul, but they soon find out they are one of many who have been victimized in this almost serial soul sabotage.  They slowly distance themselves and the perpetrator ventures out once again, the predator eyes his next prey.  And the story goes on and on and on.

They go from one family to another.  One friendship to another.  One church to another.  One pastor to another.  One program to another.  One ministry to another.  One god to another.

They are lawyers and pastors and teachers and doctors and loners and losers and lovers and livers.  They are us, and we are them.  They are in the world, they are in the church.  It is pandemic.  

And when they start acting out, I sometimes feel like just speaking up in the company of humanity and saying with a sarcastic shout, "Can you pass me some of the puss?"  And as they look at me and I look at them, I will smile with a sinister smile awaiting their deflection or diversion knowing that I won't be the first to sound the alarm, nor will I be the last.  Their puss will continue to hit the fan so long as they stay addicted to attention.  

There is nothing I feel so powerless in affecting change upon as this sort of psychosis.

I have to laugh, because if I don't, I will cry.