Come to the Dark Side, Luke-- Kayla Beebout

Well, this is probably one of the deepest questions I’ve ever been asked to answer.  After a week thinking about it and doing lots of reading, I think I have my opinion straightened out.  People have arguments and complaints against other people all the time.  We always say “that’s not fair” and “you promised” and “well, I did this for you, so you need to do this for me.”  We are trying to say that there is some kind of standard of behavior, some morality, that we are expecting the other person to know and agree with.  We know, instinctively, that some things are wrong and others are right. 

Now, reverse the position and imagine you are the one being accused of doing something unfair or breaking a promise.  There is always a reason, isn’t there?  There is always some circumstance that makes it all right for you to break the rule.    Psychologically, these reasons are excuses to yourself as much as to them.  You know what you did is “wrong,” you just don’t want to admit it.  There must be a right and a wrong, a good and an evil somewhere, or else you wouldn’t be making excuses. 

C.S. Lewis makes a brilliant point about this.  He says, “If they [good and evil] were not, then all the things we said about the war [World War II] were nonsense.  What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis… knew as well as we did and ought to have practiced?  If they had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more blame them for that than for the color of their hair.”  Somewhere, deep down, no matter what our society tells us and what other societies may say, we know there is a true standard of right and wrong, good and evil.  But even though we know this, we still cannot always stay within the good.  That is why there are fights and excuses and all of the stories we know about good versus evil.

But in stories, good overwhelmingly prevails, no matter how impossible it seems.  In the words of Sam Gamgee, “It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end… because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass.”  Voldemort had his Horcruxes, Frodo refused to destroy the Ring, the White Witch killed Aslan.  But Harry killed Voldemort, the Ring fell in the fire, Aslan came back.  In the end, good cannot be stopped.