Whacking The Wasp

“MOMMEEEEEEE!!!!”

Before the high, oscillating wail is ended, I am on my feet – shoe in hand - and running for daughter’s bedroom.  I know exactly what the problem is. 

The problem looks like this, only much larger and looking at me from atop the karate trophy where she is perched.  Waving her stinger up and down in the still air, flicking an insolent antenna at me, she looks me right in the eye and she dares me:  “Come on, you.  Catch me if you can.” 

These big black wasps have a nest somewhere outside, nearby.  Every now and then, one of them finds her way into daughter’s room through the air conditioner.  The usually-fearless Karate Kid is terrified of these things, so she sends up the alarm; and when she does, and husband is not home to do the honors, something strange happens to me. 

The heart kicks into instant doubletime. 

The lungs draw down a great breath of air. 

Eyes narrow to slits. 

Nostrils flare.

Fingers clench around the nearest sturdy shoe. 

And the entire world sharpens and focuses to stinger precision. 

The nice, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant has become a wasp killing machine. 

Gone is the church-camp mantra, “God loves bugs too”….in its place, there is only a low and rumbling bloodlust.  “Come on, you sunuvabee…fly lower…a little lower…”

WHAPTCKPTHH! 

If God had really loved that wasp, He wouldn’t've let her in the same room with my kid. 

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Kids, and threats to kids, call forth awesome and terrible energies from human heart, and mind, and muscle.  

A mild-mannered father lifts and practically throws a car off his child.   

A young mother singlehandedly fights off a pack of feral dogs who’ve gone after her toddler. 

A heavily-pregnant woman reaches through a wall of flame and carries herself and two young children out of a burning trailer. 

An inch-long wasp in a child’s room turns a peace-lovin’, daisy-wavin’ pastor into a focused and ruthless exterminator. 

Okay, so compared with the car, the dogs and the fire, the wasp was no big deal.  It just feels like it at the time. 

But we’ve had worse.

Three years ago, my family was physically attacked and threatened by a “wasp” of sorts, a profoundly and dangerously sick human being (who, American justice being the imperfect animal that it is, remains at large today).   In the aftermath of that attack, and in the steps taken to protect my family from this human wasp, I learned for good and all that I am not, nor might I ever be, a true pacifist. 

I learned what it feels like to hate, as the Psalmist says, “with a perfect hatred”.  

Perfect hatred.  It’s not smoke and fire burning through the soul – that’s just anger.

It’s not a mother chasing a wasp with a shoe – that’s just reaction.   

Perfect hatred is the soul, as it were, of a wasp. 

It is utterly alien and utterly familiar, all at the same time. 

It is cool and calm, pale bright blue and perfectly round in the soul.

It sits like a marble in the stomach.

It shows you things about yourself you never knew and wish you’d never found out. 

Deep in the soul of the wasp, that summer, I hated that human with a perfect hatred.  I fantasized about murder, oh I never would, ever, but I fantasized it - face to face, in cold blood, watching and even smiling as a human life died beneath my hand.  My hand! -Hand that has fed babies, traced oil crosses on foreheads, clasped other hands in prayer and held the Communion on our holiest of holy days – my same hand, in the cool blue light of perfect waspish hatred, fantasized about taking a human life without hesitation.  Then picking up a fork and having dinner.  Spaghetti.  With meatballs and garlic toast. 

And salad. 

Perfect hatred.  It’s terrifying and seductive, unencumbered by emotion or thought or conscience.  It is amoral, detached, the stinger on the end of satan’s abdomen.   

Waspish.

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I cannot change the human wasp who stung my family three years ago, and my earthly attempts to contain it have failed – for now.  That person flies free, buzzing mad and stinging all around it, to this very day.  All I can do, for now, is keep my family safely at a distance…and pray.

Pray?

Yes, pray.  At first, I prayed grudgingly and only because the Lord so commands it.  But over time – and it is a very long process, when the wasp has stung your family – I am learning to see this sick individual less as a wasp and more of a person.  Somewhere in that tattered and filthy ruin of a human carcass is a child, perhaps not so different from my own children, cowering under the covers and crying “MOMMEEEEEE!!!” as the wasp zooms and threatens and eventually possesses another victim.  When I pray for that person, I cannot see or know if the wasp stays away…but I know it stays away from me. 

Having seen  what happens to a person so poisoned by perfect hatred, and having tasted of that poison myself, I’ve no desire to let that particular wasp near me or mine.  Some wasps you whack with a shoe; some, you whack with prayer.

~ by Mad God Woman on September 5, 2008.