Faith is

No one believes me when I tell them this, except for Boyfriend but that’s because he knows I don’t lie about my weirdness – it’s a principle. (There’s also no point, because people find out eventually.)

When I was young, one of the shows I actually watched regularly was Scooby Doo. And never, not once, did I ever realize that it was ALWAYS going to be the bad guys pretending to be ghosts to scare people off as part of some master plan that “would’ve worked, if it hadn’t been for those pesky kids”.

Every single episode I watched, I watched with bated breath and cold, forgotten food on my lap, as I believed, over and over, that the ghosts this time were real, and the villains simply incidental.

Some (cynical) days I wonder if my believing in the basic good in people, my tightly-held conviction that decency is not extinct, is but a grown-up version of those feelings.

But, like that kid who refused to give up on her show, who refused to accept the unoriginality of it all, I refuse to renounce my faith. There IS good in everyone. There IS universal “milk of human kindness”. There IS chivalry, dammit.

But most of all, I believe there is a point in anyone, once reached, where they will do the Right Thing simply because they cannot bring themselves to do anything but.

I have to believe, that even in the most despicable of monsters, there is some spark yet uncorrupted. That they were young once, and innocent. That no one is born to evil, and that there is always hope for the fallen.

Call me weird (some have) or stupid (many more), but there. I could not believe otherwise if I tried – it would be much too painful, and to live with that belief…wouldn’t want to. At all.