Contributor Carole McDonnell’s short stories and essays appear online and in print, in speculative fiction, ethnic, and Christian publications. She lives in New York with her husband, two sons, and their pets. Wind Follower, published by Juno Books, is Carole’s first novel. Her voice adds plenty to our discussion, so I welcome Carole and her column Faith in Color to Allaboutrace.com.

Today I want to thank God for all the sweet-spirited, beautiful souls I have met in my journey through life. So often we get so caught up and oppressed by the cruelties of the judgmental know-it-all hateful arrogant selfish greedy types out there that we forget we have beautiful souled people in our lives.

I suppose I’m thinking of all this because All-Saints’ Day just passed and I, admittedly, don’t quite live in the real world. I read way too many spiritual memoirs and spiritual biographies. Modern ones like, Elizabeth Sherrill’s All the Way to Heaven and older ones like those of Brother Lawrence, C S Lewis, or Jeanne Guyon. You can understand how reading stuff like this can affect a person’s mind, especially if the mind is already geared toward things in the celestial invisible realm. Unfortunately, hubby and I live in a world where the sole purpose of human beings is to try their best to be holy, good, true, honest, and lovely people.

If we watched soap operas, for instance, we wouldn’t be so surprised – and so hurt– by human machinations, cruelty and sneakiness. Yeah, yeah, we watch reality tv shows such as I LOVE NEW YORK, but even then…competitors reveal their souls in confessionals. So there’s still all that soul searching going on. When I write a novel or a short story, my characters are forthright, honest, unstinting in their analysis of their own actions. So you see, the problem with hubby and me is that we tend to assume that everyone in the world is as morbidly introspective and soul-searching as we and our good friends are.

Of course there are other reasons –illness, money issues, challenging child– that have turned my husband and me into recluses over the past twenty years. The house is messier than it should be. I am touchier than I should be. Casual cruelties hurt more than –and last longer than– they should. We didn’t set out to be solitaries, mind you. But life happens and before one knows it…the thin veneer of normalcy flakes away and only the solid furniture of life remains. The effect of this is that one grows to be very careful who one allows into one’s life, and once one has allowed a beautiful soul into one’s life one loves that soul with all one’s heart.

Oftentimes, I end up liking people on television almost as if they were part of my family. Something about them –some inner wound, some weird trick of thought they have that falls in line with mine, whatever the reason– and bingo! The celebrity becomes a favorite. Well, I really need to stop doing that. Or else, I have to be a might more careful about what celebrities I like. Racist celebrities seem to be coming out of the cellulose lately. Lindsay Lohan’s crack about “the black guy did it.” Mel Gibson’s (well, I never really liked him) anti-Jewish crack. Dog’s n-word rant. Yes, I have to make some heavy reassessment about who I like and why. And I must stop assuming that just because someone is an artist or “outside the system” that he/she is not racist. (What is wrong with me? Where did I get that idea? It’s like assuming that just because someone is a feminist that she isn’t racist? Or like assuming that just because someone is a liberal means they aren’t racist? Or like assuming that just because someone is a conservative that he IS racist?)

Whatever the root cause of my wasting emotional energy on the wrong people, I have got to do some serious rethinking and learn to manage my emotional energies. Maybe I should create a mental hierarchy in which I really train my mind who to love, who to merely like, and who to not focus on at all.

As I said earlier, I love lovely people but I always seem to focus on the unlovely ones. Why? Why do I aim toward the negative? Why do most women do that? Is it because from childhood we learn to stuff our emotions down? Why do so many black folks do that? Is it because we’re also emotion stuffers? Or are we so used to being wounded that, unknowningly, we have trained ourselves to focus on negativity?

One would think that an emotion as wonderful as love would be more powerful than the steely hatred one feels towards one’s racist neighbor. One would assume that a night full of lovely parties, surrounded by lovely friends singing-dancing-acting-reciting, and filled with lovely food made my loving hands, that one would be inoculated against the negative emotions negative people bring. One would assume that seeing my friend’s kindness toward me, or seeing kindness in my town, or seeing goodness in the world, would enable me to not grieve so much when I see racism in real life or on television.

Yes, there is such thing as soul. And sometimes we have the power to free our souls from relentless negative emotions such as fear, hate, anger, rejection, hurt. And sometimes we don’t have the power to do that. Sad but true, God made us to be dependent on each other. One can’t be a recluse forever. How thankful I am that I have such loving sweet-souled friends. And yet, how sad I am that their influence on my heart so often wanes so quickly.

Kind and loving Holy Spirit, Dear Friend that Sticketh Closer than a Brother, please free my soul from every hurt it has ever endured. Free it once and for all from the influence of every wound. Thank you for my friends, and help me to focus more on their love and on the goodness in the world than on the hatefulness of people who really shouldn’t matter to me. I ask all this in the name of Jesus Christ, the man of sorrows who was acquainted with grief, and our dear Lord. Thank you for answering my prayer. Amen.