Good, evil, and a new year

As we end another year, I should have either a list of favorites or a profound insight that captures some of what I have learned in 2014.

Since neither is quite possible, I turn instead to a favorite quotation from Solzhenitzen's The Gulag Archipelago. 

The passage begins with a statement of what the Russian author learned from his prison years: how a human being becomes evil and how one becomes good. He says that the "line separating good from evil passes. . .right through every human heart. . . .And even in the best of hearts, there remains a small corner of evil."

"Since then," he continues, "I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: they struggle with the evil inside every human being. . .It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person."

Let us hope that more people in the coming year are able to constrict whatever selfishness, violence, and hatred live in their hearts.