No matter how you slice the geological record, it’s at least been a really long time since a human saw a living dinosaur. 

Yet, the scaled things that make us jump when we discover them hiding under rocks continue to take up residence at 100 times their usual size in our collective imagination. “Terrible lizards”—dinosaurs, or dragons—represent the fearsome for every generation of man. 

Only two and a half of Earth’s unknowably many years have included my eldest daughter (one so tiny for whom nothing “eld-” seems a fitting prefix). Still, that clawed footprint, “Dinosaur,” stamped onto the timeline of history reaches even into her young life. The enormous, hissing, carnivorous, and generally pointy experience of the dinosaurs so traumatized the planet’s inhabitants in their time that the transmitted memory of them still makes my daughter cry today. 

“Scary” was not a frequent word in her vocabulary till recently, after seeing a video of an animatronic dinosaur. The footage of her parents at a theme park was supposed to be fun; instead, a velociraptor became her first occasion for fearful tears.

Dragons: Were, and Are Not

Stories of the scaled, the serpentine, and the lizard-like populate folk stories as dragonlore the world over. I won’t pretend like I understand these cultures: representations of supernatural snakes and dragons probably ranged from wise to crafty to wicked—whether it’s fair or not, it serves my purposes best to favor the latter, the sinister reputation.

But I don’t think it’s risky to assume one quality these creatures had in common: legend. 

Dragons—it seems we all on this Earth can agree—were but are not. Whatever “dragon” is, it isn’t anymore. Something killed the dragons. 

Something killed the dragons. 

To say “evil is not a thing” is not the same as saying “nothing is evil.” Many things are truly and monstrously evil. Evil itself, however, is the “not-thing.” 

I’ve heard it described like coldness: cold is not its own physical force but is instead the absence of a real thing, heat.

Evil is the emptiness when goodness isn’t allowed where it should be. Or, evil is the contrary shape imposed upon an existing, good thing. It is not its own thing but the negation or bending of one.

Evil is nothing—that doesn’t mean it isn’t horrifying. That’s exactly why it is. Abandonment when there should be gathering. Hunger when there should be plenty. Freezing when there should be warmth. Nothing when there should be something.

Memories tell us that evil was; experience reminds us that evil will be. Something else urges us to believe that evil is not. 

Granite, For the Sake of Argument

The nothingness of evil may be like the cold—heat which is not. Another angle on that same negated being might be glimpsed in the concept of sculpture.  

When a slab of rock is unearthed and then chiseled into a beautiful likeness, it is that way only because of what has been removed. A real, tangible face remains because everything that was not that face was put away. It is what remains when everything that doesn’t belong simply…isn’t. 

Grant me to set Love itself as our bedrock for reality (other blog posts address a decent case for why) when I say: Love is this statue. Love is the beautiful image of reality that remains when every fearful, warped, ugly presentation of our experience gets set in its proper place. 

If the stone’s destiny is “sculpture,” then those uncarved, raw bits of granite, which presently jut out of a seemingly formless figure, simply don’t belong to what it will be. If the Sculptor has said “sculpture” is this block’s true identity, then everything that isn’t the final image is not what this work of art is. 

All the “un-statue”-stone that opposes the final design will be more and more relegated to not-being, as the ever-present, underlying reality of the Sculptor’s intended design takes visible shape. 

In this equation, the unformed slab of stone is that which has no concrete, eternal reality. Instead, it is the Sculptor’s design that was beforehand, that will be eventually before his eyes, and, all along, is in his intention—held in loving focus in his mind. 

Extinction Event(ually)

Evil was, evil is not, but evil is to come. 

Presently, we don’t see the finished Statue. Bits are being chipped off more and more all the time. Don’t try to guess how the sculpture is taking shape yet, either—just when you think you glimpse the design coming into relief, the Sculptor knocks off that whole bit of rock with the chisel, forcing you to reorient your perspective on the work being formed.

Don’t forget: the design is Love. Lose faith in the image that you thought it all would be a thousand times, but don’t lose faith in the Sculptor. 

Dragons are frightening. Dragons are not. That doesn’t make the nothing-ness of monsters not a threat. Cold can still kill us. But the meteor already hit. 

As life-threateningly frightening as the terrible lizard truly will be, never forget that one trillion tons of carbonaceous chondrite already rendered the mammal’s worst enemy extinct.

Fear remains. Nightmares persist.

But the bones of chiseled-out tyrannosaurs encase for us in stone one truth about every fear: “fossilized” is the only form any dragon ever had long before any of us were born.