In a dingy state park near my hometown there is a path up a hill known as The Devil’s Backbone. This particular path on this hill was mythical to me as a child. On our annual campout there the possibility of mounting The Devil’s Backbone was a terrifying and tantalizing challenge. This is because I half-believed that the twisty, knotty path was the actual devil’s spine, fixed for all eternity into place by some odd decree of the modern world, the same way I believed that he still lived in hell and that it was an effective means of showing my love for God to sit on the playground and flip ol' satan the bird through the asphalt, sometimes for the entire recess.
I was still at the age where the law of non-contradiction has not yet taken hold, so it was entirely possible for the devil’s backbone to be fixed into a gnarled path up a steep hill crowded with trees branches and roots and for him to be roaming the world tempting mortals with all manners of tricks while also ruling over the hellfires. For a few years I was much more concerned with the devil than I was with God or Jesus or anything else besides the nightly kneeling prayer of “Now I lay me down to sleep”—this latter because I knew that it might be the last thing I said before I saw the devil—or God, hence the prayer, but you never could tell – and anyway, God –or the devil, but you never could tell-- had a penchant for stealing children from my family in the middle of the night. I was forewarned.
I was still at the age where the law of non-contradiction has not yet taken hold, so it was entirely possible for the devil’s backbone to be fixed into a gnarled path up a steep hill crowded with trees branches and roots and for him to be roaming the world tempting mortals with all manners of tricks while also ruling over the hellfires. For a few years I was much more concerned with the devil than I was with God or Jesus or anything else besides the nightly kneeling prayer of “Now I lay me down to sleep”—this latter because I knew that it might be the last thing I said before I saw the devil—or God, hence the prayer, but you never could tell – and anyway, God –or the devil, but you never could tell-- had a penchant for stealing children from my family in the middle of the night. I was forewarned.