Prying Loose the Nails

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Prying Loose the Nails

Postby Hesperus » Fri Feb 21, 2014 2:13 pm

By Hesperus (c) 2013

All too often those we love most and to whom we offer our deepest trust disappoint us. Our closest friends, Family members and allies fail to live up to the potential we see in them and betray us to one degree or another. How many opportunities do we give them, then, before their infidelities finally drive the last nail into the coffin? How much forgiveness can those who let us down rightly expect?

As vampires, we have the capacity to peer far more deeply into those around us than our mundane human counterparts. We can perceive, in many respects, the highest capacity for beauty and good as well as any tendency toward low virtue that may reside in those around us in a direct and unequivocal way. This special sense grants us the freedom to make far more informed decisions about whom to trust and to what extent to trust them. It can also lead us to trust and love more deeply, more quickly than may be advisable as we learn to rely on our vampiric instincts. When the trust of a vampire is broken, it wounds all the more deeply, as we have not only had our faith in this other person challenged, but the faith in our very perception. It is no wonder, then, that we are far more tempted to respond to a violation of trust with a rage bordering on madness, for when one's own perceptions are called into question, one's sanity is challenged also.

Our gifts of perception need not lead us exclusively to wrath, however, when we are faced with betrayal. We must not allow our faith in ourselves to be alloyed by the failures of others, no matter how deeply those failures may hurt us. We must hold fast to our belief in the good and beauty in those we have loved; our trust was well-placed, our instincts correct as far as our eventual betrayer's potential. The fact that another, in a moment of weakness, failed to live up to his own capacity for virtue does nothing to negate that capacity, only to remind us of the limits within us all. I believe that as a proud community, confident in our abilities and their righteous and correct development within every vampire, we must not succumb to the temptations of rage and vengeance, but rather steadfastly maintain enough faith in ourselves that we show, instead, a greater tendency toward forgiveness.

As long as we harbor resentment for someone who has failed us, we cling not only to the image of that person as a failure, but also inextricably to the idea that we failed to judge them accurately. This debilitates us. It weakens our faith in our own ability to see those around us as they truly are and this, in turn, can starve us, as our feeding is often largely dependent upon such perception. By refusing to accept the failure of one whom we trusted as an insurmountable or fundamental flaw in our tarnished allies, by obstinately clinging to a belief in the correctness of our previous estimation, we can live up to our abilities and, arguably, our responsibilities as a community to forgive where others would condemn, to guide toward greatness where it may be easier to force into destruction. Removing the ability of another to hurt us again by cutting them out of our lives and denying ourselves the beauty we once saw in them is not necessarily the only or the most ethical option. Our gifts grant us another way and it is our birthright as vampires to employ it. It is also relatively simple. We must merely trust ourselves, trust the instincts that guided us to love, even when those instincts seem challenged. We must set a better example. If our trusted allies have let us down, let us show them how much stronger fidelity makes us by living up to the trust they placed in us that our love was well-placed in them.

This does not demand that we become victims of repetitive attacks or that we in any way send the message that our attackers' actions were acceptable when they were not; we need only show that our trust in ourselves outweighs the trust in them that they have broken. We can refuse to cow beneath the burden of the hurt and resentment they inspired in us and forgive it, freeing us to remind not only ourselves but those who have trespassed against us of the worth and the potential within our loved ones, even when they have disappointed us. Our capacity to see the very spirit of others gives us direct knowledge of the fundamental and undeniable potential of those we love, despite all superficial evidence that may dissuade us from that truth so, as vampires, it seems obvious that we should avoid the practice of nailing coffins shut.
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