The Lovely Bones

“THE LOVELY BONES.”

Jimmy Lichauco once said that Karma is a law of the universe. Simply put, the evil that happens to you is a direct result of what you did or did not do.

Bullshit... (Pls. excuse my French.)

Everytime I hear self-proclaimed psychics like Jimmy Lichauco talk about Karma, I become nauseated. Because I remember kids like Jon Benet Ramsey and the other DESAPERACIDOS, kids, mostly girls, abducted, molested, and then ultimately murdered.

It doesn’t take a scientist to realize that Jimmy Lichauco is dead wrong. These girls did not, could not have done anything to deserve their fate. If Karma is indeed a universal law like gravity or thermodynamics, then there wouldn’t be any girls like Susie Salmon, the lead character in the novel, Lovely Bones (LB for brevity.)

That book gave a detailed account of the circumstances surrounding the murder and brutal molestation of a teenage girl. She was 14. In the vernacular, “Katorse.”
The same age recently, unfairly, sexualized by a popular telenobela. (Coinicidentally, I finished reading the book LB while the women in my life were watching the replacement of that telenobela in the same room with me.)

IT still gives me chills. I believe in God and the Goodness, Justness of God. But I don’t believe in ghosts or vampires or the Devil. And I believe that Satan is just a symbol of evil lurking within the human heart. Satan is Wrath, Satan is Cancer, Satan is Ignorance- Like the kind of Ignorance being imposed on us by people like Jimmy Lichauco who want us to believe in the extraordinary claim of existence of ghosts without satisfying our scientific requirement for extraordinary proof.

It takes more than a story about ghosts to scare the living daylights out of me. But this book about ghosts, LB, still gives me chills.

I’m scared because even though I know there is no proof that the devil or evil ghosts, or those who have sold their very souls to the devil are capable of breaking the laws of physics, books like LB make me realize that Satan doesn’t need to break Einstein’s laws to wreak havoc in our lives. Satan may not be able make a book levitate at will because laws of gravity prevent him from doing so, but he can whisper unimaginable wrath into the human heart owned by someone flying a passenger plane. With that wrath he could will the pilot to plow the plane into the World Trade Center.

The perpetrator of evil in the book, serial killer/rapist George Harvey, doesn’t have horns, or hoofs, or tail.

Just like Jason Ivler.

He could be anyone. You can never know. Because how exactly can you gauge the human heart? That’s why, as I have said, IGNORANCE is EVIL.

That’s why, reading that book made me paranoid. I wanted to arm those women in my life and my kids and my son with assault rifles whenever they step out of the house, or make them put on chastity belts, or implant them with indestructible Adamantium claws of Wolverine. I couldn’t do that. I could enroll them in self-defense classes for them to learn the ways of mortal combat.

But the truth is, all I can really do is pray as hard as I can for them to be delivered from evil, everyday of their lives…