Moonlight

TS at Video meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor has an interesting review of the television show Moonlight.

I recently caught a surprisingly good television show about a friendly vampire.

The show is called Moonlight and the vampire is seen in a sympathetic light since he restrains himself from biting people - he gets his blood at the local blood bank. He didn’t ask to be a vampire after all; he fell in love with someone whom he didn’t know was a vampire. Could happen to anyone.

In a sense he’s in the same place as all of us. We didn’t ask to be tainted by original sin and to have the vampiristic instincts of concupiscence. We, too, are asked to restrain ourselves.

It seems to me that great blood-lust on the show could also be seen as simply the more old-fashioned type of lust. One feral vampire, who didn’t have a mentor and thus didn’t learn the ways of self-control, was killed by another: the feral vampire was told not to kill even though he could, and his response was laughter, for power unused is folly to man (and apparently vampires) but wisdom to God!

I often think of the crowning of thorns and how for Him there could well have been the very human urge to show them he was king, he did have power. Not power for power’s sake but merely power used to correct a wrong, for he was innocent and spoke only the truth. To be mocked went beyond mere crucifixion; the other criminals weren’t mocked as kings. But Jesus was given the robe and the fake scepter and the big audience. Christ, despite being clothed with power, didn’t exercise it, just as we are clothed with the power to speak out and lacerate our enemies and to exercise our sexuality in immoral ways, but we must relinquish and let that power be unexploited.