The weather this morning when I left for work reminded me of an old Agatha Christie movie.  The title, in case you hadn’t guessed, was Evil Under the Sun.

It was set in a posh resort off the coast of Spain and featured the typical “all-star” cast, including Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot.  In one important scene, as a woman gazes down from a cliff at sunbathers below, she talks about how nice the bright sunshine makes everything seem.  Poirot then says this:

“The sky is blue, the sun is shining.  But you forget that everywhere, there is evil under the sun.”

The weather this morning was gloomy.  It was raining.  The sky was gray with thick clouds rolling slowly by without any glimpse of a bright sky behind them.  This is how September 11th ought to be, considering what happened on this date seven years ago.

Oddly enough, September 11, 2001 was not a gloomy day.  It was a bright day with a lot of sunshine.  No clouds in the sky.  It wasn’t the kind of day you’d expect something bad to happen.

Which is sort of the point, isn’t it?

It’s so easy to forget that evil really is everywhere, especially when things seem bright and clear.  But it’s always waiting, and it’s waiting to pull you in when you least expect it, and when it can do the most damage.

It’s also easy to pretend that evil only comes from the dark shadows of our lives.  From that random stranger who’s coming up to us to ask a simple question, but who we suspect must want something else or have some cruel intent.

But those we are close to, people we see every day, even people we love, have evil in them.  That’s hard to accept sometimes, but not as hard as this:  for many of us — myself included — among the darkest evil in a given moment is within us.  Most of us are pretty good at suppressing it.  We spend most of our times hiding it so no one would ever suspect.  But when we’re alone and we’re totally honest with ourselves, we know what the truth really is.

We all put our guard up on those “dark and stormy nights” when we think some boogey man is out to get us.  We need to keep our guard up when there isn’t a cloud in the sky.

And if we’re lucky, we find a few friends along the way to help us when we need it the most.