In Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, a man races against predators and time to rescue his family from a deep pit, which rains threaten to fill. Breathless and bloody, hounded by vicious enemies, he doesn’t know if he’ll make it in time, or if he’ll be able to do anything but fall down and die when he gets there.

Apocalypto is redolent of Gibson’s other films, with its pornographic violence, its men pushed to the edge. Evil men know no restraints in these films, and good men go mad in response to the ensuing darkness.

For all the garish bloodshed there is, therefore, a truthfulness at the heart of films as disparate as Mad Max and The Passion of the Christ and Edge of Darkness that makes them far less offensive to the spirit than a wide swath of romantic comedies peddling the lie that love bears no suffering.

I don’t know if Mel Gibson is evil or insane or just has the bad luck to be caught on record at his worst moments. I know if a camera caught me at my worst, I’d qualify for both evil and insane, and maybe this means that deep down I really am both, or too nearly there to merit parsing words to the contrary.

Maybe that’s why I have a soft place in my heart for Mel, because he represents so starkly what is stark in all of us, but which most of us are better at shading, and that is the hard-scored line between good and evil that Solzhenitsyn said runs through every human heart.

On the other hand, maybe it’s because his crazy-eyed visage captures so well how I sometimes feel, like something deep within me is going to snap, sending the whole contraption that is my ill-natured psyche into a sputtering, gear-spitting, whirling dive over the cliff.

Mel Gibson may be evil or crazy or both, and so may I, and yet we are both human, which means the spark of God is in us, and in you, and even in those you hate most.

I suppose it is even in the handful of people I hate.

Last night I dreamt of demons. I dreamt they were in a room in my house. I knew any moment one of my children might wander into that room, and so I knew I had to go fight the demons. I knew the demons knew this, and in my dream they could hear my thoughts, and so as I approached the room, my body immersed in the feeling of moving through syrup, I thought the Jesus Prayer over and over in my mind:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Though my frequent childhood nightmares of demons faded with the memories of the Southern churches to which I’d been dragged, I sometimes still have them. Thanks to friends who love me more than I deserve, I know this prayer. It comes to me in dreams. Sometimes I cross myself as well; I wake with my index and middle fingers pressed to my thumb, my hand sweeping lazily across my chest.

I wish my wakeful self were as fearful, as saintly. I once spent a weekend in a monastery retreat. We prayed and fasted and heard thoughtful lectures about the golden-tongued saint, John Chrysostom. These men were gentle and humble and kind-hearted, and all of it made me, for 60 hours, a better man.

There was peace, real peace. It had been so long, you see, since I’d felt that. But I came back into the world, and the world settled back into me. I settled back into me.

Did you ever have a vision of yourself as you might be?

I’m trying to understand what about me is wrong, and what about me is okay. Forget excellent, forget commendable. I’ll be satisfied to reach heaven’s gate by a fingernail. I’ll have no crowns. If our dwellings are determined by our righteousness, I’ll have a cot in the kitchen. But I hear there is peace there, for even the lowliest sort.

We all of us make other people our lodestars—a parent, a friend, a spouse. In some respects this is a good thing. Otherwise we make ourselves little gods of little worlds, and we consume ourselves.

But when it comes to discerning what is wrong with yourself, and what about you is not wrong, but which makes someone else unhappy, things get murky. “Apokalypto” means “unveiling,” but sometimes you don’t know if you are being unveiled or undone.

We are creatures crafted for community, for communion. We are supposed to find peace with those to whom we are bound. But what if we can’t? When do we stop trying?

Maybe when holding on does more damage to our souls, and to their souls, than letting go.

If you have ever been in a relationship that is dying, you know the feeling of the man racing to save what he doesn’t know how to save, and the woman waiting to be delivered from the pit, and the wild-eyed protagonist who feels the cables that have moored his sanity popping, one by one.

And this is the thing that keeps you sane, if you believe the story of Golgotha: that no matter what you are or what you will be, you are good enough, and you are loved.

You and me and Mel Gibson and our worst enemy, even when that last proves to be ourselves.