I nearly hesitate in presenting this short short story by my father. It is very cynical and its cynicism is not assisted by the invocation of God. My father was, for years, a non-practicing Greek Orthodox. He had agreed to allow my mother, a non-practicing Catholic, to raise me as a Catholic. I left for a while and came back to the faith, and remain with it to this day. But he always hovered around religion, and participated on the peripheries with me when I attended my parish activities, even occasionally attending a service so that "I can hear you read." I have been a lector for many years. He met my pastor, similar to him in that both had Greek fathers, who ruled the roost. And my pastor said, "Leave him alone" when it came to any consideration of belief or conversion. And so I did, and went about my business religiously speaking. The only difference between my father and me regarding cynicism, which I share with him in abundance, is that I battled mine inside the faith. He battled his, like the protagonist of this story, outside of it. I will have more comments after you read this gloomy short which was written in the 1990s, as the Enron scandal was in full bloom. What was Enron? It was an energy supplier and it became a trader in the market of commodities. The machinations of the company were originally praised as creative, and I am a market idiot, so I cannot really understand what happened but when the dot come market collapsed, whatever the machinations in accounting for profit and loss, making the company look more profitable than it actually was, until the actual losses could no longer be hidden. Lots of people got charged ultimately for insider trading and fraud and some of them ended up in jail. Lots of people thought this was justice because of the damage likely done to investors who didn't have money to spare. But some people felt that there was an unreasonable inequity in punishing this type of crime so assiduously while coddling those who do physical harm to others in comparison. When I was a prosecutor at the State Bar of California, attorneys who got into these kind of "white collar" transgressions would remonstrate with me in what they considered my ivory tower (though I had worked for people much like them in my early career and was very familiar with the rationales) because "everyone did" what they were often caught in doing. They didn't raise the bigger issues with me as does this prisoner of the short story raise with the minister/probation officer in the exchange of letters. My father was a thinker, not as famous as thinkers of the past or the future, but a thinker he always was. He needed, as so many of us do, proof of absolute justice that will never be found on this earth. And not finding it, like many thinkers, he railed.
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PRIDE GOETH BEFORE A FALL
The following may be a true story. I discovered the text folded neatly within the page of a volume I bought at a yard sale. It consisted of a series of letters between a convict and his parole officer and spiritual advisor. I thought it a particularly interesting exchange in view of the Enron situation--a morality tale for our times.
Dear Reverend John:
Please forgive the familiarity of the salutation. After all, your name is John. I will admit that the use of the word, "dear" may be excessive in view of our mandated association. Please accept it in your most liberal interpretation of salutations.
On the other hand, you do deserve some deference in view of your interest in my REHABILITATION, my continued education and the invaluable assistance you have given me over the past five years. I entered this hallowed institution a crass, uneducated, materialistic felon. I am now an erudite criminal, with five more years to go--though perhaps a probation will be called for I continue to hope. I can read with a modicum of comprehension, something beter than the daily stock quotations.
I have just completed two of your more recent contributions, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, by this guy Dostoevsky. They are both dismal narrations by a man who was half afraid there might be a God, in the way that Hamleet was restrained by the same phobia. I did not get the message that crime does not pay. What comes through to me is that there are crimes and there are crimes-the phenomenon of equivalence. When I borrowed a few hundred thousand rubles from my clients, I did not tap some unwary person on the noggin or murder a close relative for his holdings. I performed an accepted business maneuver--a daily occurrence in the investment field, which simply required, for a short period, sufficient capital to cover an imbalance in accounting.
Think about it. If the stock had gone up the next day instead of down, I would have been a milionaire and a hero, instead of a patsy for an ambitious district attorney.
Padre, you are taking a chance with my sense of morality and ethics with non-relevant musings by a morose Russian. The bad guy kills himself not because of his sin against humanity and God but because he cannot even trust the anti-God or the secular satainic ministry either. His comfortable world was shattered. If you can't trust God or the Devil, where can you look in this dog eat dog world?
In a revealing passage of Dostoevsky's book, Christ, who has reappeared suddenly on earth is dragged before a Grand Inquisitor. He is castigaged for his inopportune incarnation. "Get thee hence," he is told, though not in those words, else, "We will crucify you again."
The Grand Inquisitor likes the world the way it is and needs no God to offer interference, however authentic He may be. He is urged not to meddle in a successful consortium of prelates, and the secular acolytes of a compliant government, a consortium which will abase itself to the blandishment of either.
I am convinced I was better off as a partially educated con man. The doors you have opened for me are not portals to mercy and goodness, the ultimate surcease promised by some God merchants and withheld by others, soem judges and those who interpret the law as it is dictated to them. It is an illusion.
In what y fellow inmates refer to as "stir", there is an underground culture of right and wrong. WE are like a species suddenly discovered in soe subterranean depth that does not respond to the xternal forces of life. In this Plutonic underworld, we are anomalies with our own rules of existence and death--and especially Justice.
This last is not the traditional blindfolded lady with the pendant scales. More often, she peers beneatha bandaged eye and permits the scale to tip one way or the other.
With Great Reverence,
Federico Speranza
Dear Federico:
I am saddend by your cynicism. Your trials are half over. You are no longer the man who entered those stone pillared gates five years ago. I see in your letters words that tell me His Light has indeed penetrated your heart. Yes, your sentence was severe. Yes, ore grievous transgressions escape the notice of the law, but this can only be a sign of God's Infinite Wisdom at work. Shall you rail against the Almighty? Remember how He chastised Job for questioning His unknowable purpose? Patience my son.
Reverend John Burton
Esteemed Reverend:
"What news, O Pastor of the Damned, you ask?"
Samantha, my wife, has relocated. She has taken the children to an unknown location. There were tear stains in her letter. It is out of love for me and for our three daughters, she said. They will no longer be encumbered with the name of a criminal.
Suggest, dear Reverend, a passage from the God book to palliate my pain. Tell me about the wisdom of the Eternal Father, and the forgiveness that awaits me when I am dead.
Help me to curb my rage, to repress my curses against the secular and the Divine. I will grow a beard and rend my clothes and rail against the immutable tempest of the cursed maelstrom of life, like that idiot King Lear, "What would he do had he the motive and the cue for passion that I have?" His need was only Pride and the ego disaffections of a madman.
Reverend Father, spare me your parables. There is nothing outside these walls that is preferable to my solitary cell. Like that legendary king, I had a wife who loved me, three daughters and a kingdom within my grasp. Now, there is only the abyss.
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Nothing can assuage such pain if we are unwilling. Federico, it could be argued, is looking into an abyss of his own making, even if that conduct was arguably not as bad as that of someone who escaped humanity's imperfect justice. He blames all on God, but denies his own free will. Of course, we are never sure what part of our will is free and what part mere chance--or manipulation.
But as to my father. Some years after he wrote this story, at the age of 85, he called me on the telephone late into the evening, after dinner and no doubt a few glasses of wine, and announced he was going to become a Catholic. My own genetically inherited cynicism was alerted when the only clear utterance of the sudden decision was "It will make it easier for you." I would ever have to speculate what would be easier for me. The burial after he died? He could thus be buried in a Catholic Ceremony and interred in a Catholic Cemetery. But if he did it only for that reason, he could easily have eschewed attending Mass after he was received into the Church. Instead he became a regular Sunday attendee, an usher and a Communicant. And while it was not a Pauline conversion--blinding and of auditory dramatics--it brought him inside, where there is, again I can only say, arguably, as many will disagree, the Grace to look into the abyss, and think, even at the very periphery of mind and soul, that God will indeed make sense out of it all.
After all, it was my non-practicing Greek Orthodox father, and my non-practicing Catholic mother, who put me on the path of Catholicism. That somehow does not seem to have been any accident. There is a phrase that seems to apply here, "Felix Culpa". Happy fault.
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