[RF] The Parable of the Two Thieves – Kenan Meral

Midsummer at midday, Lake Crescent was filled with sunlight and liberty. Around the lakeside, the hiking was good. It wasn’t much of a challenge to get to our destination. I knew Devil’s Punchbowl like a rivulet in my palm, because my family’s been swimming here for years. Along the coastline of the Olympic Peninsula, Devil’s Punchbowl is a famous diving spot. The highest jump is about twenty meters up—high enough to break a man if he weren’t focused. But I never jumped. I’d swan dive off the little bridge nearby, or backflip off the shorter rocks, but never from the highest point. I was afraid I’d die.
When David and me finally made it, we settled in on a sunning boulder. We weren’t alone. Several youths came to billy goat their way up the bluffsides, just to plunge themselves over the cliff wall, most not knowing the water’s depth. Their disdain for danger marked them out as naive, though brave.
In blue gorgeosity, I was floating at the lake surface, summering my belly red, and freezing my submerged back pale. Levitating on the gentle waves, I closed my eyes to drift alone for a moment when I heard people hollering. They were waving at a man all the way up the rocks. He looked about thirty. If I didn’t open my eyes in time, I would’ve missed a glimpse of the uncrucified standing at the height of the birds. That was the calmest I’ve ever seen a man. Serene upon on the diving cliffs, he appeared free from desire—mind and senses purified. Our hero took to the leap as an angel takes to any height.
A little girl screamed as he stepped off. He spread his arms out swan-style. From down below where I was paddling, there was a brief moment where the diver’s body could’ve been captured freeze-frame. His expression fixed so that his eyes almost closed. Had he flinched in fear, he’d land at an angle that would ruin him. After a flashing moment, he descended into the swimming hole, and emerged with a devil-wry grin.
Bravery was the meaning of the climb and the reason for the fall. When I was younger, I would do things just to see if they could be done. I ceased such behavior when I realized the possibility of a negative outcome. I liked myself better when I was impervious to blame. David and me spent the rest of the afternoon swimming. Afterwards, we hiked a mile back to my car and drove to get dinner at a bar off the highway. We started talking in a booth in the corner. David hadn’t spilled his guts in some time.
***
“I have to say, I wish I was an atheist. I would feel a tremendous sense of relief. Just imagining it now, I could finally admit that I don’t know a damned thing,” David said.
“You’re not one?” I asked.
“No, but I wanna be.”
“You could try.”
“No. It’s too late. I have faith.”
Our dinner came. I started eating but David was still thinking. He had a blonde Navy regulation buzzcut—a serious man’s face with a fender jaw that could’ve been youthful, but wasn’t meant to be.
“You know, I had a conversation with a friend from work, just like this one. We were talking about it and I said to him, I have an obligation to the truth. It’s no different from how a man of science would feel an obligation to reject faith without evidence,” David said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I’m an instinctual guy and the larger part of our day-to-day can’t be accounted for. Even if all of my life’s questions could be explained scientifically, it wouldn’t make much difference. I really do believe that if you investigate a godless world, there really isn’t much directing you one way or another.”
“I don’t know if that’s true.”
“It is. You could just keep probing and prodding, and eventually you’ll get to the bottom of the big nothingness. It doesn’t even take much interrogation. Once you hit the realization, that there’s nothing holding you back, you could do whatever you like.”
“But you don’t believe that, do you?”
“No. A lot of religious people won’t tell you this in earnest, but I’m jealous of atheists. They appear free. I do believe in God, but I wish I didn’t.”
“Because you think the truth is superior to freedom?”
“I suppose so, and I don’t know why.”
He finally started eating.
“Are you upset about Father Sylvia?” He asked.
I shook my head no. It was a year and some since he died.
“I would’ve liked to go to his funeral, but what can you do?” I said.
“I think he had it coming.”
“Nobody deserves to be killed. Maybe not nobody, but he wasn’t that bad of a guy.”
David shrugged.
“You don’t believe in forgiveness?” I asked.
“If a man abandons his son, what the fuck do you think he’d do to you?”
I shrugged. David kept pressing the subject.
“You don’t really know that guy. He was just a man after all, and not even a good one. Forty years ago he was a profligate. A drug addict. A failed hippie. He always had some dumb-fuck Eastern bullshit to spill. He was a loser.”
“People change.”
“He had a boy. You know that? He was a dad before he took some vows. He was a father in both meanings of the term.”
“His son got adopted by a good family.”
“You can’t abandon your fucking son. I mean.. I mean.. I mean..”
David’s stutter would come back when he was drunk, or too angry. I waited a minute for his mind and mouth to syncopate.
“I mean, Sylvia had a boy he left at the doorstep of some fucking strangers. He only had one son, who to this day never called him father, but everybody else had to. He puts the title Father Sylvia on all his book jackets. He has all the sycophants kiss his ring. He did all the drugs and fucked all the girls, and now he’s back from the party to tell you it’s degenerate shit.”
“He’s dead now. Happy?”
“Day after day, he had the audacity to speak of endless love. He was a criminal.”
“God in the flesh was also a convict.”
“You always have something smug to say, don’t you?”
I took a sip from my pint glass.
“He saved his killer’s life.”
“Just to get killed all the same.”
“A man who does something like that, to forgive the one who slashed you twice. I think he proved himself. Don’t you?”
“This is the problem with you, you’re not a Christian, you don’t actually believe in anything too strongly, so you try to see everything from both sides. That’s how you end up cross-eyed.”
We didn’t speak for a moment. I could feel my face getting red.
“He made mistakes. Everyone knows he did, but walking across a frozen lake to save your murderer from drowning is the most Christian thing I’ve ever heard.”
“That’s not Christian. That fucking kid is in prison now. And Sylvia died for nothing anyways.”
I looked down at dregs of my cup. After a wave of emotion seized me, I stepped away from the bar counter and went to the bathroom to bawl my eyes out in a stall. I was drunk enough to feel surreal. My entire year flew by like a numbing dream. Anything that happened, or anything I did, was undeserving of a point on a timeline. Anything I experienced could’ve been rearranged in any unspecified manner because my life felt meaningless. I was waiting for the winter to pass, and I was hoping spring would rejuvenate my senses. It didn’t. When I heard the birds call out the first spring morning, I wasn’t any less of an animal by the time the summer began.
When I came back to the bar counter, Davey was sitting there, sullen.
“Danny you know I’m just talking shit. I used to agree with a lot of what you’re saying. After those two guys did what they did to my dad, you know justice doesn’t mean anything to me. As long as those guys are dead, or locked away forever in a place where they can’t hurt another innocent person, I really don’t care how I feel about them.”
My words didn’t ring any more true than his. The backstory was awful.
One unlucky day, David’s dad was going to pick up pizza for lunch. Two drug dealers were in the parlor. They were there to kill some junkie who owed them money. After they blew the junkie’s brains out, they stuck up the teenage cashier while they were at it. They forced the gun barrel into the kid’s mouth, but they didn’t kill him. As the thieves made for the exit, they took off their masks. They made eye contact with David’s dad on their way out, so they shot him in the head. And just like that, the two men who stole your father will be sneering at you in court. David has the right as much as anybody to say that evil certainly exists, and that wherever evil is found, it should be annihilated. One reason we’ve been hanging out so much lately is that we both lost somebody dear to us. It’s been a numbing year, and I am afraid that my tolerant attitude, my forgiving nature, is merely cowardice, is actually apathy. I don’t believe in anything anymore, but Sylvia cared about me.
We paid our tab. On the drive back to my parent’s cabin, David and me made up.
***
When we got back to my family’s place, everyone was asleep. In my room, I cracked open a paperback copy of Zosima of the Woods and I read an excerpt. This story was told to me more times than I can recall.
Father Sylvia writes:
“In many ways, the question of the day is inspired from an unhappy solitude. I think we all know it’s true, that after a certain extent, pacifism and wrongdoing take the same silhouette of a hesitant man when viewing the apparition of evil. We might say a peaceful decision is synonymous with appeasement when devilish dealings are being made. The meaning of peace, and the quality of cowardice, appear to walk parallel with one another. Why do they seem to intertwine?
In the face of this realization, the longer I live the less certain I am of the “good person” as we know him today, and recognize that each person alive is existing more or less, in a position of moral mediocrity. What affects me now more than ever is a question of ethics when a “good man” is placed in a position of power over another. These days, a Christian man, and a weak man, to the modern onlooker, often behave so similarly that I am not sure which one is Christ’s disciple, and which one is afraid of his true nature.
In such cases, we must reflect upon The Parable of the Two Thieves, as handed down by the Cappadocian Fathers. At either side of Christ-crucified, are twin images of mankind who die beside the Lord: The Grateful Thief, and The Thief-Impenitent. They look upon the Messiah, and in a moment of confession they see a mirror. They see everything within the characteristics of their greater and lesser humanity. Then, just before their imminent demise, they see God-Himself, and in Him they see their fellow man, and they supposedly even envision their own bodies suspended-in-aerial. The thieves ultimately act accordingly with whatever breath remains of their free will. That day another saint was shepherded into paradise, while the sinner was damned who mocked the Lord for not saving Himself. I believe both of these men were tested by God.
A long, long time before I understood the meaning in The Parable of Two Thieves, I arrogantly assumed that few men on earth were ever really tested. I didn’t understand that The Parable of the Two Thieves is itself a mirror, and that every man should see in himself The Grateful Thief, and that every man should see in himself in The Thief-Impenitent, and that every man should, though it is beyond his actuality, see himself in the position of Christ-crucified.”
As I was going to sleep, I was thinking about that passage. I’ve read it over and over. I was thinking about a crisis of faith I suffered when I was a younger man, and how my particular problem lead me astray. Father Sylvia told me that parable when I came to him with my situation. Last year before Sylvia died, I was finishing up school for music. Not unlike any other person, religious or areligious, we all ask ourselves the universal question of why bad things happen to good people. I was in a crisis because I was so close with my friend who I drove to the hospital, just to discover that his loving father had died violently for no good reason. After that day, I didn’t believe the Plan concealed by mystery was worthy of an attempt at discovery, or that the Plan itself was even worth the concealment. Anyways, it was the first time I realized that terrible things happen to innocent people everyday, everywhere in the world.
Music helped get me through a very dark time in life. I was under the impression that if I could write a beautiful piece of music, God would honor me and I could earn my place in the loving sun again. So I pursued my vision of a peculiar aesthetics. On piano, I was guided by ear, toward a sensation of fullness emergent from the seat of my soul. A feeling of deep meaning arose, and that feeling of happiness meant God to me. After I finished my composition, I played it several times in piano concertos at the music hall in college where one of the church brothers heard it. They invited me to the Lake Crescent Monastery to perform the piece for some foster children and the hieromonks. The night before the performance, I read some of Father Sylvia’s essays to brush up for an interaction with him. Ironically, this essay served to implode my religious aesthesis. It was from a philosophical work Father Sylvia had written after he left San Francisco to come live in Port Angeles.
Father Sylvia writes:
“There is a problem with the quality of beauty, isn’t there? An observation on beauty is not alloyed to any evidence demonstrating its experience as a fact of reality. The quality of beauty itself remains subject to totally unclear inspirations—the truth about aesthetics being objective to that age old expression, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” The mystery of beauty is not different from the mystery of faith, in that the sensation may be stimulated intellectually. Just as we might entheiate the qualities of godliness into every action, feature, and phenomenon in occurrence, all matters of life, and those we cannot know, may be aestheticized through the will of the intellect. From an impossibly small insect, we might cultivate beauty from the sunlit reflections off a bottle fly’s body, just as our faith in God may be cultivated from a faint light cast off a fly-sized star.
All throughout my youth as a young poet, my philosophy concerning the intertwinedness of beauty and religion encoded my every interaction with faith. As I came to understand it, the pursuit of godliness is the pursuit of beauty. Gradually, as my sense of religiosity deepened, my worship of beauty surpassed admiration until I was enrapt by it. I was under an intoxication, that my every observation of beauty was an observation of truth. “If I could find beauty, I could find God, and if I could find God, I could find truth.” This became my artistic mantra.
Steadily, my adoration of righteousness dissolved, as I aestheticized all-things-in-creation. The more I worshiped beauty, as Job might’ve worshiped Yahweh, the more my religiosity grew perverse. I became transfixed by a will-o’-the-wisp named Beauty, that I’ve named my Lord, and I followed it as I now follow Christ. After some years went by, I came to a deeper realization, that I’ve ended up a slave to my perceptions, and I’ve mistaken aesthetic sublimity for the all powerful. My sense of order was gone, and I named my masquerade Faith. Another question occurred to me: What if it is the case that beauty is another device deployed as a trick of the devil? This sense of uncanniness is the result of a life path where one follows the illusory in God’s name. How did this come to be? Simply put, sublunary charms lead me astray.
What is confusing about beauty is that it lies in the most mysterious hinterland beyond our capacity for reason. To quote an earlier poet, “I’ve seen the gentle beauties in the Sharon roses, and wrath-beauties of orchid-eyed war horses. I’ve seen the starlings congress in murmuration, and I’ve seen the eagle’s claw satisfy its mouth with lesser birds.” Possessing a fear of God means to be taken out of the ecstasy of the poet’s intoxication with the state of nature, and to hold distinct respect for the reality that there is no contradiction in nature.
I’ve come to appreciate a sobering relationship with beauty. It is not a quality I want to possess me. In the end, I say all things in nature are under God’s domain and that none of them belong to me—all the things I possess, are all things I’ve been given, are all things I must let go of eventually. Though, there exists one anxiety inducing truth about beauty, that this mysterious quality transcends everything moral and everything logical. When at once meditated upon seriously, we discover with horror the amoral nature of beauty, whose affectation is of totally unknown origin.”
As I set the book aside, my memory of our last interaction phased into cold reality. The day I was meant to play piano for him, he was murdered.
The men I’ve been are looking at the same killing with two different pairs of eyes. I haven’t been myself since his death split me in two. I had to wonder what it was like for Father Sylvia in his final moments. I talked to one of the policemen who arrived at the scene shortly afterwards.
It was early in the morning. There was snow on the ground. It was white everywhere. At the entrance of the hieromonk’s quarters, there was a loose bunch of abalone shells strung together. They were a gift given to Sylvia. He hung them by the doorway. They’d act as wind chimes that’d crinkle and rattle. In sunlight or moonlight, the abalone bunch would iridesce.
It’s true, there’s a secret about the devil, that he’s a gentleman. There’s another more obvious reality afoot, that he easily persuades the retarded. Intellectuals all too often overestimate the cunning of Satan. Often, his bumbling perversions are the luck of moronic insanity. Yes, as often portrayed, Mephistopheles possesses arch-cunning. This is a typical overestimation of the common evil we are accustomed to. This arrogant oversight stems from a desire for a worthy foe. Sadly, evil is rarely brilliant. Most of the time evil’s stupid short-sightedness is hidden in pity’s plain sight.
Father Sylvia’s killer is one example.
Woe to be slain by Jared Morehouse. I haven’t had many good interactions with him. The few I had were embarrassing for everyone involved. In the ninth grade, one day during church youth organization basketball, it was allergy season. Jared and I were standing court-side ready to sub in when he snotted a gout of mucus on me. The would-be murderer in question was held back three times. He was just bright enough to avoid a mentally disabled diagnosis. Sylvia was always patient with him. Maybe so patient it humiliated Morehouse? If I’m being sincere, I can’t really think of a real M.O. Mostly because a good enough reason to kill an innocent church father cannot be conjured. This murder was what confirmed Morehouse’s lunacy in a court of law.
The police report states, that February morning there was a knock on the door. The killer was a man of about nineteen. You’d suppose, for such a specific target, Morehouse was hand-guided by Satan.
Jared lifted his kitchen knife to plunge it into the first person to answer the door. Sylvia’s hand caught a blade swipe. It wounded him, but he was able to push away his assailant. Instinct took over. Father Sylvia ran through the woods, down to the docks, in the direction of the closest cabin. As Morehouse chased him through the darkness toward the lakeside, he pursued Sylvia down the gangway, where fishing boats were freeze-moored. Sylvia leapt down onto the icy lake, and ran across. I can see Morehouse giving chase over the Devil’s Punchbowl, where the moon’s streamers twinkle in fish scales. Halfway across, Morehouse fell through the ice. As he drowned, he cried out for help.
When he heard his name, whether out of shame or conviction, Father Sylvia turned back from the other side of Lake Crescent. He ran out to the stupid boy. After pulling him out the ice, Sylvia held the boy in his arms during a moment of tenderness. Then Morehouse remembered the knife in his hand. Father Walton, the only other monk living near Lake Crescent Monastery at the time, responded to the commotion. While Walton was able to call the police, and tend to his monastery brother’s wounds, Sylvia told him everything. Walton heard his last words.
“All killing has ceased with me.” He whispered.