The Grand Inquisitor

When I first read Dostoyevsky’s long friggin’ novel, The Brothers Karamazov, I was struck by the chapter half way through the tome, The Grand Inquisitor. In the Grand Inquisitor Dostoyevsky’s character, Ivan, paints a picture with a story about the Spanish Inquisition in which the Second Coming of Christ was presumably met by the friar of infamy, Tomάs Torquemada. Reading it and re-reading it… it tires me. All this philosophy that troubles itself with good and evil… a life wasted or well lived… all of it is tiring and in the end useless. One says everything is lawful while the other affirms that a life with no meaning is without joy. The big question might whether or not it is worth making up a meaning rather than to spiral down in an inescapable reality of one circumstance leading to another to end up in the same place we were in before we were born.

            This question compels most of us whether or not we can admit it to ourselves. The most hedonistic materialist tries with varying degrees of success to fill the void between birth and death. We call our games and entertainment a diversion… a pastime… recreation... without giving a second thought to what it is we are saying. We have hundreds of channels on cable... or satellite... holding an I-phone in front of our faces... unconscious of anything around us... earplugs with the latest banality playing a sad excuse for music into that vacuum in our skulls... What's on TV tonight! There are times I would prefer to stay in bed to dream… to pass time before I must wake to work or play… to re-create something I fear I might have lost… to divert me from the truth. In such cases… in such a state of mind I’d rather make up meaning or even adopt a meaning preached from maybe a pulpit. It is a horror to us that there just might not be a meaning… any sense at all to it… no heaven or hell… a light at the end of a tunnel… nothing but the end.

            So I sit. I sit and wait. I wait for nothingness to reveal itself as though it were a bride coming from a room behind the altar obscured except in the sacrifice of surrender to the cold stone of existence. Then I rise… no bride… no promise... I rise to a rhythm… the rhythm lifts me with no sense at all but the resonance it has with my own heart-beat. I lift a foot… more feebly with age but I lift it nonetheless and pound it on the ground… thmp… thmp… thhm… thmp… a cosmic dance… ahhhh aum… ahhh aum… ahhh aum… the bride comes out from the room behind the altar I dance before in the darkest night of my soul. Ah, but you are wrong dear Ivan Karamazov and I don’t need to prove it to you cranky Torquemada! My own experience resonates with my heartbeat to yours, my friends, and thine, my Lord... there is joy in not knowing. It is the certitude of faith that flies airliners into tall buildings! So, therefore, I strive to not know more and in not knowing more I know the divine in the paradox of not knowing less. There are no secrets.

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