19 March 2022 · 2022-03 newsletter
Well, I don’t really know whether he did or not, but something in an article I read recently piqued my interest in this wild thought. The article deals with Dostoevsky’s books and particularly his book ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, a story that is generally acclaimed to be one of the best literary works ever written.
The article is in a magazine called Evangelisation & Culture and is titled ‘The Everyday Miracle’ by Gary Morson, Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University in Illinois, USA. We need not be concerned about the historical details, interesting though they are, but a quote caught my eye. One of the characters in the story is a Russian Orthodox priest called Fr Zossima, and he recounts an old Russian folk story concerning an onion.
‘A wicked old women dies and is thrown into the lake of fire. Pitying her, her guardian angel reminds God that the old woman did one good deed in her lifetime; she gave an onion to a beggar. Very well, says God, you take that onion and pull her out of hell with it. The delighted angel holds out the onion, the old woman grabs onto it and the angel, afraid that the onion will break, slowly and carefully begins to lift her out from the lake. Seeing her escape, other sinners hold onto her legs so they can escape with her, but the old woman kicks them away: “It’s my onion, not yours!” she shouts. At that moment, the onion breaks, and she has been rotting in hell ever since.’
Prof. Morson considers that there are two morals here. To begin with, we always have the power to redefine our lives, as the old woman could have done by acting generously to the other sinners. Still more important, the act that matters, the good deed that could have saved her, was not some grand gesture but a gift of something almost worthless. This is the sort of good deed we can always perform. This lesson occurs throughout the book in various guises and clearly led to the title of the article.
For me, this story is remarkably evocative of Everyday Sanctity, one of the three main dimensions (pillars) of our spirituality, where we do the ordinary things in life extraordinarily well out of love for God. Hence the thought that Fr Kentenich might have read the book!
The book was published in 1880, I think, or at least thereabouts, while the ideas about this facet of the spirituality were developed by Fr Kentenich in the early 1930’s and published in 1937 in the book written by Sr Nailis – so the timeline fits. Mind you, I imagine it’s more likely that St Therese of Lisieux’s ‘The Little Way’ – expressing a similar idea of advancing towards personal sanctity, and published around the 1900’s – would have impressed him more. I am sure, wherever the actual impulse came from, he was a brilliant man and would have been extremely well read, so it’s at least a possibility!
If you have read Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation Gaudete Et Exsultate, you would know that he also covers this very point. (14 and on), so it should be well known among Catholics. OK, but the point is that this is not so. Of course, our priests and teachers know it (or should), but possibly think it a rather specialised thing, being confined to the Carmelite or Schoenstatt spiritualities. Maybe they don’t read encyclicals very well. I don’t know.
What I do think, however, is that this provides us with a huge opportunity for evangelising through Schoenstatt. We all know that Everyday Sanctity is a great big factor in our Schoenstatt faith life, and we should be
SHOUTING IT FROM THE ROOFTOPS.
Terry Pate
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