Me and Feodor
It's all about love.
4-23-23
"Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love." 1 John 4:7-8
Some who visit this strange church of ours may remember that I carried in my wallet for years a quote from Feodor Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment: "Your sins which are many are forgiven because you have loved much."
I recently started reading on my kindle the complete works of Dostoyevski, about 7000 pages of novels, short stories, and letters. Though I have read lots of his work before, I have taken on the challenge hoping that in the process of writing my novel in progress I might sort of channel Dostoyevski's spirit. Not his style, insights, or story elements, only the spirt that moved him, which I will call love.
While reading the first of these collected novels, Netochka Nezvanova, I became more astonished than ever by the author's ability to probe the depths of human love and his passion to express why love is the key to everything. Which, I will suggest, must be true if in fact God is love.
The narrator is a girl who relates her memories concerning the different people she loved through her youth, all of them flawed, some barely sympathetic. Yet this girl deeply loves each of them. And that is pretty much what the whole novel is about -- a girl standing in for the author and wrestling with the subject of love.
I'm reminded of a great old hymn I first heard on Prairie Home Companion and the punch line "redeeming love has been my theme and shall be till I die."
Dostoyevski's last and for most readers his most powerful work was The Brothers Karamazov. Two two of the brothers and an old monk express how simply yet avidly a believer in God can be possessed by love.
To read Dostoyevski is to experience great love.
Early in this reading challenge of mine, I recognized that since I first discovered that Christ wasn't the son of a tyrant who looked like my stern grandfather only with a flowing gray beard, I have sought to understand more about love.
That, I suspect, can explain why I chose the evangelical movement out of all the legion of religions, sects, and dogmas.
My journey into the evangelical realm went something like this: at a Billy Graham crusade, I chose to follow Christ. That led me to try out a host of churches that never felt right: mainline Protestant, such as Methodist, Lutheran, and Congregational, seemed to me to revolve around about community, which wasn't my motive for churchgoing; Quakers tried to live in peace, but the meetings I attended didn't enlighten me about anything else; Catholics relied so much on ritual, felt too hierarchical, and offended me by not allowing me communion unless I first became one of them; Episcopalians dressed too nicely and drove expensive cars, which didn't set right with my bohemian/hippie inclination; fundamentalists of all sorts (including evangelical) I found annoyingly self-righteous.
But Jesus freaks, like my friend Tony Tarantino, I found quite worthy and appealing.
Jesus freaks were a subset of hippies looking to transcend materialistic culture, about which, by the way, Dostoyevski's Father Zossima, in The Brothers Karamazov, commented: "The world says: 'You have needs — satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don’t hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.' This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder."
In the musical Hair is a song that asks "Where do I go?" and among other answers replies, "Follow the children."
If I needed to briefly answer why I chose to become an evangelical, I might reply that the pentecostal / charismatic version of evangelicalism offered the only churches I found that appeared to be about experiencing the reality of God, who is love.
Or I might reply that I was led there Eric Curtis, Feodor Dostoyevski, and Tony Tarantino.
Happy forever,
Ken