FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Three Advent Tales

Rant Number 374 5 December 2009

A young man knocks at the door of a Zen temple, seeking admission. But Zen discipline requires you to be tested, to go on knocking for days, maybe weeks, before being allowed in. The young fellow persists. By the gate he sits and waits. Patiently. Days and weeks. Until a monk beckons him in. The old Abbot receives him. But warns him. ‘Being a monk is tough. You’ll have to sit in za-zen, meditation, 16 hours a day, totally still. If you move at all, you’ll get a blow. Your legs will hurt. And there is the boredom of being still so long. The food we eat is poor. We have no heating, of course. And there is silence. Are you sure you want to come here?’ The boy is undeterred. ‘I don’t mind any of that? Only...’

‘What?’

‘I really want to know the answer to a question. The only question that matters. Has life got a meaning? Existence...what is the meaning of it. If I stay here for a year...will I in the end know the meaning of life?’

The Abbot giggles: ‘I could tell you the answer right away. But you, as you are now, would not understand it. You are not ready. When you reach satori, enlightenment, you will know. You’ll then hear the silent music. The road to that is meditation. Za-zen. You must learn that first.’

The boy bows his head in obedience. He joins the monastery. Follows the hard training. Undergoes tests, hunger, blows, boredom, illness, temptations. Until...yes! He gets it! The meaning of life! The secret of secrets. The great riddle. The meaning of existence. He hears the impossible, silent music. At last he knows.

What music is that? What...what does he know?

Ah, that would be telling. Telling what cannot be told in words. Not on. Unless you too do like the young bloke. Follow the arduous path...

Deeply unsatisfactory, I know. (Zen tales usually are!) Here is another, perhaps less frustrating, narrative. By Leo Tolstoi. A short novella entitled ‘Father Sergius’. One of the deepest thinkers of the last century believed ‘Father Sergius’ encapsulates the answer to the riddle of being. Sergius is a young aristocrat. Handsome. Clever. The top of his regiment. Engaged to a beautiful, rich girl, he feels great pride. He is happy. Until she confesses to him she had been the Tsar’s lover. Sergius is shattered. Had it been any other man, he would have killed him. But he adores his emperor. So he breaks off the engagement. Determines to abandon society. Become a monk. The handsome officer shaves his fine hair, wears a coarse habit, endures long fasts, prays constantly... he excels at everything. He is the most diligent, the best monk in the monastery. So his fame spread. People come and visit him. Sergius can’t stand it. So he becomes a hermit. Lives away from human society, in a small, solitary hut, remote from the monastery. Undergoes unimaginable austerities. Again, his reputation grows. One stormy night a party of idle aristocrats passing by make a bet. A pretty lady will feign being lost, get into the hut and tempt him. The holy man not so holy after all.

All goes according to the wicked plan. Sergius is a Christian. Cannot deny shelter to the woman. But when he feels his chastity wavering, when he about to give in to the lust of the flesh, he seizes an axe and chops off his index finger. (Bit of a Freudian symbolism, eh?)The pain strengthens his will. And the woman? Horrified by what she has done, she begs the monk’s forgiveness and disappears. Later, she enters a convent.

Now Sergius’ fame is really boundless. He is revered as a saint, a living martyr, a healer. A stream of people come daily from far and wide to beg for intercessions, miracles, the lot. Thanks to him, the monastery grows wealthy. Years go by. He is treated as the most holy monk. One day a rich peasant and his daughter visit him in his cell. The girl, simple and not beautiful, has a nervous condition. The trusting peasant leaves her with Sergius so he may heal her. This time the proud monk succumbs to temptation. He lies down with the girl, the two have sex. After, Sergius runs away, distraught. Discards his habit. His certainties are shattered. He is about to kill himself when an incongruous image flashes through his mind. That of an old school friend, a girl he hasn’t seen since childhood. Sergius feels she is his only hope. So he sets out to walk the long way to the town where she lives.

At last Sergius gets there. The woman at first hardly recognises him. Sergius looks like a tramp. ‘How have you come to be so lowly?’ But Sergius wishes to know about her. What kind of life has she lived? ‘Oh, nothing special. I got married, I have children. My husband drinks and is not well. We don’t have enough money, we struggle but we manage. I know I am not good but I do my best, with God’s help...’ Now the light dawns. The outwardly ‘holy’ life Sergius had lived was driven by his desire to be special, superior, to excel. At the root, it was pride, damned pride, the sin by which the angels fell. His friend instead had lived as a normal person. An ordinary, simple life but, at bottom, more genuine, more authentic, more real. Sergius now grasps what has eluded him throughout – the meaning of his life.

The denouement? Sergius become a wandering beggar. One day he is arrested as vagrant and deported to Siberia. There he settles on the estate of a land owner, as a gardener. Sometimes, he teaches children. He is still there today, Tolstoi says.

My third tale for Advent – a time of preparation for Christmas, for Him who Cometh, for Christ’s arrival – is so modest, personal that it embarrasses me to tell. Dates back to when I was a philosophy undergraduate at Birkbeck College, London. Mugging up analytic philosophy. Conceptual, dry, linguistic stuff. Crushingly boring, at times. The meaning of life? If anything, it meant analysing the word ‘life’. ‘If you want certainties, you ought to study chemistry’ my tutor told me when I expressed my frustration. I almost gave up the course. But the penny dropped when Professor Peter Winch, a follower of Wittgenstein, politely held the door open for me to pass by in a corridor. He said nothing but...he smiled at me, kindly.

Tiny, minuscule, pathetic satori - yet it sufficed.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli