The Parable of the Onion

I find The Brother's Karamozov to be greatest novel written by a fallen man that I have ever read. The Novel is a fallen art form. The cry of Adam after the fall, trying to make sense of his misery after he lost the gifts of God. The tragedy of Don Quixote is that he loses the faith in the end after he is defeated and dies a broken man. But the Brother's Karamazov is a Novel of Hope. Dr. White sees in it an act of hope and a sign of the future conversion of Russia in fulfillment of the Fatima prophecies. Alyosha is the fictional character I adore and relate to the most. Who most touches me. People say he is boring. I see that as a sign they are bad people. I often think about Dostoyevsky and hope he is in heaven. He was buried in a Russian Orthodox Monastery. Thinking of EENS, we would assume he is damned, but we can always hope for a deathbed conversion to Catholicism. I would hope Dostoyevsky is in heaven more so than nearly any other man who died apparently outside the visible structures of the Church.

The two most important parables in the novel are "The Grand Inquisitor" and "The Parable of the Onion". I will be silent on the first and focus on the second. There is a wicked soul in hell who only ever performed one good act in her entire life. One day she saw a beggar at her door and she gave her an onion. So after she was damned her guardian angel told the good God about the onion and the good God told her to take that onion and offer it to the damned soul and if he could draw her out of hell using that onion she could be saved. So the angel offers the onion to the damsel and starts to draw her out and she is getting near out of hell. The other souls see her and cry out. "save us! Let us hold on to thy skirts so that we too can get out and be saved!" But the damsel was wicked. She did not want to help out the other poor souls. She wanted to be saved alone. And she had no faith. She thought that if the other souls grabbed on to her the onion would break. So she started kicking the other poor souls and crying out "It is my onion, not yours. Mine!" And as she cried out "Mine!" the onion broke and the damsel fell back into hell, deeper than she was before and remained there forever. Because she no compassion on her fellow souls in hell.

I feel that I have been through hell and I hope to be drawn out. I want to hold onto my onion until the sweet sweet end. I will try not to kick the other poor souls who cling on to me but instead to help them come aboard and maybe some of us will be drawn up to heaven and have peace in the bosom of Abraham forever and ever.

P.S. I saw someone from the hospital today. I will not share his name because it should remain private. He was Jewish. He looked old and feeble in the hospital and he was old and feeble today with a nurse walking with him.