ŷ������

If you’ve ever committed an unjust act, as Raskolnikov does, you know now it would have been better right at the outset to confess your injustice and seek the absolution of clemency.

For if you neglected to come clean you were probably racked with ruin within, and “delivered to the bondsman�� of tortuous guilt. It happened to Raskolnikov, and it happened to me.

Each one of us is a Raskolnikov, you know.

No, not like you’re thinking - not a shabbily-dressed, impoverished murderer. But we all share his nature. To a T.

That, in essence, is the key to understanding Dostoevsky’s tortuous, convoluted, anxious prose - it’s the one message that Fyodor Dostoevsky takes anguished pains to drum into our insulated and isolated little heads!

Not that, hey, Raskolnikov’s not such a bad guy after all... no - it’s that he is inwardly bad and so are we, potentially at every moment, bad inside - and that that that will never change.

We don’t change our inner lives; but we CAN constantly be making amends for our mistakes - and starting our life anew in others�� eyes at each moment, though never perhaps to our own complete inner satisfaction.

For our selves aren’t static and we all invariably tend towards moral entropy.

There are no easy answers in Dostoevsky!

I remember so well the time I finally quit smoking - cold turkey, 22 years ago. I was lucky I did it, I guess; but to face the indefinitely long rest of my life - stretching out before me like a vast restless desert - without smokes, seemed unbearable back then!

It was just like the Zen Master says - reaching the top of a thousand-foot pole, and then, CONTINUING TO CLIMB. In empty air. Yikes!

Panic City! The flames of utter hopeless anxiety threatened to engulf me entirely.

So I started to pray. Nonstop. Like a dog chewing a meatless bone! It must have worked... so saith the Preacher.

And I escaped from that Inferno by the very Skin of my Teeth.

So likewise, there are few pat answers in Faith, no matter what we’ve seen or heard: “Ours is only the trying,�� Eliot said. Trying to make the best of a mess!

And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if C.S. Lewis is right, and there remain plenty of challenges in Heaven.

So, there is no finality in this life, Dostoevsky is saying. We can’t rest on our laurels.

Or our guilt, either, for that matter!

The best way I can sum up my thoughts on this Everest of a novel is by quoting W.H. Auden:

“Faith, while it condemns no temperament as incapable of salvation, flatters none as being less in peril than any other... Christianity is a way, not a state, and a Christian is never something one IS, only something we can pray to BECOME.��

And if Raskolnikov is not a Christian, neither are we.

But we must never give up the trying, just like Raskolnikov...

And for us, too, in time there may come Redemption.

And a Peace that passes all understanding, after the intolerable Shirt of Flame is extinguished, in

A condition of complete simplicity
Costing not less than EVERYTHING.