By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Last Sunday at church I prayed for comfort from what seemed like the affliction of current events. Our parish priest responded to my plea with onions…Dostoevsky’s onions.
The large volume of hate spewing out of my news feeds last week was overwhelming. Jews murdered in their Pittsburgh synagogue, blacks in a Louisville grocery story, mail bombs everywhere. Florida people killed while doing yoga, and a young Utah father and local mayor attacked and killed while on duty in Afghanistan.
Acknowledging the dismal news, on Sunday Father John Evans told us this story from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “Once upon a time there was a woman, and she was wicked as wicked could be, and she died. And not one good deed was left behind her. The devils took her and threw her into the lake of fire. And her guardian angel stood thinking: what good deed of hers can I remember to tell God? Then he remembered and said to God: once she pulled up an onion and gave it to a beggar woman. And God answered: take now that same onion, hold it out to her in the lake, let her take hold of it and pull, and if you pull her out of the lake, she can go to paradise. The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her: here, woman, he said, take hold of it and I’ll pull. And he began pulling carefully, and had almost pulled her all of the way out, when other sinners in the lake saw her being pulled out and all began holding on to her so as to be pulled out with her. But the woman was wicked as wicked could be, and she began to kick them with her feet: ‘It’s me who’s getting pulled out, not you; it’s my onion, not yours.’ No sooner did she say it than the onion broke. And the woman fell back into the lake and is burning there to this day. And the angel wept and went away.”
It turns out that Father John had found his own Dostoevsky onion during the past week. He went to Salt Lake City’s Kol Ami (“All Our People”) synagogue and participated in a vigil for the victims of the Pittsburgh shooting. He stood in the Jewish synagogue with a leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and representatives of a dozen other faith organizations.
Together, they listened to a Muslim choir sing, lit 500 candles, and heard Rabbi Samuel Spector proclaim: “My friends, you all came here tonight, knowing that my people are targets, you all came here tonight and said ‘We are all Jews,’ and I guarantee you that if and when, God forbid, this happens to another faith group, my community will come forward and say, ‘We are all Muslims,’ ‘We are all Catholics,’ ‘We are all Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians, we are all children of God.’”
Dostoevsky’s onion parable explains that none of us are going to get out of hell, whether it be a hell on earth or elsewhere, by ourselves. Thus, last Sunday Father John told us, “When an angel is pulling you from hell with an onion, reach out with your other hand and pull someone else out with you.”
The same Dostoevsky novel also includes a story about another priest and another onion (which by the way was a staple in the Russian diet). This priest, a Russian Orthodox monk named Father Zosima, sees the great pain in the world but nonetheless urges his companions to seek beauty despite the presence of widespread cruelty and misery. Zosima believes that hell is not the external circumstances or conditions around us, but rather is “the suffering of no longer being able to love.”
In a vision someone else has in the novel, Zosima is a guest at the Wedding of Cana. The old priest explains his presence at the eternal banquet this way: “I gave an onion to a beggar, so I, too, am here. And many here have given only an onion each — only one little onion.”
Men and women have searched for centuries for the meaning of life and for the secret of happiness. Sometimes I think we have made this whole search way too complicated. Maybe instead we need look to only one little onion.
