Svetislav Basara - The Cyclist Conspiracy

If a man completely rises above his sin and renounces it, then God, who is true to his promise, will act as if the sinner never sinned. He won’t allow him to suffer for a moment because of his sin. If he committed his sin even as much as all people sinned all together, God will not force him to atone for them. In doing so, God established a closeness to man that he created with no other being. If he is convinced that the man is truly ready, he will not look at what the man was before. God is the God of the present. He accepts you and takes you in just as you are, and not how you were. God joyfully suffers and has suffered for years because of the evil and iniquity that arose because of all the sins done in the world, so that man would attain full cognition of God’s love and so that that love and gratitude would be as great as possible, the world stronger, which often happens after sin.

Those are my thoughts and I await the day when God will expunge all sins.

With respect,

W. K.

17.

The fate of that letter by my father was strange. The Patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church was enthralled by my father’s interpretation of God’s forgiveness. He even introduced it officially into the teachings of the Georgian church. Witold was quite proud of himself. He showed the Patriarch’s letter to his friends and his reputation grew, even among the intelligentsia. However, many years later, as I was reading the works of Meister Eckhart, I found a passage of my father’s letter, the very one on forgiveness, copied word for word. I was almost disappointed in Meister Eckhart, and then I realized: My father was the one who plagiarized! By then, Witold was already dead. I laughed. Writing against sin, he committed the sin of vanity, attributing someone else’s words to himself. But perhaps that was also part of his plan to sink to the very bottom of lawlessness, in order to rise above all of that in one moment and then draw quite close to God.

18.

But the heretical teachings of Meister Eckhart remained a part of the tradition of the Georgian Orthodox Church as one more proof that the ways of the Lord are mysterious.

19.

(part of the record of the investigation against my father)

INTERROGATOR: In May, 1913, you set off on your velocipede on a trip around the country. On that occasion, you caused confusion and disturbances through your actions in public places. Who stands behind your actions? I repeat! Who gave you the orders to act?

WK: The Holy Ghost stands behind my actions. A few months before that, when I received the commandment from the Spirit to preach the imminent end of the world, I knew that I was bound to fail, but I got on my velocipede and set off on the road. Because, I hope you know that, it is impossible to oppose God. The prophet Jonah tried that in his day, and we all know what happened to him. I do not know why I was the one chosen. But the ways of God are mysterious. Maybe that is the reason.

INTERROGATOR: To whom did you preach your first sermon?

WK: I gave my first sermon to a group of young men and women on some sort of excursion. I was passing by a field on my bicycle, I saw them and thought: Young people will believe me before the old will, and so I stopped. From my backpack, I took the banner: W. Kowalsky, PROPHET OF THE LIVING GOD and hung it on the steering column of the bike. The young men and women gathered around me immediately. The sight of a fifty-year-old in a dusty track suit necessarily attracts attention. Perhaps it was my good looks that were decisive in me being chosen as a prophet: I did attract a lot of attention. Prophets have to prophesy, and the people must persecute the prophets. That is the way the world order works.

INTERROGATOR: What did you say and how did those present react to your words?

WK: I cleared my throat and started off fairly tactlessly. But there are no tactics in prophesying. “There is,” I shouted, “life eternal and mortal!”

INTERROGATOR: What kind of reaction did your words bring out?

WK: At first — none at all. Nobody said anything. The girls elbowed the boys, they giggled, but all in all they didn’t cross the boundaries of decency. On one hand, this made me happy: it is nice to see such well-behaved young people; but on the other hand, it made me sad: in order to reach the Kingdom of God, all boundaries have to be crossed, even the boundaries of decency. In the old times they didn’t hesitate to cast stones. But just doing that, they didn’t cross the boundaries of indecency, which comes down to the same. When I thought about it, deep in my soul I felt a certain emotion, dull though it may have been, no matter what a wreck of a prophet I was.

INTERROGATOR: Did you say anything else?

WK: Yes, I cried that life eternal is not impossible, but the one we have is. I referred to Plato, Plotinus, Scotus, Erigena, and Thomas à Kempis. I offered statistical proof, too. The average life-span is sixty years, a century-span is one hundred. Some live a span of eighty, and some a span of one hundred years, the span is not constant. It says nothing. It only proves that this-worldly life is impossible, and that the length of that impossibility varies from case to case.

INTERROGATOR: Were there any comments?

WK: No. In fact, yes. One young man asked me if I believe in eternal life?

INTERROGATOR: And what was your answer?

WK: That I do. With that, I spoke a ninety percent lie. Truth be told, I myself hardly believe in the ten percent possibility of resurrection. That’s because, like you, I am seventy-five percent nothing, with a tendency to become one hundred percent nothing. Augustine wrote that God created two kinds of beings: one close to himself, the other kind close to nothingness. We, people, are among those third-rate creatures. The seventy-five percent of nothingness that we so carefully conceal, that is what ruins our calculations. Because of it, all human projects, no matter how well planned, show an inexplicable tendency to return into nothingness. I knew that my project would end up there as well.

INTERROGATOR (to his assistant): Have this Augustine character checked into.

INTERROGATOR (to my father): And then?

WK: Then, some sort of teacher showed up, a professor or whatnot, and he cried, “Hey, he’s blaspheming against God! Grab him!”

INTERROGATOR: How did you react?

WK: Seeing that the crowd was rushing toward me, I jumped on my bicycle and tried to escape while stones were flying around me, thrown without precision, luckily. I’m not a bad cyclist, but the young men were running really fast. At one instant, I saw some sort of village church; the Sunday service had just begun, so I headed there and rode my velocipede into God’s house, hoping for sanctuary.

INTERROGATOR: How did the congregation react?

WK: They knocked me off the velocipede and started beating me for blasphemy. The pastor was among the most enthusiastic. In the meantime, my pursuers also arrived. Who knows what would have happened to me, but some of the people cried, “Let him go, can’t you see he’s crazy?” Then they stopped beating me and led me out of the church. They even gave me a ham sandwich.

20.

One night in my dreams, I was awaited on the corner by a man wearing a long leather overcoat. I stiffened at the thought that the agents of the secret police had discovered our meeting place, that they had dreamt it and come to arrest us. But the man smiled the way a person smiles when they want to show that they are not agents of the secret police and he asked, “Are you waiting for Ana F.?” “Yes,” I said. “You see,” said he, “that’s why they sent me.”

I didn’t dare to ask him who had sent him.