Grand Inquisitor sketch:

All human-based systems will fail.  This is the lesson of Jesus Christ himself, the man who came from Tralfamadora to teach the human beings of Earth the wisdom of spiritual life.  This was His essential point, that subscribing to, conforming to, following the usual status quo of human society was utter folly, misguided.  And to prove it, he, as he knew, the human system would come and get him and kill him.  How about that for proving his point?

So here is someone, who brought the greatest teacherly wisdom that the consciousness of human beings could possibly understand on a good day.  He teaches us that each of us has within a gift, moral and spiritual, and capable of looking far beyond conforming to the usual selfish self-protective socioeconomic perception.   Each of us has antennae within that pick up the wisdom of the Universe, even if it comes from far away.

 The people, not so tethered to the great system of society and rulership, workers, sort of proto-union organizers, real people, responded, listened.

And those of the people who were more a part of the great human-made system, of course, they resisted.  "No, we are perfect, as perfect as can be," they said amongst themselves, though this is not quite recorded in the Gospels so much.  Their human made system was completely perfect, and indeed the proof of that was the very rewards of high status and importance and all things which protected them from coming to any harm.

So it is that the meek and the mournful, the poor in spirit, are the ones who are ready to receive the higher model of how human beings can continue to exist in harmony with the Universe.  They're happy because they get it, this thing that would otherwise be rather impossible, not to mention completely impractical, to comprehend, to even know where to begin with.

So yes, Dostoevsky was exactly one hundred percent right.  This is exactly what the Grand Inquisitor, the great archbishop, says to the re-captured Christ who has bumbled again upon the Earth.  You are ruining our, OUR, system.  And he is speaking for the Church itself!  The failure of the system meant to support the Lord Jesus Our Savior, the very system...

And Jesus says nothing, absolutely nothing.  Only in the end does he offer the Grand Inquisitor, a kiss.  A kiss reversed, sent back upon the betrayer.

The hack science fiction writer then had a taste from his glass of wine, the equivalent of a soldier lighting a cigarette, as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and my grandfather, Eddie White, had done many many a time, and not necessarily bad for the health, spiritual, mental, physical or otherwise.

And so doing, Dostoevsky, having travelled a bit himself upon the Earth and as a human being traveling in his own skin with all his particular self-made self-involved troubles, establishes a contact with Tralfamador, or Transfalmador, and all such spiritual places, realm where things have been figured out by letting them be, by letting them work things out through time and space and light, rather than attempting to impose that which never need be imposed...

Where did it happen?  Siberia?  Or when the authorities let him out, let him have some meager pension, back in the military...  Or when he, at dark hours, quiet and late at night, at rented apartments in Petersburg, took to writing again...  Almost the very thing that had gotten him into trouble in the first place.

Perhaps it took a child dying, a boy, a boy who had been born later in life, as if by miracle, the kind stenographer woman who saw something in the epileptic writer.  Shakespeare too had lost a son.  It took pain for the writer, to begin the process of Karamazov, beginning in the monastery Fyodor Dostoevsky visited, finding some meaning, some form of grace, some form of commitment to take all his notebooks of recorded conversations and self-conversations...  and thereby finding a way to communicate relevantly concerning the nature of the Beatitudes.


Wherever Jesus went in his life, he had a knack, a talent.  He had a great ability, as great, and maybe even greater than the rest of his miraculous powers, which continue to today, or attracting fellow beings to him and his life and his way.  Are those people too partly from Tralfamador?  May those people, like Peter and the original disciples, John, Andrew, James, Matthew, have been sensitive to the heavens of planets far away?  Might they have travelled once back and forth without remembering...  Where did the light which turned Saul into Paul originate?  What was that visitation like?