Innumerable Worlds of God

It rained most of the day today.

I covered the root cellar with an old canvas tarp that I had borrowed from the monastery to use as a tent when I first moved in and was building the cottage. Then the rest of the day I spent indoors drinking tea and reading Fyodor Dostoevsky The Brother’s Karamazov. (I had gotten a little behind in my reading.)

In addition to whatever new reading or miscellaneous re-reading I'm doing, there are four classic novels that I read every year to mark the seasons. Every spring I read The Brothers Karamazov, every summer Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, every fall Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, and every winter J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. These compose for me a literary liturgical calendar, if you will; and the discipline and devotion of reading them has become almost as significant.

Today I finished Part II, including Book VI of The Brothers Karamazov – the three chapters on the life and teachings of the Elder, Father Zosima. Every year that passage is an exercise in humble self-examination and a call to a higher, more spiritually developed way of living in this world.

The clouds have passed.

The stars are out ... threads to the ‘innumerable worlds of God.’