What If...?

[Polycarp1]

I'm something of a fan of science fiction and the related genres -- Tolkien's fantasy, for example. And I ran across something that really makes one want to speculate a while ago, before I joined Christian Forums -- and a recent post in News & Current Events brought it back to mind.

Harry Turtledove is an Orthodox Jew with a Ph.D. in Byzantine History, and was for some years a professor in that field at a California university. But what's made him famous is a series of "alternate universe" stories -- in which, for example, Lee's plans for Gettysburg are not discovered by the Union, and the Civil War ends quite differently, with strange consequences down through the rest of history. He has several such series going, all of them quite popular among fans of this particular genre.

What provoked this thread, though, was two short stories in a collection entitled Islands in the Stream. In this alternate history, Orthodox missionaries went a bit further south during the later years of the divided Roman Empire than they did in real history, making converts. One result of this was a man who felt called to a monastic life, a great mystic on fire with love for the Lord, whose writings and teachings led him to be canonized as one of the saints of the church. In one story, a character proudly displays an ikon of this St. Mahmoud of Yathrib.

It kind of makes you wonder what big results small impacts might have.

 

[MariaRegina]

Dear Polycarp:

Have you read any of Kyriacos Markides' books? His Mountain of Silence available from Amazon.com is powerful. Kyriacos talks about little things making big differences.

 

[Reader Nilus]

The following is from Met ANTHONY (Bloom's) article ON Death that appeared in Sobornost vol.1, №2, 1978
Jeff the Finn
The seeds we sow
Death is never the end. The good we have done continues after us and bears fruit in the lives of others. Unfortunately, the corollary is also true: we can also leave a legacy of evil.
On the positive side, consider the effect of the Gospels. There are countless people who have been converted and transformed by reading even a small passage from them. This they gain from what someone, many centuries ago, formulated and wrote down for the sake of Christ. I myself owe my faith to St Mark. If there is anything good that has come out of my life it is because one day, when I was fifteen years of age, I read St Mark's Gospel and Christ revealed himself and entered into my life.
By contrast, I think of quite other people who have written books, such as the French nineteenth century writer Gobineau. Gobineau wrote some remarkable short stories, but also a miserable little treatise on the inequality of races. It is a treatise that would now be altogether and deservedly forgotten, except for one thing: it was read by Hitler. It is difficult to suppose that Gobineau shares no responsibility before God for all that resulted from his book. He was a theoretician. But his theories became practice, and they were to cost millions of innocent lives.
In this connection, I remember a fable by Krylov. Two individuals were sentenced to hell and placed in neighbouring cauldrons. One was a murderer, the other had merely written some trashy novels. The author took a quick look over the rim of his cauldron to see how the murderer was faring. He himself was being boiled so fiercely that he could not imagine how his neighbour might be treated. To his indignation he saw the murderer basking in tepid water. He summoned the devil on duty and expressed his dissatisfaction: 'I merely wrote some novels, and yet you give me such a violent boiling. Whereas this man committed murder and he is relaxing as if that were his bath'. 'True', said the devil, 'but that's no accident, it's deliberate.' 'How so?' 'Well', said the devil, 'this man murdered someone in a fit of rage. So we give him a hard boiling every now and again because that's how his rage flared up, then we give him a rest because it subsided. As for you, whenever anyone buys one of your books we stoke up the fire under your cauldron and add extra fuel'.
There is a theological point here. Our life does not end conveniently when we die, even on earth. It continues over the centuries through heredity and through the by-products of our existence; and we continue to carry a responsibility for its repercussions. Thus, we have met today; I have spoken; I shall be answerable for anything that you will have received and for the way in which it may affect your life.