Learning to give onions

     Sunday our Theology of the Body Rector’s Forum continues with “Why Love?,” reading pages 31-34 in Theology of the Body in Simple Language. In the meantime, here’s a chapter and a couple quotes from Doesteyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov that hopefully may inspire our thinking about life as a gift from God that we, in turn, offer to and receive from others. (Here’s some extra comments on the scene.)

     Grushenka is a little like the woman at the well in John’s gospel to whom Aloysha extends love. Aloysha is a novice at a Russian monastery who has been sent into the world by his elder Father Zossima.

     Grushenka says to Aloysha,  “I’ve been waiting all my life for someone like you, I knew that someone like you would come and forgive me. I believed that, nasty as I am, someone would really love me, not only with a lustful love!” “What have I done to you?” answered Alyosha bending over her with a tender smile, and gently taking her by the hands; “I only gave you an onion, nothing but a tiny little onion, that was all!”

     Later that evening Alyosha has a vision of Father Zossima at the great heavenly banquet.  Father Zossima says, “Why do you wonder at me?  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….What are all our deeds?  And you, my gentle one, you, my kind boy, you too have known how to give a famished woman an onion today.”

     In the words of the blogger linked to above: “Think about it.  All of us, no matter how righteous we may be, all our righteous deeds amount to no more than giving away an onion to a beggar. And yet, giving an onion to a beggar is enough to move the heart of God.”