A Stitch In Space

by Christopher Lansdown

  “No, you are. This is the difference between natural evil and moral evil. Moral evil is when you seek to do evil, natural evil is when you are, regardless of what you meant to do. To give a concrete example, if you try to push someone off a building to his death, but it turns out there’s a ledge one foot below the roof you’re standing on and the person isn’t hurt, you’re morally guilty of murder, despite barely causing inconvenience. And on the flip side, if you slip on something, bump into someone you didn’t know was there, and happen to pitch them over the safety railing, you’re not morally guilty of anything, but the man who fell is just as dead as if you meant to kill him.”

  “I think I see what you mean. She’s only a whore if she realizes she shouldn’t have sex for money, but either way she’s a prostitute?”

  “Something like that,” he said, “Bearing in mind the example is fanciful, there’s no reason to believe that Katie has ever had sex for money, and remember that what I originally said was that I’m not sure Katie thinks that having sex with a man is significant, not that she’s slept with a large number of men, or in fact any at all.”

  “OK, I get it. But we were talking about why she was trying to seduce you. There is another option, you know. Sometimes women will try to seduce men just to prove that they’re desirable.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that in confessions often enough. But I don’t think that applies in this case. While not high status enough on my own, I’ll grant that the vow of celibacy puts me in the same category of conquests as married men, but unlike being married, there’s no other woman, so there’s no proof in competition. Moreover, Katie doesn’t strike me like low self esteem is her problem.”

  “Then what is her problem?”

  “That is an excellent question, and I honestly don’t know the answer. In the end, it’s only really my business to find out if it means that there’s some way that I can help her. At present, I can’t see much that I could do other than what I would do in any event.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Answer questions when asked.”

  “Couldn’t you give her a push in the right direction, if you know which direction she’s off in?”

  “I think the degree that people can push each other around is greatly exaggerated, both for better and for worse. We can tempt each other, and we can help each other, I’m not trying to deny either. We can have a great influence on each other; but to have the influence we mean to have requires a great deal more understanding than any of us actually have. That’s why the best course is usually to mind our own business, answer questions fearlessly, and help where asked; this basically means trusting God that where he wants us to help, he’ll give us the opportunity, and where he doesn’t want us to help, we won’t get in the way.

  “That’s why there’s some benefit to talking about others, in that we can learn where we can help, and sometimes we can even learn lessons for ourselves, but by and large talking about others is a practice it’s probably best to avoid, as it too easily turns into mere gossip, which does no one any good and everyone some minor harm. And occasionally, it can poison relationships, though that does depend on the people involved. People who can love others despite their failings are in much less danger of having relationships poisoned than those whose love depends on believing the ones they love very close to perfect.”

  “People do sometimes err by forgetting that.” he added, though to whom he was saying it was unclear.

  “On that note, the gospel of Mark?” she said.

  “I’d have trouble imagining a better time,” he said.

  * * *

  Their conversation ranged over a variety of topics, but eventually came to the subject of why the two gospels Hannah had so far read were, while substantially similar, so different.

  “There were differences in sources,” Fr. Xris said. “Luke was a physician and companion of St. Paul, while Mark was a companion of St. Peter. So while both drew from the recollections of the Christian community, there were differences in what was available on the basis of whose memory was being consulted. There was also the difference in audience. St. Mark was writing to a Roman audience, while St. Luke to a non-Roman but Gentile audience. Each audience had the things they cared about and the things they didn’t; the things that they would understand and the things they wouldn’t. But there was also the difference in personality of the writers.”

  “So I hate to ask it, but couldn’t the differences come from different people remembering different things?” she asked.

  “If you mean that about omissions, then certainly. No one wrote about what he didn’t remember. If you mean, ‘did they make mistakes’, the short answer is no, but it’s a much more difficult question.”

  “Why more difficult?”

  “Because when evaluating a claim, you have to evaluate the whole thing. You can either accept it, or have some sort of explanation for how that sort of mistake could have happened. That’s not an absolute, by the way. It’s a guideline. There isn’t enough time to evaluate all of the claims made in this life. And you don’t have to accept something if you don’t have an explanation for how it came to be wrong, you just have to be discontent with not having an explanation for it.

  “In the case of Christianity, you have to consider the entire claim. You can’t just assume that people put no more effort into remembering what Christ said and did than they would into an unimportant event in the marketplace one morning. People don’t work like that.

  “God walking on the earth would make a deep impression on people. People under the impression that God incarnate had talked to them would take the trouble of remembering what he said. And if God had indeed taken on flesh and lived among us, he would give us some help in remembering what he said while he was here.

  “That sort of loosey-goosey ‘Jesus may have said anything’ stuff would barely work if Christianity were false, but it just doesn’t make any sense at all if Christianity is true.

  “And incidentally, it wouldn’t even be very likely if Christianity were false, since then somebody has to be a liar since Christianity being false but the miracles and resurrection being true is just absurd. So you’ve either got Jesus faking it all, which makes the resurrection really difficult to explain since dead men don’t fake coming back to life, or the disciples had to have fabricated it all. Unlike the dead guy faking his resurrection, that’s at least not absurd on its face, but it’s still really problematic for several reasons.”

  “For one thing,” Hannah said, “their claims were all very public. I mean, it would be hard to claim to have fed five thousand people with a miracle if nobody had heard about it before.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “There are a lot of other examples of public miracles. In one of the gospels, it described Jesus as curing all of the sick people in a bunch of towns. That would be really hard to pull off if no one had heard of Jesus curing anyone.”

  “But couldn’t the apostles have just made their claims to people who had never heard of Jesus? And eventually all of the people who one could check with would be dead?”

  “Interestingly, that relies on a weird heresy that was popular about 400 - 500 years ago, around the turn of the millennia. Maybe a bit before that. Anyway, it basically consisted of believing that the bible was the entirety of Christianity—that being a Christian consisted of saying that the bible was true and (optionally) reading it.

  “But Christianity is not a book-based religion. Christianity is a living thing, and for a long time, Christianity was spread entirely by word of mouth. The Gospel of Mark was written about 30-40 years after Jesus’ death, Matthew and Luke about 40-50 years after the death of Jesus, and the gospel of John was about 60 years after the death of Jesus. Christianity existed before these were written down. Moreover, the first Christians were all Jews. You can’t be hoodwinked by unverifiable stories of something a long time ago in a far-away place when the stories are about things that happened last year where you were.”

 
“Moreover, Christianity benefited—in this regard—by having a large number of dedicated enemies early on. The enemies of Christianity traveled all over the Roman empire trying to stamp Christianity out, and if no one had remembered Jesus, that would have been a big talking point of theirs.

  “Also, Christianity grew very rapidly. It was widespread and popular a few short decades after Jesus’ death. That’s not the stuff that unverifiable claims about an obscure historical figure are made of.

  “Which, by the way, answers another question I’ve heard not infrequently about a few of the more public miracles. ‘If this happened, wouldn’t everyone who saw it have become a Christian?’ For all we know, they did. There were certainly enough Christians early on for that to be the case for any or all of the miracles. We’re not talking about a cult which consisted of one charismatic man and a few dozen gullible followers. There were many thousands of Christians from the start.

  “According to the Acts of the Apostles, in St. Peter’s first public proclamation, on Pentecost, he said ‘Jesus, whom you crucified, God has raised from the dead’ and went on to say, ‘Brothers, no one can deny that the patriarch David is dead and buried: his tomb is still with us... God raised this man Jesus to life, and of that we are all witnesses.’

  “There’s a wonderful implied argument: if you don’t believe that Jesus was raised from the dead, go find his tomb and him in it. Plus, it really highlighted just how significant someone coming back from the dead is. It would help to be familiar with just how much a first century Jew revered David to realize the contrast, and how important it makes Jesus. Anyway, it goes on to say that Peter used many other arguments, and the Jews he was speaking to were cut to the heart and asked what to do. ‘Be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins’ they were told, and it goes on to say that about three thousand were added to the number of Christians. A little later it mentions the total number of Christians reaching about five thousand, though it doesn’t fix the time for that, but the text implies a few weeks, or months at the most.

  “Now, you can of course say that this text might itself have been lying in after-times, but it would be strange for people who have never heard of a cult to be told that it’s very popular by the one guy who invented it just then. It’s hard to lie successfully about a thing being popular when it isn’t.”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “Moreover, there then becomes the problem of why this guy invented a religion which took pains to emphasize the importance of telling the truth. Most new religions of the time tended to emphasize the importance of attractive women having sex with the founders of those religions, they didn’t typically place strictures against even thinking about adultery and pointing out that if you need to swear that you’re telling the truth for people to believe you, it means that you don’t tell the truth often enough.

  “That’s what I mean about having to have an explanation. Most of the explanations I’ve heard for Christianity (I mean, that explain how it came to be despite being false) tend to assume that Jesus was a fraud but the disciples were sincere when explaining the miracles, tend to assume that he was sincere but the disciples were frauds when explaining the resurrection, and as often as not, assume that all of the original Christians were sincere and later Christian bishops were frauds when explaining the acts of the apostles. And then if you ask about the Christian persecutions, the later Christian bishops were sincere and taken in by earlier frauds. It’s sort of like a circular firing squad of gullible scam artists. Each step in the chain can sound plausible, but it becomes ridiculous when you step back and look at the whole picture.

  “Plus, it generally assumes that the medieval church structure, complete with wealthy bishops, came about more or less on Pentecost. For most of the people, if you really push them for an explanation of Christianity, they more or less believe that the modern bishops wrote the bible then time traveled back to the time of Jesus and dropped it off, and everyone (possibly including Jesus) just bought it. They won’t describe it that way, obviously. Usually you can’t get them to describe it in any coherent way, but at the end of the day the reason why they won’t describe it in any coherent way is that their ideas simply don’t cohere.

  “Now, in some sense, OK. No one can understand everything. But it’s not OK to be happy with that. You may need to suspend thinking about something because you have work to do, that’s just part of living. But that doesn’t mean it’s OK to put it down forever without picking it up again. That’s just laziness and intellectual dishonesty.”

  “It sounds like you have experience with this,” Hannah said.

  “Some,” he said. “I’ve known atheists whose explanations of Christianity were just absurd, and who didn’t care that they were absurd. That’s troubling, because it suggests that they’ve given up caring about truth. That’s unnatural for a human being, so it will lead to unhappiness, but it also has an element of intellectual suicide about it. If you decide you’re never going to think again, then what hope is there for you? How do you get a man who’s committed intellectual suicide to come back to life?”

  Hannah shrugged her shoulders.

  “Fortunately,” Fr. Xris said, “though for men it may be impossible, but for God, all things are possible.”

  Chapter 8

  Later that evening, Fr. Xris dropped in on Freia during her shift.

  “So have you talked with Katie since I did?” he asked as he walked into the engineering room.

  “I have,” Freia said.

  “And are you pleased?” he asked. “I believe I did as you asked.”

  “You did,” Freia said, “though not as I expected.”

  Fr. Xris was startled by this. Wasn’t talking with Katie about shared interests exactly what Freia had wanted. Then a thought occurred to him.

  “You didn’t expect me to see through her acting?”

  “I didn’t,” she said.

  “Did you expect me to fall for it enough to sleep with her?” he said.

  “No,” she said.

  She turned from the instrument panel to face him.

  “I know that your pants are going to stay zipped on this trip,” she said.

  “Then why throw me to the wolf?” he asked.

  “The wolf?”

  “The expression is, ‘throw me to the wolves,’ but in this case there’s only one.”

  “Oh,” Freia said, and laughed. “I wanted to see what would happen. You don’t know what something is until it’s tested.”

  “You know, I’m starting to get the impression that you’re not as innocent as you seem.”

  “Did I give you the impression that I’m innocent?”

  “Of course you did,” he said. “You know full well that the image you project is an innocent care-free child of nature. The spring-time of paganism, full of optimism and enjoying everything.”

  Freia smiled.

  “Do I give that impression?”

  “You know you do,” he said. “I’d be sad to think that it’s a show.”

  “Would you prefer not to be sad?” she asked.

  “I’d rather know the truth.”

  “What is truth?” she said.

  “Have you read the gospel of John?” he asked in surprise.

  “Maybe.”

  She smiled

  He cocked his head to one side and looked at her very intently.

  “What game are you playing?” he asked.

  “It would be cheating if I told you,” she said.

  “So why the pretense?” he asked. “Why play the innocent?”

  “It’s easier,” Freia said. “It saves one having to deal with boring people getting too close. And it gives one license to say whatever you want and people just brush it off.

  “That sounds rather lonely,” he said.

  Freia gestured around the empty room. “Do you think somebody who needs a lot of companionship would take a job like this?”

  “Fair enough,” he
said.

  “So tell me,” he said. “What do you have to lose by being honest with me?”

  “That doesn’t sound very interesting,” Freia said.

  “Or are you worried that I won’t be interested?” he said. “It’s somewhat unclear how you being mysterious will be interesting to you.”

  “How you react will be interesting to me.”

  “I suppose, though couldn’t you just ask me?”

  “But how would I ever know whether you were right?”

  “But how do you intend to keep my interest? If I stop believing you, I’m not very likely to want to talk to you.”

  “That is a risk. I admit that I will have to stay interesting.”

  “But the truth is the most interesting of all. What are you going to do? Drop hints periodically that maybe you’re interested in Christianity? I’ve met plenty of people who were maybe interested in Christianity. Mostly it doesn’t go anywhere, and the thing is, it’s not my problem if it doesn’t. Sure, I want to help people where I can, but I learned a long time ago not to play the game of trying to emotionally manipulate people into being interested. If you have a question, you know where to find me, and it’s not my job to make you come ask. It’s just my job to answer the door when you knock.”

  Freia didn’t immediately answer.

  Fr. Xris gestured around at the empty space Freia had pointed to moments before.

  “How well has playing games worked so far?” he said.

  Freia was silent.

  “It’s up to you, of course,” he said. “But why not try something different? The great advantage which I have, as a conversational partner, is that I don’t matter. I’ll be off this ship in a few months, and then you’ll never see me again. You truly have nothing to lose.”

  She looked into his eyes.

  “I really don’t know what to make of you,” she said. “It would be so easy to believe everything that you say.”

  “I try,” he said.

  He didn’t clarify what it was that he tried to do.

  * * *

  The switch from accelerating to cruising meant the switch to regular gravity, and for whatever reason a sense of normalcy seemed to come with the regular gravity. Hannah continued her studies with Fr. Xris. Shaka continued to come to daily mass. Xiao largely kept to himself except for dinner and games at night.