Monastic Luckpilling

vivianimbriotis | March 3, 2023, 2:23 p.m.

The dove, when it comes, is not white. You would simply call it a pigeon, though formally it goes by Columba Liva, the rock dove.  It does not come at the same time each day, and sometimes it does not come at all. This means Theodosius is forced to wait, watching the sky. He has learned to bring a cushion with him.

Theodosius was born to wait. He left his parents young, abandoning mortal ties for a chance to touch the divine. He had been embraced by Saint Symeon and told he was destined for revelation. For years he longed for the solitude of a monastic life, but first he settled in the Church of the Seat of St Mary. To work. To offer spiritual guidance. Many thought he was good at it, and so there he was visited by a great many admirers.

He could not stand the admirers. Certainly, they professed that they wanted salvation, but none of them were willing to put in the work. Silently (and as a monk, Theodosius did most things silently), he wondered why they could not, like him, choose the path of Abraham. Instead, time after time, they would choose alcohol, or violence, or even occasionally atheism. It brought a pounding to his head to think of them.

Now, finally, he was alone. Except, sometimes, for the dove. Here on the mountain, at the Cave of the Magi where the Wise Men had once sought shelter, there was no one unholy, because there was just Theodosius. See him seated on his cushion, his beard a premature white, headwrap in situ, tunic of linen undyed, feet dirty and bare.

The first sign of it is a dirty speck in the sky. The rock dove is a mottled gray, with a pearlescent sheen across its breast plumage. As it flares its wings the white underfeathers are revealed, a flash of sunlight in the evening sky. It lands atop the cave entrance, itself atop the mountain. It pecks at the ground aimlessly, then hops forward, once. When its beak opens, no coo is forthcoming. But the ground rumbles (a Richter 4 event), and the wind and the sound of falling pebbles conspire, the gestalt result resembling a voice:

“Theo, bro, you have got to stop asking me to come solve philosophy for you.”

Theodosius, head bowed, commits these words to memory. Later, he will record them exactly, preserved in a secret tome within the monastery that would bear his name, safe for over three hundred years until anno domini 911, when the last word would rot away.

“LORD, I ask you but one question. Why do some refuse to follow your Word, when others are holy?”

The wind sighs as the pigeon’s head droops. Theodosius’ eyes fall upon the earth, the dust having formed unlikely patterns close to the square Aramaic alphabet: “Yeah look man, the Calvinists are probably the closest. It’s all just luck.”

“I apologise, LORD, for I do not understand.”

The dove takes flight, the whispers of its wings murmuring staccato: “Ask yourself why you became a monk, mate.”

That night, see Theodosius toss and turn. He has been unable to get to sleep, contemplating those words. He chose to become a monk with the free will his God had granted him, and he chose it because it was right. Just. It was Holy. Perhaps we might say it was ethically obligated. But biology shackles us all, and try though his cortex might, his Reticular Activating System is winning, and dragging him down into rest.

In the depths, he dreams.

He dreams first of the time he approached his parents to tell them he was leaving. “I will be like Abraham”, he said. And they were sad, but like him they knew that he had made this choice of his own free will. He made the choice because he was self-negating, because he was studious, because he cared about salvation.

He dreams of mysterious movements in utuero, of the diet his mother ate, and of the biological dice of his conception that gave him academic potential. He dreams of his father’s hard work that paid for a tutor, who ignited that potential into studiousness as a child.

He dreams for a moment he was born in a different place, and had simply never heard of the LORD, and is grateful when he recalls the time his parents first read to him from the scripture, the first step on a path of righteousness.

He dreams of his friends, all of them younger than him, and how those experiences made him self-negating before the age of six.

He dreams last of starting at the wall of his parent’s house, late at night. The day he made that fateful choice, being studios and self-negating and devout, to leave. He dreamed of the moments just before which that choice was made, his minds eye findings its way through his scalp and skull, and to a single neuron in his prefrontal cortex, ions dancing across its membrane. His view grows smaller and then smaller still, a tiny patch of phospholipids with a single cellular receptor, and then smaller still, a single electron hovering between two states. The world holds its breath. The particle, smeared across its probability distribution, teeters.

All at once it collapses to the left, and the receptor it is a part of snaps into a new shape, and the electrical fire races up and down the membrane surface as the neuron comes alive, and signals the neurons around it, and from them propagate a signal that interfaces with other signals, and now Theodosius sees his teenage self’s eyes close, a decision made.

Even dreaming, he understands. What if the particle had gone right?

Thereafter, Theodosius sees the dove only once more, and asks but one more question. This time, it is raining – that persistent unstoppable kind of rain that saturates. Over the pitter-patter he cries, “LORD! Whyfor would you curse us with the perception that we can choose holiness, when naught but the cosmic dice separate us from profane ways?”

It is easy for the dove to speak, this time. Pareidolic patterns in the tinkling of the rain coalesce – “But why would you think you are ruled by luck, that you are slave to the type of person fate has ruled you play, whereas I am free to choose my traits and character?”

See Theodosius, stricken, eyes brimming with tears.

“Do not ascribe to me freedom from luck. I am Jealous, indeed, and merciful, but I did not choose to be, anymore than you chose to be self-negating. I was bound to make you as I have, just as you were bound to be a monk. Bound by luck. Bound by the dice. Do not ascribe anyone, even me, some primal causal agency over all their actions.”

See Theodosius, sobbing.

“After all bro, I am only a very small dove.”

As the dove flies away, tears dry on Theodosius’ cheeks. Watch as pride in his accomplishments falls away – his accomplishments? When he thinks of his admirers there is no fury. There is nothing left but gratitude, and moral obligation. He squares his shoulders and strides down the mountain.

He is too distracted to hear the receding dove murmuring something about “talking to Thomas Nagel.”

The monastery of St Theodosius has been rebuilt, smaller in stature, starting in 1898. It lies on the West Bank. There is no compelling historical evidence either way as to whether the Abrahamic God visited it dressed as a pigeon.