29 January 2021 - Friday of the 3rd week of Ordinary Time - Mark 4:26-34

      Yesterday, we celebrated the feast day of St Thomas Aquinas, a Doctor of the Church from the 13th century and even today, one of the most influential theologians of the Church.  Yet, the feast day of St Thomas Aquinas also marks the anniversary of the death of another influential Christian: the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I remember reading his novel Crime and Punishment in college.  And like most Russian novel, I remember that it was really really long. I also read his book Notes from the Underground, a book on existential philosophy, when I was reading just about any book on existential philosophy I could find. I remember reading a book about the faith journey of the devout Catholic actor Martin Sheen, who said that one of the turning points in his life of faith, after a long time of being away from the Catholic Church and of struggling with substance abuse, was reading Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, which was recommended to him by his good friend the film director Terrence Malick.   Dostoyevsky has a very interesting life story, a story with a lot of suffering, struggle, and angst (which is what I would expect in a Russian novelist, I must say).  He was born in Moscow in 1821.  When he was a young man, he was arrested for having been a member of a literary group that was accused of criticizing the Tsarist government of Russia.  His sentence of death was commuted at the last minute, but he was sentenced to a forced labor camp in Siberia for four years, during which time he developed epilepsy, a condition that plagued him the rest of his life.  He also had a lifelong struggle with gambling.  But, through these struggles and the demons that he battled, he was devout in his Orthodox faith and in his faith in Jesus Christ.  In his novels, there is often a contrasting battle between the believer and the skeptic.  He had a very tumultuous relationship with his family, having many affairs and having abandoned them at long periods of time.  Yet, on his deathbed, he read his children the parable of the prodigal son.  His biographer writes that in “this parable of transgression, repentance, and forgiveness,… he wished to leave…heritage to his children; and it may well be seen as his own ultimate understanding of the meaning of his life and the message of his work. 

       We hear another parable in our Gospel today - the parable of the mustard seed, of the power of a faith that start out small, but than grows and develops.  With novels that inspire the faith of others more than a century after they have been written, perhaps the life and faith of Dostoyevsky can be compared to that mustard seed as well.