Crossroads: A Parafable

It hap­pened that three men died at the same time. Since this occurred in such a syn­chro­nized man­ner, they decid­ed to trav­el togeth­er to the realm of the dead.

The road was very long. Even­tu­al­ly the three men came to a cross­roads, one road wend­ed its way into a dark val­ley, the oth­er path led to a glam­orous moun­tain. They men part­ed ways, one went toward the moun­tain, one head­ed for the val­ley and the third stayed put, con­tent where he was.

When the first man present­ly arrived at a moun­tain mead­ow he was a bit tired from his exer­tions and need­ed refresh­ment. Luck­i­ly, a well-appoint­ed cot­tage was near­by, which he approached and entered. Imme­di­ate­ly he was seized by dev­ils and thrown into a cookpot.

The sec­ond man took much longer to reach the val­ley, because his trail often seemed to dis­ap­pear or lead through dan­ger­ous areas. When he was com­plete­ly exhaust­ed he chanced upong a rude hut. He entered and was imme­di­ate­ly accost­ed by an angel and led to a ban­quet.

The third man quick­ly grew quite bored sit­ting by the fork, but still could­n’t make up his mind which path to take. Even­tu­al­ly he turned into a stone.

This real­ly isn’t a sto­ry about rewards for liv­ing a good life or doing good deeds. I specif­i­cal­ly tried to avoid giv­ing that impres­sion by not plac­ing any sort of judg­ment on the folks involved. This is more the result of some­thing the slight­ly bum­bling Fr. Tom said at Mass on Sun­day. I don’t remem­ber exact­ly what it was, since he does­n’t artic­u­late his thoughts as pre­cise­ly as the pas­tor, but it trig­gered a thought that faith is always a strug­gle or that one should nev­er assume that the work is done. A Chris­t­ian who believes that they have won sal­va­tion is guilty of hubris. AH! That is what Fr. Tom said… an appli­ca­tion of hubris [over­ween­ing pride] that I had not thought of. Hubris used as an assump­tion of strong faith, good Chris­tian­i­ty or sal­va­tion. Of course, this is also anoth­er instance of Catholic ‘you’ll nev­er be good enough’-ness, but it got the gears turn­ing.

I sup­pose I’m try­ing to make a point that a per­son [or in this case read­er of the parafa­ble] should nev­er assume that faith is ade­quate. Or maybe slight­ly broad­er, that what is right and what is wrong are always assump­tions. That, if one believes in God, judg­ment, moral­i­ty and reward are things we assume we know about, deserve, etc. So hope­ful­ly the read­er assumed that the guy head­ing to the fan­cy-pants moun­tain was going to run into groovy­ness while the dark­ling val­ley was going to lead to cer­tain doom.

This might be in oppo­si­tion to the rel­a­tiv­i­ty I wrote about last week. It might dis­sim­i­late too much. But then again, I think I might have under­stood that inher­ent­ly by hav­ing the third man be stuck in a pur­ga­to­ry of inde­ci­sive inde­ci­sion. Hm.