The Fabled Lion

Dear Kate,

Today I want to talk about my hero, a fallen angel, fallen so low that many are now questioning if he is in hell.  He's dead already, deader than dead.  If in our eyes he was once closer to heaven than all of us, his soul more vouchsafed than ours in eternity, it's from the same perspective that we can't reconcile the Saint that he once was to the Devil that he has become.  His name is Ravi Zacharias.

Ravi Zacharias, the greatest Christian apologist ever (I think), a towering giant of faith, the abuser of many women, an alleged rapist.

Last May he died, very quickly, two months after the announcement that he had been diagnosed with cancer.  Swift justice; there is a God after all.  Or maybe not, not so fast.  Maybe God should have kept him alive to bear the consequence of his sins.  No matter what God should do, He should lock Ravi up in hell now.  I might not have a medieval picture of the cosmos or believe in an angry God (or in any God at all), but one thing for sure I know, Ravi should be in hell.

I've been talking about writing a novel but haven't found anyone worth writing about.  Anyone, not anything, pay attention to what I said just now.  You don't write about things in a novel.  You write that in a science journal, an economic report, a sermon.  Yes, you will say at the end it's all for the good of humankind, to the benefit of people and everything else, but the way we do it must by first getting impersonal and speak about the stuffs and ways and doctrines that work for those ends.

Let me clarify.  Say, what is a religion?  I mean in practice, as you have practiced it all your life.  My experience of a religion is the attempt to depersonalize a personal God.  Getting personal with someone is the most dangerous thing you can do, to that person, and to yourself.  We've always been reminded to not "take it personal," especially when you know, by pledging to do the right thing in a bad world, to administer justice by taking on the injustice of being blamed and humiliated for the state of our cosmic fallenness, to get "personal" is to be ineffective in whatever good endeavor we aim to pursue.  In fact, "getting personal" is about the surest way to drive yourself insane.  How long can you stay on a boat wrestling with a tiger in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?  You would rather stay in the warm quiet coffin of your home if that's the only alternative.  You will want to tame the tiger.  You will want to kill the tiger.  You will want to kill God and build yourself a church and speak nice things about Him on the pulpit for your repentance and everyone else's comfort.

When I read Saul Bellow's "Henderson the Rain King" I saw Ravi in the Man, the King, the Lion.  I am sure Ravi would see his own heroes Malcolm Muggeridge and G.K. Chesterton in the character.  Anyone with heroes like these is not right in the head, the heart, and everything else.  But we wanted to see the rightness in Ravi as he gave his best Billy Graham roar to set the world right.  We wanted to be on it, rolling alongside him, as if we are roaring too, lions ourselves, God in us.

Years ago, Ravi came to my province, and some of my friends drove a long way to meet him.  I asked a friend after she came back how it was, the seminar that featured not only him but many other speakers, and she commented not on what she has learned but Ravi himself, "Nah, he's just an old man."   A rhetorical lion limping about on his crutches.  Why would a person say that about another person?  There's something this lady was trying to kill, in Ravi, and even more, in herself.  She was young then, aiming for the jugular.

I want to write a novel about Ravi--no, let me correct myself, I am writing a novel about people circling around Ravi's dead body.  No one can write about Ravi.  How are we to speak about a person we so very much want to depersonalize to satisfy our own religious sentiments, self-righteousness?  If the evidence were right, Ravi was a sociopath, and why don't we just leave him dead at that?  We live in a world that not only has the deepest sympathy for the devils, we often reward them with our money (even charity), attention (even celebration), and justification (even their "rights" to blame and hurt others for their actions).  Why can't we grant the same generosity to Ravi?  Well, we say, cos he has dug his own grave.  If he hasn't claimed to be so right all along we wouldn't want to be so wrong him to send him to hell.  He could have been a snake-oil salesman or Wolf of Wall Street, and have Mailer speak on his behalf and Scorsese tell his tale.  We couldn't tame the lion when he was alive; let's do what needs to be done, now that it is safe for us to proceed.

Ravi had over 200 pictures of women stored in his Blackberry, some explicit, the evidence show.  My novel will begin with one vulture moving closer to the body and ask, Why?  Why didn't you delete the pictures, unto the last moment on your death bed, with a few simple clicks your fingers could still manage?  You knew your cancer was untreatable.  That's the least you could have done to not shame your family this way.  You're a fuckin' heartbreaker, Ravi.  But I know you were too smart to be so stupid.  Were you telling me you have no intention to cover yourself up?  That these women you allegedly abused and some raped actually meant something, someone, to you?  You're fucked up, Ravi.

I will need to finish this letter with a positive note, something decent for you to take home.  But I can't think about anything else now but my own disloyalty.  It took me almost a year after Ravi's death for me to write what I wrote just now.  I was afraid, that's why.  I don't want to get killed.  I am too smart to be called naive, my pride too heavy on my fingers to type the words.  I want to stay decent and nice, even in my temperament, friendly and agreeable to everyone.  I can't afford to be judged and picked apart.

This morning I started running again.

Yours, Alex