Fragrance (novel) [29]
Pr. Dr. Dorin Octavian Picioruș
Fragrance
(novel)
*
The Police car summons you and you stop in panic. Documents at control! is your obsession. You don’t know who you’re dealing with, you don’t know who’s in front of you. The interrogation begins, although no one calls it that. You try to be rational, to be sober, to lie like a book, the Policeman pushes the law down your throat. As in court, the answers cannot be random, even if the questions may be abrupt. And the questions started at School, where you thought you were being asked about form and not as a preparation for life, for life on your own. To the question about the theme, you had to say what you wrote in your notebook. According as, when your parents asked you if you have homework for School, they weren’t interested in homework, but they were interested in you doing your homework. And everyone expects us to do our homework, to remember the address on our ID card, as if, if I messed up, I would live at a different address than the one on my documents, and the homework solution gets a high grade, if it’s original. But what does it mean to be original in a few sentences about an author or a book? To know this, you must have read something about them or some of their work. And the way you perceive them is your originality, it’s the naturalness in which you see and expose the things.
The Police officer insists on whether you have been drinking or using drugs. Sometimes the answer is enough, he believes you like that, all of a sudden, while other times you are suspicious and you are made to do all kinds of tests. The tone of your voice, the answers, how you look at face, what you’re wearing, what the car looks like inside and out, how you drove there, all matter. And if you answer like you did in School, with stupid jokes, you’ll lose your license, but also get a large fine. And it’s in vain that you beg the Policeman to forgive you, to overlook you, his camera is already filming you and taking everything to headquarters. Which doesn’t mean that, somewhere, the path of truth can’t be short-circuited. In comparison with the Truth, Which is a person and not an idea, our subjective truths can be distorted in many ways. What I say about myself may be uncredited, because you have more props at fence. And, until the situation is clarified, you can spend many years in prison, and then demand enormous compensation from the State. But the financial compensations doesn’t give you your life back, it doesn’t give you any of your joy and fulfillment, because you, old and ruined inside, have no other solution than the solution of salvation. For there, on the last hundred meters, you redeem your life through repentance, and leaving prison means breathing a sigh of relief and with godliness, breathing the freedom of your salvation.
After the Divine Liturgy of the day and after the local proclamation of his canonization, the first worship of Saint Sofian Boghiu, our Father, was a great fulfillment, an inner relief. Of course, I didn’t like that I kissed the glass and not his Holy Relics, but my comfort was that I saw part of them, removed from the iconographic vestment above. I never spoke to him, but I saw him up close. While he was white and full of decency and known by many. And the question of many, asked or not asked, is how do you get from what you do and what you say to your canonization? Because many saw him, stood next to him, confessed to him, were indifferent to him, fought with him internally, and now they must honor him as a Saint. And many don’t, they can’t honor him in their heart, because they still minimize him. They have the same shortsighted perspective of him, where they haven’t seen anything special about him their whole life. But he, then and now, was and is the Saint of God, and many do not understand why, through what, how he reached sainthood? And the questions are not superfluous, because the continuous inner change of man, the ghostual one, is not a metaphor, but the everyday reality of the holy life. And when it happens in you, anyone can deny you in appearance, but not in reality. For the ontological reality of the ghostual man is the holiness. But if you live only in the magma of sin, that is why you do not understand how the Saint is full of holiness now, while he lives with us, and you cannot see the divine life in himself.