A comment on Musa Abisheganaden, Abbot

For Theo, who endures my reading assignments with admirable stoicism.

I am writing this on the train from Cardiff, following your sage advice. The train has emerged from the tunnel after the Bristol channel and is fast approaching its eponymous town, a place famous for being the personal graffiti-wall of Banksy. In any case, we should start by reviewing the contents of our call.

We have discussed to what extent the Abbe, the Aspag, and the Haji are projections of my personality under different circumstances: The Abbe for when I am angry at the state of the world, the Aspag for when I feel that I am not measuring up to expectations, and the Haji for me in a depressive funk. I have not yet reached a point where the personalities of these here characters are in harmony with what actually happens in the story, but it is very close.

The Abbe, in his previous life, was a violent rogue, the leader of a party of bandits, vile beings who preyed on the weak, and lived off their labour. Musa Abisheganaden, as that was his name at birth, attacked and destroyed the previous iteration of Amatodate Abbey. Now the Abbey itself can be considered by some metrics a character in its own right, behaving as if a living organism going through the cycle of birth, death, and reincarnation. I call each of these cycles an "iteration". The first iteration lies in our known history, when Benedictine missionaries established their operations in Seoul (our world, 1908). There they attained the status of an abbey under Abbot Boniface Sauer (1913) and were relocated to Wonsan (presently in North Korea) as a territorial entity (1927-1952). The members of this society were variously executed, worked to death, or deported back to Germany in events following the partition of Korea. In 1952 a group of survivors moved to a monastery at Waegwan, near Daegu, in South Korea. They maintain their status as an abbey, as well as the territory of Wonsan, even though it is a territory they could no longer access*. In my story, events of near total annihilation (and, on the flip side, near total regeneration) occur to the abbey as a rule, and the cataclysmic disaster that befalls it roughly every century is expected and taken for granted by members of the society.

We move back to the story of chief brigand Musa and his encounter with the Abbey. For context, the abbey is known for its charitable works, in particular stockpiling grain for times of famine. The grain comes from contributions by friends of the abbey -- nevertheless, the word spreads that the monks and nuns of the abbey are privy to a magical source of riches, a cornucopia, a strange treasure that generates anything that one desires. Musa and his brigands infiltrate Amatodate, and kill all its inhabitants. Searching for the fabled treasure, Musa stumbles into the abbey's oratory, where he is met with an empty, open tabernacle, in front of which the abbot lies slain. Every door in the monastery complex then slams shut. A fire which was started by the band slowly begins to engulf all of the buildings, trapping all of the brigands. At this point Musa is forced to confront the sins in his life by a loud voice, which seems to rattle out from inside the walls, in an event saturated with physical and mental anguish. Finally, Musa takes on the ironic position as the new abbot, after what seemed like a full day in the scorching fire.

I imagine it is not easy rebuilding the abbey you have helped to burn down, or earning the trust of the people who have known you as a robber all your life. Those aspects have not been fully formed in my mind yet. I have on the other hand thought much of the ongoing interior conversion of Musa as the Abbot, and the marks left in his psyche from his previous life as a criminal. I recall the life of St. Moses the Black (who is the reason behind the name of Musa), whose violence and impulsiveness metamorphosed into boldness and tenacity in his walk with Jesus. I rather feel that such qualities have been woefully de-emphasised as saintly qualities in some quarters of the church, where the saints, with all their richness of character, are relegated to comfortable chambers among the clouds with cherubs, as if the Kingdom of God could be compared to the residences of a feudal lord. I wish for Musa to be a counterpoint against this cultural sensibility: he is the villain who dives with courage and daring into battle for personal gain, becomes converted, and then does the same in service to the church to repay his dues. A leader of tenacity such as his serves the Lord by vigorously defending truth. If Jesus could reform and make use of the worst impulses in us, then would the story of Musa not give hope, that we do not have to obliterate the gifts of our own personalities in order to follow in his footsteps?

*The name "Amatodate" is a corrupted form of the Japanese gloss of "Waegwan", which means "Japanese Court"

Cardiff Castle, February 2020