My Brush With Rasputin

Many years ago when I was working in a large bookstore in San Diego, I was offered the opportunity along with a few other booksellers to meet with Maria Rasputin, daughter of the “mad monk.” She’d been making her living writing and then rewriting and issuing anew sanitized biographies of her notorious father. Even though, as someone always interested in the more obscure byways of religion, I really wanted to meet her (I think in catholic terms this would be a second degree relic), I had a conflict that made it difficult to accept the offer.

I decided to pass on meeting her, knowing she had a pretty regular circuit and would be back.

Not long after she died.

While I haven’t completely integrated this lesson (I’ll tell you sometime about how I’ve now not met the Dalai Lama twice…), but when opportunities of this sort present, I always think of Maria and her dad…

Grigori Rasputin was born on this day in 1869, at least according to our contemporary calendar keeping…