I don't own "Alias" If I did, there'd be a lot more Irina.
Sola Gratia
Wittenberg. The cradle of the Reformation. She walks past the church doors where the monk's words, forged in iron now, tore apart Christendom. The tourists gasp and gawk, taking photos of the famous door where Martin Luther nailed the 95 theses.
Luther found his truth here. She will too. His was liberating; it stopped the Anfechtung. Her truth she dreaded, knowing it would only make the darkness and struggle worse.
Surrounded by the statues and symbols of the reformer's certainity, she feels nothing of it. She would recant, dammit, if it meant whatever truth she found here would not be.
Retreating to modernity, she makes her way to the security deposit box. Luther found his salvation here, in a Bible chained to a wall. She was certainly going to find sin and damnation, in a small, windowless room; five hundred years after the giants of the Reformation trod here.
As she opens the box, she prays to Luther's God, whom she doesn't believe in. Perhaps, she thinks, he was right about grace. Maybe this will bring salvation. Yet there is a problem: she has nothing of faith, which is necessary.
She reads, she weeps. There is no grace, no salvation. Here, where Luther tore apart a Christendom based on what he thought was lies, she learns she lived a life of lies. Here where Luther proclaimed truth more important than concord, she discovers that the illusion of concord rescues; the truth kills.
Luther declared, "There is nothing better on earth than the love of a woman." Here, he loved his wife and his children. She finds that familial love is sheerly an illusion. His family, built on his truth; hers built on lies. His enemy, the anti-Christ; her's her own father.
Her father walks in, and they exchange words. Short, bitter, arcebic words. She leaves him behind and wanders the streets where reformers discussed theology and emperors sought revenge. The lines of the Catechism ring out from a pastor leading his congregation to their roots, to the dust that was once their reformer.
"The Fourth Commandment : Honor your father and your mother. The Fifth Commandment: Thou shalt not kill."
Bitterly, she wonders why in her life the two are mutally exclusive. Hot tears of betrayal stream down her face. She rushes past another tourist group; this one is going on about grace alone.
She knows nothing of grace, because she has received none. Stumbling, she wants to scream that there is no grace, there are no miracles, it's only bread and wine and nothing more, there is no God. Luther was a fool, Melanchthon was a fool, and she, she was the biggest fool of all.
No grace, no faith, no scripture. No salvation. Just the torment of this life and endless blackness.
Finally, she finds herself away from the tourists, away from Protestants mirroring the pilgrammages they scorn. In a courtyard, she finds the statue. Katharina von Bora. Luther's wife. The statue, eternally frozen in mid-stride, reminds her of her mother. Her mother was no ex-nun, far from it. Yet, they share the determination, the rebellion, the love of their daughters.
She kneels down before the statue and weeps. She has no mother; her father executed her. Please God, she thinks, send a miracle, send a miracle, send a miracle.
Help me forgive my father.
Raise my mother from the dead.
In this sleepy little city, which once shook the foundations of the world, where sinners and saints both trod, where Luther boomed law and gospel from pulpit, where he made love to his wife, wept as he buried daughters, in this little city she remembers.
There are no miracles.