Here Carr enters the thread, introducing a new character, the Monk. Carr too was a frequent contributor to OST, though his involvement in Sir Toby’s had heretofore been mininal. It is not known whether Carr joined the thread solely out of personal interest or as a favor to Doyle, inasmuch as the two of them had previously discussed the subject on Doyle’s blog. At OST and on his own blog Carr presents himself as a Christian concerned primarily with living a Christlike life.

As with the Old Man and the Trappist, the Monk is presumably the author’s alter-ego. He is a visitor to the West who is familiar with “maya,” a fundamental Hindu concept in which physical appearances are an illusion of the unenlighened mind. Here the Monk signals a preliminary intent to engage the Old Man in his discussion of Jesus’s ability to dematerialize himself. Unlike the Trappist, Carr’s Monk does enter into conversation with the Old Man, interpreting maya from the perspective of modern physics. But then the Monk disappears: is it a demonstration of maya, or complicity with the Trappist’s all-too-human disappearances?

In the next comment Doyle introduces the Andalusian priest, who offers a ludicrous metaphorical interpretation of the Monk’s disappearance. Doubtless this was Doyle’s mildly sarcastic jab at Christian attempts to re-interpret some of the more problematic passages of Scripture as “true myths” or metaphors rather than as purely human inventions or errors. The Old Man then recounts a story about an invisibility cloak that could not be removed. “Had his thoughts been visible, written in letters for all to see,” the Old Man muses, “the other theologians would have known that he was thinking of the Trappist.” Did Doyle intend for this story to be interpreted metaphorically, possibly referring to the invisibility of his own discourse to Wilkinson? As we make our way through these posts we see more and more clearly that Wilkinson’s eyes remained fixed on the one whose physical absence only accentuated his psychological omnipresence at Sir Toby’s…