Dear reader,
In the past two weeks our family has had our feet firmly planted in the valley of the head cold, keeping tissues and cough drops close at hand. As is typical for her, my youngest’s breathing turned raspy and belabored, struggling especially at night. One night, as I lay next to her to help soothe her, she was very distressed, crying through her coughs and gasping breaths. The humidifier wasn’t helping as I hoped it would. Anxious for her, I held her tightly and prayed that God would ease her symptoms, giving her relief so that she could sleep. A few minutes later, she breathed deeply, her sobbing stopped, and she fell asleep.
Immediately, tears came to my eyes, tears of relief and astonished gratitude—astonished because, in truth, I had not expected God to answer my prayer.
When it comes to the way I see the world, I’m becoming aware of just how unbaptised my imagination is. I’ve had a decent science education, thanks to a few stellar teachers, and I’m able to explain my world in terms of processes and cycles, reactions and substances. Yet, Scripture’s images of the Spirit brooding over the waters of the earth (Gen 1) and the Lord giving birth to the frost from the heavens (Job 38) are not explanations that readily come to my mind.
This failure of my own imagination has come into focus with a novel I’ve recently finished: Laurus, by Eugene Vodolazkin. It’s been years since I’ve read any Russian literature, but Laurus did not disappoint. Most certainly the strangest and most beautiful book I’ve read in a long time, Laurus follows the life of a medieval healer from his childhood up to his death.
Not until halfway through the book did I realize that it was written only recently—less than ten years ago. This surprised me, because the author gives no sense of distance between himself and his characters. His tone is entirely sympathetic to the medieval way of thinking: its unscientific approach to illness and medicine, its seeing the divine hand in natural and historical events, its high respect for the religious. One reviewer writes,
“The lines between the natural and supernatural become blurred, as do those between life and death. The result is less a work of magical realism than of hagiography. Holy fools walk on water and monks communicate over long distances through prayer. Historical events have moral or symbolic reasons for occurring…[the novel is] an extended meditation on time in light of God’s eternal presence in the created world.”
That “God’s eternal presence in the created world” could be imagined by Vodolzakin with such sincerity is truly an accomplishment. This tone is so far from the typical modern disdain for pre-moderns, a disdain that shows up both inside and outside of the church. Our technological and scientific advances have produced an arrogant posture towards those who so naively (we judge) understood the world.
This shift from pre-modern to modern ways of imagining the world, from a world charged with God’s presence and of moral and symbolic resonance to a world of a distant clockmaker God (at best) that runs on its own without any transcendent significance to events, has been examined, and lamented, by many philosophers and theologians. Heaven and earth have been torn apart, leaving the world empty of God’s presence through his sustaining Spirit. This modern culture is one that I “swim in” (to use David Foster Wallace’s analogy)—it is so pervasive as to be invisible. Whether I’m confronted with my own, or my children’s illness, or the shifts of the season, or the behavior of the animals around me, my first impulse is to explain or react scientifically.
What I’m wondering is if, unintentionally, this modern separation of heaven and earth has reinforced a posture towards the world that is primarily oppositional. I wonder if there’s a connection between seeing the world as absent of God’s presence and seeing the world primarily as evil: filled with sin, antagonistic to God and his ways, primarily a place of temptation and corruption.
Perhaps I’m stepping on a cherished book here, but I think this may be why I don’t love Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. As much as is beautiful about Bunyan’s allegory, I find it frustrating that the places Christian and Faithful pass through are either places of refreshment or places of temptation and peril. There is no sense of God’s transforming work through the Spirit for the cities that the pilgrims encounter, no vocation of being “ministers of reconciliation” to the world. The world is an evil place to pass through as quickly as possible, and the only vocation they have is to encourage others to join them in their journey. This, I think, is what we should expect from a world that is divorced from heaven—a world that God has receded from and ceded to the enemy.
But if the medievals were wiser than we are in this regard, if in fact God is present in the created world, and the categories “natural” and “supernatural” are less distinct than we have imagined, this has radical implications for our own identity as pilgrims on the way. For one, I would not be so slow to sense God’s hand in the routine events of my family. I wonder also if we would be so quick to relegate justice to the world to come, and to dismiss concerns for a vulnerable creation.
In Psalm 84, the sons of Korah sing of the dwelling place of God, the holy city, Jerusalem. They rejoice with the pilgrims who travel there. Along the way, the pilgrims travel through a (metaphorical? literal?) valley called “Baca,” which is translated “weeping.” As they go, the psalmists tell us that “they make it a place of springs” (v.6). I’m fascinated by this verse—the agency is on the pilgrims, they are actors in the sentence. And yet, a spring is not something man-made. In this synthesis of divine and human agency (Philippians 2:12-13 comes to mind here), the pilgrims have not simply endured the valley of Baca, but transformed it. How might we do the same?
All this thinking about pilgrims led me to find an essay on pilgrimage in medieval Europe from the MET. The object above is a bursa reliquary, made to enshrine the holy objects such as saints’ bones or clothes. I’m amazed at the intricacy and symmetry of the craftsmanship. Its context reminds me of the complexity of the time. On the one hand, beautiful artwork like this flourished, as artisans were commissioned to make reliquaries, badges to commemorate a pilgrimage, paintings and sculptures to celebrate the movement of a relic from one place to another, among other things. And yet I cannot look favorably on all of this; I’m deeply troubled by the practices of selling indulgences, and other ways that the poor were relieved of their money by the religious class. That such beauty and such injustice are intertwined here gives me pause.
I’m deep into research at the moment, and one of the books I managed to finish was Belden Lane’s Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality. Looking at themes of beauty, the natural world, and desire in John Calvin and the Puritans, Lane traces a legacy of Reformed theologians that surprised him, and surprised me as well. I loved it, and I’m so grateful to Lane for offering to me a vision of Reformed spirituality that is wider and richer than the usual sound bytes. Along similar lines, I read Alister McGrath’s Reimagining Nature: The Promise of Christian Natural Theology. In my education, natural theology has either been seen as a weapon of proof to wield against unbelievers, or a hopeless task that doesn’t take seriously the counter-cultural nature of the Gospel and the specific revelation of God in Jesus. McGrath deals with both of these strains of natural theology (among others), and offers insightful and Scripture-grounded ways forward. I’m also glad to have finished Eloise Jarvis McGraw’s The Golden Goblet with the kids. I love the excitement in the conclusion, and the wonderful reversal that comes at the end.
From The Risk of Gentleness: Welcoming the Baby I Did Not Want: I knew I would choose this baby, say yes to him, despite my fears and exhaustion. There was never any doubt in my mind that this baby was ours, and that he was a gift to us. But I also knew that I was choosing him, in those early days, despite myself.
There’s a tendency in some pro-life Christian circles to fear acknowledging the difficulty in choosing life. But this closes us off to the love and empathy we must extend to women who truly need it.
FromConsoling the Heart: I confess to some anxiety about pinning all our hopes for persuasion and moral transformation solely on appeals to beauty and narrative empathy—as much as I value those things. I worry, for instance, about the very effective sophistry of the political fringe and the narrative power of the social media hivemind. I also worry about the heart’s ability to weave stories that cater to our misbegotten appetites and addictions.
FromThe Choices That Came Before Us: Whenever I’m tempted to doubt God’s providence, whenever I’m tempted to think that I somehow missed the life I was supposed to have, when the hard times come and the pain bears down, I remember spring peepers. And I think of how God reveals Himself and His will. He doesn’t shout His plans from the mountains so much as He repeats them over and over in low, quiet songs that only make sense to those who know the significance of them. Like spring in Appalachia, His plans unfold in gentle, persistent ways—sometimes two steps forward and one back—but always in rhythm and always in time.
We’re back in soup weather down here, and we happily slurped up this Tom Yum Ramen soup tonight for dinner. I’ve also discovered this cake in a hunt for a vegan dessert, and it’s turned out to be my favourite easy chocolate cake.
Elsewhere this past month: short essays on Safety in the Household of Faith and the implications for us of the givenness of Jesus’ body
Resurrected Lord, you who opened the eyes of the disciples so that they might recognize your presence with them, open my eyes, I pray, so that I might not be blind to your presence at home, at work and in my exchanges with everyone I meet this day. In your name. Amen.
From Prayers for Eastertide by W. David O. Taylor
On the road with you,
Laura