Deserts Into Oases
Two very different novels illustrate the power of memory to show us the relationship between waiting and suffering, and the value of waiting well.
By Megan Joy Rials
They also serve who only stand and wait.” In this famous line, a personified Patience comforts poet John Milton about his fears that his blindness will steal his talent from him. The word patience derives from the Latin patior, or to suffer; thus, in this short line, Milton deftly reveals the suffering inherent in waiting.
Suffering, that most universal experience of human beings, is a critical element of the Christian faith. Unique to Christianity is the claim that God Himself, through His Son, Jesus, suffered for and with humanity. But although Christians are frequently exhorted to practice the virtue of patience, we are not as often told what it means in practice to wait well: The key to waiting well lies in learning to wait actively in the midst of suffering. We learn this process through the salvific and sanctifying work of memory, one of the most important faculties of the Christian disposition.
No less a theologian than St. Augustine of Hippo himself, in his Confessions, celebrated the faculty of memory as a pathway to knowing God. Because it frames suffering in the larger story of the overall meaning of our lives, memory forms a robust Christian response to suffering. Memory’s very existence reminds us that we are creatures whose existence occurs in time, constantly subject to the narrative of the past, present, and future. With its structure of beginning, middle, and end, time directly gives birth to the telling of stories.
Through the Incarnation, Jesus not only divinely embodied storytelling, but sanctified it. As the greatest apologist of the twentieth century, C.S. Lewis, explained, Jesus is the “myth became fact” who entered His own creation. Through the story or “myth” of Jesus’ life that also occurred in time and history, we encounter Christianity’s “vital and nourishing” element. Crucially, Lewis insists that assent to Jesus’ story as such is no less essential than acceptance of the historical nature of His life. In story or myth, Lewis explains, we experience reality concretely, which opens the door to feeding directly on the ultimate, life-giving truth of Jesus. Although he does not explore the reasons underpinning this truth, when we consider Lewis’s propositions in conjunction with the fact that we are time-bound creatures, it is clear we can only understand and identify the meaning of any life in the tripartite arch of time.
As a reflection on the past, memory acts as our entry point for understanding the meaning of life, including our own lives and those fictional lives portrayed in literature. Therefore, despite the literary penchant for beginning stories in media res, a proper understanding of the past—particularly past suffering—through memory sets the stage for the redemptive action of the Son (the present) and the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit (the future). As it mirrors in miniature the tripartite structure of our lives, literature is thus an art form uniquely suited to reshaping imagination and training human memory to recognize God’s work over time.
Although the novel form in general has the capacity to reflect the transformative power of memory, two novels in particular breathe life into this concept. C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces and Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow each demonstrate the role of memory in effecting, respectively, present salvation and future sanctification.
This perspective, bird’s-eye yet simultaneously intimate, reveals God’s work in our lives and how He weaves the meaning of an individual’s life together with that of others.
A retelling of the ancient myth of Cupid and Psyche, Till We Have Faces is the life history of its main character, Queen Orual of the fictional realm of Glome, whose pantheon of deities loosely resembles that of the Greco-Roman world. Orual fittingly observes that suffering is infinite and the human capacity for it is without limit: despite the fact that significant elements of her suffering are self-imposed, the tragedy of her life is undeniable. Repeatedly beaten by her father and lacking a mother figure, Orual comes to a warped understanding of love and lavishes her possessive affections on her younger sister, Psyche, who represents the beauty, both moral and physical, that Orual lacks. Orual’s moral ugliness manifests itself when her jealousy of Psyche’s happiness with her god-husband drives her to blackmail Psyche into betraying him, which results in Psyche’s exile and the sisters’ alienation from each other.
After this tragedy, the rest of the novel traces Orual’s path to salvation through the work of memory. Over the decades of her reign, she builds walls around her soul to protect herself from the ugly truth that she is in fact an embodiment of the ugly, cruel goddess she despises, Ungit. These are symbolized by the physical walls she has built around the well whose clanking chains remind her of Psyche’s sobbing. Only the faculty of memory can break down these internal barriers to awaken Orual’s conscience to her corruption; as she remarks, “Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant.”
Indeed it does, through long and hard work, as another of the novel’s highly symbolic scenes illustrates. Orual dreams that her long-dead abusive father returns to force her to dig deep into the earth beneath the palace with a pickaxe. Their descent through ever-smaller versions of the Palace Room excavates Orual’s past and unearths her ugly self as, in the final room, her mirror image confronts her with the face of Ungit. At last, Orual confesses, “It was I who was Ungit. That ruinous face was mine.” This realization spurs her on to the path of transformation. Through what she describes as the “gods’ surgery,” Orual’s memory compels her to admit that she willfully ignored the actual past that revealed her moral depravity in favor of the whitewashed history she wanted to believe instead. Memory thus rouses and quickens her recognition of her inability to change herself and her corresponding need for the god of love to transform her heart—to give her a beautiful face, in the novel’s terminology—and rescue her from her sin. Although this awakening does not itself constitute Orual’s salvation, it demonstrates the capacity of memory to plumb the soul, expose sin, and reify the need for a savior—a critical step on the path to salvation.
Although Orual’s story is a good case study in the role that memory plays in salvation, given the abrupt nature of her redemption and death shortly thereafter, it offers little opportunity to study the work of memory post-salvation as it works to effect sanctification. Memory acts myopically before deliverance by focusing on the details of the past that uncover personal sin, while after salvation, the new believer’s sanctified memory broadens its view to fit the providential pieces of the past together. This perspective, bird’s-eye yet simultaneously intimate, reveals God’s work in our lives and how He weaves the meaning of an individual’s life together with that of others.
A sanctified memory reveals our deserts of suffering as instead being oases of God’s blessings.
Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow depicts the fruits of such a sanctified memory. Although the novel gives no clear indication that its main character, the Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, is a Christian (he never marries his lifelong lover, for instance), it nonetheless features Christian themes and draws heavily on Christian imagery. The novel begins in Bolshevik Russia, where the Count spends thirty-two years, from 1922 to 1954, under house arrest at the Metropol Hotel in Moscow for the crime of being an aristocrat. To be sure, the Count suffers in the lap of luxury, but the sentence nevertheless curtails his freedom and prevents him from pursuing the life he otherwise would have had.
Despair eventually overtakes the Count, but when he tastes honey made by bees that visited the apple trees of his hometown, memory rescues him by stopping his suicide attempt dead in its tracks. He then determines to pursue a “life of purpose.” Following this choice, the Count begins to transcend his geographical limitations, and the Metropol opens up into a fruitful life. Through the rich relationships he cultivates there, the Count gains a new family to fill the void left by the family he lost before the Russian Revolution: his lover, Anna Urbanova, his brothers Emile (the Metropol’s main chef) and Andrey (the maître d’), his sister Marina (the seamstress), and, most importantly, his adopted daughter, Sofia. Given the Metropol’s strategic placement in Moscow, the Count also gains allies in both the Russian and American governments. All of these relationships, along with every exquisite detail from his past, form the ingredients that enable him to fulfill his life’s purpose: his mission to free Sofia, a piano prodigy, from the shackles of Cold War Russia. From the scissors his late sister left him, to the master Metropol key Sofia’s biological mother gave him as a Christmas present; from his friendships with an American ambassador to France and Sofia’s own piano instructor; from his knowledge of the pistols hidden in the Metropol’s main office to his familiarity with the streets of Paris from his family history there—no piece of the Count’s past is too small to help orchestrate Sofia’s escape to the United States.
The Count’s success in drawing on the varied elements of his past can be traced directly to the work of memory. Through memory, he recognizes the providential interlocking of his past circumstances over his years at the Metropol that shaped him into a “man of purpose.” He demonstrates this remarkable clarity when he explains to Sofia that the action of a rude fellow patron of the Metropol (cutting off the Count’s mustache) directly occasioned the conversation that began his friendship with Sofia’s biological mother. Without this small, seemingly insignificant event, he would never have become Sofia’s adoptive father, for he would have missed the “one time when Life needed me to be in a particular place at a particular time.… And I would not accept the Tsarship of all the Russias in exchange for being in this hotel at that hour.” The Count’s memory thus equips him to understand the meaning of a life that most would assume was wasted under house arrest. This is an excellent illustration of Lewis’s belief, expressed in his allegory The Great Divorce, that heaven works retroactively to transform our agonies into glories. In other words, as the Count proves, a sanctified memory reveals our deserts of suffering as instead being oases of God’s blessings. The Count further drives this point home when, during a conversation with his lover Anna, he lists all the comforts he experienced at the Metropol, yet concludes, “These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka—and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”
If we reject suffering and refuse to wait, we are attempting to jump ahead to the ending of our stories before we have earned them.
The journeys of Orual and the Count serve as illustrations that the waiting period of suffering is critical to the development of memory and to the pivotal role that time plays in spiritual maturation. If we reject suffering and refuse to wait, we are attempting to jump ahead to the ending of our stories before we have earned them. But flipping to the end of a book spoils the rest of the story for a reason: when we refuse to walk and breathe and eat with the characters through their highs and lows, to suffer with them and develop alongside them, we demand that which we have not earned and, more importantly, are not prepared to accept. The same holds true for our own lives. We would not learn the same lessons in our lives if the end result were granted to us immediately from the very start. In this fashion, suffering equips us to withstand the fires and storms of our lives. It shows us our need for change and salvation, as Orual learns, and also teaches us to be good stewards of God’s greatest blessings, as the Count was when he was prepared to become Sofia’s father. The passage of time, with our unique circumstances embedded therein, sculpts our identities and moral characters, and their creation is an essential element of the stories of our lives, an element we cannot simply skip over for an easy payoff or a “cheap grace,” in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words. The development of an individual’s character is thus part and parcel of the story itself, like a seed cultivated through patience that grows and flowers over the seasons of our lives.
Together, Orual and the Count demonstrate the blossoming of that seed through learning to wait actively in suffering. Through this preparation, Orual and the Count are prepared for the glorious future awaiting them. In Orual’s case, she actively waits in several ways. She struggles with the reality of the gods’ existence; valiantly attempts to accomplish her own salvation through works, despite the impossibility of the endeavor; and in the writing of her life history, sifts her truthful memory from the lies she has told herself over the years. The Count, meanwhile, actively cultivates his relationships at the Metropol, self-sacrificially throws himself into his role as Sofia’s father, and meticulously plots Sofia’s flight from Russia at the expense of never seeing her again. The woman who threatened suicide to blackmail her sister (the young Orual) and the man who in a rage challenged his sister’s cad suitor to a duel (the young Count) would not have been prepared, respectively, for the blessings of salvation and parenthood.
As historian Wilfred McClay has observed in his essay “The Claims of Memory,” memory assists in this process by acting as an organizing force to sift through the past. In Dorothy Sayers’s masterful cycle of plays about Jesus’s life, The Man Born to be King, her Lazarus, after Jesus revives him from the dead, compares his preview of eternity to seeing the right side of the work of the loom. There, he saw the events of life fit together in “the wonder of the pattern,” and he explains that during this life, only the loom’s wrong side with the chaos of crossed threads is visible to us. Nevertheless, through memory, God may unveil in this life a glimpse of the tapestry’s right side. Memory offers a foretaste of the perception and clarity of eternity so that, however dimly, the meaning of our past suffering becomes apparent, along with its place in the mosaic of God’s plan for all of our individual, yet interconnected, lives.
The tripartite nature of our life story in Christ is echoed by Thomas Oden, who posits that the Trinity’s action in any particular person’s creation, redemption, and sanctification is mirrored in the entirety of the universe. Literature and our lives thus both have the potential to mimic the cosmic story of God’s Trinitarian action in the world to create the new heavens and the new earth and to remind us of our places in that cosmic tale. In our individual sufferings—as we agonize like Milton over our physical ailments, as we struggle like Orual to comprehend God’s existence and confront our own sinful nature, as we remember like the Count the precarious, precious domino effect of our past’s hidden blessings that led us to our lives today—God invites us to catch a glimpse of that tapestry in all its wonder and glory. Let us, then, follow where this invitation leads: to waiting actively for the feast the King is preparing for us.
Megan Joy Rials is a Christian apologist and research attorney in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She holds a Juris Doctor from the Louisiana State University Paul M. Hebert Law Center and is working toward completion of a Master of Arts in cultural apologetics from Houston Christian University. She is a regular contributor for and Board member of An Unexpected Journal and serves as Content Editor and Scholar in Residence on the Leadership Council of the Society for Women of Letters. Her work has also appeared in Christ and Pop Culture, Dappled Things, Mere Orthodoxy, The Worldview Bulletin, Perichoresis, and the Louisiana Law Review, where she served as Production Editor of Volume 77.
