{"id":8998,"date":"2024-03-11T20:24:20","date_gmt":"2024-03-11T20:24:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=8998"},"modified":"2024-05-31T16:08:19","modified_gmt":"2024-05-31T16:08:19","slug":"deserts-into-oases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2024\/03\/11\/deserts-into-oases\/","title":{"rendered":"Deserts Into Oases"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Deserts Into Oases<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Two very different novels illustrate the power of memory to show us the relationship between waiting and suffering, and the value of waiting well.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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By Megan Joy Rials
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They also serve who only stand and wait.\u201d 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<\/em> derives from the Latin patior<\/em>, or to suffer; thus, in this short line, Milton deftly reveals the suffering inherent in waiting.<\/p>

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.<\/p>

No less a theologian than St. Augustine of Hippo himself, in his Confessions<\/em>, 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>

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 \u201cmyth became fact\u201d who entered His own creation. Through the story or \u201cmyth\u201d of Jesus\u2019 life that also occurred in time and history, we encounter Christianity\u2019s \u201cvital and nourishing\u201d element. Crucially, Lewis insists that assent to Jesus\u2019 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>

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<\/em>, a proper understanding of the past\u2014particularly past suffering\u2014through 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\u2019s work over time.<\/p>

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\u2019s Till We Have Faces<\/em> and Amor Towles\u2019s A Gentleman in Moscow<\/em> each demonstrate the role of memory in effecting, respectively, present salvation and future sanctification.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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This perspective, bird\u2019s-eye yet simultaneously intimate, reveals God\u2019s work in our lives and how He weaves the meaning of an individual\u2019s life together with that of others.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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A retelling of the ancient myth of Cupid and Psyche, Till We Have Faces<\/em> 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\u2019s moral ugliness manifests itself when her jealousy of Psyche\u2019s happiness with her god-husband drives her to blackmail Psyche into betraying him, which results in Psyche\u2019s exile and the sisters\u2019 alienation from each other.<\/p>

After this tragedy, the rest of the novel traces Orual\u2019s 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\u2019s sobbing. Only the faculty of memory can break down these internal barriers to awaken Orual\u2019s conscience to her corruption; as she remarks, \u201cMemory, once waked, will play the tyrant.\u201d<\/p>

Indeed it does, through long and hard work, as another of the novel\u2019s 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\u2019s 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, \u201cIt was I who was Ungit. That ruinous face was mine.\u201d This realization spurs her on to the path of transformation. Through what she describes as the \u201cgods\u2019 surgery,\u201d Orual\u2019s 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\u2014to give her a beautiful face, in the novel\u2019s terminology\u2014and rescue her from her sin. Although this awakening does not itself constitute Orual\u2019s salvation, it demonstrates the capacity of memory to plumb the soul, expose sin, and reify the need for a savior\u2014a critical step on the path to salvation.<\/p>

Although Orual\u2019s 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\u2019s sanctified memory broadens its view to fit the providential pieces of the past together. This perspective, bird\u2019s-eye yet simultaneously intimate, reveals God\u2019s work in our lives and how He weaves the meaning of an individual\u2019s life together with that of others.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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A sanctified memory reveals our deserts of suffering as instead being oases of God\u2019s blessings.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Amor Towles\u2019s A Gentleman in Moscow<\/em> 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.<\/p>

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 \u201clife of purpose.\u201d 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\u2019s main chef) and Andrey (the ma\u00eetre d\u2019), his sister Marina (the seamstress), and, most importantly, his adopted daughter, Sofia. Given the Metropol\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s biological mother gave him as a Christmas present; from his friendships with an American ambassador to France and Sofia\u2019s own piano instructor; from his knowledge of the pistols hidden in the Metropol\u2019s main office to his familiarity with the streets of Paris from his family history there\u2014no piece of the Count\u2019s past is too small to help orchestrate Sofia\u2019s escape to the United States.<\/p>

The Count\u2019s 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 \u201cman of purpose.\u201d 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\u2019s mustache) directly occasioned the conversation that began his friendship with Sofia\u2019s biological mother. Without this small, seemingly insignificant event, he would never have become Sofia\u2019s adoptive father, for he would have missed the \u201cone time when Life needed me to be in a particular place at a particular time.\u2026 And I would not accept the Tsarship of all the Russias in exchange for being in this hotel at that hour.\u201d The Count\u2019s 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\u2019s belief, expressed in his allegory The Great Divorce<\/em>, 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\u2019s 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, \u201cThese are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka\u2014and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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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.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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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\u2019s greatest blessings, as the Count was when he was prepared to become Sofia\u2019s 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 \u201ccheap grace,\u201d in Dietrich Bonhoeffer\u2019s words. The development of an individual\u2019s 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.<\/p>

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\u2019s case, she actively waits in several ways. She struggles with the reality of the gods\u2019 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\u2019s father, and meticulously plots Sofia\u2019s 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\u2019s cad suitor to a duel (the young Count) would not have been prepared, respectively, for the blessings of salvation and parenthood.<\/p>

As historian Wilfred McClay has observed in his essay \u201cThe Claims of Memory,\u201d memory assists in this process by acting as an organizing force to sift through the past. In Dorothy Sayers\u2019s masterful cycle of plays about Jesus\u2019s life, The Man Born to be King<\/em>, 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 \u201cthe wonder of the pattern,\u201d and he explains that during this life, only the loom\u2019s 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\u2019s plan for all of our individual, yet interconnected, lives.<\/p>

The tripartite nature of our life story in Christ is echoed by Thomas Oden, who posits that the Trinity\u2019s action in any particular person\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2014as we agonize like Milton over our physical ailments, as we struggle like Orual to comprehend God\u2019s existence and confront our own sinful nature, as we remember like the Count the precarious, precious domino effect of our past\u2019s hidden blessings that led us to our lives today\u2014God 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.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Megan Joy Rials<\/strong> 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<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>and serves as Content Editor and Scholar in Residence on the Leadership Council of the Society for Women of Letters<\/a>.\u00a0Her work has also appeared in\u00a0Christ and Pop Culture<\/em>,\u00a0Dappled Things<\/em>,\u00a0Mere Orthodoxy<\/em>,\u00a0The Worldview Bulletin<\/em>,\u00a0Perichoresis<\/em>,\u00a0and the\u00a0Louisiana Law Review<\/em>, where she served as Production Editor of Volume 77.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 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