Products of Divine Will
Products of Divine Will
Blake Randolph
On Sacred Time, Biblical Typology and Laurus
“Making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure which was set forth in him, as a plan for the fullness of time, to recapitulate all things in Christ, things in the Heavens and things upon the Earth,” — Ephesians 1:9-10
There is a problem with our understanding of time. We often believe it to be malleable, gripable, some material that may be dangerous but is still free to use. If it is true that time is my own resource, how can I use it meaningfully? How do I create meaning out of the bare, uncut resources of life: time, relationships, talent, physical embodiment, intellectual capacities, personality, etc. We’ve got to make something of it ourselves right?
I go slow as I drive through the streets of my small town, avoiding potholes, those small evidences of the passage of time, on an overcast January day. “Time” by Musiq Soulchild plays in my car, on the recommendation of a colleague and friend who shares my liking for R&B. Soulchild sings, “time waits for nothing/and everything is going to take its time/time waits for nothing and no one.” The line is a poignant reflection on the fact that the movement of time is up to something beyond our grasp. Its effects on romantic pursuit is the primary concern of the track, but the point is applicable elsewhere.
We are told we must take control of our stories. Since time is not truly our resource in the way we often believe, we have much less capacity to nudge it along toward the storyline we desire to create for ourselves than we had hoped for. Our days pass away quickly, says the Psalmist, and “we bring an end to our years as a sigh” (Psalm 90:9). One sighed breath is the measure of time we are allotted, it seems. How could we hope to subvert time for our ends? We cannot do this thing. The Babelic attempts to reach beyond our means—the human impulse towards self-constructed utopian projects—must be abandoned. But we are not without hope.
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With such thoughts providing a reflective palate, I am drawn again to Euguene Vodolazkin’s novel, Laurus. This book ministered to me at a time when, as a post-grad 20-something, my inability to have a final say over my story led me to deep woundedness and a series of anxiety attacks. I was discontent and reeling because of how divergent a path time had seemed to take me. I was tempted towards self-victimization on the one hand and shame on the other. Either time and God had conspired against me, or I had simply not been up to snuff. Vodolazkin’s use of sacred time throughout the book is particularly compelling. The characters, either by their faith or by God’s grace, can surmount time’s seemingly binding cyclicity and by doing so give light and meaning to their stories that would otherwise be hidden to the time-bound. Elder Innokenty, a monastic mentor to Laurus, is a character with a transcendent vision, and is able to instruct his mentee on God’s use of time towards the end of the story. The end of the story is the most appropriate place for this instruction, because perspective is everything.
“‘But the longer I live, the more my reminiscences seem like an invention... Life resembles a mosaic that scatters into pieces.’ ‘Being a mosaic does not necessarily mean scattering into pieces,’ answered Elder Innokenty. ‘It is only up close that each separate little stone seems not connected to the others. There is something more important in each of them, O Laurus, striving for the one who looks from afar.’”
Innokenty challenges Laurus to understand his life in the same perspective that St. Irenaeus challenges all Christians to understand the Scriptures, as a mosaic best seen in light of the full picture. Too close of a view will often give a distorted image. Vodolozkin further demonstrates the spiritual space-time connection that exists for those who are united to Christ, and therefore also to each other, by regularly having Innokenty and Laurus hold conversations despite great physical distance. As they span spatial gaps, so too are the characters able to reach across temporal gaps.
The novel is chiastically bookended by Amvrosy—one of Laurus’s several names—having visions of himself through a fire at the twin ends of his life. It seems he ends exactly where he began. Has progress been made? Does he shake his fist because time has given him no movement? Below, Innokenty and Laurus, here called Amvrosy, discuss the binding cyclicity that he believes his life is caught up in. Innokenty wisely points out to the younger monk that God has already proven that such cyclicity is surmountable through the recognition of typology in disparate events in the Scriptures.
“Elder Innokenty began to walk around the monastery during the time he spent talking with Amvrosy. ‘And you, O elder, are making circles,’ Amvrosy told him. ‘No, this is already the spiral. I am walking, as before, along with the swirl of leaves but - do take note, O Amvrosy - the sun came out and I am already a little different... There are events that resemble one another,’ continued the elder, ‘but opposites are born from that similarity. The Old Testament opens with Adam but the New Testament opens with Christ. The sweetness of the apple that Adam eats turns into the bitterness of the vinegar that Christ drinks. The tree of knowledge leads humanity to death but a cross of wood grants immortality to humanity. Remember, O Amvrosy, that repetitions are granted for our salvation and in order to surmount time.’”
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Theologians have long used the two Greek nouns, kronos and kairos, to describe two conceptions of time. Kronos being the ticking of regular time, chronologically, and kairos describes the opportune, critical moment; the right time, or what the scriptures might call the “fullness of time.” The idea behind the usage is older than Christianity, but Christians happily co-opted the distinction and used its categories to describe God’s providential action. God as “the one who looks from afar” contrasts our smaller perspective, which is defined by our brevity. God is the one who is able to expand the circle of time into a spiral, much as Innokenty’s laps around the monastery are shown to be more spirals than circles.
Vodolazkin and the host of ancient and medieval saints who interpreted the Bible and the world sacramentally ask the helpful question: in light of Providence, is the rhythmic passage of time actually moving in the cyclical manner that it appears to be at first glance? Ecclesiastes provides the terminology. The distinction must be made between perspective under the sun and beyond. The realm “under the sun” in the wisdom of Qohelet is the realm in which chronological, cyclical time does seem to rule the earth. “Under the sun” is the place where the miasmatic curse has subdued and de-created time. Time, under the sun, appears as a chained reality; it is bound to cyclicity and the mistiness, or vapor, that so often gets mistranslated from the Hebrew word, hevel, as “vanity”. The mistiness, or vaporousness, of time and life in Ecclesiastes is contingent upon its being bound to “life under the sun”, but if a God from beyond the sun, a God who “looks from afar”, is moving events along, then this mistiness and vapidity are actually surmounted by providential, redemptive-historical action. We cannot grasp mist and we cannot shepherd wind, but God can. There is a definiteness to things that once seemed vain or misty.
As those who live in finitude, under the sun, we teeter on the brink between Existentialism and Nihilism because our reading of our lives is too close. We misread Ecclesiastes and bemoan vanity. The mosaic looks ugly and distorted to us because our noses rest against the tiles. Like Adam and Eve, our relationship with God is subjected to exile through Adam, so also the relationships between one point in time and another also feel the curse. The connection between the points seems broken. Yet these relationships have an ultimate connection in the Triune God. How do we broaden our perspective? How can we step back to see more of the mosaic? Providential action, the Divine Will in motion, is the thread of connections, and it is revealed by the grace of God through the pages of Holy Scripture. It provides the distance we need. The circle is shown to be an upwards spiral because even as events repeat, as Innokenty points out, the repetition is nudged along by God’s loving hand to show a redemptive arc to the story of Creation. I do not mean this in a mere metaphoric sense, but I mean to say that God has actually worked to release the created reality of time from the curse of the Fall. Linear conceptions of history in the Christian imagination must be optimistic concerning the end of Creation’s timeline. The economy of salvation demands it. The telos is in God’s hands, and he has promised the outcome. The Bible, interpreted typologically, is God’s gift to us to look beyond our brevity and see more of the whole of the spiral-that-looked-like-a-circle.
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Typology is a well-studied field throughout the history of the church, and one that is enjoying a resurgence for evangelicals. When we look for the typological similarities in the scriptures between historic persons living in dramatically different times (such as Noah’s garden-tending similarity to Adam, that John the Baptist has a similar fashion-sense to the prophet Elijah, or that Jesus is the Son of David who is always flanked by three “mighty men”) we do not merely gain interpretive clarity through these symbolic resonances. We also are given, time and time again, evidence of the loving recapitulation of history, of time itself, into the diastolic plans of the eternal, loving Triune God. It is a sign he is drawing creation toward its true end. As St. Maximus the Confessor wrote, the Cosmos itself is being drawn into the eternal, blessedness of stasis; rest in the Triune God. He holds all the threads of parallelisms that connect these Biblical persons, which means that he also holds the threads of our stories. These persons are actually connected through redemptive time to God and therefore are also connected to each other through God. Contrary to our first glance, all things are moving towards an end, and their end is Christ.
All things temporally lean towards Christ and his resurrection. His redemptive pull imbues meaning on those living in their particular moments in time. At the same moment that we are leaning towards him he is also continuously making himself near to the particulars in our time; therefore he was always near to us and will always be near to us. The meaning that we ourselves feel our hearts leaning towards is all at the same time behind us, before us, and beside us. A sort of transcendent experience is granted redemptively and derivatively by participating in Jesus’ death and resurrection; we do so first in baptism and someday in body.
This is why the universal church includes those who are dead in the flesh but still alive in Christ. Not to infringe upon incommunicable divine attributes, but to ponder the mystery of corruptibility supplanted by incorruptibility. Our stories are redefined, likewise, by his story; our lives themselves become “good news” because of the gospel. We are not ourselves written into Moses, David, Elijah, or Israel’s stories, but through Christ we are joined to the same story that they were.
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Near the end of Amvrosy’s life, and after performing many miraculous healings, much of Russia believes him to be in possession of the mythic “Elixir of Immortality.” As pilgrims gather around his monastery in hopes of learning his secret of immortality, Amvrosy leads a group of pilgrims into the monastery church during service. As Elder Innokenty comes forth from the iconostasis holding the communion chalice, “Amvrosy pointed to the chalice and said: the elixir of immortality is in there and there is enough for everyone.” The bread and the cup act as one of the highest typological recapitulations, this is where the Tree of Life, Melchizedekian meals, Passover lambs, manna, unleavened bread, rock-cleft spring water, bread of the presence, a Zaraphathian widow’s flour jar, and water-turned-wine all find their new and better referent. Both the symbol and the res, the thing itself, present in a moment. If we partake in the bread and cup this typology is really present to our story, deepening its meaning.
The threads weave into the spiral of recapitulation to grant unto us, amid our anxieties about meaning, the moment of sacramental participation whereby the faithful are given anew. Week by week, the foretaste of immortality is ours by participating. Through it, God, who can look from afar, is giving us through Jesus the sort of purpose and identity that the wider world would have us try to construct for ourselves. We are made whole by the broken one, and we eat his body; we are kept sure by the cup of the New Covenant, and we drink his blood.
Time is not our resource, it belongs to the God who has always hospitably offered the fruits of his creative actions to us; “you may surely eat of every tree of the garden” (Genesis 2:16). Are we given exact clarity? Has a 5-year plan fallen into our laps? Have we transcended the need for personal responsibility or effort? No. But, “Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses” we are not left to conjure a narrative for ourselves, because others have actually lived out a particular narrative that God promises to make our own as well through Christ’s life.
Blake Randolph
Writer & Teacher
Blake has published poems on Fathom and here on Ekstasis. Blake teaches Bible and Theology at The Academy of Classical Christian Studies in Oklahoma City. He lives in Shawnee, OK with his wife, Grace, and their two dogs.
Photography by Nathan Tran
