Letter #41: The River of the Ever-Living Thing

Life is Grander Than Time

The way I see it, age is just a number you reach before pitching face first into your bowl of soup.

Which leads me back to the Bible, because your discussion of tradition as a kind of river flowing from generation to generation hints at just how deep that river runs.

Most Christians are familiar with the idea of typology. The risen Christ, speaking to his dispirited followers on the Road to Emmaus, teaches them that their holy scripture is shot through with predictive references to himself. These “types,” are like impressions stamped by the future onto the past. The movement of the spirit on the face of the waters at creation is the type of Christ’s baptism. Jonah’s three days in the whale is the type of Jesus’s three days in the belly of death. And so on.

But, of course, you can also — as many have — read the same phenomenon in the opposite direction. Then it seems Jesus’s life contains the history that came before him. His escape into Egypt reenacts Israel’s sojourn there. His twelve disciples mirror the twelve tribes. And so on.

This matters because the Old Testament history of Israel — from Abraham to empire to exile — is the very pattern of life — the life of individuals and civilizations and of the whole world — from infancy to prime to decay. That pattern is reiterated in Christ because he is the source of that pattern in its pre-fallen form. He is the Logos made flesh. In him, we see what seems to us like a series of meaningless endings is really the insistently retold story of something more.

How often have we felt that a new thing was the return of the old? We realize our latest projects are actually the continuation of hobbies we enjoyed as children. Or a stagnant civilization bursts into new life and declares it is a “Renaissance,” a rebirth of lost ideas. Like Shakespeare inventing modernity by seeking to imitate the playwrights of ancient Rome, life springs up from the soil of the dead past.

I remember in the 1980’s, after a decade of American decay very much like this one, the nation’s fortunes were restored during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. “They called it the Reagan revolution,” he said. “But for me it always seemed more like the great rediscovery, a rediscovery of our values and our common sense.”

We struggle so to keep from losing what we have — our youth, our civilization, our world. But when, through faith and tradition, we plunge into the River of the Ever-Living Thing, we find that even death is part of a pattern grander than time.

“Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”

More next week,

Dad