All the Saints, and the Ones They Leave Behind

My mother visited me in Ireland five years after my father’s death. Five years is an eternity when one is living with grief, and she was very much still living with grief. The visit was enjoyable; it was nice to introduce my mom to the life my wife and I had built in Ireland, but grief and loss hovered in the air even still. As I was taking my mother to the airport at the end of her trip, the conversation turned, as it often does, to my father, and to loss, and to that for which we might hope. As Christians, we had clung to the idea that we would see him again in the resurrection, but she had been reconsidering this.

“I’ll never have my Ross back again,” my mother said. I was confused.

“What do you mean?” I said. “You don’t think we’ll see him again?”

“Yes, I do, but he won’t be the same. Imagine all that he has seen and done by now. If he is even aware of us, he won’t just be sitting around watching us. He will have changed. He’ll know things and have experienced things we couldn’t possibly imagine, and he’ll be different. He’ll never be the Ross I lost.”

I was stunned. Here I was, a PhD student studying theology, and I had no answer for my mother. I could feel her dismay as she followed this train of thought, and I felt as though there must be something wrong about this thinking, but I couldn’t see what it might be, certainly not in the moment. I stumbled through some vague reassurances, not wanting to send her away with such dour thoughts, but I doubt I managed anything particularly comforting as she grabbed her luggage out of the back of my little hatchback and headed back to the States.

Wassily Kandinsky, All Saints Day l, 1911, oil on canvas.

My mother’s questions stayed with me. What did I think Dad was experiencing at that moment? If he was experiencing anything at all, wouldn’t that change him? Wouldn’t he be different, then, and at least partially unrecognizable when I finally saw him again? And if he was experiencing nothing at all, waiting unconsciously for the bodily resurrection, then was he truly just lost to me, at least for now? What hope could the communion of saints offer, if it could be severed so quickly and easily?

I needed some help; I was sure I must be thinking about this all wrong, but I couldn’t see how. Until I read Laurus.

Eugene Vodolazkin’s 2012 novel Laurus tells the story of a medieval Russian Orthodox holy man, the titular Laurus, as he navigates a path of redemption from his spiritual and moral failings. He begins as a simple healer, a sort of village medicine man dispensing folk remedies and serving as a conduit of God’s grace, before spending time as a holy fool, then a pilgrim to the Holy Land, and finally a monastic and saint. Throughout the book, the reader is invited into the spiritual imagination of medieval Orthodox Russia; there is no modernist nod toward what must “really” be happening behind the various miracles and oddities, no bifurcation between material and spiritual, and no overt attempt to speak into contemporary pressing issues.

But this invitation into the past does not mean that the novel is stuck there, nor that it fails to speak to the contemporary reader. As one progresses through the novel, time begins to come unstuck. At first, it is small things: a bit of plastic in the woods when no plastic could possibly yet exist, days and hours passing unusually quickly or slowly. But Laurus’s relationship to time becomes increasingly odd. One winter he finds that he “does not remember how many winters had passed since his arrival … or maybe all the winters had blended into one and no longer had anything to do with time.” He has a conversation with himself at a younger age, he relives moments from his past, recapitulating significant events in a way that both participates in the past and opens up a new future. At a certain point in his life, Laurus finds “time definitely began moving differently for [him]. More precisely, it simply stopped moving and remained idle.” He continues, “Events had, in some strange way, diverged from time and no longer depended on time.”

What is happening? On first glance, and rooted in contemporary expectations, the novel seems like it is offering some kind of complicated puzzle to the reader, perhaps involving time travel. The reality, however, is that Laurus in engaged in a spiritual journey whose destination shifts from temporal and horizontal to eternal and vertical over the course of the book. He is increasingly disengaged from the temporal, worldly reality of his birth as his life crosses over into the eternal.

Laurus, nearing the end of his life and doubting the efficacy of his efforts, pleads with a spiritual elder: “I want only to know the general direction of the journey.”

“But is not Christ a general direction?” asked the elder. “Do not be enamored of excessive horizontal motion.”

“Then what should I be enamored of?” asked Laurus.

“Vertical motion,” the elder answered, pointing upward.

It was precisely here, at the intersection between eternity and history, that my thinking had gone wrong. So many of us modern Christians have come to think of “heaven,” or the life that comes after death, as a sort of resumption of our previous lives. We each live our life and then death appears as the great interruption. Perhaps that interruption is short, and we “close our eyes in this life and open them in heaven,” as the popular sentiment would have it. Or, perhaps this intermission is longer and we await the resurrection of the dead at the end of history. Regardless of the length, we imagine that “life” essentially resumes, though obviously in a different venue and under improved conditions. Many disagree over the details (what will occupy our time, precisely how much or little our heavenly abode will resemble our earthly existence), but the shape of the narrative is often broadly similar.

The truth evoked by Vodolazkin in Laurus, however, is that eternity is not simply history extended out to the distant horizon. “Eternity” denotes a fundamentally different relationship to time than that which we experience in the present. It is easy enough to see why the popular vision is so popular. If I will simply resume my life after my death, then death is subverted, it becomes nothing at all, really, certainly nothing to fear. But while the Bible promises that death will not have “victory” and the “sting” of death has been removed, it does not suggest that death is not real.

Augustine, in his Confessions, famously mused about time: “I know what it is if no one asks me what it is; but if I want to explain it to someone who has asked me, I find that I do not know.” Perhaps we find here another reason that the popular belief that death simply leads to an extension of life is so hard to dislodge: thinking about time and eternity is hardly straightforward, and it is easiest to stick with what we know (even if unexamined).

There is one thing certain about our present, historical relationship to time, however. According to Augustine, “If the present were always present and did not go by into the past, it would not be time at all, but eternity…. So that it appears that we cannot truly say that time exists except in the sense that it is tending toward nonexistence.”

All our lives are characterized by the loss of ourselves. We live a moment, and then it fades. We are a version of ourselves at a certain point, but we lose that version as it slips further and further into the past. Our entanglement with history, with the ceaseless march of time, steals from us our past and withholds from us our future. As Laurus puts it, “Life resembles a mosaic that scatters into pieces,” and it seems there is no essential unity between these pieces to be found within ourselves.

The good news, however, is that “being a mosaic does not necessarily mean scattering into pieces…. It is only up close that each separate little stone seems not to be connected to the others.” There is one “who looks from afar, … who is capable of seizing all the small stones at once…. They will gather together again in Him.” That is, in eternity, when our lives are no longer characterized by the ceaseless parade of moment after moment, and are instead a whole, held together by the eternal one.

Throughout church history, the communion of saints has always included others besides those who happen to occupy the same point in time as ourselves. The saints are all those who have gone before us, who have stepped out of history and into eternity.

Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson speaks of a human person as a history. We each are the lives we live over the course of the time given to us. But a history can only be a history if it comes to some definite end. It is only at death that our lives take on their full shape, when the last piece of the mosaic drops into place and the picture itself becomes clear.

To simply pause a moment before we resume placing pieces in the mosaic would be to alter the image fundamentally, and to betray the significance and finality of death. But in eternity, in the lives of the saints, we do not simply resume creating the mosaic; instead, the whole image is held together in living communion with the author of history and all those whose lives are joined to his.

To answer my mother’s question: Will we see my father again?

Yes, I believe we will meet precisely the one that we knew, in the fullness of the mosaic of his life as held together and given shape by God himself. We will meet not just Dad as we knew him in the days before his death, but the father who would take me with him to work on all his Saturday DIY projects, and the young man who married my mother well before I knew him, and the boy who made extra spending money on the weekends by running a trapping line. History, for him, has ended and eternity has begun. This not only means that death is not the end of him, but it affirms the meaningfulness of the life he lived.

This shift, from history to eternity, has another implication. As Laurus’s story suggests, eternity does not await us in the future; it surrounds us. Eternity is not the goal that awaits us at the end of a long period of horizontal motion; it exists in a different dimension altogether. Eternity is up, not ahead. This means eternity is available to us even now, and those who have entered eternity ahead of us are not lost to some distant future.

All Saints Day is a day set aside for remembering all those faithful ones who have gone before us. It is easy, though, to see it as a grim reminder that we have been left behind, a commemoration of absence. The promise of the church, however, and the practice of the church for many centuries, has been that the saints are not absent at all. The communion of saints is unbroken by death, and the dead remain with us, even as eternity surrounds us.

For the medieval church, as in the world of Laurus, the saints remain profoundly available to us, even physically so in the form of relics and holy sites. We might wish that they would speak with us more clearly or were with us more obviously, for there remains a separation between life and death. And yet, that separation is not absolute, and the barrier is more porous than we might think.

In the midst of his pilgrimage, Laurus visits one such holy site with his friend Ambrogio. “A city of saints, whispered Ambrogio, following the play of the shadow. They present to us the illusion of life.”

“No, objected [Laurus], also in a whisper. They disprove the illusion of death.”

Of course, while All Saints Day serves as a reminder that the dead in Christ are not dead but alive in him, it also should serve as a spur to those of us who have not yet tasted death. For, while it is true that not even death can sever the communion of saints, a deeper communion still awaits us if we can follow Laurus, and all the saints, in living into eternity even now.