The Scandal of Holiness

Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints

Jessica Hooten Wilson

• Publisher: Brazos Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781587435249
• eBook ISBN: 9781493435340
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory

Christianity Today 2023 Award of Merit (Culture & the Arts)
Midwest Book Review 2023 Silver Book Award (Nonfiction - Religion/Philosophy)

How do we become better people? Initiatives such as New Year's resolutions, vision boards, thirty-day plans, and self-help books often fail to compel us to live differently. We settle for small goals--frugal spending, less yelling at the kids, more time at the gym--but we are called to something far greater. We are created to be holy.

Award-winning author Jessica Hooten Wilson explains that learning to hear the call of holiness requires cultivating a new imagination--one rooted in the act of reading. Learning to read with eyes attuned to the saints who populate great works of literature moves us toward holiness, where God opens up a way of living that extends far beyond what we can conjure for ourselves. Literature has the power to show us what a holy life looks like, and these depictions often scandalize even as they shape our imagination. As such, careful reading becomes a sort of countercultural spiritual discipline.

The book includes devotionals, prayers, wisdom from the saints, and more to help individuals and groups cultivate a saintly imagination. Foreword by Lauren F. Winner.

1
Holy Foolishness

The world has its own center: fallen, lost, though many ways good. Christians have a different center. Christ is our center. That makes us stand out if we’re faithful in ways that are odd. That’s who the saints are. The saints are the odd wads who have stood out from society—cultures they would have been predicted to conform to.

—Ralph C. Wood1

WHEN I FIRST READ Eugene Vodolazkin’s novel Laurus, I was pregnant with my third child. The year prior, I had been pregnant two other times and lost both babies. We buried the second in our yard in a jewelry box. He had been so much bigger than I had expected, which made the loss that much heavier. I read Laurus when I was thirty weeks along, and I had endured fifty weeks of pregnancy without yet holding a baby. I was temporarily living in Southern California with my four-year-old daughter and two-year-old son while my husband remained for those four months at our home in Arkansas. I was on a sabbatical fellowship at Biola University, renting an apartment that continuously smelled of my neighbor’s bulgogi and laundry lint. Because I shared a room with my two children, I would read on my Kindle at night so as not to wake those saints-in-progress from their dreams. I’d rub my rounded belly, skin tight from expanded womb, trying to catch my baby’s foot when she’d kick me. It was in this state that I read Laurus—how Arseny, the hero of the story, lost his lover and their son in childbirth. Weeping along with him, I also knew how much pregnancy entailed being open to death as much as to life.

In Laurus readers receive a gift, a vision from another vantage point, where death is viewed from the perspective of the eternal. Life thus takes on a reordering. We see in Laurus a life lived in Christ. For me, this novel awakened a desire to be more than an ordinary Christian, to move toward the extraordinary, to be open to the mystery and the mystical, to celebrate God’s providence even in suffering and pain. G. K. Chesterton says, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.”2 In Laurus we experience the Christian ideal in all its difficulty. The novel transmits knowledge by the experience of reading it, such that one cannot say Laurus is “about” any certain plotline or reduce the novelistic truth to a sound bite. Instead, reading the novel introduces you to holiness; it becomes palpable in the life of this fictional character. His extreme sanctity increases our desire for holiness.

The story is set in fifteenth-century Russia, where the realities of sin and faith permeate all of life. Because the plague has killed both of his parents, our protagonist Arseny is raised by his grandfather Christofer, an elderly and devout healer who resides beside a graveyard so that it will be easy to carry his dead body a short distance for burial. Christofer trains Arseny in the art of healing. When Christofer dies, Arseny takes over as the medicine man for his village, Rukina Quarter. He falls in love with an abandoned woman Ustina, and she becomes pregnant. Ashamed of their unholy union, Arseny refuses to allow her to go to confession or to have a midwife at her birth, and thus she dies without forgiveness of her sins, and the baby dies as well. Arseny thereafter surrenders his life for the one he feels that he robbed from her, traveling the country to heal others, risking his life during the plague, spending time as a holy fool, pilgrimaging to Jerusalem, and finally dying back in Rukina Quarter as a different man than the one who left. Some might even say a saint.

Laurus as an Icon

Protestant writer Frederick Buechner defines holiness in relation to how much we see God active in a person’s life. “Only God is Holy,” Buechner reminds us. “To speak of anything else is to say that it has something of God’s mark upon it. Times, places, things, and people can all be holy, and when they are, they are usually not hard to recognize.”3 When we see holiness in the life of Arseny, later named Laurus, we are seeing God at work. The character becomes what we have all been called to be—a living icon. While we are made in the image and likeness of God, the Russian Orthodox Church believes that the fall distorts this likeness. To imitate Christ is to restore the likeness. A Russian saint whom I admire, Maria Skobtsova, says we will become “the very incarnate icon of God in the world.”4 Christ’s likeness will be enfleshed in us in such a way that God’s holiness shines through.

If you’re not familiar with icons, they are more than mere illustrations or decorations in a church. In the icon tradition, the two realities of God and the world come together; the “icon transmits historical fact, an event from Sacred History or an historical personage, depicted in his physical form, and again, like the Holy Scriptures, it indicates the revelation that is outside of time, contained in a given historical reality.”5 For the Eastern church, an icon bears the Holy Spirit as the saint depicted in the icon did in life, becoming a window to the sacred world, an invitation to participate in the divine light manifested in the holy person’s biographical life. Each icon likewise manifests “the presence of the all-sanctifying grace of the Holy Spirit”; encountering an icon is thus an experience of the divine.6 In the icon, the saint’s visage offers an encounter with God. We reflect on ourselves as seen by the one who knows us better than we know ourselves. In a mysterious way, the icon provides a portal through which we envision God gazing at us.

For those who are skeptical, let me explain in a less mystical way. We have all met people who have revealed to us how God loves us—strangers whose attention never wavered when they listened to us speak, parents who patiently served us when we were sick and bedridden, friends who wept beside us when we mourned those we lost. We’ve experienced God acting through other people. The Russian Orthodox tradition would say such people are living icons, incarnate portals of God’s holiness.

If readers approach Laurus as a “fictional icon,” we might grasp again the old truths that Vodolazkin inscribes there. The phrase “fictional icon” would be antithetical to the Orthodox church, and I do not want to blur the distinction between mystical and aesthetic realities. Laurus should be read similar to how one reads an icon, yet the novel cannot be venerated as one would an icon because the “saint” narrated is not a real person. However, I do not think it is heretical to hope that through this artistic depiction of a saint, we may experience the transformative power of the Holy Spirit. Laurus is like a hagiographic icon, which, in the Russian Orthodox tradition, displays the saint, usually in the center, with the scenes of his or her life from left to right, top to bottom across the icon, so that readers may experience the story of sanctification simultaneously with the presence of the saint who faces them. What dominates is the providential order of events, the sense of a divine author or artist.

In Russian Orthodox iconography, each saint’s life is depicted in resemblance to other icons. Often the saint’s particular stories—no matter the time or place—are set within biblical scenery or ancient costume. The objective of depicting the saint is not individuality but transfiguration. In the mystical theology of the Eastern church, there is no notion of imitating models, but each saint participates in the divine life. Holiness is gauged by how much one’s life resembles the life of the incarnate Jesus Christ; humans are living icons of God, and the icon written is then an “external expression of this transfiguration, the representation of a man [or woman] filled with the grace of the Holy Spirit.”7 When you read an icon, you may notice certain features that communicate whether this saint was a desert father, mystic, holy fool, and so forth, but many of the features will be identical—thin noses, small mouths, large eyes. Harmony and unity are emphasized over individuality. Within the icon tradition, Laurus reads like an assemblage of saints.

Living by Providence

Arseny’s story begins in the 6,948th year since the creation of the world and the 1,440th since the birth of our Savior Jesus Christ. He is born on the feast day of Arsenius the Great. In every way that he can, Vodolazkin reorganizes our imagination to see time according to the Christian perspective. Arseny’s story is part of a larger story, in which he is a character. From our place in the middle of our own stories, we often cannot understand what is going on, what God is doing with us. The beauty of reading a story like Laurus is seeing the whole picture, the life of the saint from beginning to end, a narrative in which the author has created order and meaning. In Laurus we vicariously experience the path to sanctification pursued by the title character, whose life journeys from healer to sinner to penitent to ascetic to holy fool to pilgrim to monk to hermit to saint.

Vodolazkin is an Orthodox believer, a historian, and an expert in medieval folklore who has worked for nearly thirty years in the department of Old Russian Literature at Pushkin House in St. Petersburg. He sets his novel in the Middle Ages so that he can depict a counternarrative to those of the twenty-first century regarding identity and purpose, the world’s order or disorder, and the relationship to the divine. In his own words, Laurus “describes the life of a saint and is written according to the rules of medieval poetics.” Rather than prioritize the role of the author in the creation of the text, medieval writers saw themselves as humble scribes recalling old truths to the current culture, passing on traditions. In hagiography, the writers “would include in their texts fragments from other saints’ lives” without recourse to historical accuracy, any modern sense of cause and effect, or even consistency of fact within the narrative. For medieval writers, providence mattered more than time, the vertical plane more than the horizontal, and the unseen reality was more real than the empirical world. At the heart of medieval writing was Holy Scripture, which “set the tone for the majority of medieval compilations.” While the story may appear to be a collection of fragments, the divine reality gives the narrative its order.8

In the medieval world, Holy Scripture “gave meaning to the signs that were generously scattered in daily life,” and life was “a text written by God that excluded the ill-considered and accidental.” Knowledge of this truth has been lost, so the world may now have “any number of individual meanings. . . . Think of the blogger who describes, minute by minute, a day that has passed.”9 Contemporary readers lack the sense of an overriding narrative, or they choose meaning according to their dissonant beliefs, or perhaps some no longer permit themselves to desire a cohesive order.

To practice seeing our life as Laurus saw his own—as an ordered mosaic—I would recommend either journaling or practicing the daily examen. In twenty-first-century America, people lose interest in journaling when they exit eighth grade, but diaries provide a witness of how God has authored your life. From within certain seasons and moments, it is hard to see how that time fits within the whole story. Yet when you read a journal entry from several years prior in comparison to where you are now, you are able to see prayers that have been answered or justly received silence. You see that God was at work even when you doubted his presence. Similarly, the daily examen can provide a structure to your journals, or it can be silent reflection. If you follow the St. Ignatius method of daily examen, you will adhere to five steps at the end of each day: become aware of God’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Holy Foolishness
• 2. Communion of Saints
• 3. Creation Care as a Holy Calling
• 4. Liberating Prophets
• 5. Virgin, Bride, Mother
• 6. Contemplative and Active Life
• 7. Sharing in His Suffering
• 8. Ars Moriendi
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Cover Flaps
• Back Cover