My life as a writer Part 2 (the Crystallization of faith) By Robert Fullarton

My life as a writer Part 2 (the Crystallization of faith)

By Robert Fullarton

One of the great delights I have stumbled upon over these past 7 years has been that of reading much Russian literature. These are the writers who examine the suffering of the human individual as a means to humility, to repentance and to spiritual growth. Russian authors too can be the wackiest, zaniest and most satirical of writers and their work bares a cheerful grin in the face of an autocratic despot, of social unrest, personal sorrows and least of all the unforgiving severity of the Russian winter.

I love the fresh dose of reality, the precise, journalistic, yarn filled, account ridden, metaphysical power that extends through the writings of say Solzhenitsyn’s writings of the gulag system, Dostoyevsky’s psychology of a guilt ridden murder or Tolstoy’s examination of the cancerous death of a wealthy Muscovian judge.

These books are more real to me than much of what the west possesses. Western literature can often be shallow, superficial and pandering to the secular life and its fickle curiosities. In its obsession with censoring free speech in accordance with secular demands, the Christian reader can find the depth and thought provoking critique of man fall short in comparison with the “classics” of Russian literature, much of which was written through times of horrific social chaos (as I already stated) and let it be stated the tenets of the Christian faith, run through much of the Russian canon. The life of Christ is given a pivotal connection to the psychology of the protagonist (Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn and Gogol were deeply religious figures, deeply intrigued with the Christian faith) who is on a pilgrimage so to speak to finding God (Rashkolnikov is the classic example for this as he repents and confesses his double murders to a prostitute, who agrees to go into exile with him in Siberia. In this scene she reads the raising of Lazarus to him from the Gospel of John and convinces him that confession and repentance are the start of a new beginning. Into exile he goes, but with a new testament from which his inner psychology of self hatred and confounded anger transforms into a Christ like love).

The Christian life is a crystallization of God’s nature within our imperfect domain, fashioned from within the caves of our deepest pain, where little crystals of change transform, that are foreign to our old selves, but are the harmony of the unknown God, whom we did not know, whom we were strangers to once upon a time. God to us was once an association, thrust upon us when our parents cajoled us to the church once a week. God to us was a tradition and anomaly, a curiosity and yet a deep mystery which had the power to hold our breath. I state that when we were slaves to our pleasures and in the middle of an addictive spiral that threw us downwards, he called us by name, one by one, spoke directly into our hearts, revealed himself in happenings which were the codex of our identity and in such moments we left the world behind and became “Children of God”. Jesus Christ is the measure of God’s mercy to the gentiles, his life is a gift to the nations and his love is a celebration of the God of the Jews, the Gentile nations and the created universe directly to the humble heart. It was written that Moses had to veil his face from God upon Mt. Sinai and likewise the people had to cover their faces from the sheer radiance that was streaming forth from his face. There is a similar incident mentioned in the Gospel of Luke with Jesus Christ, who has been transfigured and bathed with light, because it is almost as if he is made of pure incandescent light that illuminates the figures of the apostles before him. In this moment the mask of God comes off the earthly costume and the hidden nature of God is revealed upon the mountain. The light is in fact the purity of holiness that is too much for the weak irises of the human body to comprehend and contain. It is a moral difference between man and God that needs to be filled, it was and is filled with the suffering sacrifice of the human person that God became. Here we have a man that embodied man and God simultaneously, greatly suffered and yet was risen to great glory. His pain and his life is relevant to mine, but his pain gives consolation, comfort and assessment to the fact that this world, our suffering and its assortment of weaknesses and failures are a finality in the face of a great eternity, the horrid pitch black midnight of man’s descent to anarchy, before the hours of the God filled dawn.

“The world does not know me”, says the Lord and how true he was and is today, the world’s appetite for want and unending power does not have an ounce of truth within it, because it lives in separation from God. The world pursues desires and is trapped in the cycle of human nature that is destructive, yet many want to continue in this shadow of weak and tiny comforts in the face of someone much greater than our own desires.

The Russian fable, the novel, the epoch and the expose of the gulags are in reality little examinations of human nature and its failings in the face of what God wanted of man, then came the exile from God, then came the terror of man’s anarchy, the destruction of all orders and unions and such happens when men are separated from the great union with God. One must repent of one’s misdeeds, but the punch to such power, the force of such feeling we undergo is that when experience a falling in love with God, where doors open, where real power is revealed and hate filled hearts become tenderised by the letting in and coming of Christ’s nature and his spirit within ourselves. To the secular world this is a riddle in perpetual motion which they will dismiss as madness, but which we will flourish in continuity like oak trees that reach to celestial heights into the canopy of God’s warmth.