Light and Resurrection

As I settled into the Bealey Hotel yesterday in Arthur’s Pass I came to the end of the novel Resurrection, by Leo Tolstoy. As with Anna Karenina, Tolstoy doesn’t spare the reader any of the drama endured by the characters or the painful interpersonal struggles they need face. It was only this morning that I came to appreciate more fully the meaning of such struggle and the novel’s title, Resurrection.

I watched the sunrise this morning over the mountains (I apologize for being the cause of any jealousy). Before the sun crept over the horizon there was just a hint of color in the sky, a deep red outlining the profile of the dark mountains. And little by little the clouds above the horizon turned burnt orange then faded to yellow and the surrounding landscape moved from pure darkness to that phase of light where you can distinguish between tree and rock, but can’t see any of the detail. As I’m typing this, the sun is rushing into my windows and illuminating the northeastern side of the surrounding hills. Throughout this day, as this light makes its way across the sky unimpeded by the clouds, it will make visible what had been hiding in the shadows. 

This was the path traveled by Nekhlyudov (Nekhlúdoff) in Tolstoy’s Resurrection. With each turn of the page Nekhlyudov meets a new injustice that he seeks to correct, both in himself and in his native Russia. It’s fascinating to watch how his awareness changes, how the light of the circumstances that he’s forced to confront show him things that he had either previously ignored or had not seen. Only after this light of awareness ran its full course across the sky of his experience did he discover a new reason to live, a new object to follow. He becomes a new man, a new creation precisely because he follows what is happening around him and within him.

Resurrection is the story of one man’s awakening and the journey needed to arrive there. We don’t have to create the drama so marvelously described by Tolstoy; we have plenty in our lives. The challenge is to look at all of it in the light: to grow in awareness of what God makes happen. Particularly in these days when many of our circumstances are clearly out of our control, we can ask whether we are merely pushing them back into the shadows or if we are willing to look at them for what they are—as given. What are we hiding in the shadows? What newness we could experience if we brought it to the light!