Fall Issue 10
Andrei Rublev: On Friendship
By Débora da Silva Raimundo
Disclaimer: this is not a film review. For it to be a film review I would have to tell you why the prologue of the film Andrei Rublev is trying to say that life is but a brief moment of beauty and grace. And I would have to explain how the movie is divided in two parts and eight novellas that at first seem to be disconnected, with seemingly unimportant characters, but who actually come together at the end. Also, I would have to make the case for how the story of forging a bell parallels Andrei’s own journey and sufferings. And I would ask you to consider that that’s probably why, when the bell finally rings, Andrei gets his voice and his vocation back. But I don’t want to tell you about that. I want to tell you about Andrei and Daniil.
Andrei, Daniil, and Kirill are three monks who are traveling together when they arrive at a monastery. We learn early on that Kirill is incapable of offering Andrei his friendship because he is envious of his artistic gifts. “Andrei is good, yes. But he paints with no faith,” Kirill accuses. When someone comes to the monastery to summon Andrei to paint frescoes in Moscow, the young Andrei promptly accepts, not realizing that he is hurting his friend Daniil, who feels betrayed and abandoned. And then, it happens: Andrei sits with Daniil at the table, under candlelight, and asks for forgiveness.
“I see the world with your eyes.
I hear the world with your ears…
… with your heart.”
Can you imagine such friendship? Isn’t it absolutely beautiful?
I think I was 16 the first time I read C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves. I was trying to survive the hostile environment of high school, making efforts to keep my head together, sometimes avoiding the mean girls, other times being one, when Lewis’s chapter on friendship caught me. Lewis knew what he was writing about. He was recovering Aristotle’s idea that, although we certainly do not need friendship to survive, it is what makes life worth living. What a beautiful love!
A love that makes you part of someone, and makes someone part of you. “Débora, aren’t you stretching it a bit?” No, no I am not. What is the church if not a body of friends?
The image of the body (as you are surely aware) is not mine, but it is the best we have. It speaks to us of differentiation, yes, but also of belonging and submission to one another. That’s why Andrei can tell Daniil that he sees the world with his eyes.
Let me tell you one last thing: sometimes this might be literal, not just poetic. You might be called to be someone’s eyes, or you might need someone to be your legs, or your arms, or your memory. And that is okay! If you will, you might call it “an embodied spiritual friendship.” Virtuous friendship is helping one another in our limitations. Or ‘being’ for each other. That’s also how community is born.
Finally, speaking of community and acknowledging each other’s limitations and gifts, a piece of advice: when Ben Nelson recommends a movie, you watch the movie, because he knows best! With that, I invite you to enjoy CTC movie nights on Thursdays and to make good friends.
Feisty Females!
By Erica Bowler
Where are the historical women? Want to find out what they were writing about? Join us next term for Women’s Theological Writing (Hist/Theo 682)! Taught by Dr. Cindy Aalders (PhD, Oxford), this exciting new course is offered next term!
I love history, and thoroughly enjoyed the first Christian history courses I took at Regent. Learning about St. Francis of Assisi, John Newton, William Wilberforce, and John Newton was fantastic, and they are all personal heroes. But by the end of the year, I couldn’t help feeling ‘left out’ of Church history. Where were my female role models?
Perhaps you have also felt this way. If so, there’s good news! While many historical women aren’t well-known today, they did write, and made important theological contributions. To avoid restrictions against women’s religious authority, female writers creatively used different genres to express their thoughts about God, including songs, diaries, poetry, letters, novels, and plays.
This course (open to male and female students!) examines these genres and explores female writers from the late 1st century to modern times. Some of these women, like Hildegard of Bingen and Catherine of Siena, might already be familiar. Other female writers might be new! There’s Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-95), a Mexican genius and child prodigy who wrote poetry, scientific thought, philosophy, music, theology, and a sassy defence of women. There’s Maria Skobtsova (1891-1945), a cigar-smoking Orthodox nun who worked with the homeless in France. When the Nazis invaded Paris, Skobtsova assisted Jews by distributing fake baptismal certificates. Some women are sweet, such as young Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-97), whose ‘little way’ modeled holiness in ordinary living. Others, like playwright and novelist Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957), are feisty! Witness wisdom and wit despite persecution and prison. There’s even a shrunken head!
Curiosity piqued? Yes, I know that Regent has many required courses, but this class is only offered next semester, so sign up now! Hope to see you there!
The Season of Too Much
By Steven Gomez
Vancouver, and its satellite municipalities, is by far the most urbanized corner of British Columbia. Most of this province is forests, mountains, small rural communities, and highways. The stretch of road that runs east-west from Prince George to Prince Rupert has the imaginative name of Highway 16. But the large number of murders and disappearances that have taken place along it, with most of the victims being Indigenous women, have earned it the nickname ‘Highway of Tears’. Running perpendicular to Highway 16 is Highway 37, heading due north towards the Yukon and passing through a small community called Dease Lake.
That was where my uncle’s body was found at the end of the third week in July.
All of our lives are marked by the death of loved ones. We all lose family gradually as the generations pass on. Some of us lose friends or spouses to illness or accident. But there’s a curious otherness to the term ‘murder’. For most of us it’s present only through detective fiction, television, and the news, which means that we’re sure it can only happen in someone else’s family. It is odd and peculiar and foreign to our everyday existence. Our lives might be marked by death, but never murder.
Uncle Len, who had left my aunt and two cousins here in town to take a solo road trip through northern BC, was murdered by a couple of troubled teenaged boys who later fled to Manitoba where they committed suicide.
The news came in the middle of the week when N.T. Wright visited Regent. In the middle of the summer when I was TA for five courses. In the middle of a year when I was awarded a scholarship which meant going back to a full-time level of studies on top of being hired as the Et Cetera editor. In the middle of a string of romantic disappointments, and soon after the passing of my Dominican grandmother after a long illness, and just before the sudden death of one Dominican uncle after an unexpected illness. And…and…and…
And on the day that I found out about Uncle Len, I felt that word marking me. Over and over the thought surfaced: I have a murdered uncle. Over and over I had to literally push it down and bury it just to survive everything else happening.
Allysen wrote last week how on how balance is a myth, how life is about seasons rather than trying to keep up with everything at once. But what to do when everything happens at once? If this is a season of my life, then it is surely the Season of Too Much. Were I in a more jovial mood, I would call it the Season of Et Cetera—and also this, and also this, and also this.
I’m writing this because I need to fill space, but I also need to be marking DQs, and also to study my Hebrew vocabulary, and also to write a book review, and also to finish reading Charles Williams on Dante, and also to start researching for my paper on James and 1 Peter…et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And in the middle of all these et ceteras is the continual reality that I have a murdered uncle. An uncle who has deserved more grief than I have had time to give, and that fact brings a peculiar mix of bitterness and shame. We talked often at family gatherings, sharing jokes and opinions on movies we’d seen. But it wasn’t until now that I realized how many authors we shared, how we both held a wonder for the world from different directions, how we were both fascinated by the spiritual transcendence of art. He drew astounding and detailed pictures in ink, one of them the cover art for a local poet’s collection, depicting the angel in the Revelation of John who holds the golden censer. How I wish we had talked more about books, about the things I was reading and learning at Regent.
The Season of Too Much has exposed how imperfect I am, where my limits are, and what I’m incapable of doing. I have been struggling with the fact that my life is not what I thought it would be when I got to my early 30s. I have left undone the things I ought to have done, and the things I thought would happen naturally have failed to materialize—nor do they seem likely to. I am picturing my own end and how much might be left unresolved, how much regret and grief might have piled up in the interval between now and then. How much grace will be necessary.
Judith shared beautifully on Friday night about her journey of grieving her father through a road trip, and the reality that grief remains unresolved however much we push ourselves and however much time has passed. If this weren’t the Season of Too Much, I might be able to resolve, if not my grief, then at least this essay into something more meaningful and more profound and more spiritually mindful or uplifting. But I have been reminded by more than one friend that this is probably truer to our experience. Our lives go through seasons, not necessarily narratives. They don’t actually wrap up in a nice neat resolution, and through it all we are constantly in need of God’s grace.
We have our Seasons of Too Much, when we can barely keep it all together, when what we thought was resolved springs back up, when all we’re juggling keeps slipping through our fingers to smash on the floor. And perhaps never more than when we try to put it all into words.