The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy finished his “War and Peace” with an ellipsis, indicating that the story continues. Marvelous the implication! Tolstoy’s richest of all novels by the force of those three periods suggests that the tale, now told, has not yet ended. Rather, its telling trails off into all the unfinished business of human life — the life of the reader … your lives and mine.

JUST SO! Might not the Christian find figuratively an ellipsis at the end of the New Testament? Yes, it is possible to envision the story of our Christian faith ending against an ellipsis — three periods, for it, too, is a continuing story — continuing down the centuries into the ongoing and unfinished business of our lives. Think! Think of this faith-story continuing into the welter of our living. When I was a child, sometimes my mother, in pushing my brother and me out the door to catch the bus to school, would call after us, “You boys do right today! Remember your name is Steva!” Benorden was our step-father’s name. But we were never encouraged to assume the Benorden name. Mother always insisted that we belonged to the Steva family. For the most part, the Stevas were a plain spoken, promise-keeping and responsible people shaped by the Lutheran faith. The continuing story of the Steva family was to be worked out in my brother’s and my life in such a manner so as not to sully the Steva name.

HERE IS MY POINT: Something like that is what is being asked of us who take upon ourselves the work of living out the story of our faith. Popular novelist John Updike wrote of his own Christian faith, “… it tells that truth is holy and truth-talking is a noble and useful profession; that the reality around us is created and worth celebrating; that men and women are radically imperfect and radically valuable.”

To have such a view of faith challenges us to go through the narrow gate of responsible engagement with both our sacred writings and our culture…requiring that we recover the dimension of depth in our believing and integrity in the working out of those beliefs. It is not right that anyone who has been a lifetime in the church should live his or her mental life in the shallow waters of what one learned about faith before the age of ten.

THERE IS IN EACH one of us some substance of being of which we are barely aware that yearns to be nurtured. It was Shakespeare who pointed to that substance when he put upon the lips of Cleopatra before she took her life, “Give me my Robe, put on my Crowne; I have Immortal longings in me.” Just so! You and I are at heart listeners and searchers — beings meant to “run on God.”

These “immortal longings” are both substance and foundational for us. We are citizens of two worlds. In his essay on “The Art of Teaching Science,” physician and writer, Lewis Thomas, once proposed that the best way to interest young people in science is to teach not only what is known, but also what is unknown. There should be, he emphasized, “courses dealing systematically with ignorance and with informed bewilderment.” Informed bewilderment — how appropriate those words become when associated with contemporary science’s increasing astonishment respecting its unfolding understanding of reality.

NOW HERE’S THE DEAL! I do not know who or what God is. Nor do I know what God purposes in giving us being. What I do know is that increasingly I view this universe and my place in it in a spirit of “informed bewilderment.” I live in the mode of astonishment. Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton wrote, “We have come to the wrong star…That is what makes life at once so splendid and so strange. The true happiness is that we don’t fit. We come from somewhere else.” Jesus’ life and message opened our minds to our true dignity, hinting that we are more than we seem to be. For Jesus lived as if humanity’s story and God’s story were one story and a continuing story. The insightful reader of the New Testament knows that the gospel telling bumps against an ellipsis. The reader is committed to making alive in the present that which has been given us in hope …

The Rev. Merle G. Steva is minister of visitation at First Parish Church in Saco.

 

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