Losing, Finding & Logos

We lose all the time. In the year just thus far, we are bound to have lost countless things, thoughts, places, personalities, or even persons.

Many of these would be somewhat incidental to our lives, while others would have ploughed a furrow so deep into our hearts that nothing can seem to level them again.

This really struck home as I realised that my life here in Australia recently entered its third decade, which prompted me to think not only of the move made here all those decades back, but also the other continents which I (even if temporarily) called home. It also prompted me to think all the connections to places, chances and people that entered my purview also fell from it through choice or circumstance.

As we said in our first podcast episode on Awkward Asian Theologians, nothing that has entered our biographies are accidents. All that said, one thing that we did not fully address concerns the fate of those that exited our biographies, those things, places, and people that for one reason or another are not the biographical fixtures we thought (or even hoped) they would be.

While I did conjecture in a number of places (in popular form in Church Life Journal, and in an expanded and more scholarly form in the journal Religions) that our losses can be folded back into the workings of grace in the Divine Logos who is the concidence of opposites, this was mostly conjecture on my part, which extended a medieval precedent. In other words, I had until that time not found a direct textual connection.

This changed when, during my spiritual reading, I read the final chapter of James K.A. Smith’s On the Road with St. Augustine, which was an absolute treasure trove of writings of the Doctor of the West that even those familiar with him might not know about (that certainly was the case for me).

Among those was a letter that Augustine wrote to a woman named Sapida, who lost her son Timothy, who was due to be ordained to the diaconate, and passed what would have been his liturgical garment over to the Bishop of Hippo. In responding to the kind gift, Augustine spoke of how passing things can have a permanence, not because of the thing in and of itself, but the love that cleaved itself onto that thing. As Augustine wrote to Sapida:

For the love by which Timothy loved and loves Sapida has not perished because those things…have passed away over time. That love remains, preserved in its repository, and is hidden with Christ the Lord (216).

The key in the preservation of love woven into the things that pass away, Augustine tells us, lies in the Divine Word, whose rationale (Logos) is none other than love itself.

Augustine had an additional comfort for Sapida in his letter. In speaking of Christ’s conquering of death, Augustine also left us with a hope that the resurrected Christ:

…can restore what has been lost, bring to life what has died, repair what has been corrupted, and keep thereafter without end what has come to an end (216).

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