{"id":26221,"date":"2016-11-29T05:55:54","date_gmt":"2016-11-29T10:55:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=26221"},"modified":"2016-11-27T23:45:43","modified_gmt":"2016-11-28T04:45:43","slug":"what-good-is-a-road-if-it-doesnt-lead-to-a-church","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2016\/11\/what-good-is-a-road-if-it-doesnt-lead-to-a-church\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cWhat good is a road if it doesn\u2019t lead to a church?\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"Laurus\"<\/a>Rod Dreher has interviewed Eugene\u00a0Vodolazkin, the author of Laurus<\/a>, which we posted about <\/a>yesterday. \u00a0Read what he has to say. \u00a0Sample:<\/p>\n

During the\u00a0perestroika<\/em> period, we had a great film, Repentance<\/em>, by the Georgian\u00a0director Tengiz Abuladze . It\u2019s a movie about the destruction wrought by\u00a0the Soviet past. The last\u00a0scene of the film shows a woman baking a cake at the window. An old woman\u00a0passing on the street stops and asks if this way leads to the church. The woman\u00a0in the house says no, this road does not lead to the church. And the old woman\u00a0replies, \u201cWhat good is a road if it doesn\u2019t lead to a church?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nMore after the jump.\n

<\/p>\n

From Rod Dreher,\u00a0\u2018People Need Other Things To Live By\u2019 | The American Conservative<\/a>:<\/em><\/p>\n

RD: I think one of the most important moments in Laurus\u00a0<\/em>occurs\u00a0when an elder tells Arseny, who is on pilgrimage, to consider the meaning of\u00a0his travels. The elder advises: \u201cI am not saying wandering is useless: there is\u00a0a point to it. Do not become like your beloved Alexander [the Great], who had a\u00a0journey but no goal. And do not be enamored of excessive horizontal motion.\u201d\u00a0What does this say to the modern reader?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That it is time to think about the destination, and not about\u00a0the journey. If the way leads nowhere, it is meaningless. During the\u00a0perestroika<\/em> period, we had a great film, Repentance<\/em>, by the Georgian\u00a0director Tengiz Abuladze . It\u2019s a movie about the destruction wrought by\u00a0the Soviet past. The last\u00a0scene of the film shows a woman baking a cake at the window. An old woman\u00a0passing on the street stops and asks if this way leads to the church. The woman\u00a0in the house says no, this road does not lead to the church. And the old woman\u00a0replies, \u201cWhat good is a road if it doesn\u2019t lead to a church?\u201d<\/p>\n

So a road as such is nothing. It is\u00a0really the endless way of Alexander the Great, whose great conquests were\u00a0aimless. I thought about mankind as a little curious beetle that I once saw on the\u00a0big road from Berlin to Munich. This beetle was marching along the highway, and it seemed to him that he knows\u00a0everything about this way. But if he would ask the main questions, \u201cWhere does\u00a0this road begin, and where does it go?\u201d, he can\u2019t answer. He knew neither\u00a0what is Berlin, nor Munich. This is how we are today.<\/p>\n

Technical and scientific revelation brought us the belief\u00a0that all questions are possible to solve, but that is a great illusion. Technology\u00a0has not solved the problem of death, and it will never solve this problem . The revelation that\u00a0mankind saw conjured the illusion that everything is clear and known to us. Medieval people, 100\u00a0percent of them believed in God \u2013 were\u00a0they\u00a0really so stupid in comparison to us? Was the difference between their\u00a0knowledge and our knowledge as different as we think? It was not so! I\u2019m sure\u00a0that in a certain sense, our knowledge will be a kind of mythology for future\u00a0generations. I reflected this mythology with humor in Laurus<\/em>, but this\u00a0humor was not against medieval people.\u00a0Maybe it was\u00a0self-irony.<\/p>\n

RD: Timelessness is one of the main ideas of Laurus<\/em>, which leaps\u00a0suddenly and unexpectedly from the medieval present, to our own time. What does\u00a0this mean?<\/strong><\/p>\n

EV: Time doesn\u2019t exist. Of course time exists if we\u2019re speaking in everyday terms, but if we think from the perspective of\u00a0eternity, time doesn\u2019t exist, because it has its end point. For medieval\u00a0people, God was the most important thing about life, and the second most\u00a0important thing was Time. On the one hand, medieval people lived rather short\u00a0lives, but on the other hand, life was very, very long, because they lived with\u00a0their minds in eternity. Every day is an eternity in the church, and all that\u00a0surrounded these people. Eternity made time very long, and very interesting.<\/p>\n

If you would think about the first patriarchs, Adam, Methuselah,\u00a0and others, they had an incredible long life. Adam lived 930 years, Methuselah\u00a0lived, as far as I remember, 962 years. Because they had eternity in their\u00a0memories, eternity could not disappear at once. This eternity disappeared\u00a0slowly, dissipated in the long life of the patriarchs. Medieval people, by comparison\u00a0to us, are these patriarchs. Their life was very long because they had as part\u00a0of daily life this vertical connection, the connection to the divine<\/p>\n

[Keep reading. . .]\u00a0<\/a><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rod Dreher has interviewed Eugene\u00a0Vodolazkin, the author of Laurus, which we posted about yesterday. \u00a0Read what he has to say. \u00a0Sample: During the\u00a0perestroika period, we had a great film, Repentance, by the Georgian\u00a0director Tengiz Abuladze . It\u2019s a movie about the destruction wrought by\u00a0the Soviet past. The last\u00a0scene of the film shows a woman baking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[4978,2407,4976,4977],"class_list":["post-26221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","tag-christian-novels","tag-christianity-literature","tag-eugene-vodolazkin","tag-laurus"],"yoast_head":"\n\u201cWhat good is a road if it doesn\u2019t lead to a church?\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Rod Dreher has interviewed Eugene\u00a0Vodolazkin, the author of Laurus, which we posted about yesterday. \u00a0Read what he has to say. \u00a0Sample: During\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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