Beginnings

By Debie Thomas

           The early Church Fathers called Sunday the "Eighth Day," a day of fresh beginnings.  "An eighth and eternal day," St. Augustine called it, "consecrated by the Resurrection of Christ."  A day when we "shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise." 

           Basil the Great called it a day "without evening, without succession, and without end."  In his treatise on the sixth Psalm, St. Gregory of Nyssa imagined the Eighth Day sun, "radiating the true light; embracing all things in its luminous power," so that all who shared in that continual light would themselves become "other suns."

           It was with these lofty images of renewal and perpetual sunlight in mind that I spent the last few days on the beach with my family.  Wanting to celebrate the New Year outdoors, we vacationed along the Pacific Coast in Monterey County, California.  On the evening of the 31st, we stood on a white-sand beach, our three-month-old labradoodle digging ecstatically at our heels, and watched the last sun of 2014 dip below the horizon in a blaze of pink and orange glory.

           Around us, people took selfies, built campfires, argued into cellphones, and huddled under fleece blankets.  Children threw sand at each other, seagulls squawked, dogs barked.  In the distance, a gray whale broke the surface of the water in one long, gliding movement, supremely uninterested in my gasping surprise.  All the while, oblivious of everything but the delightful sand beneath her paws, our puppy kept digging.  She dug until sheer exhaustion wore her out and she collapsed — a curly chocolate ball — at our feet.

           What does it mean to live in the Eighth Day?  For the Church Fathers, it meant a life characterized by radical hope — hope beyond death, hope beyond time and space.  For me — for now — it means something smaller, messier, and closer to home.  As poet Christian Wiman explains in his memoir, My Bright Abyss: "To experience grace is one thing; to integrate it into your life is quite another.  What I crave now is that integration, some speech that is true to the transcendent nature of grace yet adequate to the hard reality in which daily faith operates." 

           In my daily reality, Eighth Day grace means foremost that conversion isn't a one-time transaction; it's a series of renewals enacted hour-by-hour, day-by-day, decade-by-decade.  Which isn't to say I don't believe in Basil the Great's eschatological "day without evening," or St. Gregory's luminous sun.  I do.  But I'm not kidding myself; I've got a fair number of sunsets to go before I achieve any blazes of glory.  Living in the Eighth Day means resting — impatiently at times, I'll confess — in the arms of a careful and meticulous God, a God whose creative work rarely follows the dictates of my calendar.

           And yet, the Eighth Day also invites my active participation.  In the Genesis story, God invites Adam and Eve to steward the earth, to become co-creators and draw out the potential embedded in creation.  The Eighth Day marks the beginning of an artistic partnership.

           But the partnership is a challenging one.  Every beginning presupposes an ending.  Every resurrection requires a death.  Though I'm happy to usher in a new year, it was with mixed feelings — regret, satisfaction, and longing — that I stood on the shore, watching 2014 slip away.  Renewal isn't straightforward, and coming back to life can hurt.  Staying alive — alive to oneself, alive to one's friends and enemies, alive to an indifferent and often bewildering world?  There's nothing easy about that daily resurrection. 

           For me, this aspect of the Eighth Day means dying to beliefs that have remained convenient and comfortable long after they've proven untrue.  Embracing mystery when I'd much prefer certainty.  Opening myself to change in my relationships — not once or twice or fifty times.  But ceaselessly.

           So, I put words to paper, not least to keep myself open to the very changes I fear.  For as long as I can remember, I've written in order to figure out my life, especially my life with God.  I don't write as an expert, but as a fellow traveler, hungry to explore the questions that matter, hungry to circle the pathways of my life until I see old things with new eyes.  T.S Eliot describes the journey perfectly: "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time."

           Sometimes when I write-to-explore, I feel like my puppy must have felt on New Year's Eve, basking in the sheer joy of excavation. Once in a while, though, far in the distance, something rises ever-so-fleetingly into view.  Another kind of life — huge, mysterious, otherworldly — emerges in my peripheral vision.  Those moments take my breath away.  Time beyond time, space beyond space.  The Eighth Day as Resurrection.

           In the weeks to come, I hope to explore and excavate my faith in ways that will encourage you.  Wherever you are in your journey with God, I hope the questions and experiences I consider here will inspire your own, and that many moments of renewal will surprise, delight, and nourish your soul.  "A day when we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise."  Let's live it together. 

           Welcome to the Eighth Day.