I have found the term “fractal” to be increasingly useful. Rather than thinking of one thing as a “copy” of another, I see the similarities that are, nevertheless, unique. I have three adult daughters, all of whom resemble their mother (and each other) with each them still being quite unique. Interestingly, I did not recognize this until a decade or so ago in which their resemblance was a theme in a dream. I woke up, and, as they say, “Once you see it – you can’t unsee it.” I have noticed the same sort of thing as I look in a mirror. There, I see my father as well as my two brothers. Growing up, I did not see that we resembled each other at all (despite being told so by others). Now I cannot unsee it.
Our genes are not the only fractals of our lives. Even personalities tend to “rhyme” through the generations, as do many of the situations they confront. Revolutionary change is very much the exception rather than the rule. I suspect that this aspect of our existence underwrites the striking relevance of ancient stories to our lives. It is, all in all, the same story, lived over-and-over with slight changes, a fractaled tale of human struggle, triumph, and failure.
In an interview, J.R.R. Tolkien opined that all great human stories are about one thing: “death.” It is the haunting presence that threatens to end any story, undo its meaning, or wrap it in unfinished and unanswered questions. And so, the gospels confront our humanity. The story confronts death and defeats it. That defeat echoes back through every action, every spoken word, every gesture. Everything is Pascha.
It is a story that we lose sight of in an intermittent manner – thinking that our lives are either self-defined or fractals of some other narrative. A present generation laments that the American Dream is beyond their reach (as though such a story was ever worth much). That dream, last time I checked, always ended in a grave, some coffins fancier than others as if such mattered to its decaying contents.
The Christian life is, properly, baptized into the fractal of Christ’s Pascha. Buried with Him in Baptism, raised in the likeness of His resurrection, we become “Christ-ians” (little Christs). The moral life that we might live is not measured against an abstract standard of rules, but measured against the silhouette of Christ Himself. Our actions of greed, envy, and lust (and such) are thus revealed to be betrayals of the Story, lines of forgetfulness.
The term “fractal” seems to fit the on-going drama. For no living depiction of Christ in a human life exactly matches the image according to which it is made. Nevertheless, or, precisely because of this, we constantly draw ourselves back to Christ Himself and the original story. Repentance erases and redraws the lines of our lives, even as God Himself directs our hand.
St. Silouan of Mt. Athos spoke and wrote about the “whole Adam,” a way of describing the whole human race. It is not a mere collection of billions of different things, but things (people), whose differences are actually quite small, all rhyming in a manner with an original pattern. Of course, he was interested in more than their similarity. The “whole Adam” can be spoken of in the singular because its commonality is grounded in a single, common life. In some manner, what happens to any one of us happens to all of us. “My brother is my life,” the great saint said. With a grounding in a single, common life, it is little wonder that our lives rhyme with one another. We are fractals.
What we proclaim as Christians is that God Himself becomes one of us. He is the Adam from whom the whole family of humanity is named. Christ, the “Second Adam,” is the Pattern according to whose image the “First Adam” is created. It should be of note that the gospel of Christ, that story which is the fullness of the human story (for so we believe), has found nowhere within our planet in which the story fails to resound. Indeed, it would seem that all the stories ever told find some level of resonance within Christ. As C.S. Lewis observed:
The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle.
Or, as Lewis himself first heard it expressed by a fellow Oxford professor (T.D. Weldon):
“Rum [odd] thing, all that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.”
I would add something perhaps odder still. It not only happened once, but seems to be repeated over and over within the life of every human being. The Orthodox say it this way:
“God became man so that man might become god.”
And the God we become is not the imagined Omnipotence-in-the-sky; it is none other than the Crucified God. Created in the image of Christ, our every step graced by His presence is a movement towards the completeness declared from the Cross. To be like Christ is not measured by miracle or speech, but by the fullness of the stature of His love.
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