Palimpsests as a metaphor for becoming over time with God

"I am still every age I have been" - Madeleine L'Engle

For a couple of years now, I’ve been fascinated with the marvel of palimpsests. Did I miss a calling studying ancient manuscripts? (Probably not…)

A palimpsest is a type of manuscript on which you can see traces of multiple writings, often written hundreds of years apart. Think of a piece of paper on which you’ve written with a pencil, erased your words, and then written again. It’s likely you can see traces of the first thing you wrote underneath the final version. That piece of paper would be considered a palimpsest.

A palimpsest found at Saint Catherine Monastery, via Atlas Obscura

I first learned the word palimpsest from the novel The Invisible Life of Addie Larue by V.E. Schwab (which has had a lasting spot in my top 10 books of all time since I read it). Schwab uses it to describe the protagonist’s experience of time, but I keep thinking of it as an analogy for how we at any stage can discern God’s movement in our lives, incorporating our past selves rather than doing away with them.

I consider Simon, Andrew, James, and John who were already well into adulthood, working the jobs their families had likely done for generations, living as they were expected to do. And yet they made a change when God called them to do so. Their former lives were not suddenly null and void when they left it all behind to follow Christ. Their former lives and work informed how they understood the Gospel. Their lives were a palimpsest. Though no long fishermen on boats with nets, God called them to be fishers of people. They understood God’s instruction through the lens of what they knew well and from within their own history. When they became Christ’s disciples, they did not begin with an entirely clean slate, devoid of memory of their former vocations. Instead, those vocations informed who they were to become as ambassadors of Christ.

Then there’s Jonah. We know him as the prophet who was so reluctant to speak that his experience being in a whale is the most retold detail of his story. He is known for his disobedience. And yet… he did go on to give the message God gave, and the result was a people spared. The layers of Jonah’s life and story inform our understanding of this story. God’s intent to bring calamity on Nineveh was, in a way, like pencil marks erased on paper. They were replaced with God’s grace, the significance of which could not be fully understood without knowing, too, God’s initial intent to destroy the city. God changed God’s mind thanks to Jonah’s obedience. The palimpsest of the story is key to understanding its purpose in the story of God’s redemption.

To live as Christ’s disciple is not necessarily to do away with all earthly responsibilities and relationships. But it is a call to reorder our affections. Since learning this word, I wonder about the values, relationships, and emotional experiences of my life and how they are a palimpsest. A living document where the traces of other values can be seen and even explored and understood. An opportunity to see my life’s story in relation to the writing of God’s call upon my life.

Leaving the denomination I grew up in was profoundly sad to me. Becoming Episcopalian has been profoundly joyful. I’ve pursued a new vocation but what makes this story significant includes how it began, what my first ecclesial community taught me about Jesus, and how I’ve experienced God’s presence over time. My life with God is a palimpsest, and each version of the undertext reveals treasure from particular moments when God was especially near. Each are needed to understand the whole and to discern where God might call me in the future.

Our society wants us to believe that time is linear. That we have a beginning and an ending, and our value throughout our lives is determined by wherever we are on that scale. Relationships are simply for capitalistic consumption: what sort of investment and return can they give us? God’s economy is different. God invites at all stages of life to bear witness to the power of God’s grace and to receive it. Simon, Andrew, James, and John were well into their life’s work when they started fresh with a new vocation. Jonah was running away from the Lord and who knows what else when he experienced his own call.

It is never too early, nor too late, to hear God’s voice and respond. For some this looks like a complete change in vocation. For others it looks like reordering values so that our lives are ordered by the Good News rather than our own priorities. God’s time is different from our time, and nothing is wasted.

I think of Madeleine L’Engle who wrote,

“I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I’m with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don’t ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child’s awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.”

I like to think of us as palimpsests, full of stories, and invited into a life of meaning and fullness at every stage, building on each one rather than clearing them away. God incorporates who we have always been, who we are, and who we are becoming.

Keeping that is mind is how we really learn to discern God’s presence in each new chapter of the story.

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