John Arnold - Life Conquers Death: Meditations on the Garden, the Cross, and the Tree of Life

Foreword

J ohn Arnold once said that he had learned Russian during his military service as part of a process of equipping him for conflict during the Cold War era; but what his knowledge of Russian had done was to equip him instead for a lifetime of friendship and understanding. He had never, he said, uttered a word of Russian in anger. It is an apt parable for the way in which God overrules human suspicion and human conflict to draw his own purposes gently through.

This book is the fruit of a long absorption in the riches of the Christian tradition, East and West, and its subject matter is nothing less than the great central theme of redemption, treated with a fullness of classical theological sensitivity. But it also represents that lifetime of listening to and loving the heritage of Russia in particular the great twentieth-century testimonies to hope and human dignity out of the heart of terrible suffering. Writers like Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn show, without any evasion or sentimentality, how the beauty of the human face can show itself in the most apparently inhuman of places. John Arnolds superb meditations on these stories and testimonies lead directly into meditation on the gospel narratives that lie behind them and make full sense of them.

God has chosen to redeem us and restore our humanity by nothing less than his own journey into the wars and gulags and inner mental prisons where human beings try to blot out the image of God in themselves and each other. The face of glory has to be allowed to come to light in the heart of the darkness. If it were only a slightly improved version of the best we can do, we should have no compelling reason to see it as Gods face. But when it appears in the depth of greatest despair and inhumanity, it shows its true and indestructible power.

With that vision in our hearts and minds, we can, as John Arnold urges, take up again the task of humanising our own environment our built environment with all its social tragedies and traumas, but also our whole material environment, symbolised in these pages by the recurring image of the tree of life.

This book is a powerful statement of basic Christian hope; I asked John to write it after hearing him deliver two retreats in which I felt that I had been introduced afresh, with authority and profundity, to what was most central in our faith. I hope many others will find here just that sense of hearing great and supposedly familiar truths as if for the first time.

+ROWAN CANTUAR:
Archbishop of Canterbury
Lambeth Palace, London
Visit of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Elizabeth, 2007

Acknowledgements

M y chief thanks go to the Archbishop of Canterbury for his kind invitation to produce his Lent Book for 2008, for his encouragement to proceed with the work and for his gracious Foreword.

Next I would like to thank my daughter, Frances, for reading the entire manuscript with critical and appreciative care. Any remaining errors and lapses are my own.

Mrs Jill Pollock typed several drafts with diligence and cheerfulness. The editors and staff of Zondervan have been generous with their time, their advice, their expertise and their professionalism. I am grateful to them all.

Much of the material is based on addresses, meditations and sermons, delivered over several decades and not originally intended for publication. In many cases it is not possible to identify the source of a particular phrase or insight. I am, therefore, indebted to innumerable anonymous persons, living and departed, for their conversation, their writings, their teaching and their inspiration. Parts of chapters 3 7 have appeared in Theology and Sobornost and in the Proceedings of the British-Russian Conferences on Religion and Literature, Durham and Moscow, 2000 2004.

Chapters 5 and 6 contain substantial quotations from Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, published by Harvill Press. They are reprinted by kind permission of the Random House Group Ltd.