Timeless Love
As the clocks change, I think it’s about time I returned to this blog. And what better subject to return with than time itself? More specifically, Falling Out of Time by award-winning Israeli novelist David Grossman. Ironically, if that’s the word (how many of us have been told, “That’s not what ironic means” and now are afraid to use the word?), my own copy of Falling Out of Time fell in the Dead Sea. This moving elegy-allegory brings together multiple voices to speak about grief with honesty, rage, and tenderness. It has resonances with C. S. Lewis’s autobiographical A Grief Observed and Max Porter’s Grief Is The Thing With Feathers. Let me share with you what I found to be the most poignant of passages in Falling Out of Time:
WALKING MAN:
I seem to understand
only things
inside time. People,
for example, or thoughts, or sorrow,
joy, horses, dogs,
words, love. Things that grow
old, that renew,
that change. The way I miss you
is trapped in time as well. Grief
ages with the years, and there are days
when it is new, fresh.
So, too, the fury at all that was robbed
from you. But you are
no longer.
You are outside
of time.
How can I explain
to you, for even the reason is
captured in time. A man from far away
once told me that in his language
they say of one who dies in war,
he ‘fell’.
And that is you: fallen
out of time,
while the time
in which I abide
passes you by:
a figure on a pier,
alone,
on a night
whose blackness
has seeped wholly out.
I see you
but I do not touch.
I do not feel you
with my probes of time.
How can comfort be found in grief? It can’t. But the God of all comfort finds us in our grief and provides us refuge from its ravages, hope in the hurting, and love in our loss.
‘The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms’ (Deuteronomy 33:27).
