Earlier this year, I read Eugene Vodolazkin’s widely acclaimed Laurus, a novel about a man in medieval Russia who is both a healer and a “holy fool” in the Russian Orthodox tradition. It’s a story filled with vivid descriptions and mystical encounters—a search for redemption that takes the reader through landscapes plagued by war and disease.
A recurring theme in Laurus is the parting of ways. In one scene, when several men take leave of each other, we’re told the moment was marked “with an especial cordiality” because there was no question “they were parting forever.” They assumed they’d never meet again on the earth. “In this lay a particularity of partings during that era,” Vodolazkin comments. “The Middle Ages rarely presented opportunities that brought people together twice during the course of an earthly life.”
Parting Ways
Parting forever.
I’ve contemplated the significance of parting ways this year, having lost a friend and colleague in January in a sudden accident. After a week of working on various projects and attending meetings, we walked out to the parking lot together, talked about future plans, and then parted ways. Neither of us knew that within a few hours or so, he’d be with his Savior. Since that day, maybe as a result of the shock and grief we’ve felt, our team has parted ways with apprehension and sadness (and we often text each other when we get home!).
Whenever someone dies, you immediately think of your last encounter—perhaps a phone call or text message, or running into them at a conference or at church. A past parting of ways grows in significance when it becomes the last. There’s finality. An end to the chapter. Not that the end is forever. The official hymn of Southern Seminary includes a line that says, “We meet to part, but part to meet,” hinting at the significance of earthly partings and pointing ahead to the day we’ll meet again in glory.
Even when it’s not death but a change in circumstances, there’s a bittersweet aspect to parting ways with someone—watching them board the plane to go overseas, or load up the U-Haul to move across the country, or stay behind after being dropped off at college. Even when you expect to meet again—just in a different way, or not as often, or under new circumstances—the parting is still powerful.
Never Completely Parting
In a later scene in Laurus, the main character embraces another and says,
You know, O friend, any meeting is surely more than parting. There is emptiness before meeting someone, just nothing, but there is no longer emptiness after parting. After having met someone once, it is impossible to part completely. A person remains in the memory, as a part of the memory. The person created that part and that part lives, sometimes coming into contact with its creator. Otherwise, how would we sense those dear to us from a distance?
This is the profundity in parting. We’re different because we met. The encounter has changed us.
This is why someone no longer with you remains close to your heart. There’s still presence in the absence, something real in the empty room. As long as you remember the person you worked with, or lived next to, or served alongside, or roomed with, there may be a physical parting of ways, but the parting is never complete. Something of them in you remains. You’re different from who you might have been otherwise.
This is what it means to encounter another living person, an image-bearer of the one true God. “There are no ordinary people,” C. S. Lewis reminds us. “You have never talked to a mere mortal.”
When we meet with another human being, when we spend time with someone made in the image of God—sitting across the table, enjoying a hot beverage, working on a project, or falling into deep conversation—we are changed. And when we part ways, we acknowledge this with the hug or the handshake: It’s good that you exist. I’m glad that you are.
A beautiful parting of ways is steeped in the ethos of the kind farewell. And whenever we part ways—no matter our frailties and fears, anxieties and questions, hopes and dreams—we give thanks for the connection, and we savor the memory, nodding at the power of presence, even in absence. Knowing that nothing good will ever fully pass away.
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