Perhaps the most sobering of Erik Varden’s reflections on remembrance in The Shattering of Loneliness comes in the third chapter.  The chapter is centered on Jesus’s command in Luke 17 to “remember Lot’s wife.”  

The command to remember Lot’s wife is set in a long talk from Jesus about “the coming of the kingdom.”  It’s not coming in a way that can be observed.  There will be people pretending to point to it, but they are wrong.  The sign of Noah is given- people aren’t going to realize what’s actually happening in the world around them.  The same with Lot:

²⁸ “It was the same in the days of Lot. People were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building. ²⁹ But the day Lot left Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all.

³⁰ “It will be just like this on the day the Son of Man is revealed. ³¹ On that day no one who is on the housetop, with possessions inside, should go down to get them. Likewise, no one in the field should go back for anything. ³² Remember Lot’s wife! ³³ Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will preserve it. (Luke 17 NIV)

Varden uses the language of conversion throughout the book.  By this he does not mean an initial “conversion experience” so much as conversion of life as it is lived over time.  It is, perhaps, a kind of working out of our salvation (reference).  He spends time in the chapter retelling the story of Lot and his wife and brings to bear a few difference approaches to the story: how she turns and looks back even though she has been commanded not to.  And thus she becomes a pillar of salt.  What might that have to do with us today?  How do we engage with the Old Testament story and Jesus’ gloss on this side of both?  How do we keep moving forward instead of pausing and looking back? Varden asserts:

. . . to maintain a forward momentum, we need to be honest enough to discern and unpick our complex motivations; to enquire what arises from our passions, what may stand a chance of being from God; then to enact a prudent, gracious response. 

He goes on to say:

. . .  conversion must be constructed in aspirational, not reactive, terms; as an option for what is good, not against what is thought bad— or dangerous.

So we have and are allowed to use the critical distance of centuries to mindful of how we live in our own time.  Not that we know better or that human nature has changed, but that we have more to draw from.  We have the Spirit.  But as Lent reminds us, we are never far from temptation, whether to look back or to give up or to give in.  Varden challenges his readers to be careful when addressing the temptations and passions that could lead us to turn around when we ought not:

The Desert Fathers, though innocent of Freud, insisted on the interconnectedness of the passions: the most libidinal may voice what is really a spiritual malady, which is why it is futile to combat them in isolation.

I mentioned that this chapter was the most sobering of the book.  Part of that is, of course, the nature of the Genesis story and Jesus’ capturing of it.  The other part is how Varden employs Father Sergius, a story by Leo Tolstoy.  I don’t want to say more about the story because of how embedded the story is into the argument that Varden has been building.  It is his most effective use of a cultural artifact in the book (and it is one among many).  It reminds us, in the end, of this sobering truth:

Apparent success must never seduce us into thinking we are beyond temptation’s reach . . . It is never to late to turn into a pillar of salt.

And so we remember Lot’s wife.