My last Gilead post at least until I reread it in another year or two. This passage is so remarkable that I recommend not even reading what I write further down.
There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us. Augustine says the Lord loves each of us an only child, and this has to be true. "He will wipe the tears from all faces." It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required.
Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave--that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing.
The sublime beauty of this book overpowers me. I don't remember this passage landing with as much weight the first time I read the book. I wasn't much of a reader back then and tended to treat reading as conquest more than absorption.
I think part of the reason, too, that it didn't land is that I did not love this world the way I do now. In other words, I never felt my mortal insufficiency to the world, only it's own towards me. Love of the world is a fraught thing for a Christian. I exchanged emails with a friend this week on the temptation of pantheism. It is real and especially so for people who love the outdoors like I do.
But the fear of pantheism shouldn't lead us into the opposite error of denying the splendor and beauty (more than we can bear), the God-hauntedness, the very groaning of creation. It, like us, waits for redemption. It, like us, is marred by sin. It, like us, will be made new. Christ came because he so loved the world, as my son memorized when he was not yet three. I have no reason to think that love confined simply to humans.
I will cool it with these Gilead posts at some point. I finished the book a few weeks ago, but just keep circling back around to so many of these ideas.
It has seemed to be sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance--for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light. That is what I said in the Pentecost sermon. I have reflected on that sermon, and there is some truth in it. But the Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than it seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?
One of the great glories of this book for me is how it teaches us mindfulness of the mundane, to see the beauty in the everyday, the common, even the ugly. I love how the first part of this can strike us as true--yes, this world does seem illuminated at times as if by God's special grace--but then the second part comes home as even more true as it diverges from the first. It's better than that: this world is, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins "charged with the grandeur of God." It is we who are unable to see it. Obscured by our sin and grime and muck we have lost the vision that is there, the world pulsing with transfiguration and glory.
From Gilead:
When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation? If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably laugh at the thought that the Lord sent him to you for your benefit (and his), but that is the perfection of the disguise, his own ignorance of it.
This is my fifth (sixth?) reading through Gilead. It is passages like that which will keep be coming back every couple of years for the rest of my life. Lord willing. We are liberated by God's grace to respond out of kind, to subvert our need to get what we think we deserve. Amen.
 |
| Read this book NOW! |
The first time I read Gilead was in the Neuro-ICU at University Hospital while my mom's body rebelled against the shock of an aneurysm and the attendant surgeries and we were waiting to know if she would live or die. And, if life won, to what degree that life would be impaired going forward. In other words, I was suffering, perhaps for the first real time in my life. By God's grace my mom lived. And thrived.
But the book was an epiphany for me and a great gift. A literal gift, I had received it as a graduation gift from my best friend some six months before but, not being a reader at the time, it had sat on my shelf until then. Somewhere in the funk of that period, and the days bleeding into days, and the deep tiredness, I began reading. And I will read it every two or three years until my body or mind is taken from me.
Here is one passage that stuck out particularly to me the first time I read. It was pertinent, then, in a way it is not necessarily so now. But I believe it more than I did at that first reading. Experience and age have taken the initial raw emotion of the reading, but it is no less precious for that exchange.
Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.
Good old Isaac Watts. I've thought about that verse often. I have always wondered what relationship this present reality bears to an ultimate reality.
A thousand ages in Thy sight
Are like an evening gone. . .
No doubt that is true. Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, All that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannot be true. I can't believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life.
It is unnecessary to point out how little our culture enjoys suffering or cultivates the ability to suffer with dignity. To say we are addicted to comfort is simply to say, at this point, that we are Americans living in the 21st century.
But, if Robinson is right (or her mouthpiece, the Reverend Ames, is right), then suffering is something inextricably human, something upon which our very humanity is predicated. In other words, to be human is to suffer. And these sufferings are not without purpose. They are, according to the Apostle Paul, achieving for us an eternal weight of glory that far outweighs them all. As we suffer we approach the sufferings of Christ, our elder brother and co-heir. As we suffer, too, we prepare to share with him in his glory. We might, some day and by God's great grace, come, like Paul, to rejoice in our sufferings. Though I know no one granted that type of sainthood.
This is not to say that we seek out suffering or become indifferent to it when we see it ravaging the lives of those whom we love; rather, it is to acknowledge the beautiful truth that on the day when every tear is wiped away from every eye the joy we feel will be all the more joyous for the sorrows we once endured.
It should be noted before I get into the body of this post that there is today no more beautiful novelist in the world than Marilynne Robinson. I have read Gilead four times and Home three times and I am anticipating Lila with great eagerness. I have read all of her books of nonfiction as well and have always found her to be an engaging thinker. A solid part of me is convinced that she couldn't possibly be as simplistic in her responses as it is conveyed in the interview she gave to Religion News Service. I hope she finds occasion to elaborate at some point in the near future. For now I am giving her the benefit of the doubt that she just may not interview very well or that her responses were injudiciously truncated.
You can read the interview I will be referring to here.
There are a few things I would take issue with in her responses, not least of which is her glib dismissal of any notion of historic Christian ethical teaching. The interviewer asks her two questions about gay marriage, the first asking if people with differing opinions can coexist on the issue with the second asking if the size of the population opposed to gay marriage will shrivel to insignificance in the near future. While her answer to the second question is maddening for its deliberate anachronism and lack of cultural awareness, the first is almost more frustrating for its arrogance.
In answer to the first question, Robinson replies:
Sometimes I wonder about the authenticity of the controversies themselves. My own denomination (the United Church of Christ), has blessed same-sex relationships and married them as quickly as it became legal in my state. It has been a process that’s gone on for a long time. Nobody gives it a thought, so when you read in the newspaper that there are people calling down brimstone, it’s startling. In time it will become an old issue for the culture that simply will not bring out this kind of thing anymore.
My people are so awesome and progressive on this issue that it is difficult for me to even conceive that there are still knuckle-dragging troglodytes out there somewhere who might disagree. First of all, come on. Second of all, there are fewer than one million people in the United Church of Christ so I am not sure in what world the views of its membership are taken to be representative for Christendom in general. Thirdly, it is not like Iowa started blessing same sex marriages in the 1820s. The state Supreme Court ruled on that in two-thousand-freaking-nine. I have pairs of socks much older than same sex marriage in Iowa, yet Robinson acts as if she can conceive of the state in no other way. Fourthly, are we to believe that the church that dove headfirst into blessing gay marriages before the ink was dry on the Supreme Court decision really didn't "giv[e] it a thought"? The mix of arrogance and head-in-the-sandiveness of this comment is incommensurate with the best American novelist.
Her answer to the second question, about whether all of the knuckle-dragging troglodytes will eventually shut up and die, repeats the tired assertion that since we mix fabric in our clothing and for the most part refuse to stone witches and kill children who disobey their parents then the whole Levitical teaching on sexual ethics must be tossed aside as well. Again, I have written before how frustrating it is to have the Bible's teaching on the subject, as well as traditional marriage supporters knuckle-dragging troglodytes' arguments in favor of traditional marriage the ancient and oppressive tool of the patriarchy, reduced to the phantom contemporary preacher of Leviticus, but here we are yet again, with America's greatest living novelist.
Robinson doubles down on pro-gay marriage boilerplate by saying that since Jesus never explicitly condemned homosexuals and dudes were into dudes back then that maybe we should just be like Jesus and never teach or say anything controversial. This is ridiculous, again, on any number of levels. First, Jesus also didn't say anything about the government's role in ending poverty, but Robinson seems to find a definite argument in favor of government assistance in his teachings. Second, Jesus was preaching to mostly Jews in Judea. In other words, he was speaking to people who from birth had imbibed the Old Testament sexual ethic. This is not to say that homosexuality did not exist in first century Judea, just to say that there was no question about where Yahweh stood on the issue. Paul, writing to different people in different contexts, has to be more explicit in dealing with the issue and for those who have spent any time reading Paul (like presumably Marilynne Robinson has) this should not be a controversial point to make.
In the very next question, one asking about Hobby Lobby and issues of religious freedom, Robinson continues to parrot the arguments of a commenter on The Daily Kos. Here is Robinson's response:
That seems to me like an artificial problem. I wish I could go to the Supreme Court every time I saw somebody trying to cut food stamps, or pre-K, or any of these other things. These people that are so attentive to babies that don’t exist yet, and so negligent of babies that need help. It’s part of the narrowing of the culture, so that only certain things are considered to be religious controversies. It’s a religious controversy, to me, that we would think of cutting back on help for the poor. Especially after our financiers have crashed the economy.
Again, Robinson seems to be all over the place here. 1) The religious freedom of business owners is artificial; 2) Conservative Christians are somehow negligent of babies that need help; 3) Cutting back on aid to the poor is a religious controversy; 4) Financiers, who were all Republicans, right?, wrecked the economy, which is very relevant to a question about the HCA's contraceptive mandate. That is one busy paragraph.
All of these statements are strange in their own way. What makes forcing someone to go against their conscience because Big Brother says so an artificial issue? Who in the world does more for impoverished children than Christian organizations? I hate the false antithesis between concern over state-sponsored baby-murdering and concern for babies once they are born. Maybe the same state that thinks it is within the moral pale to kill babies in utero is not the best judge of how to care for these children post utero? I don't know, just thinking and typing here. Finally, she knows the guy who owns Hobby Lobby was not a Wall Street financier, right?
I really don't know what else to say other than I am disappointed that this is the best we could get from Robinson. I already knew she would disagree with me on any number of things and that is fine. I don't expect to ideologically agree with all of the novelists I read, or any of them for that matter. I simply expected someone with Robinson's prodigious mind and research in historic Christianity to have a more nuanced view of these issues than some bastard child of a Paul Krugman and Maureen Down column.
None of this changes the fact of Robinson's greatness as a novelist, but for someone who delights in being contrarian (rehabilitating Calvin for goodness' sake) it is unfortunate that she doesn't even seem to have considered both sides to important questions for our culture. In essay after essay in The Death of Adam she asks her reader to reconsider previously held notions about Darwin and Calvin and the Puritans, and it is this type of intellectual curiosity that drew me to Robinson as a thinker. Here, though, she is monochromatic, unoriginal, and seems to have closed off thought altogether.
