Mondays with Marilynne: The Capacity for Imaginative Love

“I am persuaded for the moment that this is in fact the basis of community. I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly. This thesis may be influenced by the fact that I have spent literal years of my life lovingly absorbed in the thoughts and perceptions of--who knows it better than I?--people who do not exist. And, just as writers are engrossed in the making of them, readers are profoundly moved and also influenced by the nonexistent, that great clan whose numbers increase prodigiously with every publishing season. I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.” --Marilynne Robinson, “Imagination and Community,” When I Was a Child I Read Books, 21.

When most of us think of fiction, we probably don’t think of God. Religious faith is a harrowing topic for the contemporary novelist precisely because we find so much God-language coopted by lazy or unscrupulous writers looking for a fast track to somber tone or a niche audience with a big hankering for kitsch. This contemporary reticence to speak of matters of the soul once led The New Yorker’s James Wood to describe Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead as “one of the most unconventional conventionally popular novels of recent times.” (Last October, she also gained the distinction of becoming the only author who ever kept this blogger up literally all night with a new book release.)

Robinson, a devoted member and former lay preacher of the United Church of Christ, has never been shy about her Christian faith. “It’s too exhausting and demanding to write,” she told RNS’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey, “I would never write about anything I didn’t really want to write about…. Faith is one of the great structuring elements in civilization. It has fascinated the best minds of many centuries. If it happens to fascinate yours also, there is no reason to be afraid. Of what? A bad review?”

Robinson’s work certainly hasn’t garnered many of those. In 2005, she received the Pulitzer Prize for her second novel, Gilead. In 2012, she received the National Humanities Medal, and just last week, President Barack Obama used her words in his eulogy for the for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney.

For Robinson, the theological concept of the imago Dei is at the absolute center of both literary production and the civic life. “I believe very strongly that this world,” she once said in an interview with The American Conservative, “these billions of companions on earth that we know are God’s images, are to be loved, not only in their sins, but especially in all that is wonderful about them.” Reading her work has convinced me that the power of language is quite truthfully a sacramental power, making the presence of Christ, the Word made flesh, evident even in absence. I am not sure I believe all the claims bandied about that literary fiction makes us more empathetic (some of the very nastiest people I have ever met have held graduate degrees in literature), but I do believe, like President Obama, that Robinson’s writing has changed me for the better.

Over the next few months, this Groupthink series will introduce (or reintroduce) readers to her life and thought, her theological impact and influences, her social convictions, and her brilliant contribution to the life of the church. I hope, in the weeks to come, that I can pique each reader’s curiosity enough to pick up every one of Robinson’s books for herself. Along the way, we will engage critically with the work of theologians from John Calvin to James Cone to Fanny Howe. Ultimately, I hope every one of you will come to share my conviction that, in the words of John Ames, the narrator of Gilead, “It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I can find words for.”