Mondays with Marilynne: One Kind of Vision

Last month in Mondays with Marilynne, we discussed novelist Marilynne Robinson's critical success, her cultural impact, and some of the ways her faith shapes her perspectives on the public life of our nation. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that Robinson's political vision is the most important aspect of her work. After all, there are other figures in contemporary Christianity saying, substantively, the same things as Robinson about social and economic issues, but there are few who are able to capture in such moving prose the beauty of a spiritual life.

Robinson's spirituality, like her politics, centers on the theology concept of imago Dei, the image of God. The centrality of this concept is evident from the first pages of her best known work, Gilead, in which the narrator John Ames, an aging Congregational minister, confesses:

“I can’t really tell what’s beautiful anymore. I passed two young fellows on the street the other day. I know who they are, they work at the garage. They’re not churchgoing, either one of them, just decent rascally young fellows who have to be joking all the time, and there they were, propped against the garage wall in the sunshine, lighting up their cigarettes. They’re always so black with grease and so strong with gasoline I don’t know why they don’t catch fire themselves. They were passing remarks back and forth the way they do and laughing that wicked way they have. And it seemed beautiful to me. It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it. I see that in church often enough. So I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you’re done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent. “When they saw me coming, of course the joking stopped, but I could see they were still laughing to themselves, thinking what the old preacher almost heard them say" (5).

Here we see Ames' characteristically Protestant way of being grandiose and understated at once. What Ames hears in the laughter or crying of the people around him is the laughter or crying of God's very Self. Although he'll occasionally launch into reflections on Calvin or Feuerbach, Ames is, on the whole, far more of pastor than a theologian, far more present to the people and things surrounding him than to anything he may have studied in seminary.

Ames, like Robinson herself, is alive to the mystery of divinity in humanity, a mystery which must be carefully taught and zealously guarded lest it go unnoticed: "You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but love and loyalty and mutual incomprehension" (7). For Ames, this knowing in unknowing comes most clearly in the moments a human life begins or ends, moments he has been observing for a lifetime in his vocation as minister. He perceives this existential awareness as a gift of divine grace he received most clearly at the birth of his daughter, who died in infancy decades before the start of the novel:

 "Memory can make a thing seem to have been more than it was. But I know she did look right into my eyes. That is something. And I’m glad I knew it at the time, because now, in my present situation, now that I am about to leave this world, I realize there is nothing more astonishing than a human face … It has something to do with incarnation. You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any" (66).

The full beauty of Robinson's spirituality here is that, even if few of us will ever be able to write like Robinson, the experience to which she points is accessible to all of us--to anyone willing to pay attention to his or her neighbors, friends, family, anybody we meet. Here, admittedly, Robinson might owe as much to Whitman as to Whitefield, but the point remains. The simple attentiveness commended in these passages from Gilead gives rise to Christian love, and "Love is holy," Ames points out in perfectly Calvinistic fashion, "because it is like grace--the worthiness of its object is never really what matters." Rather, it is always something else. When we think of someone we love, we may be able to offer a list of characteristics in that person which we admire, but none of them constitute the reason we love the person. If we tried to name that mystery, I suspect the only language we'd have is the sort of religious vocabulary Robinson reclaims from the spewers of cliches: words like grace, love, incarnation--and yes, the image of God.