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.

Marriage and the Church: A Mainline Response

This post is part of Groupthink’s conversation on the questions Obergefell v. Hodges. The first essay in this series was written by Logann Merritt. The second, a moderate evangelical response by Marshall Johns, may be found here. Christoph’s essay below responds from a mainline Protestant point of view.

As a life-long resident of rural Missouri, last week was not a good week to be on Facebook. For days on end, I found my newsfeed flooded with links to vitriolic conservative articles with titles like “The Roots of Marriage’s Redefinition,” “The Supreme Court and Religious Liberty: Reason for Concern,” and “Why Homosexuality is Not a Sin Like Any Other.” These responses from my conservative coreligionists were disheartening, but predictable.

Equally predictable were the debates that followed in the comment threads for these posts. The conservative line usually boiled down to some variation of the old bumper sticker cliche: “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” The progressive response was essentially, “Yes, but isn’t religion supposed to be about acceptance and love and not judging others?”

Groupthink’s own Logann Merritt used one variation of the latter argument in his own response, “Same Sex Marriage and the Christian Church.” Merritt quite correctly points out the hypocrisy of those who insist we must toe the line on Scripture’s statements on homosexuality, but not on other matters of marriage and sexuality addressed in sacred writ.** He points to the need for a hermeneutic that reads Scripture through Jesus-lenses, Jesus “the embodiment of the God of love.”

While I find myself in substantial agreement with Merritt’s main principles, I believe he is mistaken to assume that biblical interpretation is the only pertinent factor informing conservative Christians’ view of gay marriage and same-sex sexual activity in general. The same assumption is present in Matthew Vines’ best-seller, God and the Gay Christian. In spite of Vines’ excellent treatment of the six biblical passages referencing same-sex sexual behavior, he still fails to move beyond the questions of hermeneutics to a thoroughgoing examination of the history, culture, and socialization process which informs American Christians’ views of sex and sexuality.

Merritt takes an important step in the right direction, though, when he states that he doesn’t believe same-sex relationships are sinful “unless these relationships bring harm and destruction to the people in them, which could just as easily be said of heterosexual relationships.”

In most moderate to progressive evangelical discourse, examination of Scripture gives way to the conclusion that gay and lesbian relationships are acceptable to God provided they are committed, monogamous relationships based on Christian love and mutuality. This is a step in the right direction, but, in my view, does not go far enough in developing a coherent and authentically Christ-like sexual ethics.

The most important step for Christians right now is to move beyond a monogamy-promiscuity model of thinking about sexuality (with all the debates about “sexual purity” that come with it) and toward a model which prioritizes the health and wellbeing of individuals and relationships. I believe that monogamous marriage and celibacy (for those who are called to it and accept it willingly) are beautiful expressions of sexuality in the Church, but I am not willing to label all sexual acts or sexualities outside those contexts as sinful a priori. I would also stress that wedding bands do not in themselves give all sexual acts between those who wear them God’s stamp of approval. Charity, consent, and reverence for the image of God in the other person are all essential elements of authentically Christian sexual acts. The sacrament of marriage affirms, but does not magically confer those elements.

If Christianity hopes to survive in a culture that is growing increasingly aware of humanity’s amazing diversity of sexual expressions and gender identities, then the first step for Christians is to reexamine not simply the “rules” governing sex to which we have historically held, but the very principles at the heart of our ethics, principles I am sure Logann alludes to when he urges a hermeneutic with Jesus at the center.

So what does Obergefell v. Hodges mean for progressive Christians? Perhaps that our culture is heading in the right direction, but still falls far short of full-bodied Christian charity.

**As an aside, I found myself a bit irritated that Merritt repeatedly uses the inclusive abbreviation "LGBTQ*" when he really only discusses matters addressing the "LG" part of the equation.

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.”