Christianity,  Essays

Reflections on Marilynne Robinson’s essays

By the standards of my generation, all my life I have gone to church with a kind of persistence, as I do to this day. Once recently I found myself traveling all night to be home in time for church, and it occurred to me to consider in what spirit or out of what need I would do such a thing. My tradition does not encourage the idea that God would find any merit in it. I go to church for my own gratification, which is intense, though it had never occurred to me before to try to describe it to myself.

The essence of it, certainly, is the Bible, toward which I do not feel in any degree proprietary, with which after long and sometimes assiduous attention I am not familiar. I believe the entire hyptertrophic bookishness of my life arose directly out of my exposure, among modest Protestant solemnities of music and flowers, to the language of Scripture. Therefore, I know many other books very well and I flatter myself that I understand them — even books by people like Augustine and Calvin. But I do not understand the Bible. I study theology as one would watch a solar eclipse in a shadow. In church, the devout old custom persists of merely repeating verses, one or another luminous fragment, a hymn before and a hymn afterward. By grace of my abiding ignorance, it is always new to me. I am never not instructed. (Marilynne Robinson)

I don’t have a complete book review this week. I’ve been reading — and rereading, and mulling over — Marilynne Robinson’s Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. The passage above is taken from her essay “Psalm Eight,” and it captures an aspect of my own experience I’ve never put into words — and wouldn’t ever manage to with such delicacy. The Bible is, for me too, “always new.” I have a strong inner resistance to any proposition that purports to be the final, definitive reading of this or that passage.

Just this week, when I was drying my youngest’s hair, she asked, “Do I have to go to Sunday school tomorrow?”

“Why don’t you want to go to Sunday school?” I asked, thinking I’d hear that there was too much writing or something like that.

“I already know all those stories,” she said. “I know all about the Bible. I’ve heard all those stories before.”

Obviously it led into an interesting conversation (not for the first time) about how if the Bible is God’s word, it will speak new things to us every time we read it. I’ve been rereading it myself for years now. And in all fairness, this multidimensional quality is not confined to the Bible, but is a feature of all books. Rereading any text yields new things. But there is a uniqueness to the Bible among all books. Maybe it’s in the nature of its revelation — its truthfulness, its total unexpectedness, its relevance, its ability to speak to personal, inner depths. Add in its literary pervasiveness as a source of so many motifs and themes in western thought, though this is something incidental, something about how people have responded to the Bible rather than something integral to the text.

In “Psalm Eight,” Marilynne Robinson combines a reflection on some aspects of her own spiritual experience with her knowledge of the art of narrative to propose a way of reading the Bible that makes sense to me. She suggests that it is like a seed, in which stories fall like “possibility in a sleeve of limitation” on the rich or stony ground of our temporal experience.

Over the course of the essay she looks at the resurrection narratives, suggesting that they are probably not written to provide documentary proof, but to preserve likeness. There is too much evidence that resurrection would not have been seen as all that incredible to the original audience, she explains. The stories are written as “portraiture” — as a depiction of how Jesus’ resurrection was unique among other such events. Thus the differences in the gospel accounts fade, and what is striking is their agreement on certain things. But she also points out how even those narratives show Jesus recalling the old stories of Scripture — echoing past stories and motifs. “What is eternal must always be complete,” she concludes, “So it is possible to imagine that time was created in order that there might be narrative — event, sequence and causation, ignorance and error, retribution, atonement.” Even Jesus himself reveals who he is using Scripture, in which God laid the groundwork for his entry into the temporal world, and gave us the terms to recognize him.

One of my favorite parts of the essay is where Robinson remembers the way her relatives gave her “Presbyterianism taught in parables.”

God spoke to Moses from a burning bush, Pharoah dreamed a dream of famine, Jesus said, Take up your bed and walk. We drew or colored pictures of these events, which were, I think, never explained to us. No intrusion on the strangeness of these tales was ever made. It was as if some old relative had walked me down to the lake knowing an imperious whim of heaven had made it a sea of gold and glass, and had said, This is a fine evening, and walked me home again. I am convinced that it was all this reticence, in effect this esotericism, that enthralled me.

What a wonderful caution against over-instructing our children in what this or that Bible story “really means.” Give them the stories. Plant the seeds. Then let them flourish forever in the different seasons of our children’s lives.

I find this idea of Scripture, and our own experience, as eternal truth broken down and mapped out in the temporal language of stories, very satisfying. It appeals to me both as someone resistant to final conclusions about passages of Scripture, and as someone story-loving by nature. But Robinson’s working-out of her thought is far more complete and poetic than my attempt to portray here. My purpose in writing about it is to give a small glimpse of the experience of reading this book, one that requires me to linger in its pages for awhile longer.

5 Comments