EXCURSIONS INTO DIFFICULTY
Peter C.
Hodgson
[10-2-10]
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One of the most imaginative theological minds at work
today is that of the novelist Marilynne Robinson. Her interlinked novels,
Gilead (2004) and Home (2008), (Note 1) provide a wealth of figures, images, and narratives for those who are
interested in theological and pastoral issues. Far from the caricatures that
have become standard in American literature and culture, Robinson offers a
sympathetic and complex portrait of one minister-theologian in particular,
John Ames.
In 1956 (the time-setting for the novels) Ames is 76 years
old and still pastor of the Congregational church in Gilead, Iowa. The name
Gilead is familiar to us from the Hebrew Bible, where it refers to a hilly
area east of the Jordan River, famous for the resin from a tree used for
medicinal purposes. In his lament for Israel, the Lord asks, “Is there no
balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?” (Jeremiah 8:22). The question
posed by the novels is whether a home can be found in Gilead—the
fictional Gilead being a small town in western Iowa founded by abolitionists
in the nineteenth century as an outpost in the struggle over whether Kansas
would enter the union as a slave or a free state.
Gilead takes the form of an
extended letter written by Ames to his six-year old son, Robby, a letter
that he hopes the boy will read when he has grown up and his father is long
gone from this world. Ames writes with both grief and joy—emotions that seem
to be built into each other when a man fathers a child at age 69. Ames’s
first wife died in childbirth, and the baby girl with her. For nearly fifty
years of his ministry Ames lived alone, until a young woman he had never
seen before appeared at his church one day—a woman of mysterious background
(a “Mary Magdalene”) with a sadness and intensity of expression, and a
beauty and simplicity of soul, that immediately attracted his attention. It
was she who told him that he ought to marry her, and so he did. Robby is the
issue of that happy union.
Ames’s letter to Robby is filled with family memories,
poignant experiences, and theological insights. I’ll focus on just a couple
of these, avoiding altogether the main plot that is shared by the two
novels. Ames remembers the time, when he was a boy, that lightning struck
the Baptist church and started a fire (Gilead, 95-96). The whole town
turned out to salvage what they could. A warm rain began to fall, turning
the ashes into watery soot. Ruined Bibles and hymnals were buried, and a
prayer was said over them. Men and women worked together and sang softly,
the women’s hair falling behind their backs. Food was brought and shared.
His father took an ash-covered biscuit, broke it, and gave it to him. Ames
remembers this as an act of communion, and indeed it was—communion in the
profoundest sense of receiving the body and blood of Christ, the body broken
and the blood shed to share the pain and heal the community as it labored
together.
Once, when the Lord’s Supper was celebrated at his church,
Ames preached on the words of institution (Gilead, 69-70). When he
was finished with the service, his wife brought Robby up the aisle and said,
“You ought to give him some of that.” She was completely right. Ames began
to appreciate the gifts of physical particularity and how blessing and
sacrament are mediated through them—not simply human actions but images of
nature, such as water and light (Gilead, 14, 23, 51, 119, 162, 246,
etc.). He remembers being caught in rainstorms, playing in the river, seeing
light flood the barren plains at sunrise and disappear suddenly at sunset.
He remembers once seeing the full moon rise as the sun was setting, and
thought of the whole earth as embraced by these two orbs. These are physical
signs of an invisible grace—the hands of the Lord wrapped around the fragile
passing world.
Water is not simply a sign of grace. It is also a
powerful, destructive force. I am reminded of that in Nashville, my
hometown, where terrible floods devastated parts of the city on May 1st and
2nd. But the response was the same as when the church burned in Gilead.
Volunteers turned out in flooded neighborhoods, tearing out sodden drywall,
removing ruined possessions, starting the slow process of recovery. Men and
women worked side by side, neighbors brought food and drink, and acts of
silent communion were shared.
Ames recalls many conversations with members of his
congregation. A great part of his work had been listening to people, in the
intense privacy of confession, or at least unburdening (Gilead,
44-45). These conversations were, he said, like a contest, or game, of which
life is the real subject. By “life” he means not only energy and vitality
but also the “incandescence” or “loveliness” in the presence shaped around
the human “I” like “a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt
and joy and whatever else . . . quick, avid, and resourceful. To see this
aspect of life is a privilege of the ministry which is seldom mentioned.”
Then Ames says that a good sermon is “one side of a passionate
conversation.” There are three parties to it, as there are even to the most
private thought—“the self that yields the thought, the self that
acknowledges and in some way responds to the thought, and the Lord.”
How is the Lord the party to a conversation? Since Ames
does not elaborate, I offer my interpretation: the Lord is present in
the conversation, is in a sense the conversation itself, the thought
itself, the spiritual force that links the parties. In writing about the
Trinity, St. Augustine draws analogies from love and knowledge: there is the
lover, the beloved, and love itself; or the knower, the known, and knowledge
itself; likewise there is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The
third term—love, knowledge, spirit—is the bond that links the other two. God
is in fact all three terms, the lover and the beloved as well as love
itself, and this means that God is an intrinsic relationality, the matrix
that holds the world together, the creator of the communion that for human
creatures is always a struggle and an adventure. Ames has learned to see
this relationality in all that surrounds him, in nature as well as in the
sheer, majestic fact of human existence.
A good sermon is one side of a passionate conversation.
The role of the preacher is not principally to convey doctrine or teach
morals, but to evoke a conversation, to raise questions and to seek answers
with the congregation. The congregation becomes an active participant.
African American and Pentecostal churches are notable in this regard. The
action of call and response, when it gets going well, is a wondrous thing to
behold. By “response” I don’t mean simply emotions and bodily movements,
though they have their place. I mean thought, and that’s what Ames
mentions in his illustration. The Lord is in the thought, the thinking
process, that transpires when a group of people come together for
celebration and reflection, reflection on the highest mysteries: a community
at prayer and at thought. Thought requires words, and the words become
sanctified, the visible sign of an invisible grace, the presence of the Lord
in the midst of the people. Not only the water of baptism, not only the
bread and wine of communion, but the words of this passionate conversation
become sacraments. Ultimately everything can become a sacrament when we stop
long enough to notice it and rejoice in it.
But wait a minute. What about the bad things, the terrible
things, the accidents and illnesses, the greed and malice, the conflicts and
tragedies? Water, wind, fire, words give life, but they also destroy. How
does God’s providence manifest itself when conversation and communion break
down, and we are left with a broken heart? Is there no balm in Gilead, no
healing for the wounds of God’s people? This is the question that must give
every sermon pause.
Marilynne Robinson notes the pause. In an interview, she
comments on the idea that a good sermon is one side of a passionate
conversation and then adds the following: “A sermon is a form that yields a
certain kind of meaning in the same way that, say, a sonnet is a form that
deals with a certain kind of meaning that has to do with putting things in
relation to each other, allowing for the fact of complexity, reversal -- such
things. Sermons are, at their best, excursions into difficulty that
are addressed to people who come there in order to hear that.” (Note 2) I think this is a very profound insight. I wish that more ministers and
congregations would be prepared to make such excursions, to dwell on
difficult and complex matters, to engage in passionate conversations about
them.
A prime example of such an excursion into difficulty is
the sermon Ames once preached on the stories of Hagar and Ishmael and
Abraham and Isaac, found in Genesis, chapters 21-22 (Gilead, 129-30;
Home, 206-7). Abraham’s wife Sarah was too old to bear children. She
had an Egyptian slave-girl whose name was Hagar. Sarah told Abraham to “go
in to my slave-girl so that I might obtain children by her.” Abraham did as
he was told, and Hagar gave birth to a son, who was named Ishmael (we learn
this several chapters earlier, in Genesis 16). But later (in Genesis 21) the
Lord promised to give Sarah and Abraham a son of their own, despite their
advanced years, and he was named Isaac. Sarah became jealous when she saw
Ishmael and Isaac playing together. So she said to Abraham, “Cast out this
slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit
along with my son Isaac.” Abraham was distressed, but the Lord approved of
Sarah’s demand, so again Abraham did as he was told. He gave Hagar bread and
water and sent her away with the child into the wilderness of Beersheba.
When the provisions were used up, Ishmael would have died had not an angel
of the Lord appeared to Hagar and showed her a well of water. Of Ishmael God
said, “I will make a great nation.”
In the next chapter of Genesis, God tested Abraham by
telling him to take his son Isaac into the mountains and to offer him as a
burnt offering. Once again, Abraham did as he was told, and he was about to
sacrifice Isaac when the angel of the Lord intervened and provided a ram
instead. These two stories have had fateful consequences in human history.
The followers of Muhammad claim to be descendants of Ishmael, and the “great
nation,” they say, is the nation of Islam, born of the concubine, the
Egyptian. Enmity between Arabs, Jews, and Christians has haunted many
generations. The radically obedient faith of Abraham, his willingness to
consign one son to the wilderness and to sacrifice the other, has been
praised as the highest virtue and condemned as the most despicable crime. It
drove Kierkegaard to write his book about faith called Fear and Trembling,
and it has driven others to lose faith altogether.
Ames does not shy away from the difficulty of these
stories, and he offers a novel interpretation of them. He describes his
sermon to Robby: “My point was that Abraham is in effect called upon to
sacrifice both his sons, and that the Lord in both instances sends angels to
intervene at the critical moment to save the child. Abraham’s extreme old
age is an important element in both stories, not only because he can hardly
hope for more children, not only because the children of old age are
unspeakably precious, but also, I think, because any father, particularly an
old father, must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to
the providence of God. It seems also a cruelty for one generation to beget
another when parents can secure so little for their children, so little
safety, even in the best circumstances. Great faith is required to give the
child up, trusting God to honor the parents’ love for him by assuring that
there will indeed be angels in that wilderness. I noted that Abraham himself
had been sent into the wilderness, told to leave his father’s house also,
that this was the narrative of all generations, and that it is only by the
grace of God that we are made instruments of his providence and participants
in a fatherhood that is always ultimately his.” (Gilead, 128-9)
“The narrative of all generations.” This puts a different
spin on the story. It’s not simply about the terrible faith of Abraham but
also about the human condition: generation follows upon generation, and each
generation must at some point give up its children to the wilderness.
Letting a child go is one of the hardest but inescapable decisions that
parents have to make. We prepare our children as best we can, but then they
go out into the world on their own, and we know what a savage world it can
be, how little safety there is, what risks must be taken, what goals can be
attained or lost, what compromises are inevitable. We don’t stop bearing
children, but we have to entrust our children to the providence of God.
Abraham knows that, once Sarah has borne a legitimate son, his illegitimate
son will have to leave the community. And he knows that God, having given
him another son, can also take him away.
There is cruelty in these narratives. On this matter John
Ames comments that children are often victims of rejection and violence. The
Bible does not seem otherwise to countenance such cruelty, but even in these
cases the child is within the providential care of God. “This [care] is no
less true if the angel carries her home to her faithful and loving Father
than if he opens the spring or stops the knife and lets the child live out
her sum of earthly years.” In both instances we speak of the providence of
God. But, as Ames also emphasizes, we human beings are made instruments of
God’s providence and participants in the divine parenting. The stories
attribute the working of this providence to the intervention of angels, but
in fact it is we who are responsible. Our actions make a difference,
even if we cannot prevent the hazards of the wilderness. Providence works by
providing lures for our ideals and restraining the effects of our
recalcitrant passions. We can avoid religious, cultural, and racial
stereotyping, we can protect the weak and vulnerable, we can strengthen the
fabric of the human community, we can overcome our selfishness and take
seriously our responsibilities.
Marilynne Robinson commented on the loss of seriousness in
the interview to which I have referred. She says that in earlier times
people actually wanted to make the world good for future generations that
they would never see. Being serious about our responsibilities makes people
think in very large terms to try to liberate women, for example, or to try
to eliminate slavery (two of the great goals of the nineteenth century). Of
course, she adds, slavery has come back all over the world now (child
prostitution in Asia, involuntary servitude in Africa, even in the USA).
People say, “Well, we won’t think about that. It’s too bad.” Robinson is
disturbed by the degree to which she doesn’t hear them saying, “Are we
leaving the world better than we found it?” She thinks we are a generation
that perhaps could not answer in the affirmative; we evade the larger
responsibility of being only one generation in what one hopes will be “an
infinite series of fruitful generations”. There is a selfishness in refusing
to understand that we are simply “passing through”.
It would help if ministers and theologians thought more
about these ideas rather than simply emphasizing, for example, the finality
of salvation in Christ. Salvation is in fact a long and difficult journey on
which we human beings play a continuing role. Only eighty generations have
passed since the time of Jesus, whereas there have been some 2,000
generations since Homo sapiens first wandered out of Africa.
Humankind faces a long road ahead if it does not render the world
environmentally uninhabitable or destroy itself in nuclear warfare.
Confronting difficulties at all levels, political as well as personal, is a
major task of ministry, and in this regard much is to be learned from the
imagination of Marilynne Robinson.
Notes
1
Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, was published by Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, New York, 2004. Home, winner of the Orange Prize, was
published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2008. The novels are
unusual in that they tell an overlapping story from different perspectives.
I refer to an interview with Marilynne Robinson conducted by Religion &
Ethics Newsweekly on March 18, 2005 (pbs.org./wnet/religionandethics/week829/interview.html).
Robinson teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is also
the author of Housekeeping and has published three works of
nonfiction.2
Interview with Religion & Ethics
Newsweekly. My italics.
The Author
Peter Hodgson is Charles G. Finney Professor of Theology,
Emeritus, at Vanderbilt Divinity School, and a long-time member of the
Witherspoon Society/Voices for Justice.
