Marilynne Robinson - The Death of Adam - Essays on Modern Thought

Marguerite was born to Louise de Savoie when Louise was a girl of sixteen. At twenty, Louise was a widow with another child, a two-year-old boy, François. Learned herself, she was devoted to the education of her children. In the year of Marguerite’s birth, 1492, Spain expelled its Moors and Jews, scattering its strangest riches over Europe. There had been a great many Moors and Jews in the old kingdom of Navarre. In the time of the Albigensian crusades, troubadours had gone there for refuge. Some scholars say their art of sung poetry had first been learned from the Moors. Marguerite, as a child, learned Spanish, and a little Hebrew. Who can imagine how the things we call ideas live in the world, or how they change, or how they perish, or how they can be renewed?

ONE EASTER I went with my grandfather to a small Presbyterian church in northern Idaho, where I heard a sermon on the discrepancies in the gospel accounts of the resurrection. I was a young child with neither the habit nor the expectation of understanding, as the word is normally used, most of what went on around me. Yet I remember that sermon, and I believe in some degree I took its meaning.

As an older child in another church and town, on no special occasion, I heard the Eighth Psalm read, and kept for myself a few words from it, because they heartened certain intuitions of mine — “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars … What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels…” I quote the King James Version because those were the words I heard and remembered. The thought never entered my mind that the language could be taken to exclude me, perhaps because my experience of it was the religious one, of words in some exceptional sense addressed precisely to me.

I can imagine myself that primal Easter, restive at my grandfather’s elbow, pushing my nickels and dimes of collection money into the tips of my gloves to make toad fingers, struggling with the urge to swing my legs, memorably forbidden to remove my hat, aware that I should not sigh. In those days boredom for me was a misery and a passion, and anticipation a pleasure so sharp I could not tell it from dread. So of course I hated holidays. For these and other reasons my entire experience of being in the world was slightly galled and antagonized. Quotidian events, dawn and evening for example, I found almost unbearable. I remember exasperating the kindly intentions of elders with moodiness and weepiness I could not explain. I do not remember childhood as happy but as filled and overfilled with an intensity of experience that made happiness a matter of little interest. I can only imagine that other versions of me, realer than that poor present self forever being discarded in their favor, larger than me and impatient with my immaturity and my awkwardness, simply wanted out. Metamorphosis is an unsentimental business, and I was a long time in the thick of it, knees scraped, clothes awry, nerves strained and wearied.

I doubt I concealed my restlessness, or much of it, and I doubt my grandfather knew the hour was anything but tedium for me. He would not have known, because no one knew, that I was becoming a pious child, seriously eager to hear whatever I might be told. What this meant precisely, and why it was true, I can only speculate. But it seems to me I felt God as a presence before I had a name for him, and long before I knew words like “faith” or “belief.” I was aware to the point of alarm of a vast energy of intention, all around me, barely restrained, and I thought everyone else must be aware of it. For that reason I found the majestic terrains of my childhood, to which my ancestors had brought their ornate Victorian appreciation at daunting cost in life and limb, very disturbing, and I averted my gaze as I could from all those luminist splendors. I was coaxed to admire, and I would not, admiration seeming so poor a thing in the circumstances. Only in church did I hear experience like mine acknowledged, in all those strange narratives, read and expounded and, for all that, opaque as figures of angels painted on gold.

This is of course to employ language a child would never use. Then again, I describe experience outside the constraints of understanding that asserted themselves in me as I grew into this strange culture and century, and which oblige me to use language as little mine as mine is the language of that child. I describe the distantly remembered emotions of a girl long vanished — I am sure if I met her on the street I would not recognize her. In another time and place she and I might have grown up together, and she would have been able to speak for herself. Asked if I romanticize or exaggerate the world she saw and felt, she would reply, She does not touch the hem of it.

All the old writers on the subject remark that in every age and nation people have had the idea of a god of some sort. So my archaic self might have been nothing other than a latter-day pagan whose intuitions were not altogether at odds with, as it happened, Presbyterianism, and so were simply polished to that shape. Or it might have been that I was a mystic by vocation and, despite Presbyterianism, suffered atrophy of my gift in a life where I found little use for it. For all I know I am a mystic now, and simply too close to the phenomenon to have a clear view of it. In any case I began as a pagan and have ended as one, though only in the sense that I have never felt secure in the possession of the ideas and loyalties that are dearest to me. I am a Saxon in a basilica, refusing to admire so that anyone can see me, thrown back on impassivity as my only notion of decorum. I am surely wrong if I blame history for this sense I have of tenuous claim, wrong to invoke the notion of blame at all. Interloper though I may be, I enjoy the thief’s privilege of pleasure in the simple preciousness of things that are not my own. I enjoy it far too much to attempt to regularize my situation. In my childhood, when the presence of God seemed everywhere and I seemed to myself a mote of exception, improbable as a flaw in the sun, the very sweetness of the experience lay in that stinging thought — not me, not like me, not mine.

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 hypertrophic 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.

I have shifted allegiances the doctrinal and demographic inch that separates Presbyterians from Congregationalists, but for all purposes I am where I ought to be, as sociologists calculate, and I should feel right at home. I will concede only that the sensation of exclusion is more poignant to me in these precincts than in others, being after all these years so very familiar. The people around me every Sunday are as reserved and attentive as I am, like very respectful guests, in a church they own, sustain, and entirely govern.