Discovering a voice of faith

A capacity for mystery comes with the territory, really, for Christians.Lila

As the limited people of an infinite God, we resist the lure of the black-and-white, the urge to fit everything into concrete, comprehensible systems, with nothing left over. But nor do we simply shrug (“it’s a mystery”) and ignore what we can’t hope to fathom. The depths – of God’s grace, of his might or mercy, his calling, his justice, his will – may be inexhaustible, but that doesn’t keep us from joyfully losing ourselves in even the shallows.

Marilynne Robinson has pondered the mysteries of life and of faith more than most, perhaps – as have John Ames, the old mid-Western preacher we first met in her novel Gilead (2004), and his wife, the inimitable Lila (2014). Much of Robinson’s latest novel winds its way among the byways and beaten paths of Lila’s past, or rather her reflections on her past: being taken up, as a neglected child, by ugly old Doll, with her own chequered past; wandering year after year with a band of tramps, working in the fields, sleeping in the open; storms, violence, prostitution, and crushing loneliness. And then, arriving in the town of Gilead, and – in one of the most beautiful twists of contemporary fiction – finding herself the wife of the kind old Reverend, carrying his child and living an existence she can’t quite grasp as her own.

Indeed, “existence” is a deeply charged word in Lila. The rootless wanderings Lila looks back on, an outsider not only to “normal” community but to “normal” structures of meaning as well, reveals to us the thousand thousand ways in which interpretation criss-crosses our lives, makes them intelligible to us. From her lone year of schooling as a child, Lila knows to marry up the cornfields and orchards and dust she tramps through with the words “the United States of America”, but it’s in Gilead that she first learns there even is such a word as “existence”, that there are words for the things she feels and wonders about, or for the birds (“pelicans”) that come to the river in their hundreds but that nobody eats.

The poet W. H. Auden suggests that, in keeping with our Adamic right and duty to give names to things, it’s only those things we have names for – down to flowers or animals – that are quite real to us. Thoreau: “With a knowledge of the name comes a distincter recognition and knowledge of things.” Lila probes the very foundations of this human way of ordering our experiences – the unmediated data of our senses – by ideas, by language, of making meaning out of apparent chaos. Of living by faith and not merely by sight.

One of the most remarkable things about this remarkable novel, in fact, is the strange intimacy between the reality Lila has experienced and the one she finds in the Bible. The metaphors and parables and larger-than-life episodes of Scripture, which can feel a million miles away from the modern, middle-class existences of so many of its readers, to Lila simply name the things she knows already. Ezekiel, she finds, “knows what certain things feel like”. The baby weltering in its blood, taken up by one who chooses to love it; the “whoring” of Israel; what it means to be “a desolation and a reproach” to people – these are what she knows of existence. And the glory of the Lord, great storms and fire. “It could be that the wildest, strangest things in the Bible were the places where it touched earth”, she muses.

Lila’s exegetical methods wouldn’t be taught at any Bible college. And her “theology”, as she struggles towards an understanding of how the gospel can be true and yet leave everybody she ever knew and cared for untouched and unrescued, is unorthodox too. But the insights of Lila – that “the Lord is more gracious than any of us can begin to imagine”, that there is goodness at the centre of things, that God looks after the strays (“Especially the strays”) – are profoundly orthodox, in spite of the universalism they inexorably slide towards here. If we don’t struggle, as Lila (and Lila) does, to reconcile the vast, unplumbed grace of God with the unmeasured suffering and the condemnation of unnumbered people, then do we not have much to learn yet about the heart of God himself?

Lila’s life has been mightily unlike her husband’s, or his neighbours’. All of their lives are foreign to us, as ours would be to them, or to our own ancestors. And yet the Bible is, somehow, like all of them, and truly foreign to none of them. It is right, surely, for Lila to wonder how grace might fill the gap between the sheer ignorance and unrelenting hardship of those she grew up with and the starkness of the doctrine of hell and the narrow gate. And it’s right, too, for the appallingly abused and oppressed of our world to cry out for, and to expect, a real and final judgment. For the glory and justice of God to be larger, far larger, than our grasp of it.

“Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvellous”, the Reverend, Lila’s husband, writes, and reads aloud to her. “Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don’t add up. They don’t even belong in the same calculation.” Some mysteries seem only to deepen the more we know and experience. But, as Lila comes to realise, “Eternity had more of every kind of room in it than this world did”. It is the mysterious grace of God that makes mystery ultimately bearable, and even beautiful.