I’ve wanted to read Marilynne Robinson’s second novel, Gilead, ever since Andrew Peterson mentioned it in a blog post about his favorite books of 2007, saying that it was “not just one of my favorite books of the year, but of my life.” Jason Gray’s review for the Rabbit Room, as well as the NPR interview with Marilynne Robinson Andrew posted, pushed it higher on my to-read list. After a friend mentioned it to me again a couple weeks ago, saying she had just read it and loved it, I decided I needed a break from some of the heavier reading I’d been doing, and asked Andrew if I could borrow his copy. I ended up finding a copy at a used bookstore before I got his copy, and am now almost finished with it. The week after I picked it up, I was in Chattanooga for Thanksgiving, and found a copy for my mom at a used bookstore there. I think she read about 150 pages the first time she picked it up, and finished it shortly thereafter.
If you’re not familiar with the story, it is written as a letter from the Reverend John Ames to his 7 year old son. Reverend Ames is 76 years old, and decided to write a letter as a way to pass on the lessons and information he wants his son to know that he won’t get a chance to share throughout his childhood. Here’s a passage I read last night that I really loved.
In the matter of belief, I have always found that defenses have the same irrelevance about them as the criticisms they are meant to answer. I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things. We participate in Being without remainder. No breath, no thought, no wart or whisker, is not as sunk in Being as it could be. And yet no one can say what Being is. If you describe what a thought and a whisker have in common, and a typhoon and a rise in the stock market, excluding “existence,” which merely restates the fact that they have a place on our list of known and nameable things (and which would yield as insight: being equals existence!), you would have accomplished a wonderful thing, still too partial in an infinite degree to have any meaning, however.
I’ve lost my point. It was to the effect that you can assert the existence of something – Being – having not the slightest notion of what it is. Then God is at a greater remove altogether – if God is the Author of Existence, what can it mean to say God exists? There’s a problem in vocabulary. He would have to have had a character before existence which the poverty of our understanding can only call existence. That is clearly a source of confusion. Another term would be needed to describe a state or quality of which we can have no experience whatever, to which existence as we know it can bear only the slightest likeness or affinity. So creating proofs from experience of any sort is like building a ladder to the moon. It seems that it should be possible, until you stop to consider the nature of the problem.
So my advice is this – don’t look for proofs. Don’t bother with them at all. They are never sufficient to the question, and they’re always a little impertinent, I think, because they claim for God a place within our conceptual grasp. And they will likely sound wrong to you even if you convince someone else with them. That is very unsettling over the long term. “Let your works so shine before men,” etc. It was Coleridge who said Christianity is a life, not a doctrine, words to that effect. I’m not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I’m saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the mustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment.