They acknowledge the sacred worth of the human person with characters whose dignity shines through humble circumstances.
Marilynne Robinson’s novels function like this baptism. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time.
I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. Everyone has petted a cat, but to touch one like that, with the pure intention of blessing it, is a very different thing … There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. I still remember how those warm little brows felt under the palm of my hand. John Ames, “repeating the full Trinitarian formula.” The elderly pastor elaborates on this memory in a letter to his young son: “I myself moistened their brows,” recalls the narrator, the Rev. One by one they wrap each reluctant kitten in a doll’s white dress and-sparing them full immersion-sprinkle their heads with cold water. In a wonderful scene early in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, young children baptize a litter of feral cats by a river’s edge.
The key to Robinson’s luminosity, though, lies less in her prose style than in her religious vision, and in the remarkable similarities between good religion and good fiction. With his turn to Robinson for help explaining grace, the president proved himself a more probing reader than many of her reviewers, who use words like “luminous” and “revelatory” to describe Robinson’s novels, but only in the sense that she is a beautiful writer. Robinson’s words had a special role to play in the president’s powerful speech, since he used them to link the black church’s long struggle with white racist violence to a concept of grace as the experience of love in the midst of terror and sorrow. That, more than any particular policy or analysis, is what’s called upon right now, I think-what a friend of mine, the writer Marilynne Robinson, calls “that reservoir of goodness, beyond, and of another kind, that we are able to do each other in the ordinary cause of things.” That’s what I’ve felt this week-an open heart. Clementa Pinckney, the slain pastor of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, President Obama made an unexpected reference to contemporary literature:
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