Words on the Word
Erik Varden is a monk and bishop, born in Norway in 1974. In 2002, after ten years at the University of Cambridge, he joined Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in Charnwood Forest. Pope Francis named him bishop of Trondheim in 2019.
Please find below a selection of homilies:
Commencement Address 
Address given at St Mary’s graduation ceremony on 7 May 2026.
Your Grace, President, honoured Faculty, ladies and gentlemen, dear graduates!
Thank you for inviting me to share this day of joy with you. Thank you for the encouragement you give me Read More
Your Grace, President, honoured Faculty, ladies and gentlemen, dear graduates!
Thank you for inviting me to share this day of joy with you. Thank you for the encouragement you give me Read More
Innocence Restored Homily given as part of a day of recollection to priests at St Mary’s.
Wednesday: Remain in me (John 15.1-8)
Although I know it by heart and look out for it in advance, the collect set for today, Wednesday in the fifth Read More
Wednesday: Remain in me (John 15.1-8)
Although I know it by heart and look out for it in advance, the collect set for today, Wednesday in the fifth Read More
Searing Grace Homily given as part of a day of reconciliation to bishops at St Mary’s.
Acts 14.19-28: They stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city, supposing him dead
In his Second Letter to the Corinthians, Paul itemises incidents of violence suffered Read More
Acts 14.19-28: They stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city, supposing him dead
In his Second Letter to the Corinthians, Paul itemises incidents of violence suffered Read More
Like Floating Thoughts A friend who is a poet recently wrote after a visit to the Aquarium in Baltimore of how she had ‘watched the other worldly fantastical creatures flutter a fin or a tail and fluently glide through the blue water. There Read More
Sound of Mercy In a recent episode of Private Passions, Francis Spufford recounts an incident he has also written about. It regards his coming to faith. The setting for it was pretty unpromising. Spufford had gone out to a café to recover from Read More
God in Law Saarland, the German federal state, this week added a preamble to its constitution. It reads: ‘Conscious of its responsibility before God and human beings, on the basis of its religious and humanistic heritage, Saarland has given itself this constitution through Read More
St Joseph the Worker This homily was given to conclude a symposium held in Kaunas for the religious of Lithuania.
Matthew 13.54-58: Is this not the carpenter’s son?
The feast day of St Joseph the Worker was instituted by Pope Pius XII in 1955. The pope Read More
Matthew 13.54-58: Is this not the carpenter’s son?
The feast day of St Joseph the Worker was instituted by Pope Pius XII in 1955. The pope Read More
Honest Books For The Tablet’s Spring Festival five years ago, back in the days of Covid confinements, I was privileged to conduct a long conversation with Marilynne Robinson about her Gilead novels. The recording has long since vanished from the internet, but Read More
Commencement Address
Address given at St Mary’s graduation ceremony on 7 May 2026.
Your Grace, President, honoured Faculty, ladies and gentlemen, dear graduates!
Thank you for inviting me to share this day of joy with you. Thank you for the encouragement you give me in honouring my work with a degree. I am thrilled to be with you and to get to know in person this venerable house, from which many ardent apostles have gone forth nurtured by sound devotion and solid learning.
While looking forward to my visit, I found my anticipation illumined from an unexpected angle. A few weeks ago, a kind acquaintance — who could not have known of my appointment here — sent me a copy of Willa Cather’s novel published in 1927, Death Comes for the Archbishop. I had long wanted to read it, but the title, I suppose, makes any prelate a bit wary of taking it into his hands: one just never knows. Anywhere, there it suddenly was, dropped into my mail box.
The novel, as you know, sets out from Baltimore. In the prologue we find three curial cardinals and a missionary bishop gathered in the Sabine Hills outside Rome in 1848 to discuss a request from Baltimore’s Provincial Council for an Apostolic Vicariate in New Mexico. Amid descriptions of a delicious supper, obligatory in narratives evoking Italy, the qualities needed in a Vicar are discussed. The Irish-French Bishop Ferrand, who knows America, stresses that the appointee will direct ‘momentous things.’ New Mexico, he explains, was evangelised in the sixteenth century, but allowed to drift. It might call itself Catholic but is marked by superstition and malpractice. Its few priests, of scarce instruction, live tawdry lives. The Vicar-to-be ‘will eat dried buffalo meat and frijoles with chili’. The country ‘will drink up his youth and strength as it does the rain. He will be called upon for every sacrifice, quite possibly for martyrdom.’ He must be, then, ‘of strong constitution, full of zeal, and above all, intelligent’. One of the cardinals, taking all this in, puts it to Ferrand that such conditions surely call for a German? Ferrand says: ‘No!’ The Vicar has to be French. ‘Oh’, he says, ‘the Germans classify, but the French arrange!’
The scene is set for the novel’s hero, Monsignor Jean Marie Latour, to ride onto it — for a bishop without a horse is of no use at all in this story. Latour is appointed Vicar in 1851. As the novel unfolds, he visits Baltimore repeatedly. It is hard to think that he wouldn’t have stopped at old St Mary’s down in Paca Street. After all, Cather constructed her fictional Monsignor on the basis of the factual Jean-Baptiste Lamy, born in Auvergne and trained by the Sulpicians of Montferrand. Both the bishop of the novel and his historical double would have found at St Mary’s sweet scents and sounds of home, and, who knows?, perhaps even a beneficial draught of Bordeaux.
At first sight it might seem odd that a Sulpician formation should be thought to equip a man for the trials that await the Vicar Apostolic as Cather tells them: dirt, deserts, and beans; folklore, idolatry, and violent feuds; a life in the saddle.
As a student at Montferrand Lamy will have been formed according to the Examinations of Conscience of Louis Tronson, third superior of Saint Sulpice. Tronson collated the Society’s patrimony. He edited its constitutions. His Examinations distil its spirituality. They are a guide to conscious Christian living and self-discipline.
Reading them now, one is struck by the fact that they seem to leave no aspect of existence to chance. They tell a good Sulpician with what disposition of soul he should get out of bed in the morning, how he should eat his lunch, at what speed he might appropriately walk – strictly on devout errands, of course – about town. They instruct him to make sure that his surplice is spotless and that he is ever able, at a nod from his superior, faultlessly to intone a complex Gregorian antiphon.
The charism of Saint Sulpice is urban. It is ordered. The society educated Christian gentlemen. Its customs appear to presuppose the backdrop of a quiet French provincial town with cobbled streets, neat gardens, and the Angelus sounding melodiously at dusk.
Such a setting contrasts with the one the Vicar Apostolic in Cather’s novel meets one night as, making his way to Mora, he seeks shelter in a wretched homestead. The farmer, an American, is described as ‘gaunt and ill-formed, with a snake-like neck, terminating in a small, bony head’. He is quite as odious of character as he is of appearance. He snarls and menaces. The poor Mexican girl he keeps as a house-slave lets the visitors understand that he is dangerous. She signals to the bishop and his priest-companion to ride away as quickly as they can.
Now, how on earth would the formal regimentation of Saint Sulpice prepare a man to face a situation like this, straight out of an old-fashioned Western movie?
Very well, it turns out. The bishop responds with great presence of mind. He is courteous yet firm. When the serpent-headed fellow starts swearing he draws from his pocket, not a rosary, but a pistol, saying: ‘No profanity, Señor!’ Then he rides off. Sulpician discipline is clearly not incompatible with resourcefulness. This incident in Death Comes for the Archbishop is reflected in countless examples from real life.
It seems appropriate to pinpoint this paradox as I address those of you who, today, graduate from St Mary’s University. During your years of study you will have read lots of books, written many essays, sat many exams. You will have acquired knowledge and practical skills. Some of you will have produced original research. All this is capital, precious capital, for whatever work, whatever duties lie ahead.
Even more essential, though, are the discipline of mind and formation of character you surely will have benefited from in this Sulpician house.
Nowadays there is a tendency to think of universities as degree-factories. People sign up for courses they are not really terribly interested in. They follow lectures online while doing their ironing, produce a few written assignments with the discreet collaboration of ChatGPT, then emerge with a hood and an acronym after their name, hoping to further their career and salary prospects. There is nothing wrong about this in the sense that it is morally culpable. But this approach is hardly likely to generate intellectual joy, intellectual freedom.
And that is what education is about.
Saint John Henry Newman, whom we now rejoice to honour as a Doctor of the Church, put it even more audaciously in The Idea of a University published in 1852, just as Bishop Lamy was getting himself sorted out down in Santa Fe, the HQ of his newly established New Mexican vicariate. The result of genuine education, Newman insists, is the ‘perfection of the Intellect’. He understood that phrase to point towards
the clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things, as far as the finite mind can embrace them, each in its place, and with its own characteristics upon it. It is almost prophetic from its knowledge of history; it is almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature; it has almost supernatural clarity from its freedom from littleness and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith, because nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation, so intimate is it with the eternal order of things and the music of the spheres.
Dear graduates, your time at St Mary’s will have given you a taste for such ‘perfection’. Make sure you keep your appetite for it alive. Be determined to awaken it in others. That will be a most noble and effective expression of Christian charity.
Our world is in dire straits. I think most people would consider this an uncontroversial affirmation at the moment. Few are those with patience to pursue an overview of ‘all things’ to see particulars in perspective. Hardly anyone, now, knows any history; it is risky to formulate even rudimentary notions of human nature, for we might upset those with divergent views; littleness and prejudice seem to be enjoying a heyday; people are highly startlable. Much societal discourse depends on keeping others’ fears alive.
Your education equips you to step into this reality as benevolently ordering presences, awakened as you are to a contemplative vision of things.
When the bishop in Willa Cather’s novel wonders how he might bring order into his diocese, a wilderness spread out before him, a friend tells him: ‘Don’t begin worrying about the diocese. […] Establish order at home.’ Order, the ‘beauty of order’, spreads like rings in a calm forest lake when you have plopped a pebble into it. Order develops marginally from the energy of an orderedly impacted centre.
To order the world around us, we must be ordered. For that, we need to know how we fit into the universal order of things. In Monsieur Tronson’s Examinations, that great Sulpician manifesto, each apparently mundane observance presented for consideration is preceded by an act of adoration. The study of theology helps us — ought to help us — to regard all things in the light of God’s majesty, that is, to see them as created in love, destined for greatness, their wounds reparable by grace.
To hear the music of the spheres is to note the cantus firmus voiced in all creation: in the helix of a DNA molecule as well as in the galaxies above. The music is that of God’s Creator Word singing itself as praise to the Father through the Spirit. It resonates, too, in the heart and mind of Christians washed clean in the Blood of the Lamb.
Dear graduates, you go forth from Baltimore, much like the Auvergnat Vicar of New Mexico in 1851, with a grand task ahead. The specifics of the task will be unique to each of you; its essence, though, is the same. You are to carry clarity into catastrophe; to bring ordered, bright intelligence to bear on a world in sombre chaos; to give Christ’s love coherent expression in your words and deeds. That is what you have been educated for. It is what the world hopes for from you, what the Church expects. It is an arduous task, but a glorious one. I pray it will fill you with gladness.
Listen out for the music of the spheres. Let it resonate in you. Become its instruments. Then you cannot go far wrong. You will proceed quietly, not having to dread sudden needs, menacing occurrences, or even outright threats. You will be ready for the sacrifices that are part and parcel of your task. Your heart-searched lives will be blessed. And you will be for a blessing.
Set out, then, in humble confidence, with gratitude, in Christ’s name.
Thank you for your attention.
Your Grace, President, honoured Faculty, ladies and gentlemen, dear graduates!
Thank you for inviting me to share this day of joy with you. Thank you for the encouragement you give me in honouring my work with a degree. I am thrilled to be with you and to get to know in person this venerable house, from which many ardent apostles have gone forth nurtured by sound devotion and solid learning.
While looking forward to my visit, I found my anticipation illumined from an unexpected angle. A few weeks ago, a kind acquaintance — who could not have known of my appointment here — sent me a copy of Willa Cather’s novel published in 1927, Death Comes for the Archbishop. I had long wanted to read it, but the title, I suppose, makes any prelate a bit wary of taking it into his hands: one just never knows. Anywhere, there it suddenly was, dropped into my mail box.
The novel, as you know, sets out from Baltimore. In the prologue we find three curial cardinals and a missionary bishop gathered in the Sabine Hills outside Rome in 1848 to discuss a request from Baltimore’s Provincial Council for an Apostolic Vicariate in New Mexico. Amid descriptions of a delicious supper, obligatory in narratives evoking Italy, the qualities needed in a Vicar are discussed. The Irish-French Bishop Ferrand, who knows America, stresses that the appointee will direct ‘momentous things.’ New Mexico, he explains, was evangelised in the sixteenth century, but allowed to drift. It might call itself Catholic but is marked by superstition and malpractice. Its few priests, of scarce instruction, live tawdry lives. The Vicar-to-be ‘will eat dried buffalo meat and frijoles with chili’. The country ‘will drink up his youth and strength as it does the rain. He will be called upon for every sacrifice, quite possibly for martyrdom.’ He must be, then, ‘of strong constitution, full of zeal, and above all, intelligent’. One of the cardinals, taking all this in, puts it to Ferrand that such conditions surely call for a German? Ferrand says: ‘No!’ The Vicar has to be French. ‘Oh’, he says, ‘the Germans classify, but the French arrange!’
The scene is set for the novel’s hero, Monsignor Jean Marie Latour, to ride onto it — for a bishop without a horse is of no use at all in this story. Latour is appointed Vicar in 1851. As the novel unfolds, he visits Baltimore repeatedly. It is hard to think that he wouldn’t have stopped at old St Mary’s down in Paca Street. After all, Cather constructed her fictional Monsignor on the basis of the factual Jean-Baptiste Lamy, born in Auvergne and trained by the Sulpicians of Montferrand. Both the bishop of the novel and his historical double would have found at St Mary’s sweet scents and sounds of home, and, who knows?, perhaps even a beneficial draught of Bordeaux.
At first sight it might seem odd that a Sulpician formation should be thought to equip a man for the trials that await the Vicar Apostolic as Cather tells them: dirt, deserts, and beans; folklore, idolatry, and violent feuds; a life in the saddle.
As a student at Montferrand Lamy will have been formed according to the Examinations of Conscience of Louis Tronson, third superior of Saint Sulpice. Tronson collated the Society’s patrimony. He edited its constitutions. His Examinations distil its spirituality. They are a guide to conscious Christian living and self-discipline.
Reading them now, one is struck by the fact that they seem to leave no aspect of existence to chance. They tell a good Sulpician with what disposition of soul he should get out of bed in the morning, how he should eat his lunch, at what speed he might appropriately walk – strictly on devout errands, of course – about town. They instruct him to make sure that his surplice is spotless and that he is ever able, at a nod from his superior, faultlessly to intone a complex Gregorian antiphon.
The charism of Saint Sulpice is urban. It is ordered. The society educated Christian gentlemen. Its customs appear to presuppose the backdrop of a quiet French provincial town with cobbled streets, neat gardens, and the Angelus sounding melodiously at dusk.
Such a setting contrasts with the one the Vicar Apostolic in Cather’s novel meets one night as, making his way to Mora, he seeks shelter in a wretched homestead. The farmer, an American, is described as ‘gaunt and ill-formed, with a snake-like neck, terminating in a small, bony head’. He is quite as odious of character as he is of appearance. He snarls and menaces. The poor Mexican girl he keeps as a house-slave lets the visitors understand that he is dangerous. She signals to the bishop and his priest-companion to ride away as quickly as they can.
Now, how on earth would the formal regimentation of Saint Sulpice prepare a man to face a situation like this, straight out of an old-fashioned Western movie?
Very well, it turns out. The bishop responds with great presence of mind. He is courteous yet firm. When the serpent-headed fellow starts swearing he draws from his pocket, not a rosary, but a pistol, saying: ‘No profanity, Señor!’ Then he rides off. Sulpician discipline is clearly not incompatible with resourcefulness. This incident in Death Comes for the Archbishop is reflected in countless examples from real life.
It seems appropriate to pinpoint this paradox as I address those of you who, today, graduate from St Mary’s University. During your years of study you will have read lots of books, written many essays, sat many exams. You will have acquired knowledge and practical skills. Some of you will have produced original research. All this is capital, precious capital, for whatever work, whatever duties lie ahead.
Even more essential, though, are the discipline of mind and formation of character you surely will have benefited from in this Sulpician house.
Nowadays there is a tendency to think of universities as degree-factories. People sign up for courses they are not really terribly interested in. They follow lectures online while doing their ironing, produce a few written assignments with the discreet collaboration of ChatGPT, then emerge with a hood and an acronym after their name, hoping to further their career and salary prospects. There is nothing wrong about this in the sense that it is morally culpable. But this approach is hardly likely to generate intellectual joy, intellectual freedom.
And that is what education is about.
Saint John Henry Newman, whom we now rejoice to honour as a Doctor of the Church, put it even more audaciously in The Idea of a University published in 1852, just as Bishop Lamy was getting himself sorted out down in Santa Fe, the HQ of his newly established New Mexican vicariate. The result of genuine education, Newman insists, is the ‘perfection of the Intellect’. He understood that phrase to point towards
the clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things, as far as the finite mind can embrace them, each in its place, and with its own characteristics upon it. It is almost prophetic from its knowledge of history; it is almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature; it has almost supernatural clarity from its freedom from littleness and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith, because nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation, so intimate is it with the eternal order of things and the music of the spheres.
Dear graduates, your time at St Mary’s will have given you a taste for such ‘perfection’. Make sure you keep your appetite for it alive. Be determined to awaken it in others. That will be a most noble and effective expression of Christian charity.
Our world is in dire straits. I think most people would consider this an uncontroversial affirmation at the moment. Few are those with patience to pursue an overview of ‘all things’ to see particulars in perspective. Hardly anyone, now, knows any history; it is risky to formulate even rudimentary notions of human nature, for we might upset those with divergent views; littleness and prejudice seem to be enjoying a heyday; people are highly startlable. Much societal discourse depends on keeping others’ fears alive.
Your education equips you to step into this reality as benevolently ordering presences, awakened as you are to a contemplative vision of things.
When the bishop in Willa Cather’s novel wonders how he might bring order into his diocese, a wilderness spread out before him, a friend tells him: ‘Don’t begin worrying about the diocese. […] Establish order at home.’ Order, the ‘beauty of order’, spreads like rings in a calm forest lake when you have plopped a pebble into it. Order develops marginally from the energy of an orderedly impacted centre.
To order the world around us, we must be ordered. For that, we need to know how we fit into the universal order of things. In Monsieur Tronson’s Examinations, that great Sulpician manifesto, each apparently mundane observance presented for consideration is preceded by an act of adoration. The study of theology helps us — ought to help us — to regard all things in the light of God’s majesty, that is, to see them as created in love, destined for greatness, their wounds reparable by grace.
To hear the music of the spheres is to note the cantus firmus voiced in all creation: in the helix of a DNA molecule as well as in the galaxies above. The music is that of God’s Creator Word singing itself as praise to the Father through the Spirit. It resonates, too, in the heart and mind of Christians washed clean in the Blood of the Lamb.
Dear graduates, you go forth from Baltimore, much like the Auvergnat Vicar of New Mexico in 1851, with a grand task ahead. The specifics of the task will be unique to each of you; its essence, though, is the same. You are to carry clarity into catastrophe; to bring ordered, bright intelligence to bear on a world in sombre chaos; to give Christ’s love coherent expression in your words and deeds. That is what you have been educated for. It is what the world hopes for from you, what the Church expects. It is an arduous task, but a glorious one. I pray it will fill you with gladness.
Listen out for the music of the spheres. Let it resonate in you. Become its instruments. Then you cannot go far wrong. You will proceed quietly, not having to dread sudden needs, menacing occurrences, or even outright threats. You will be ready for the sacrifices that are part and parcel of your task. Your heart-searched lives will be blessed. And you will be for a blessing.
Set out, then, in humble confidence, with gratitude, in Christ’s name.
Thank you for your attention.
Innocence Restored
Homily given as part of a day of recollection to priests at St Mary’s.
Wednesday: Remain in me (John 15.1-8)
Although I know it by heart and look out for it in advance, the collect set for today, Wednesday in the fifth week of Eastertide, never fails to jolt me. It begins startlingly with the affirmation that God not only loves, but restores innocence.
The loveability of innocence is clear to everyone. We’re aware of it not least when faced with innocence lost and the sadness that results.
The thought that innocence might be restored, however, seems just extravagant.
We human beings might do our best to repair effects of lost innocence, but however hard we try, we can’t restore it. The restoration of innocence amounts to a re-creation. That is God’s prerogative, and his alone.
Today’s collect is linked to that for Thursday in the second week of Lent.
Both begin with the same formula: ‘God, restorer and lover of innocence, direct the hearts of your servants towards yourself’. At that point, though, their ways part.
The Lenten prayer continues aspirationally. It asks that, ‘caught up in the fire of your Spirit, we may be found steadfast in faith and effective in works’. This corresponds to the atmosphere in which we get ready to celebrate Christ’s Pasch.
Today, illumined by Easter, our intention is more essential. We pray, after the introduction, that those ‘set free from the darkness of unbelief may never stray from the light of [God’s] truth’. Those words recall the prayer we pray secretly before Communion: ‘Free me by your most Holy Body and Blood from all my sins and from every evil; keep me always faithful to your commandments, and never let me be parted from you.’
We are children of light. We cannot turn back into darkness. And why would we want to?
Christ exhorts us: ‘Make your home in me!’ He reminds us that he is the vine, we are the branches. Then he states the obvious: ‘A branch cannot bear fruit all by itself’.
Any Christian is, by baptism, grafted on to Christ, the true vine. Still, we who rejoice in the wonderful gift of being Christ’s priests are bound to him in a singular way. We have been ordained to act in his stead, ‘in eius persona’ (CCC 1558). That has been, from the day of our consecration, the whole point of our existence.
Such is our sacramental union with Christ that we may speak the words of Absolution in his name, not because of some magic aura we’ve acquired, but because Christ chooses to exercise his grace through us. It is an astounding thing to be, in this way, instruments of his restoration of innocence, able to say to a penitent forgiven: ‘Nothing binds you anymore! You have been set free, made new!’
The more we realise the vast grace of priestly ordination, the reach of the promises entrusted to us, the more we shall be determined to live up to it, firmly rejecting anything that might make us stray even slightly from Christ’s side.
This means we must surrender ourselves to him unstintingly, unconditionally.
The image of the branch joined to the vine is inseparable from the image of the grain of wheat sown to give life through dying.
Exactly a week ago I found myself praying before the relics of Blessed Jurgis Matulaitis at Marijampolė in Lithuania. Let me conclude with something that model priest and confessor of the faith wrote in 1913 to a young man mustering up the courage to be ordained:
You must not be afraid to take a chance for the glory of God. Christ clearly says: “Unless the grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone” (Jn 12.24). Only when it has fallen to the ground, died and decayed does the grain bring forth new life and fruit from itself. Do not wish to protect yourself so very much. Do not be afraid to immerse yourself in God and die to yourself for God’s sake — then, when you become a priest, you will give forth much fruit.
May we be priests of such mettle, generous, gentle and strong, faithful to the innocence won for us so that we may, on Christ’s behalf, joyfully restore it in others.
Amen.
Archbishop Jurgis Matulaitis-Matulevicius (1871-1927)
***
Deus, innocentiæ restitutor et amator, dirige ad te tuorum corda servorum, ut, Spiritus tui fervore concepto, et in fide inveniantur stabiles, et in opere efficaces.
Deus, innocentiæ restitutor et amator, dirige ad te tuorum corda famulorum, ut, quos de incredulitatis tenebris liberasti, numquam a tuæ veritatis luce discedant.
Wednesday: Remain in me (John 15.1-8)
Although I know it by heart and look out for it in advance, the collect set for today, Wednesday in the fifth week of Eastertide, never fails to jolt me. It begins startlingly with the affirmation that God not only loves, but restores innocence.
The loveability of innocence is clear to everyone. We’re aware of it not least when faced with innocence lost and the sadness that results.
The thought that innocence might be restored, however, seems just extravagant.
We human beings might do our best to repair effects of lost innocence, but however hard we try, we can’t restore it. The restoration of innocence amounts to a re-creation. That is God’s prerogative, and his alone.
Today’s collect is linked to that for Thursday in the second week of Lent.
Both begin with the same formula: ‘God, restorer and lover of innocence, direct the hearts of your servants towards yourself’. At that point, though, their ways part.
The Lenten prayer continues aspirationally. It asks that, ‘caught up in the fire of your Spirit, we may be found steadfast in faith and effective in works’. This corresponds to the atmosphere in which we get ready to celebrate Christ’s Pasch.
Today, illumined by Easter, our intention is more essential. We pray, after the introduction, that those ‘set free from the darkness of unbelief may never stray from the light of [God’s] truth’. Those words recall the prayer we pray secretly before Communion: ‘Free me by your most Holy Body and Blood from all my sins and from every evil; keep me always faithful to your commandments, and never let me be parted from you.’
We are children of light. We cannot turn back into darkness. And why would we want to?
Christ exhorts us: ‘Make your home in me!’ He reminds us that he is the vine, we are the branches. Then he states the obvious: ‘A branch cannot bear fruit all by itself’.
Any Christian is, by baptism, grafted on to Christ, the true vine. Still, we who rejoice in the wonderful gift of being Christ’s priests are bound to him in a singular way. We have been ordained to act in his stead, ‘in eius persona’ (CCC 1558). That has been, from the day of our consecration, the whole point of our existence.
Such is our sacramental union with Christ that we may speak the words of Absolution in his name, not because of some magic aura we’ve acquired, but because Christ chooses to exercise his grace through us. It is an astounding thing to be, in this way, instruments of his restoration of innocence, able to say to a penitent forgiven: ‘Nothing binds you anymore! You have been set free, made new!’
The more we realise the vast grace of priestly ordination, the reach of the promises entrusted to us, the more we shall be determined to live up to it, firmly rejecting anything that might make us stray even slightly from Christ’s side.
This means we must surrender ourselves to him unstintingly, unconditionally.
The image of the branch joined to the vine is inseparable from the image of the grain of wheat sown to give life through dying.
Exactly a week ago I found myself praying before the relics of Blessed Jurgis Matulaitis at Marijampolė in Lithuania. Let me conclude with something that model priest and confessor of the faith wrote in 1913 to a young man mustering up the courage to be ordained:
You must not be afraid to take a chance for the glory of God. Christ clearly says: “Unless the grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone” (Jn 12.24). Only when it has fallen to the ground, died and decayed does the grain bring forth new life and fruit from itself. Do not wish to protect yourself so very much. Do not be afraid to immerse yourself in God and die to yourself for God’s sake — then, when you become a priest, you will give forth much fruit.
May we be priests of such mettle, generous, gentle and strong, faithful to the innocence won for us so that we may, on Christ’s behalf, joyfully restore it in others.
Amen.
Archbishop Jurgis Matulaitis-Matulevicius (1871-1927)
***
Deus, innocentiæ restitutor et amator, dirige ad te tuorum corda servorum, ut, Spiritus tui fervore concepto, et in fide inveniantur stabiles, et in opere efficaces.
Deus, innocentiæ restitutor et amator, dirige ad te tuorum corda famulorum, ut, quos de incredulitatis tenebris liberasti, numquam a tuæ veritatis luce discedant.
Searing Grace
Homily given as part of a day of reconciliation to bishops at St Mary’s.
Acts 14.19-28: They stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city, supposing him dead
In his Second Letter to the Corinthians, Paul itemises incidents of violence suffered after his conversion to Christ: ‘Five times I have received the forty lashes less one. Three times I have been beaten with rods; once I was stoned’ (11.24f.).
Today’s reading from Acts gives us details of the stoning.
The event occurs in about 47 AD, at the end of Paul’s first missionary journey. It had been rich in contrasting experience.
At Cyprus he had had a run-in with Elymas, a pagan magician, whom Paul’s prayers blinded in the hope that Elymas would, as he himself had on the road to Damascus, come to his inward senses by being deprived for a while of sense-perception.
At Iconium Paul had had to escape an ambush mounted by Jewish opponents.
Then, at Lystra, he’d had to fight to keep people from worshipping him as a god. The excitement had barely died down when a band of Jewish zealots turned up and won the crowds over: ‘They stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city [of Lystra]’.
A year or so later, Paul wrote in his letter to the Galatians: ‘I have been crucified with Christ’ (2.20). In this statement there is more than just devotional hyperbole.
At Lystra Paul had literally tasted something of what Christ went through in Jerusalem during his Passion. The crowd that one moment shouted ‘Hosanna!’ soon united in crying: ‘Crucify!’ Likewise Paul was hailed as a messenger of the gods by an ecstatic crowd only in order, hours later, to be pelted with stones by those same people, and left for dead. They had loved Paul as long as he had seemed a hero on terms they had set; they hated him when he turned out to be working on entirely different terms.
Well, such is the life, such are the conditions of apostolic ministry. Paul’s example teaches us not to get too carried away by others’ praise. On the contrary, when the world speaks well of us and starts bringing out the incense, it’s time to be wary, prepared.
There is another aspect of the stoning at Lystra worth considering.
Paul first turns up in the Biblical narrative in the context of a stoning.
When Stephen was stoned in Jerusalem for proclaiming Jesus as God, those who took active part, needing freedom of movement to chuck stones with all the needed force, laid their cloaks down at the feet of Paul who, still called Saul, was wardrobe-keeper for the occasion, fully approving of what was going on (Acts 7.54-8.1).
With what grief, what shame Paul must later have recalled this incident!
How powerfully it must have been present to him when he found himself cast defenceless on the ground, to be stoned.
Paul would later write to the Colossians that he was making up, in his flesh, what is ‘lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his Body, the Church’ (1.24).
Christ’s oblation, wrought on the Cross, was divinely sufficient. Nothing is ‘lacking’ in it in the sense that it is incomplete. The ‘making up’ concerns the instantiation of its effects, the application, through the Church, of the Cross’s grace to specific wounds and failings.
First among these are our own intimate betrayals, needing to be reconciled.
At Lystra Paul sustained, in his flesh, a concrete atonement. It released him from the particular wages of a deeply personal sin. This freed him to proclaim to others — and with what force! — the real possibility of such gracious liberation.
May we likewise be open to receive God’s searing, purifying grace as it comes to us to set us free from our bonds; and may we thus acquire the authority and courage we need to witness credibly to the presence in our midst of God’s kingdom.
Amen.
The Stoning of St Paul at Lystra by Philippe de Champaigne. Wikimedia.
Acts 14.19-28: They stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city, supposing him dead
In his Second Letter to the Corinthians, Paul itemises incidents of violence suffered after his conversion to Christ: ‘Five times I have received the forty lashes less one. Three times I have been beaten with rods; once I was stoned’ (11.24f.).
Today’s reading from Acts gives us details of the stoning.
The event occurs in about 47 AD, at the end of Paul’s first missionary journey. It had been rich in contrasting experience.
At Cyprus he had had a run-in with Elymas, a pagan magician, whom Paul’s prayers blinded in the hope that Elymas would, as he himself had on the road to Damascus, come to his inward senses by being deprived for a while of sense-perception.
At Iconium Paul had had to escape an ambush mounted by Jewish opponents.
Then, at Lystra, he’d had to fight to keep people from worshipping him as a god. The excitement had barely died down when a band of Jewish zealots turned up and won the crowds over: ‘They stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city [of Lystra]’.
A year or so later, Paul wrote in his letter to the Galatians: ‘I have been crucified with Christ’ (2.20). In this statement there is more than just devotional hyperbole.
At Lystra Paul had literally tasted something of what Christ went through in Jerusalem during his Passion. The crowd that one moment shouted ‘Hosanna!’ soon united in crying: ‘Crucify!’ Likewise Paul was hailed as a messenger of the gods by an ecstatic crowd only in order, hours later, to be pelted with stones by those same people, and left for dead. They had loved Paul as long as he had seemed a hero on terms they had set; they hated him when he turned out to be working on entirely different terms.
Well, such is the life, such are the conditions of apostolic ministry. Paul’s example teaches us not to get too carried away by others’ praise. On the contrary, when the world speaks well of us and starts bringing out the incense, it’s time to be wary, prepared.
There is another aspect of the stoning at Lystra worth considering.
Paul first turns up in the Biblical narrative in the context of a stoning.
When Stephen was stoned in Jerusalem for proclaiming Jesus as God, those who took active part, needing freedom of movement to chuck stones with all the needed force, laid their cloaks down at the feet of Paul who, still called Saul, was wardrobe-keeper for the occasion, fully approving of what was going on (Acts 7.54-8.1).
With what grief, what shame Paul must later have recalled this incident!
How powerfully it must have been present to him when he found himself cast defenceless on the ground, to be stoned.
Paul would later write to the Colossians that he was making up, in his flesh, what is ‘lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his Body, the Church’ (1.24).
Christ’s oblation, wrought on the Cross, was divinely sufficient. Nothing is ‘lacking’ in it in the sense that it is incomplete. The ‘making up’ concerns the instantiation of its effects, the application, through the Church, of the Cross’s grace to specific wounds and failings.
First among these are our own intimate betrayals, needing to be reconciled.
At Lystra Paul sustained, in his flesh, a concrete atonement. It released him from the particular wages of a deeply personal sin. This freed him to proclaim to others — and with what force! — the real possibility of such gracious liberation.
May we likewise be open to receive God’s searing, purifying grace as it comes to us to set us free from our bonds; and may we thus acquire the authority and courage we need to witness credibly to the presence in our midst of God’s kingdom.
Amen.
The Stoning of St Paul at Lystra by Philippe de Champaigne. Wikimedia.
Like Floating Thoughts
A friend who is a poet recently wrote after a visit to the Aquarium in Baltimore of how she had ‘watched the other worldly fantastical creatures flutter a fin or a tail and fluently glide through the blue water. There were fish with funny lips, and with unicorn horns, and rays with leopard print, and huge silvery flat fish with tiny fins, not to mention gills, nettles that look like thoughts floating through the sky, and moon jellies with the finest fibers. We were utterly transfixed’. Today, having occasion to visit the Aquarium myself, I could so well understand what she meant, though I would not have been able to put it so beautifully. The gratuitous elegance and beauty of normally invisible creatures speaks powerfully of the existence of God.
Sound of Mercy
In a recent episode of Private Passions, Francis Spufford recounts an incident he has also written about. It regards his coming to faith. The setting for it was pretty unpromising. Spufford had gone out to a café to recover from what he describes as ‘a horrible night of rowing’ at home. Sitting bruised and solitary in that neutral, public space, he heard the sound of Mozart’s clarinet concerto. It came to him ‘like unbelievably welcome news’. It sounded a way of facing reality illusionlessly, yet with firm (and at the same time tender) hope. Richard Powers apparently once said of the concerto that it is ‘what mercy would sound like’. That is how Spufford heard it. He, who had abandoned religion as a young man, was reawakened to the possibility of it. He didn’t experience the music as a divine revelation. Rather he encountered Mozart as a kind of emissary ‘reporting something I felt inclined to trust when it was put like that.’ That’s the sort of reporting any Christian is called to.
God in Law
Saarland, the German federal state, this week added a preamble to its constitution. It reads: ‘Conscious of its responsibility before God and human beings, on the basis of its religious and humanistic heritage, Saarland has given itself this constitution through its freely elected parliament.’ The addition has met resistance. Isn’t reference to God in a legal text hopelessly old-fashioned, irrelevant in times not overtly religious? Thomas Jansen addressed criticism well in yesterday’s FAZ: ‘Democratic politics cannot pretend to present ultimate truths. The chancellor, members of parliament, mayors, and party conferences do not proclaim the Gospel. Ultimate truths belong to the religious sphere.’ Saarland’s parliament developed a formula developed by the Parliamentary Council while defining the national constitution in 1948-49. The memory of Hitler’s dictatorship was fresh. People knew what can happen when statesmen start deluding themselves they are divine. Jansen concludes: ‘Awareness of their agency’s limitation can be a helpful guiding principle for all engaged in politics, whether they believe in God or not, also beyond the frontiers of the Saarland.’
St Joseph the Worker
This homily was given to conclude a symposium held in Kaunas for the religious of Lithuania.
Matthew 13.54-58: Is this not the carpenter’s son?
The feast day of St Joseph the Worker was instituted by Pope Pius XII in 1955. The pope had a supernatural intention: he wished to foster devotion to a great saint. He also had a social intention: the feast was an antiphonal response to Communist May Day celebrations. It would show that the cause of workers is not over against the Church, or estranged from the Church. The example of Joseph places the worker honourably, even sublimely, at the heart of the manifestation of the New Testament.
Since 1955 the feast has been instrumentalised in aid of many good causes and of some more dubious causes. It has been used as a means by which to politicise the Gospel. As we know, and see before our eyes these days, that is a slippery slope. This is not because the societal order, the polis we are part of, lies beyond God’s redemptive work or the Christian’s task. We’re called to sanctify society by the way we are and act in it; we are called to order the world in such a way that all may live worthily.
The problem is that we, when we turn faith into a project of welfare, easily forget what the whole thing is about. We think of ourselves as decisive agents — our outlook becomes horizontal and we end up, to speak in Biblical terms, ‘forgetting God’.
We cannot take Joseph hostage to this sort of enterprise. His life and sovereign silence are oriented vertically. When we honour Joseph as ‘worker’, it cannot just be about an effort to feel affirmed in the work we do ourselves.
In the Litany of St Joseph, Joseph is referred to as a ‘patriarch’. The patriarchs of the Old Testament were all shepherds. The wilderness, the broad plains were their element; so was the camp fire round which they sat and spoke of God’s faithfulness in their own lives and in the lives of their fathers.
The patriarch of the New Testament, by contrast, is a carpenter. His is an urban calling. It is in cities large and small that houses are built to last and to be furnished — for the Bible does not feature the romanticism of the little house on the prairie: it belongs to a different cultural setting.
Joseph represents the forming of fellowship, a society that has at last found its place of belonging and is no longer constantly on the move. Even as life is movement, our final call is a call to come home; and home is what the city stands for.
It is significant that Scripture lets human history set out, in Genesis, from a wonderful garden, but that the history ends, towards the end of the Apocalypse, in a city.
Joseph, Protector of the Saviour, reminds us that our goal is within reach. He reminds us that we are called to flourish, and that our flourishing will result, not so much from what we go around saying as from what we do to enable communion, service, security.
I would have loved to see a piece of furniture made by Joseph, the carpenter. I do not doubt that his artisanship was beautiful. In his arms he carried the Origin of all Beauty, all Loveliness. May we, as we honour Joseph, our patriarch, likewise work beautifully in the city of God, which is our city, too.
We are called to found our city on Christ’s peace, not of this world. Let us make sure it infuses all our doings, from the most sublime to do the most everyday. Amen.
St Joseph expertly at work. Details from the Merode altarpiece in the Met Cloisters. Did he also make this?
Matthew 13.54-58: Is this not the carpenter’s son?
The feast day of St Joseph the Worker was instituted by Pope Pius XII in 1955. The pope had a supernatural intention: he wished to foster devotion to a great saint. He also had a social intention: the feast was an antiphonal response to Communist May Day celebrations. It would show that the cause of workers is not over against the Church, or estranged from the Church. The example of Joseph places the worker honourably, even sublimely, at the heart of the manifestation of the New Testament.
Since 1955 the feast has been instrumentalised in aid of many good causes and of some more dubious causes. It has been used as a means by which to politicise the Gospel. As we know, and see before our eyes these days, that is a slippery slope. This is not because the societal order, the polis we are part of, lies beyond God’s redemptive work or the Christian’s task. We’re called to sanctify society by the way we are and act in it; we are called to order the world in such a way that all may live worthily.
The problem is that we, when we turn faith into a project of welfare, easily forget what the whole thing is about. We think of ourselves as decisive agents — our outlook becomes horizontal and we end up, to speak in Biblical terms, ‘forgetting God’.
We cannot take Joseph hostage to this sort of enterprise. His life and sovereign silence are oriented vertically. When we honour Joseph as ‘worker’, it cannot just be about an effort to feel affirmed in the work we do ourselves.
In the Litany of St Joseph, Joseph is referred to as a ‘patriarch’. The patriarchs of the Old Testament were all shepherds. The wilderness, the broad plains were their element; so was the camp fire round which they sat and spoke of God’s faithfulness in their own lives and in the lives of their fathers.
The patriarch of the New Testament, by contrast, is a carpenter. His is an urban calling. It is in cities large and small that houses are built to last and to be furnished — for the Bible does not feature the romanticism of the little house on the prairie: it belongs to a different cultural setting.
Joseph represents the forming of fellowship, a society that has at last found its place of belonging and is no longer constantly on the move. Even as life is movement, our final call is a call to come home; and home is what the city stands for.
It is significant that Scripture lets human history set out, in Genesis, from a wonderful garden, but that the history ends, towards the end of the Apocalypse, in a city.
Joseph, Protector of the Saviour, reminds us that our goal is within reach. He reminds us that we are called to flourish, and that our flourishing will result, not so much from what we go around saying as from what we do to enable communion, service, security.
I would have loved to see a piece of furniture made by Joseph, the carpenter. I do not doubt that his artisanship was beautiful. In his arms he carried the Origin of all Beauty, all Loveliness. May we, as we honour Joseph, our patriarch, likewise work beautifully in the city of God, which is our city, too.
We are called to found our city on Christ’s peace, not of this world. Let us make sure it infuses all our doings, from the most sublime to do the most everyday. Amen.
St Joseph expertly at work. Details from the Merode altarpiece in the Met Cloisters. Did he also make this?
Honest Books
For The Tablet’s Spring Festival five years ago, back in the days of Covid confinements, I was privileged to conduct a long conversation with Marilynne Robinson about her Gilead novels. The recording has long since vanished from the internet, but recently a Canadian Benedictine was kind enough to transcribe it. I am happy to be able to share this exchange. It was, to me at least, not only very enjoyable but deeply instructive.
Brendan Walsh, Editor of The Tablet:
Wherever you are in the world, whatever time of day it is — welcome to the final event in what has been an unforgettable Tablet Spring Festival. I am joined by two remarkable guests who are going to be in conversation with each other: Father Erik Varden, the former Abbot of the only Cistercian Abbey in England, who is now the Bishop of Trondheim in Norway, and Marilynne Robinson, whose novels are among the great works of contemporary literature.
My name is Brendan Walsh and I am the editor of The Tablet, the International Catholic Weekly. We have had three days now — this is the last event — three days of astonishing events, conversations, discussions, films, music, laughter, and tears. It really has been wonderful for all of us. On Thursday night we saw an extraordinarily moving documentary film that took us inside and alongside the monks of the Cistercian community where Erik was Abbot. We met the monks, we ate with them, we talked with them, we prayed with them, and in some cases we saw them dying and being interred in the Abbey grounds.
I hope that in this festival we brought some of the best of The Tablet — its spirit, its values, its spirit of faithful curiosity — to you. Father Erik and Marilynne Robinson are two writers who each have a gift of making ordinary things numinous, of seeing the holiness in ordinary lives. Norwegian by birth, Father Erik was the son of a country vet.
He was a fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, before entering Mount St Bernard Abbey in Leicestershire. Pope Francis appointed him to the see of Trondheim in 2019. Father Erik is the author of a book, The Shattering of Loneliness, which the Times Literary Supplement described as “a book of extraordinary importance.”
It is, with prophetic clarity, aware of the depravity, the weakness, and the glory of the human condition. I have to confess that there are some words of a piece that Father Erik wrote in The Tablet a couple of years ago which I cut out and stuck on my wall, and they are a reminder of what the editor of The Tablet should always have in mind about what The Tablet is trying to do: “In a world marked by indifference and cynicism, hopelessness and division, it is our task to stand for something different, to point towards the light that no darkness can overcome, to nurture goodwill, to enable a communion founded on trust, in peace, to bear witness that death has lost its sting, and that life is meaningful and beautiful and of inviolable dignity.”
Marilynne Robinson has written five highly acclaimed novels. Her first novel, Housekeeping, was published in 1981. It was recognised at once as an extraordinary piece of work, achievement. An early reviewer in the New York Times wrote that it was “as if in writing it she broke through the ordinary human condition with all its dissatisfactions and achieved a kind of transfiguration.”
It would be more than twenty years before Marilynne wrote her next novel, Gilead, published in 2004, and it was followed by three further novels: Home, Lila, and Jack. Each focuses, as we know and love these books, on the same group of characters, each one of them indelible in our memory, members of the households of two Presbyterian ministers in a midwestern AmErikan town. Earlier this afternoon, just a few hours ago, Francis Spufford, the English novelist, was talking about his recent work — a lovely novel he has written this year — and he spoke this afternoon about his admiration for Marilynne Robinson.
“She is so palpably marvellous, and her marvellousness is so palpably connected to her faith, that she has prised open a space in literature for people to be curious.” Marilynne, I am going to leave you in Father Erik’s confessional box. There might be time towards the end to have some questions.
If you have questions, there is a little box at the bottom of our screens that says “chat”, and if you key in a question there we will pass them on to Father Erik, who might be able to put them to Marilynne towards the end of the conversation. So, Father Erik, over to you.
Bishop Varden:
Thank you very much, Brendan, and thank you, Marilynne, for being present tonight. I have been looking forward to this conversation. At the same time, I have been dreading it a bit. Having lived with — and really having lived in — your books for the best part of fifteen years, having wept with them and laughed with them, I almost hesitate to talk about them. They have come to stand for something so intimate. That is partly why I want to set out from a scene in Lila where John Ames and Lila have gone to bed. It is a Saturday evening, and as Ames says, when you are in the clerical line of trade it seems always to be either Sunday, or Saturday evening.
So they are talking about this, that, and the other. Lila asks a question which impresses Ames, and he says, “I am going to keep you safe, and you are going to keep me honest.” I think that is wonderful, because your novels are so honest and draw honesty forth in the readers.
The setting for all your four books is a world marked by an excessively religious atmosphere: where men walk for miles in the middle of winter to clear a point of Hebrew grammar, where children are named for theological virtues, and where even bean salads have denominational specificities. So I wanted to ask you: was it part of your project, as it were, from the beginning to embody an honest articulation of faith — and so to preserve it from platitudinal certainties and preacherly vagueness?
Marilynne Robinson:
Well, I would be delighted to think that I had done that, or even approached it. The period I am writing about in those novels was the period most influenced by the abolitionist movement, and then the Civil War, and then Reconstruction. The abolitionist people were many of them clergy, and they were profoundly religious people — religious at saturation level, one might say. The irony, of course, is that this is not sustainable over the long term, or at least not in the forms that they would perhaps have wished to see it persist. It is an intensification of religious culture that I have seen, but even that is perhaps a carryover from an earlier kind of passion and selflessness and generosity of intention that could not keep its focus, that did not fully understand its implications in changing circumstances.
Bishop Varden:
There is a scene in Gilead that, when I first read it, moved me very much. It has become an important reference for me in my life as a monk, because I think it says a great deal about what it means to live the monastic and contemplative life, but also about what it means to be a human being. It is the scene when the young John Ames sets off with his father and they walk into Kansas, the two of them, in order to tend the grandfather’s grave. When they have done all this work and finally found the grave, the father prays a very long prayer over it, and young Ames — who is about twelve, I think — is a bit tired. He looks around and sees something extraordinary: the setting sun and the rising moon in perfect parallel, with the two of them, father and son, right in the middle. Knowing that his father is engaged in something profoundly important, he does not want to startle him out of his attention, so he performs a most beautiful gesture — he takes his father’s hand and kisses it. Then a bit later in the narrative, he describes to his own little son, to whom he is writing the letter that is Gilead, what had happened. If I may, I would like to cite that passage, because I would like to sound you out about it. John Ames says to his son:
“I can’t tell you how I felt walking along beside my father that night along that rutted road through that empty world, what a sweet strength I felt in him and in myself and all around us. I’m glad I didn’t understand, because I’ve rarely felt joy like that, and assurance. It was like one of those dreams where you’re filled with some extravagant feeling you might never have in life — it doesn’t matter what it is, even guilt or dread — and you learn from it what an amazing instrument you are, so to speak, what a power you have to experience beyond anything you might ever actually need.”
I find that so heart-rendingly beautiful that it still sends shivers down my spine. I love the fact that it is an evocation of a profound experience left unprettified. It states clearly that sometimes to live at that sort of depth, suffering is involved. It seems to me that awakening to that depth is what is going on at one level in your books. We see it in Lila, we see it in Jack, but we also see it in the old preachers. There is something about the spareness of life in your novels that sharpens this experience and provokes it. I wonder: accustomed as we are to untold comforts and distractions, do we now tend to miss out on this discovery? And is a major part of the modern malaise a kind of failure to acknowledge our spiritual depth and our spiritual perception?
Marilynne Robinson:
Well, I have to believe that people are simply capable of whatever profound question, or intuition, or whatever it is that we live with in the idea of God. And I think that we do everything to distract ourselves from it. I think distraction is secondary to some anxiety about the intuition — an intuition that is really a more profound part of experience for very many people. I was struck by the passage in the book you quote [in The Shattering of Loneliness] where the speaker sees people as an inchoate mass, a kind of protoplasm, and then suddenly begins to see them as human in a deeply meaningful way.
I think we have that tendency to see other people as less profound creatures than God made them, and that on the basis of what is really a superficial response to them we make generalisations about them. We even make important decisions about how to present religion to them, or whether there is any point in trying. I often teach the Bible to writers at the workshop — I have just finished touching on the Old Testament — and people are very interested, and very often almost shy about the fact that they grant great importance to these texts and traditions and have no approach to them, no familiarity with them.
I think that is the kind of longing that I believe you would be very sympathetic to, but it veils itself. We do not see it in people. It is rare that we have the opportunity to address the profound seriousness of the human situation as it is manifest in people who are opaque to us.
Writing about the American Midwest, I am writing about a part of the country that is, in a certain sense, blanked out — people passing through have no idea where they are, yet they generalise and feel there is no life there, no culture, and so on, even though very great cities are scattered throughout the Midwest. The thing that is always said about the Midwest is that it is very flat, which is exaggerated, but nevertheless true enough to inspire a number of poems. Sometimes the sun and the moon are on opposite horizons and equally visible. The great beauty of that is the kind of thing that people do not always notice, because they subscribe to the convention that this is a place that is flat and not beautiful.
Bishop Varden:
What you do so wonderfully is precisely to reveal those moments of beauty — both in nature and in people — drawing them out of their opaqueness and making them so present and so specific. To turn to one such specificity, I would like to hone in on Jack a bit. In Gilead, Jack appears to be — at least so he appeared to me when I first read it — an incidental character, someone we largely see through the anxious projections of John Ames, the narrator.
The next book, Home, reveals him in all his complexity, but even there he remains a stranger — even to the people who have known him all his life. Then in your most recent book he suddenly stands there before us, and in that book you enable us to know him, as far as we can, on his own terms. There are so many things that are striking about him there, not least his joyousness. A couple of times — I think once in Jack and once in Home — he is likened, jocularly, to Raskolnikov: once by himself and once by Glory when he refuses to eat his breakfast.
Personally, I could not quite imagine Jack going out to kill an old woman with an axe, but thinking in Dostoevskian terms, I can see something Karamazovian about him, something of the three brothers folded into one. One could quite see the elder Zosima prostrating himself before Jack for what he has to carry. This might be a daft question, but I wonder: is Jack an emblematic character representing something — a tendency, a personality, a weakness, or a strength — or is he ultimately a kind of everyman? I was touched and delighted by something Della says to him in a moment of confidence: “Jack, maybe you’re more like most people than you think.”
Marilynne Robinson:
Well, I think of Jack as someone who has taken on the fact, at least, of his being able to incur great guilt, and who corrects for that radically by trying to be truly harmless. At the same time, he feels as though he cannot really engage with people and still assume that he has kept his harmlessness intact. I think he is an extreme instance of a kind of human capacity for conscientiousness and self-scrutiny. He is almost a hunger artist in some sense: he has taken himself down to the bare nervous structures of potential guilt. And yet, for all of that, it is also true that he cannot be conventional. He is not in the drift of society, and things like scrupulousness about the truth have never had quite the same hold on him as they might on another person.
Bishop Varden:
And yet he is a very honest person, isn’t he?
Marilynne Robinson:
Yes, he is. Yes, he is.
Bishop Varden:
I mean, he is almost cruelly honest with himself.
Marilynne Robinson:
Yes, he is. And I am glad that you see joy in him, because I certainly intended that as well. He would not want to be someone else, frankly.
Bishop Varden:
No, exactly.
Marilynne Robinson:
But what can I say? I was going to say something, and you would have liked it, but now I have forgotten what it was.
Bishop Varden:
There is a scene in Jack where, as a young boy, he is in the kitchen with some caterpillars in a mayonnaise jar, thinking of pouring water into the jar to see whether the caterpillars breathe. Old Boughton observes this gravely and then says, “Well, these things do want to exist.” That clearly touches Jack somehow, and he asks later in life, “Maybe a chirp means I exist — and then, I exist, as if it could matter. But it must, since they all do it.” And then later on, when he is returning Della’s book of poetry, which he has kept for a very long time and which is in a somewhat parlous state, he discreetly writes his own address in it. In your book you say he put his address in the book as a sort of “I exist,” thinking that if she ever noticed it, it might also make her laugh.
I find that is something you convey so wonderfully — the thirst Jack has simply to live and to be noticed as living. Not simply to be forgiven, although he appreciates that, being a courteous man, but to be recognised as being alive.
Marilynne Robinson:
Yes. Well, you know, isn’t that mysterious? That is from my own experience. I never do violence to vermin, because I can tell they want to have life — the complexity of their response to a threat is just astonishing to me. It is part of my theological feeling that the world is much more saturated with intelligence and consciousness than we normally assume.
Jack and I have shared certain experiences, such as watching an insect walk across the ceiling, which must be like the Gobi Desert from the point of view of the insect — walking a straight line with no obvious intent, all by itself. And you think: how does this fit into insect life? What is it doing? Why can it do it? I do not want to imply a direct analogy between human beings and insects, but a lot of the mysteries do tend to overlap, I think.
Bishop Varden:
And they mirror one another, and perhaps they might even illuminate one another.
Marilynne Robinson:
Absolutely.
Bishop Varden:
I would like to take that theme of laughter further. I hope you won’t feel put out if I say that your books do make me laugh.
Marilynne Robinson:
Good. Good.
Bishop Varden:
There are scenes in them of such perfect comedy that they almost seem constructed as such — like the inebriated horse in the abolitionist settlement who has the misfortune of falling down through a dug tunnel. Or that rather elaborate baptism of kittens, when Ames remarks that the kittens have cause to be grateful that it was not his Baptist friend, who believes in complete immersion, who performed the ceremony. Or that omnipresent wry self-irony of which all the characters are capable, some indulging in it more than others. It brings an element of sheer delight to the reading.
But it strikes me that laughter in your books is also something very serious, and it is thematised as serious. Ames says — I think it is in Gilead — having watched two mechanics he knows from the local garage just engaged in banter on a road in town, that it is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over, “a kind of ecstasy.” And later on, when he has come to know Lila, and having made a little experiment with hair tonic, and then finds her to his astonishment waiting for him at the door of the church, wanting a word with him, he says, “At that point I began to suspect, as I have from time to time, that grace has a grand laughter in it.” Which I think is a wonderful insight.
But the third passage, which I think crowns the other two, is an insight of Jack’s when he has been rehearsing a poem by Thomas Traherne, trying to imagine the resurrection. He says: “Wings are fine, and a kind of luminosity would also be very nice, but to hear a familiar laugh would be an almost unbearable joy. A human joy exceeding anything seraphim could feel, since angels cannot know death.” Could you say something about this density of laughter?
Marilynne Robinson:
Well, it is an amazing thing. It is true that people — well, it is like singing, in a way, except it is spontaneous. It is just something that people do, unless events utterly forbid. And that is, in a sense, an assent. It is like giving the meaning of the wonderful, the comprehended, to something that has happened, or has been thought of, or has been said. It is like a kind of secondary reality.
I am not being very articulate, but you know — you do not just walk through the world; you are in conversation with the world. And sometimes the world does something that simply delights you in the way of provoking laughter. And in that sense, it is a deep engagement with what the world is, or what language is. I think I am intentional about making my books, which aspire to seriousness, but are also, I hope, humorous.
Bishop Varden:
Yes, and I think it is wonderful to have that theological affirmation of laughter. I think we are all a bit conditioned — not least those of us who live in monasteries — by the caricature of the monk in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, who is so frightened of laughter, so censorious about it, that he wants to eliminate anything that can provoke it. I loved — and I would love to have the reference to — something you quote Calvin as saying: that for God, each of us is an actor on a stage, and God is the audience. It is Ames quoting Calvin, and he says, “I do like Calvin’s image, because it suggests how God might actually enjoy us.” That is a luminous and very reassuring insight, even in our absurdity.
Marilynne Robinson:
Absolutely. Calvin calls human beings “the masterpiece of creation.” He speaks very often in terms that suggest an artist, or someone appraising a work of art. It is as if the arena of human freedom is this: that given circumstances, you can respond to them well. You can be uniquely artful, in a sense, with the idea of God as the appraising mind — so that the art is to be what God would wish you to be in that circumstance, with the suggestion that in some way it is you doing this, not just any human being.
Bishop Varden:
Yes. And what parent does not delight in their children’s laughter? And recognise that it is specific to that child.
Marilynne Robinson:
Yes.
Bishop Varden:
The question of an eternal specificity — the question of the soul, of an eternal soul — is one that haunts Jack in particular, though not only Jack. Strikingly, it is Glory, who seems so settled in the certainties of faith, who has the real quandary about what the soul is. She has this notion that Jack must know, because Jack so clearly has a soul. She is a bit embarrassed at first, and she thinks about it, but then she musters up the courage to ask Jack what he thinks the soul is. And Jack, with a bit of cynicism — perhaps even a trace of sarcasm — says: “On the basis of my vast learning and experience, I would say it is what you can’t get rid of. Insult, deprivation, outright violence. If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there—” and so on.
Elsewhere, he reflects on himself and says, “Daylight is purgatory. It is a terrible thing being a thing to be looked at. He had always thought so, even before he had his history written all over him.” And yet what happens in Jack — which chronologically anticipates the other three novels — is that he awakens to an experience of being seen that is not threatening, but life-giving. It is when Della sees him and sees a brightness, what Ames would call an incandescence. What strikes her, she says in Jack, is that he does not hide his brightness. So she says to him, wonderfully: “In your own way, you’re kind of pure” — which I think is the last thing Jack would expect to hear. What is that purity she sees?
Marilynne Robinson:
Well, I think partly it is just the degree to which he is undefended by himself. And then the other thing is that the whole framework for all these stories is the existence of enormously cruel and rigid social distinctions — made and enforced. Jack, by nature, is simply not coerced by them. It is not as if he were defying them; they are just not there for him. He does not imagine himself in a position of moral advantage over anyone. And so there is a sense in which, if you think of the world as tainting or corrupting, he is not corrupted — because the great cruelty, the great fraud that he is contemporary with, is not something he has any impulse to engage in.
Bishop Varden:
No. And that leaves him, in a sense, untouched.
Marilynne Robinson:
Exactly. Out of all the descendants of the original John Ames, he is the one who would probably have John Ames’s approval.
Bishop Varden:
Yes. The theme of homecoming is an important one, obviously. The second book is called Home, and there is a paradigm of the prodigal son that runs through the novels. The embodiment of it is Jack, but it seems to me that the theme of homecoming really haunts all the major characters, in that it stands for an emergence out of loneliness. I am touched by the fact that both Lila and Jack, in their separate secret lives, are people who go around at night looking in through other people’s windows just to see how people live, how they do it, and that both of them have been bruised by the experience of being outside. Lila says at one point, “When you’re scalded, touch hurts. It makes no difference if it’s kindly meant.”
But it moves me that even John Ames, who spent all his life in this blessed place, is one who knows homelessness. I was struck by the fact that at one point he cites the novel of Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest, in many ways another embodiment of homelessness. I love the fact that when he says to his son “I felt a lot of sympathy for the fellow,” Boughton — who is a bit dour, after all — says: “It was the drink!” But Ames remarks later on, “God lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.” And he goes on to reflect on his own years of loneliness, which for the majority of his life seemed to him what his life simply was.
He says: “Now that I look back, it seems to me that in all that deep darkness, a miracle was preparing. So I am right to remember it as a blessed time, and myself as waiting in confidence, even if I had no idea what I was waiting for.” I am slightly wary of using the word “prophetic,” which is rather overused these days, but it does seem to me that that is a prophetic statement for the world right now, caught up in such a profound experience of exile, of not being at home.
Marilynne Robinson:
And of being too much at home, like John Ames.
Bishop Varden:
Yes, in the other sense.
Marilynne Robinson:
Yes. Well, I myself — I do not know what to anticipate at any point now. And I am not uncomfortable with that, because what it means, basically, is that I do assume it is in God’s hands, which does not, as we all know from Scripture, guarantee that we will not see hard times. It is just that if you understand time as being always equivalent to itself in some sense — so that you have a long life of loneliness, and a few last years of great happiness — how do you understand that? Is the time that approaches the period of happiness an instruction, a preparation? Or is it simply something that, if you put the two in a balance, you would have to say: my life was basically lonely until the last few years? That is a theological question, isn’t it? How you choose to value what might seem to be the opposite of itself — to accept silence and vacancy and so on — and whether you are also, during that time, accepting preparation, which I would say he was, yes.
Bishop Varden:
Yes. I suppose, living within that energy of hope, which obviously, as a man of faith, Ames is — he would know that the present is a preparation for something. But I also suppose that what comes to him is a kind of anticipation of beatitude, a joy that takes him entirely by surprise.
Marilynne Robinson:
Yes.
Bishop Varden:
On that note, the themes of salvation and loss are important. The theme of perdition is important. The theme of predestination is important. But what strikes me particularly is the theme of a kind of solidarity in the quest for salvation. John Ames at one point makes clear that it is not in his tradition to pray for the dead. But one rather suspects that he does anyway, perhaps behind closed doors.
The role of those who have gone before is decisive, both dramatically and structurally, throughout the work. I am struck again and again by the deep emphasis you place on compassion — and I mean that in the most literal sense: being involved in the pathos of another life, being entangled in other lives, each man not being an island but a stitch in a delicate embroidery, like the glorious one that Della made on Jack’s shirt, an embroidery that would be forever imperfect if a single stitch were extracted.
It is wonderful that Lila and Glory, who come at this question from about as different angles as one could, spell out what seems to be much the same sentiment and perhaps even the same existential conviction. When Glory, in a moment of profound worry for Jack, has an insight and says, “If I, or my father, or any Boughton has ever stirred the Lord’s compassion, then Jack will be all right, because perdition for him would be perdition for every one of us” — which is a most noble statement. Lila says something similar when she thinks of Doll, the woman who brought her up. She says that if Doll was going to be lost forever, Lila wanted to be right there with her, holding on to the skirt of her dress.
Later on, when she is safely established in Ames’s house and more literate in biblical thinking and biblical piety, she becomes a little more daring as she listens to Boughton’s great concern with China. And she says that she thought maybe, just by worrying about it, Boughton would sweep up China into an eternity that would surprise him out of all his wondering. “God is good, the old men say. Now that would be the proof.” So I wonder: is there, among these good Presbyterians, something of the whiff of the mystical doctrine of the communion of saints?
Marilynne Robinson:
Oh, well, you know, they also adhere to the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, and the resurrection of the body.
Bishop Varden:
But in terms of an active communion of intercession and carrying?
Marilynne Robinson:
Well, they would not say they intercede. But they would say that the love of a human person survives that person. And that there is nothing inappropriate about thinking very lovingly, and with concern, about anyone who has gone before. Also, I think a lot of the difficulty of Christianity as an emotional experience is that you do not know what to do with the great mass of humankind that does not satisfy the formula of salvation that you tend to be offered. What both my characters and I were thinking is that if you understand the grace of God as fully sufficient, then it seems more appropriate to the love of God — and more in keeping with the celebration of God — to let go of any exclusion from the idea of resurrection and immortality and so on.
Bishop Varden:
I love the way you present grace as not only being sufficient, but as being boundlessly attentive. At some point, Della says to Jack: “Anyone — any human being — and then that person’s actual life, everything they didn’t mean or couldn’t say or wished for or grieved over, that’s reality. So someone who would know the world that way — some spirit — seems kind of inevitable. Why should so much reality, most of it, count for nothing? That’s how it seems to me.” That seems to me a very reasonable position.
Then she goes on to say the most glorious thing: “I just think there has to be a Jesus to say beautiful about things no one else would ever see. The precious things should be looked to, whatever becomes of the rest of it.” You wonderfully show just how far that preciousness extends.
Marilynne Robinson:
That is a kind of appropriation of what Calvin says — that we perform our lives and God is the audience — that there is a Jesus to know how we think, to know how we pray, to know how we reconcile ourselves to difficulty. That is an analogy to what Calvin says.
Bishop Varden:
Well, I have now had the privilege of asking many of my own questions. There are some that have come in from listeners and viewers. There’s a question from Alan, who asks whether you always intended that there would be four novels in the series, and if there is any chance of a fifth?
Marilynne Robinson:
Well, I did not intend that. When I wrote Housekeeping, I refused to consider that I would write another book in the same setting or with the same characters, because I felt I had meant to solve certain problems with that book and I had to address those problems. And then I was silent for twenty-four years. So after I finished Gilead, I had that same initial reaction: that I could not use the characters again. But they were so alive in my mind that it seemed purely destructive not to let them have — first one novel, and then the series of four. I might very well write another novel. The longer I think about it, the likelier it becomes, frankly.
Bishop Varden:
That is a great reassurance. There is also a question from Christopher, who asks how you would relate your work to writers like Bernanos, Endo, and others who write what are often called “Catholic novels.”
Marilynne Robinson:
Well, I am embarrassed to admit that I have read very little contemporary literature, because I am interested in the Renaissance and theology and so on, and I read very far afield. I like it very much when people write from the point of view of a religious understanding of reality — to keep that music in the mind of the Western world, which does not do so much of that any more. There is nothing more natural to human beings than thinking religiously — it is the first thing they get around to, you know. And I think we are in the situation where we have retreated from the traditions that have allowed us to articulate things that are important for people to be able to articulate. I simply appreciate it whenever writing is done that carries forward this kind of thinking, which people are so inclined to do if they have any help at all.
Religion is always cultural in the sense that it is too large for anyone to arrive at alone. It is enriched enormously by every contribution anyone makes to it; it is a collective thing. And people who engage in it seriously are performing a great service for the rest of us.
Bishop Varden:
Since you say there may be more novels coming, there is one particular text I have been thinking of. It is John Ames preaching on the Spanish flu. He says in Gilead: “there was talk that the Germans had caused it with some sort of secret weapon, and I think people wanted to believe that because it saved them from reflecting on what other meaning it might have.” He says of his sermon — and this is a man who is normally very modest — a sermon which he never preached and in fact burnt: “It might have been the only sermon I would not mind answering for in the next world.” And that is coming from a man who reflects that he has written almost as much as St Augustine. He sums it up by saying, “I believe that plague was a great sign to us, and we refused to see it and take its meaning. And since then we have had wars continuously.” I just wonder: do you think there is any chance that a draft of that sermon might turn up somewhere, in an attic somewhere? It would be interesting to read.
Marilynne Robinson:
Well, you know — mutatis mutandis.
Bishop Varden:
It could have some very useful things to say to us right now.
Marilynne Robinson:
Yes. I am almost afraid to write any more about John Ames. There he is, preaching with the scoffer at his elbow.
Bishop Varden:
There is one other question which has come in. Ben asks: one reviewer says your novels show how God’s grace works in ordinariness, and you once said that American life is gripped now by a spasm of fear. How do you see grace at work in American politics today?
Marilynne Robinson:
There is a deficiency, insofar as human behaviour is gracious in response to grace. There is a deficiency. I am not in the habit of passing dire judgements, but I am really, really unimpressed with many people at the moment. I hope that God has not lost interest in us, because I can’t really believe how petty and ungenerous and fearful so much thinking is in certain parts and certain factions of the country right now. I have never seen anything like it. I think you have to go back before the Civil War to find a mentality of that kind, which is probably not coincidental.
Bishop Varden:
Well, thank you for confirming our hope that God has not lost interest in us. I am conscious that time is ticking. There is one final thing I would like to evoke, because obviously people talk about the Gilead novels — I do not know whether that is a term you approve of, given that the last one does not really take place in Gilead, but nevertheless it is a good umbrella term. Gilead is a biblical place and a biblical name with strong associations. There is that question in Jeremiah 8: “Is there a balm in Gilead?” And there is the wonderful spiritual that turns that question into an affirmation: “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole; there is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.”
At one point in the novel Gilead, John Ames says this — and this is a man who also goes out at night and looks at the stars: “In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets, because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.”
I think that is a true insight. What you have done in these novels is to narrow our focus even more sharply and show us, in Gilead, allowing us to look patiently at the same scenery, the same buildings, the same interiors, the same people, the same relationships, the same challenges — just what an extraordinary depth there is in human existence, what beauty, and what there is to hope for. So from this particular reader, and I dare say from very many, thank you.
Marilynne Robinson:
Thank you. Very kind.
Brendan Walsh, Editor of The Tablet:
Thank you so much, Father Erik. I think you have really helped us to peel away a few more layers — there are so many layers to Marilynne’s work, but I think you have found some neglected corners of them to investigate. I have really, really enjoyed it. You have helped me reimagine the world that Marilynne creates in those novels, and not just about the novels, but in the whole conversation, I do feel enriched. So thank you so much, Erik, and Marilynne, thank you so much for joining us this evening and for being so generous with your time.
Marilynne Robinson:
It has been a great pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.
Della at one point embroiders one of Jack’s shirtsleeves white on white, almost invisibly, on the pretext of repairing a tear. The symbolism is rich. Photograph: Royal School of Needlework.
Brendan Walsh, Editor of The Tablet:
Wherever you are in the world, whatever time of day it is — welcome to the final event in what has been an unforgettable Tablet Spring Festival. I am joined by two remarkable guests who are going to be in conversation with each other: Father Erik Varden, the former Abbot of the only Cistercian Abbey in England, who is now the Bishop of Trondheim in Norway, and Marilynne Robinson, whose novels are among the great works of contemporary literature.
My name is Brendan Walsh and I am the editor of The Tablet, the International Catholic Weekly. We have had three days now — this is the last event — three days of astonishing events, conversations, discussions, films, music, laughter, and tears. It really has been wonderful for all of us. On Thursday night we saw an extraordinarily moving documentary film that took us inside and alongside the monks of the Cistercian community where Erik was Abbot. We met the monks, we ate with them, we talked with them, we prayed with them, and in some cases we saw them dying and being interred in the Abbey grounds.
I hope that in this festival we brought some of the best of The Tablet — its spirit, its values, its spirit of faithful curiosity — to you. Father Erik and Marilynne Robinson are two writers who each have a gift of making ordinary things numinous, of seeing the holiness in ordinary lives. Norwegian by birth, Father Erik was the son of a country vet.
He was a fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, before entering Mount St Bernard Abbey in Leicestershire. Pope Francis appointed him to the see of Trondheim in 2019. Father Erik is the author of a book, The Shattering of Loneliness, which the Times Literary Supplement described as “a book of extraordinary importance.”
It is, with prophetic clarity, aware of the depravity, the weakness, and the glory of the human condition. I have to confess that there are some words of a piece that Father Erik wrote in The Tablet a couple of years ago which I cut out and stuck on my wall, and they are a reminder of what the editor of The Tablet should always have in mind about what The Tablet is trying to do: “In a world marked by indifference and cynicism, hopelessness and division, it is our task to stand for something different, to point towards the light that no darkness can overcome, to nurture goodwill, to enable a communion founded on trust, in peace, to bear witness that death has lost its sting, and that life is meaningful and beautiful and of inviolable dignity.”
Marilynne Robinson has written five highly acclaimed novels. Her first novel, Housekeeping, was published in 1981. It was recognised at once as an extraordinary piece of work, achievement. An early reviewer in the New York Times wrote that it was “as if in writing it she broke through the ordinary human condition with all its dissatisfactions and achieved a kind of transfiguration.”
It would be more than twenty years before Marilynne wrote her next novel, Gilead, published in 2004, and it was followed by three further novels: Home, Lila, and Jack. Each focuses, as we know and love these books, on the same group of characters, each one of them indelible in our memory, members of the households of two Presbyterian ministers in a midwestern AmErikan town. Earlier this afternoon, just a few hours ago, Francis Spufford, the English novelist, was talking about his recent work — a lovely novel he has written this year — and he spoke this afternoon about his admiration for Marilynne Robinson.
“She is so palpably marvellous, and her marvellousness is so palpably connected to her faith, that she has prised open a space in literature for people to be curious.” Marilynne, I am going to leave you in Father Erik’s confessional box. There might be time towards the end to have some questions.
If you have questions, there is a little box at the bottom of our screens that says “chat”, and if you key in a question there we will pass them on to Father Erik, who might be able to put them to Marilynne towards the end of the conversation. So, Father Erik, over to you.
Bishop Varden:
Thank you very much, Brendan, and thank you, Marilynne, for being present tonight. I have been looking forward to this conversation. At the same time, I have been dreading it a bit. Having lived with — and really having lived in — your books for the best part of fifteen years, having wept with them and laughed with them, I almost hesitate to talk about them. They have come to stand for something so intimate. That is partly why I want to set out from a scene in Lila where John Ames and Lila have gone to bed. It is a Saturday evening, and as Ames says, when you are in the clerical line of trade it seems always to be either Sunday, or Saturday evening.
So they are talking about this, that, and the other. Lila asks a question which impresses Ames, and he says, “I am going to keep you safe, and you are going to keep me honest.” I think that is wonderful, because your novels are so honest and draw honesty forth in the readers.
The setting for all your four books is a world marked by an excessively religious atmosphere: where men walk for miles in the middle of winter to clear a point of Hebrew grammar, where children are named for theological virtues, and where even bean salads have denominational specificities. So I wanted to ask you: was it part of your project, as it were, from the beginning to embody an honest articulation of faith — and so to preserve it from platitudinal certainties and preacherly vagueness?
Marilynne Robinson:
Well, I would be delighted to think that I had done that, or even approached it. The period I am writing about in those novels was the period most influenced by the abolitionist movement, and then the Civil War, and then Reconstruction. The abolitionist people were many of them clergy, and they were profoundly religious people — religious at saturation level, one might say. The irony, of course, is that this is not sustainable over the long term, or at least not in the forms that they would perhaps have wished to see it persist. It is an intensification of religious culture that I have seen, but even that is perhaps a carryover from an earlier kind of passion and selflessness and generosity of intention that could not keep its focus, that did not fully understand its implications in changing circumstances.
Bishop Varden:
There is a scene in Gilead that, when I first read it, moved me very much. It has become an important reference for me in my life as a monk, because I think it says a great deal about what it means to live the monastic and contemplative life, but also about what it means to be a human being. It is the scene when the young John Ames sets off with his father and they walk into Kansas, the two of them, in order to tend the grandfather’s grave. When they have done all this work and finally found the grave, the father prays a very long prayer over it, and young Ames — who is about twelve, I think — is a bit tired. He looks around and sees something extraordinary: the setting sun and the rising moon in perfect parallel, with the two of them, father and son, right in the middle. Knowing that his father is engaged in something profoundly important, he does not want to startle him out of his attention, so he performs a most beautiful gesture — he takes his father’s hand and kisses it. Then a bit later in the narrative, he describes to his own little son, to whom he is writing the letter that is Gilead, what had happened. If I may, I would like to cite that passage, because I would like to sound you out about it. John Ames says to his son:
“I can’t tell you how I felt walking along beside my father that night along that rutted road through that empty world, what a sweet strength I felt in him and in myself and all around us. I’m glad I didn’t understand, because I’ve rarely felt joy like that, and assurance. It was like one of those dreams where you’re filled with some extravagant feeling you might never have in life — it doesn’t matter what it is, even guilt or dread — and you learn from it what an amazing instrument you are, so to speak, what a power you have to experience beyond anything you might ever actually need.”
I find that so heart-rendingly beautiful that it still sends shivers down my spine. I love the fact that it is an evocation of a profound experience left unprettified. It states clearly that sometimes to live at that sort of depth, suffering is involved. It seems to me that awakening to that depth is what is going on at one level in your books. We see it in Lila, we see it in Jack, but we also see it in the old preachers. There is something about the spareness of life in your novels that sharpens this experience and provokes it. I wonder: accustomed as we are to untold comforts and distractions, do we now tend to miss out on this discovery? And is a major part of the modern malaise a kind of failure to acknowledge our spiritual depth and our spiritual perception?
Marilynne Robinson:
Well, I have to believe that people are simply capable of whatever profound question, or intuition, or whatever it is that we live with in the idea of God. And I think that we do everything to distract ourselves from it. I think distraction is secondary to some anxiety about the intuition — an intuition that is really a more profound part of experience for very many people. I was struck by the passage in the book you quote [in The Shattering of Loneliness] where the speaker sees people as an inchoate mass, a kind of protoplasm, and then suddenly begins to see them as human in a deeply meaningful way.
I think we have that tendency to see other people as less profound creatures than God made them, and that on the basis of what is really a superficial response to them we make generalisations about them. We even make important decisions about how to present religion to them, or whether there is any point in trying. I often teach the Bible to writers at the workshop — I have just finished touching on the Old Testament — and people are very interested, and very often almost shy about the fact that they grant great importance to these texts and traditions and have no approach to them, no familiarity with them.
I think that is the kind of longing that I believe you would be very sympathetic to, but it veils itself. We do not see it in people. It is rare that we have the opportunity to address the profound seriousness of the human situation as it is manifest in people who are opaque to us.
Writing about the American Midwest, I am writing about a part of the country that is, in a certain sense, blanked out — people passing through have no idea where they are, yet they generalise and feel there is no life there, no culture, and so on, even though very great cities are scattered throughout the Midwest. The thing that is always said about the Midwest is that it is very flat, which is exaggerated, but nevertheless true enough to inspire a number of poems. Sometimes the sun and the moon are on opposite horizons and equally visible. The great beauty of that is the kind of thing that people do not always notice, because they subscribe to the convention that this is a place that is flat and not beautiful.
Bishop Varden:
What you do so wonderfully is precisely to reveal those moments of beauty — both in nature and in people — drawing them out of their opaqueness and making them so present and so specific. To turn to one such specificity, I would like to hone in on Jack a bit. In Gilead, Jack appears to be — at least so he appeared to me when I first read it — an incidental character, someone we largely see through the anxious projections of John Ames, the narrator.
The next book, Home, reveals him in all his complexity, but even there he remains a stranger — even to the people who have known him all his life. Then in your most recent book he suddenly stands there before us, and in that book you enable us to know him, as far as we can, on his own terms. There are so many things that are striking about him there, not least his joyousness. A couple of times — I think once in Jack and once in Home — he is likened, jocularly, to Raskolnikov: once by himself and once by Glory when he refuses to eat his breakfast.
Personally, I could not quite imagine Jack going out to kill an old woman with an axe, but thinking in Dostoevskian terms, I can see something Karamazovian about him, something of the three brothers folded into one. One could quite see the elder Zosima prostrating himself before Jack for what he has to carry. This might be a daft question, but I wonder: is Jack an emblematic character representing something — a tendency, a personality, a weakness, or a strength — or is he ultimately a kind of everyman? I was touched and delighted by something Della says to him in a moment of confidence: “Jack, maybe you’re more like most people than you think.”
Marilynne Robinson:
Well, I think of Jack as someone who has taken on the fact, at least, of his being able to incur great guilt, and who corrects for that radically by trying to be truly harmless. At the same time, he feels as though he cannot really engage with people and still assume that he has kept his harmlessness intact. I think he is an extreme instance of a kind of human capacity for conscientiousness and self-scrutiny. He is almost a hunger artist in some sense: he has taken himself down to the bare nervous structures of potential guilt. And yet, for all of that, it is also true that he cannot be conventional. He is not in the drift of society, and things like scrupulousness about the truth have never had quite the same hold on him as they might on another person.
Bishop Varden:
And yet he is a very honest person, isn’t he?
Marilynne Robinson:
Yes, he is. Yes, he is.
Bishop Varden:
I mean, he is almost cruelly honest with himself.
Marilynne Robinson:
Yes, he is. And I am glad that you see joy in him, because I certainly intended that as well. He would not want to be someone else, frankly.
Bishop Varden:
No, exactly.
Marilynne Robinson:
But what can I say? I was going to say something, and you would have liked it, but now I have forgotten what it was.
Bishop Varden:
There is a scene in Jack where, as a young boy, he is in the kitchen with some caterpillars in a mayonnaise jar, thinking of pouring water into the jar to see whether the caterpillars breathe. Old Boughton observes this gravely and then says, “Well, these things do want to exist.” That clearly touches Jack somehow, and he asks later in life, “Maybe a chirp means I exist — and then, I exist, as if it could matter. But it must, since they all do it.” And then later on, when he is returning Della’s book of poetry, which he has kept for a very long time and which is in a somewhat parlous state, he discreetly writes his own address in it. In your book you say he put his address in the book as a sort of “I exist,” thinking that if she ever noticed it, it might also make her laugh.
I find that is something you convey so wonderfully — the thirst Jack has simply to live and to be noticed as living. Not simply to be forgiven, although he appreciates that, being a courteous man, but to be recognised as being alive.
Marilynne Robinson:
Yes. Well, you know, isn’t that mysterious? That is from my own experience. I never do violence to vermin, because I can tell they want to have life — the complexity of their response to a threat is just astonishing to me. It is part of my theological feeling that the world is much more saturated with intelligence and consciousness than we normally assume.
Jack and I have shared certain experiences, such as watching an insect walk across the ceiling, which must be like the Gobi Desert from the point of view of the insect — walking a straight line with no obvious intent, all by itself. And you think: how does this fit into insect life? What is it doing? Why can it do it? I do not want to imply a direct analogy between human beings and insects, but a lot of the mysteries do tend to overlap, I think.
Bishop Varden:
And they mirror one another, and perhaps they might even illuminate one another.
Marilynne Robinson:
Absolutely.
Bishop Varden:
I would like to take that theme of laughter further. I hope you won’t feel put out if I say that your books do make me laugh.
Marilynne Robinson:
Good. Good.
Bishop Varden:
There are scenes in them of such perfect comedy that they almost seem constructed as such — like the inebriated horse in the abolitionist settlement who has the misfortune of falling down through a dug tunnel. Or that rather elaborate baptism of kittens, when Ames remarks that the kittens have cause to be grateful that it was not his Baptist friend, who believes in complete immersion, who performed the ceremony. Or that omnipresent wry self-irony of which all the characters are capable, some indulging in it more than others. It brings an element of sheer delight to the reading.
But it strikes me that laughter in your books is also something very serious, and it is thematised as serious. Ames says — I think it is in Gilead — having watched two mechanics he knows from the local garage just engaged in banter on a road in town, that it is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over, “a kind of ecstasy.” And later on, when he has come to know Lila, and having made a little experiment with hair tonic, and then finds her to his astonishment waiting for him at the door of the church, wanting a word with him, he says, “At that point I began to suspect, as I have from time to time, that grace has a grand laughter in it.” Which I think is a wonderful insight.
But the third passage, which I think crowns the other two, is an insight of Jack’s when he has been rehearsing a poem by Thomas Traherne, trying to imagine the resurrection. He says: “Wings are fine, and a kind of luminosity would also be very nice, but to hear a familiar laugh would be an almost unbearable joy. A human joy exceeding anything seraphim could feel, since angels cannot know death.” Could you say something about this density of laughter?
Marilynne Robinson:
Well, it is an amazing thing. It is true that people — well, it is like singing, in a way, except it is spontaneous. It is just something that people do, unless events utterly forbid. And that is, in a sense, an assent. It is like giving the meaning of the wonderful, the comprehended, to something that has happened, or has been thought of, or has been said. It is like a kind of secondary reality.
I am not being very articulate, but you know — you do not just walk through the world; you are in conversation with the world. And sometimes the world does something that simply delights you in the way of provoking laughter. And in that sense, it is a deep engagement with what the world is, or what language is. I think I am intentional about making my books, which aspire to seriousness, but are also, I hope, humorous.
Bishop Varden:
Yes, and I think it is wonderful to have that theological affirmation of laughter. I think we are all a bit conditioned — not least those of us who live in monasteries — by the caricature of the monk in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, who is so frightened of laughter, so censorious about it, that he wants to eliminate anything that can provoke it. I loved — and I would love to have the reference to — something you quote Calvin as saying: that for God, each of us is an actor on a stage, and God is the audience. It is Ames quoting Calvin, and he says, “I do like Calvin’s image, because it suggests how God might actually enjoy us.” That is a luminous and very reassuring insight, even in our absurdity.
Marilynne Robinson:
Absolutely. Calvin calls human beings “the masterpiece of creation.” He speaks very often in terms that suggest an artist, or someone appraising a work of art. It is as if the arena of human freedom is this: that given circumstances, you can respond to them well. You can be uniquely artful, in a sense, with the idea of God as the appraising mind — so that the art is to be what God would wish you to be in that circumstance, with the suggestion that in some way it is you doing this, not just any human being.
Bishop Varden:
Yes. And what parent does not delight in their children’s laughter? And recognise that it is specific to that child.
Marilynne Robinson:
Yes.
Bishop Varden:
The question of an eternal specificity — the question of the soul, of an eternal soul — is one that haunts Jack in particular, though not only Jack. Strikingly, it is Glory, who seems so settled in the certainties of faith, who has the real quandary about what the soul is. She has this notion that Jack must know, because Jack so clearly has a soul. She is a bit embarrassed at first, and she thinks about it, but then she musters up the courage to ask Jack what he thinks the soul is. And Jack, with a bit of cynicism — perhaps even a trace of sarcasm — says: “On the basis of my vast learning and experience, I would say it is what you can’t get rid of. Insult, deprivation, outright violence. If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there—” and so on.
Elsewhere, he reflects on himself and says, “Daylight is purgatory. It is a terrible thing being a thing to be looked at. He had always thought so, even before he had his history written all over him.” And yet what happens in Jack — which chronologically anticipates the other three novels — is that he awakens to an experience of being seen that is not threatening, but life-giving. It is when Della sees him and sees a brightness, what Ames would call an incandescence. What strikes her, she says in Jack, is that he does not hide his brightness. So she says to him, wonderfully: “In your own way, you’re kind of pure” — which I think is the last thing Jack would expect to hear. What is that purity she sees?
Marilynne Robinson:
Well, I think partly it is just the degree to which he is undefended by himself. And then the other thing is that the whole framework for all these stories is the existence of enormously cruel and rigid social distinctions — made and enforced. Jack, by nature, is simply not coerced by them. It is not as if he were defying them; they are just not there for him. He does not imagine himself in a position of moral advantage over anyone. And so there is a sense in which, if you think of the world as tainting or corrupting, he is not corrupted — because the great cruelty, the great fraud that he is contemporary with, is not something he has any impulse to engage in.
Bishop Varden:
No. And that leaves him, in a sense, untouched.
Marilynne Robinson:
Exactly. Out of all the descendants of the original John Ames, he is the one who would probably have John Ames’s approval.
Bishop Varden:
Yes. The theme of homecoming is an important one, obviously. The second book is called Home, and there is a paradigm of the prodigal son that runs through the novels. The embodiment of it is Jack, but it seems to me that the theme of homecoming really haunts all the major characters, in that it stands for an emergence out of loneliness. I am touched by the fact that both Lila and Jack, in their separate secret lives, are people who go around at night looking in through other people’s windows just to see how people live, how they do it, and that both of them have been bruised by the experience of being outside. Lila says at one point, “When you’re scalded, touch hurts. It makes no difference if it’s kindly meant.”
But it moves me that even John Ames, who spent all his life in this blessed place, is one who knows homelessness. I was struck by the fact that at one point he cites the novel of Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest, in many ways another embodiment of homelessness. I love the fact that when he says to his son “I felt a lot of sympathy for the fellow,” Boughton — who is a bit dour, after all — says: “It was the drink!” But Ames remarks later on, “God lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.” And he goes on to reflect on his own years of loneliness, which for the majority of his life seemed to him what his life simply was.
He says: “Now that I look back, it seems to me that in all that deep darkness, a miracle was preparing. So I am right to remember it as a blessed time, and myself as waiting in confidence, even if I had no idea what I was waiting for.” I am slightly wary of using the word “prophetic,” which is rather overused these days, but it does seem to me that that is a prophetic statement for the world right now, caught up in such a profound experience of exile, of not being at home.
Marilynne Robinson:
And of being too much at home, like John Ames.
Bishop Varden:
Yes, in the other sense.
Marilynne Robinson:
Yes. Well, I myself — I do not know what to anticipate at any point now. And I am not uncomfortable with that, because what it means, basically, is that I do assume it is in God’s hands, which does not, as we all know from Scripture, guarantee that we will not see hard times. It is just that if you understand time as being always equivalent to itself in some sense — so that you have a long life of loneliness, and a few last years of great happiness — how do you understand that? Is the time that approaches the period of happiness an instruction, a preparation? Or is it simply something that, if you put the two in a balance, you would have to say: my life was basically lonely until the last few years? That is a theological question, isn’t it? How you choose to value what might seem to be the opposite of itself — to accept silence and vacancy and so on — and whether you are also, during that time, accepting preparation, which I would say he was, yes.
Bishop Varden:
Yes. I suppose, living within that energy of hope, which obviously, as a man of faith, Ames is — he would know that the present is a preparation for something. But I also suppose that what comes to him is a kind of anticipation of beatitude, a joy that takes him entirely by surprise.
Marilynne Robinson:
Yes.
Bishop Varden:
On that note, the themes of salvation and loss are important. The theme of perdition is important. The theme of predestination is important. But what strikes me particularly is the theme of a kind of solidarity in the quest for salvation. John Ames at one point makes clear that it is not in his tradition to pray for the dead. But one rather suspects that he does anyway, perhaps behind closed doors.
The role of those who have gone before is decisive, both dramatically and structurally, throughout the work. I am struck again and again by the deep emphasis you place on compassion — and I mean that in the most literal sense: being involved in the pathos of another life, being entangled in other lives, each man not being an island but a stitch in a delicate embroidery, like the glorious one that Della made on Jack’s shirt, an embroidery that would be forever imperfect if a single stitch were extracted.
It is wonderful that Lila and Glory, who come at this question from about as different angles as one could, spell out what seems to be much the same sentiment and perhaps even the same existential conviction. When Glory, in a moment of profound worry for Jack, has an insight and says, “If I, or my father, or any Boughton has ever stirred the Lord’s compassion, then Jack will be all right, because perdition for him would be perdition for every one of us” — which is a most noble statement. Lila says something similar when she thinks of Doll, the woman who brought her up. She says that if Doll was going to be lost forever, Lila wanted to be right there with her, holding on to the skirt of her dress.
Later on, when she is safely established in Ames’s house and more literate in biblical thinking and biblical piety, she becomes a little more daring as she listens to Boughton’s great concern with China. And she says that she thought maybe, just by worrying about it, Boughton would sweep up China into an eternity that would surprise him out of all his wondering. “God is good, the old men say. Now that would be the proof.” So I wonder: is there, among these good Presbyterians, something of the whiff of the mystical doctrine of the communion of saints?
Marilynne Robinson:
Oh, well, you know, they also adhere to the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, and the resurrection of the body.
Bishop Varden:
But in terms of an active communion of intercession and carrying?
Marilynne Robinson:
Well, they would not say they intercede. But they would say that the love of a human person survives that person. And that there is nothing inappropriate about thinking very lovingly, and with concern, about anyone who has gone before. Also, I think a lot of the difficulty of Christianity as an emotional experience is that you do not know what to do with the great mass of humankind that does not satisfy the formula of salvation that you tend to be offered. What both my characters and I were thinking is that if you understand the grace of God as fully sufficient, then it seems more appropriate to the love of God — and more in keeping with the celebration of God — to let go of any exclusion from the idea of resurrection and immortality and so on.
Bishop Varden:
I love the way you present grace as not only being sufficient, but as being boundlessly attentive. At some point, Della says to Jack: “Anyone — any human being — and then that person’s actual life, everything they didn’t mean or couldn’t say or wished for or grieved over, that’s reality. So someone who would know the world that way — some spirit — seems kind of inevitable. Why should so much reality, most of it, count for nothing? That’s how it seems to me.” That seems to me a very reasonable position.
Then she goes on to say the most glorious thing: “I just think there has to be a Jesus to say beautiful about things no one else would ever see. The precious things should be looked to, whatever becomes of the rest of it.” You wonderfully show just how far that preciousness extends.
Marilynne Robinson:
That is a kind of appropriation of what Calvin says — that we perform our lives and God is the audience — that there is a Jesus to know how we think, to know how we pray, to know how we reconcile ourselves to difficulty. That is an analogy to what Calvin says.
Bishop Varden:
Well, I have now had the privilege of asking many of my own questions. There are some that have come in from listeners and viewers. There’s a question from Alan, who asks whether you always intended that there would be four novels in the series, and if there is any chance of a fifth?
Marilynne Robinson:
Well, I did not intend that. When I wrote Housekeeping, I refused to consider that I would write another book in the same setting or with the same characters, because I felt I had meant to solve certain problems with that book and I had to address those problems. And then I was silent for twenty-four years. So after I finished Gilead, I had that same initial reaction: that I could not use the characters again. But they were so alive in my mind that it seemed purely destructive not to let them have — first one novel, and then the series of four. I might very well write another novel. The longer I think about it, the likelier it becomes, frankly.
Bishop Varden:
That is a great reassurance. There is also a question from Christopher, who asks how you would relate your work to writers like Bernanos, Endo, and others who write what are often called “Catholic novels.”
Marilynne Robinson:
Well, I am embarrassed to admit that I have read very little contemporary literature, because I am interested in the Renaissance and theology and so on, and I read very far afield. I like it very much when people write from the point of view of a religious understanding of reality — to keep that music in the mind of the Western world, which does not do so much of that any more. There is nothing more natural to human beings than thinking religiously — it is the first thing they get around to, you know. And I think we are in the situation where we have retreated from the traditions that have allowed us to articulate things that are important for people to be able to articulate. I simply appreciate it whenever writing is done that carries forward this kind of thinking, which people are so inclined to do if they have any help at all.
Religion is always cultural in the sense that it is too large for anyone to arrive at alone. It is enriched enormously by every contribution anyone makes to it; it is a collective thing. And people who engage in it seriously are performing a great service for the rest of us.
Bishop Varden:
Since you say there may be more novels coming, there is one particular text I have been thinking of. It is John Ames preaching on the Spanish flu. He says in Gilead: “there was talk that the Germans had caused it with some sort of secret weapon, and I think people wanted to believe that because it saved them from reflecting on what other meaning it might have.” He says of his sermon — and this is a man who is normally very modest — a sermon which he never preached and in fact burnt: “It might have been the only sermon I would not mind answering for in the next world.” And that is coming from a man who reflects that he has written almost as much as St Augustine. He sums it up by saying, “I believe that plague was a great sign to us, and we refused to see it and take its meaning. And since then we have had wars continuously.” I just wonder: do you think there is any chance that a draft of that sermon might turn up somewhere, in an attic somewhere? It would be interesting to read.
Marilynne Robinson:
Well, you know — mutatis mutandis.
Bishop Varden:
It could have some very useful things to say to us right now.
Marilynne Robinson:
Yes. I am almost afraid to write any more about John Ames. There he is, preaching with the scoffer at his elbow.
Bishop Varden:
There is one other question which has come in. Ben asks: one reviewer says your novels show how God’s grace works in ordinariness, and you once said that American life is gripped now by a spasm of fear. How do you see grace at work in American politics today?
Marilynne Robinson:
There is a deficiency, insofar as human behaviour is gracious in response to grace. There is a deficiency. I am not in the habit of passing dire judgements, but I am really, really unimpressed with many people at the moment. I hope that God has not lost interest in us, because I can’t really believe how petty and ungenerous and fearful so much thinking is in certain parts and certain factions of the country right now. I have never seen anything like it. I think you have to go back before the Civil War to find a mentality of that kind, which is probably not coincidental.
Bishop Varden:
Well, thank you for confirming our hope that God has not lost interest in us. I am conscious that time is ticking. There is one final thing I would like to evoke, because obviously people talk about the Gilead novels — I do not know whether that is a term you approve of, given that the last one does not really take place in Gilead, but nevertheless it is a good umbrella term. Gilead is a biblical place and a biblical name with strong associations. There is that question in Jeremiah 8: “Is there a balm in Gilead?” And there is the wonderful spiritual that turns that question into an affirmation: “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole; there is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.”
At one point in the novel Gilead, John Ames says this — and this is a man who also goes out at night and looks at the stars: “In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets, because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.”
I think that is a true insight. What you have done in these novels is to narrow our focus even more sharply and show us, in Gilead, allowing us to look patiently at the same scenery, the same buildings, the same interiors, the same people, the same relationships, the same challenges — just what an extraordinary depth there is in human existence, what beauty, and what there is to hope for. So from this particular reader, and I dare say from very many, thank you.
Marilynne Robinson:
Thank you. Very kind.
Brendan Walsh, Editor of The Tablet:
Thank you so much, Father Erik. I think you have really helped us to peel away a few more layers — there are so many layers to Marilynne’s work, but I think you have found some neglected corners of them to investigate. I have really, really enjoyed it. You have helped me reimagine the world that Marilynne creates in those novels, and not just about the novels, but in the whole conversation, I do feel enriched. So thank you so much, Erik, and Marilynne, thank you so much for joining us this evening and for being so generous with your time.
Marilynne Robinson:
It has been a great pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.
Della at one point embroiders one of Jack’s shirtsleeves white on white, almost invisibly, on the pretext of repairing a tear. The symbolism is rich. Photograph: Royal School of Needlework.