Glory in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and Home

Christiallity ami Literature Vol. 59, No. 2 (WhIter 2010)

"The Courage to See It": Toward an Understanding of Glory

Jen nifer L. Holberg

Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?

- Marilynne Robinson (Gilead 245)

And since the glory of [God's ] power and wisdom shine more brightly above, heaven is often called his palace IPs. 11 :4J. Yet ... wherever you cast your eyes, there is no spot in the universe wherein YOLI cannot discern at least some sparks of his glory. You cannot in one glance survey this most vast and beautiful system of the universe, in its wide expanse, without being completely overwhelmed by the boundless force of its brightness. Certainly however much the glory of God shines forth , scarcely one man in a hundred is a true spectator of it.

- John Calvin (/nstitlltes of the Christian Religio1l 52, 61)

If one generalization might be made about Marilynne Robinson's body of work, both fiction and nonfiction (risky and presumptuous as I realize such a gesture to be), it is that her writing urges us again and again to pay attention to what she calls in her first novel, HOllsekeeping, the "resurrection of the ordinary" (18). As anyone with even a passing familiarity with Robinson's work knows, her project is deeply embedded in a rich Christian theology-one that considers "fragments of the quotidian" (64) (another winsome phrase from Housekeeping) integral to any conception of the holy. Significant ly, Robinson's theology is explicitly and insistently Calvinist; in interview after interview, in her essays and speeches, she invokes John Calvin as central to her artistic mission. As she explai ned in a Ju ne 2009 interview with Andrew Brown of Britain's Guardia/! newspaper,

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One of the things Ihat has really struck me, reading Calvin, is what a strong sense he has that the aesthetic is the signature of the divine. If someone in some sense lives a life that we can perceive as beautiful in its own way, that is something that suggests grace, even if by a strict moral standard .n they might seem to fail. (Robinson, "Comment Is Free)

If Robinson's goal is to explore Ihis "signature of the divine:' then, her essay on Psalm Eight articu lates what I believe might be taken as a sort of credo. She writes:

[ have spent my Hfe watching, not to see be),ond the \,'orld, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us. (The Dentl, of Adnm 243)

ll11ls,although Psalm 8 open!. with the majestic declaration of God's hean'nlr splendor: ("0 LORD, ou r Lord , how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who hast set thy gtory above the heavens") ', importantly, the Psalm is not merely one of praise, but o ne that examines in verses three through five how an exal ted view of God affects humanity's view of itself:

)\Vhen I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? ' For thou hast made him a little lower than theangcls, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.

Here, what Robinson calls "the strategy of the Psalmist . . . to close the infinite distance between God and humankind" (Adam 240) has profound consequences, as she articulated wbile on a panel w ith Robert Alter at New York's 92",1 Street Y:

One of the things that is so striking to me about the Bible, the literature of the Bible altogether, is that it has named human writers. And they are human: you know, the Psalms despair and the prophets lament and all that sort of thing. nley feel weakness-and rou feci the burden of their humanity in something that is, nevertheless, received as being a sacred testimony. It seems to me that that 's one of the poignant and

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powerful things about Scripture: that it situates the testimony of the sacred in fallible human voices-which arc only extraordinary, only more beautiful, because you sense the frailty. TIle frailty is insisted upon. And here we have this enormous disproportion between the grandeur of God that's reported in this Psalm and the sense of the presumed triviality of the human perSOll, the human perceiver of these stars and so on. The Psalm says God crowned human beings, God. gaye them the glory that they have, and therefore even though it is, in a sense, secondary to what they are, It is also utterly reaL (Alter and Robinson)Z

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Hence, for Robinson, an understanding of the "utterly real" quality of the God-given glory which human beings possess mllst radically change the way we think about ourselves and others. In a 1994 interview wit h Thomas Schaub publ ished in Contemporary Literatllre, she argued that "re-establishing a sense of the sacredness of what is occurring here is probably the 01l1y antidote, because without that there is no final urgency about the rescue of either [humankind or the world]" (Robinson, "An Interview wi th Marilynne Robinson" 25 1). More recently, in an interview with Scott Hoezee published in Perspectives: A JOllrnal oj ReJormed 'flJollght, she ties th is re-visioning expl icitly to Calvin's notion that

any person one encounters is an image of God, with all that implies in terms of the obligat ion to honor and comfort, and with all it implies aboul the astonishing privilege of being given the occasion to encounter such an image, and to honor and comfort .... Because, understood in his terms, these images of God are God. This understanding really does purge contempt, resentment, suspicion, even boredom. [t forbids the thought that the other, however familiar, is not still the most profound mystery. There is a deep aesthetic in thut, and a demand for the greatest attentiveness. Human beings are out of place in the world, out of scale with it. This being true, another reality might astonish me, but it would not su rprise me. Over against all this, a reality suffused with the glory of Christ-which to my mind is grace- is so deeply beautiful that I am pleased to grant it the status of truth. (Robinson, "A World of Beautiful Souls")

As such, this "deeply beautiful" reality is profoundly transformative, particularly in the way that we must view not just the creat ion generally, bu t our fellow human beings specifically: "The assumption is that this is The Age of Cynicism. On the basis of my experience, I must disagree. Calvin again:

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the world is teeming with beautiful souls, and if we greet them as Christ, they may well show tiS the face of Christ" (Robinson, "Beautiful Souls") ,

Robinson's rejection of what she call s the ''Age of Cynicism") would seem to put her at odds with much of the contemporary literary scene. For example, in an interview with the Nell' }'ork Times in April 2009, Joyce Carol Oates was asked why she found violence "so alluri ng 3!) a li terary subject." Oates' response? "If you're going to spend the next year of your life writing, you would probably rather write Moby~Dick than a little household mystery with cat detectives. I consider tragedy the highest form of art" (Oates, '';\ Woman's Work.")

Robinson has long been known a!\ an admi rer of Melville, I ranking Moby-Dick as her favo rite book after the Bible ("An Inte rview" 234). And she has also long been compared (and compared herself) to ma ny of the great American writers ot' the nineteenth century: Wh itman, Dickinson, Thoreau, Emerson,

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yourself." Eliot and Robinson both seem to agree that a profounder sense of neighbor comes concomitant with a novelistic allegiance to representing the full spectrum of human existence. For Eliot (and I would argue Robinson too), bad representation leads to bad intellectual positions leads to bad hermeneutics. In the wonderfully titled chapter of Adam Bede, "In Which the Story Pauses A Little:' Eliot, after invoking the aesthetic of Dutch paintings as her model, maintains:

do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of Art those old women scrapping carrots with their work-worn hands .... It is so needful we should remember their existence. else we may happen to leave them quite oul of our religion and philosophy. and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes. (224)

Robinson echoes this position in an Autumn 2008 interview published in Paris Review:

You have to have a certain detachment in order to see beauty for yourself rather than something that has been put in quotation marks to be understood as Hbeauty." Think about Dutch painting. where sunlight is falling on a basin of water and a woman is standing there in the clothes that she would wear when she wakes up in the morning-that beauty is a casual glimpse of something very ordinary. (Robinson, "Interview: The Art of Fiction")

Some critics of Home. however, have chafed at the "very ordinary." Donna Freydkin, writing in USA Today, warns that readers will find the attention to "piano teachers, gardens, grocery store orders and myriad other small -Iown details ... either charming and richly layered - or deeply annoying" and goes on to argue for the latter, claiming the novel "bore[d ber] to tears" (Freydkin). Ted Gioia finds the portrayal of life within the Boughton home deeply disappointing as well:

The reader must endure at least two dozen conversations in Home during which Jack Boughton is evasive and says ~Thank you" or "You are so kind" or "Yes. sir" or some other equivalent statement-dead end dialogues thaI gets tiresome after the tenth or twentieth repetition. The action of the book revolves around Jack, our prodigal son. Yet, sad to say. no work and all play has made lack a dull boy-or at least a dull conversat ionalist.

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One final example (and extended critique) comes from Frank Wilson in a review from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

So we are left with Glory and Jack, irrevocably crippled by their upbringing. Unfortunately, Robinson has not done nearly enough to make either of them interesting in their misery. Glory's endless second o. third- and fourth -guessing of her every least thought and action, to say nothing of her propensity for lears, grows exasperating.

And anyone who thinks Jack is interesting hasn't spent enough lime in bars. The casual reader will quickly guess where things are headed, and no attentive reader will be surprised by the revelation in the final pages.

Toward the end of the novel , Glory wonders why anyone would stay in Gilead. It 's a good question, because if the all the households are as claustrophobic as the Boughton manse and the other inhabitants are gripped by the kind of psychic paralysis that prevails there, then Gilead could well be the most boring place on Earth.

But Frcydkln, Gioia, and \Vibon seem to completely miss one of the poin ts of the book, what English novelist S.llley Vickers, writing in "nzc Illdepclltielll, iden ! ifie~ a~ the "super-subtleties of human exchange:' Instead, Vickers astutely understands that "it is the delicate growth of tentative trust between the two siblings which forms the skein of redeeming promise in this otherwise aClItely painful narrative of human misunderstanding:' This is part of Robinson's larger realist project and part of the book's genius since this "tentative trust" is only built lip over the course of numerous, yes, often frustrating conversations, which- like any real conversation between intimates- circle round repeatedly to old wounds, \\'ell-\\'orn verhal habits, and familiar themes.

But as important as a commitment to the quotid ian is, Robi nson's vision is finally more complete than Eliot's because it is able to mo\'e from insight and symp.lthy to rcstoration and renewal. Like Fcuerbach whom she t ranslated for the English-speaking worl d , Eliot "is about as good on the joyful aspects of religion as anybody, and [s]he loves the world;' to adapt John Ames' quote from Gilead (24). But she cannot (and does not want to) take us to a place where our sympathy and compassion for each other are ultimately acknowledged as a gift from one who "first loved liS:'

But that 's exactly the place that Home is. For me, a primary reason is Glory Boughton. So tenderhearted, so prone

to tears, yet deeply practi cal, self-critical, and understatedly funny- how can


YOll not love a character who "takes things so hard" but who also possesses the wry insight to claim that she knows she needs to avoid "country music and human interest stories" (Home 16)? Despite the book jacket's invitation to focus on Jack ("one of the great characters in recent literature"), despite critics' propensity to frame the book mostly as a tale about a dying father and his errant son (or about innumerable pairings of fathers and sons, biological and otherwise), Glory is central to this narrative, her story as important as her father's and her brother's. For it is through her that I believe Robinson's rich theology is perhaps most potently expressed.

Glory's name is one clue. Like everything else in Robinson's fiction, character and place names often have deep resonances. Housekeeping's Ruth, for example, like her biblical counterpart, begins her story in a way befitting her name: full of sorrow. After their mother's suicide, Ruth and her sister Lucille are initially cared for by their appropriately named grandmother, Sylvia Foster, who lovingly "fosters" them as best she can. When their grandmother's death necessitates care by their aunt, the subtle shift in name from "Sylvia" to the more informal "Sylvie," and from "Foster" to "Fisher" marks an even bigger change in the girls' care. Sylvie Fisher has a name which suggests the natural (sylvan) world with which she is associated; as a "Fisher" woman, she seems more comfortable out of doors. At the same time, Fisher, with its association with birds,s also signals nicely Sylvie's free-spiri ted drifting. This is the world that Ruth ultimately chooses, like the biblical Ruth chooses the world of her mother-in- law, Naomi. Perhaps it could be that Ruth's surname of "Stone" with its own natural associations signals her underlying allegiance to Sylvie's world, while simultaneously marking her sister Lucille's stolidity. The attention 10 names and naming is not limited to HOllsekeepillg, either. I appreciate, for example, that in Gilead John-"the beloved"-Ames, who strives so mightily to be a good man, has a last name thai puns on his ongoing quest: John Aims. Then, tOQ, Robinson herself has traced out in TIle Atlantic the "complex history" that Gilead has as an allusion.6 And the examples could go on and on.

Robinson explicitly draws attention to Glory's name throughout the novel, where it is often the source of jokes ("Glory Bee:' "Glory Hallelujah;' "The paths of Glory lead bullO the grave"). Interestingly, all of the characters seem to think of the name only in its Ch ristian context, not in the classical sense of "glory in war." But that is probably unsurprising in a family where the sisters have all been named for "theological abstractions" (82). As the youngest sister, Glory should have been named Charity had her father had

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his will: Faith and Hope and Grace ... and Ch9

Nevertheless, Glory-in both person and theological abstraction-is exactly what the Boughtotls need. Glory (the Hebrew word is kabod, the Greek doxa) is a frequent word in scripture, particularly beloved in the King James version where it appears some 375 times and a rich, if perhaps under-discussed, attribute of God. Rather interestingly, the Hebrew kabod derives from an earlier word, literally meaning "to be heavy" (Richardson J 75). Indeed, the first instance of "glory" in Genesis is as a word appl ied not to God, but to Jacob- who is described as a man of wealth, a man of substance. As the word becomes more associated with the gloriolls and majestic manifestation of God, the scripture conceives all of this kabod as God's weightiness, this substantial presence which, when encountered, is real and overwhelming.

Biblical glory is most often linked with verbs of "seeing and appearing:' and it can be witnessed in the sanctuary. in creation-indeed, in all of history (Verbrugge 151). But importantly, this glory is seen not only in radiance, but in darkness as well: for the Israelites, God resides in the pillar of fire and in the cloud. So too for the three Boughtons: in an hour of loneliness and despair and impending death, glory-the real presence of God-can still be a reality.

In the New Testament, when kabod's weightiness morphs into doxa's radiance, glory is beheld in Christ9- and the apprehending of this glory is assumed to have the transformativc pO\\'er to move people to salvation. Take John 2: II: "This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee. and manifested forth his glory; and his diSciples believed on him." Hence, seeing the glory of God (the noun) moves us to glory in God (the verb) and then, as we saw above in the example from Psalm 8, we are ourselves blessed by God with a radiance of our own. Again as Robinson notes in her essay on Psalm 8:


The Hebrew Scriptures everywhere concede: yes, foolish; yes, guilty; yes, weak, yes, sad and bewildered. Yes, resistant to cherishing and rebellious against expectation .... Tl,en how is this dignity manifest? Surely in that God is mindful of man, in that he "visits" him-this is after all the major assertion of the whole literature. (Adam 241)

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"Foolish, guilty, weak, sad and bewildered ." Certainly, this is Glory Boughton when she returns home at the novel's beginning. her heart sinking in the novel's very firs t sentences. Feeling like a "lonely schoolgirl at thirty-eight" (248), she worries that her life has gone nowhere, that she has "had a dream of adu lt life and woke up from it, still here in [her] parents' house" (19). Fleeing the embarrassment and lies of her failed relationship with the feckless fiance-whose idea of love seemed to be mostly letters, bad poems, and the keeping of strict, if unpaid, monetary accounts (oh yes, and a wife)-she comes back to care for her dying fathe r and gets a long- lost, tortured alcoholic brother in the bargain. What we see of these two men is largely through Glory's perspective,ll Robinson here adapting the free indirect discourse pioneered by Jane Austen. No doubt because of this, Glory's character and reactions strike me as more complicated, more various, perhaps more understandable. We see the full range of her responses to these men-love, frustration, anger, loyalty, and more.

As for Glory herself, we observe how she is often overlooked or undervalued (though with notable and increasing exceptions), and how she has internalized tbese opinions. In common with Robinson's other narrators, she is possessed of a good command (perhaps too good, in fact) of understatement and irony and a dism issal of ber own gifts (her frequent defeated exclamations of "ah well" are one indicator). At one point in the novel, for example, she relates her credentials: "I have a master's degree. I taught high school English for thirteen years. I was a good teacher" (19), but of course later in the novel this is undercut. Her academic accomplishments can be explained away into nothing:

She was so conscientious that none of her I\s and Apluses had to be accounted for otherwise than as the reward of diligence. She was good in the fullest and narrowest sense of the word as it is applied to female children. And she had blossomed into the sort of adult her childhood had predicted. Ah well. (55)

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This same sense of gendcred inadequacy comes through as well when, carly on, she describes an attraction to the ministry,lI Instead, she dismisses it because implicitly she knows:

If she had been a man she might have chosen the ministry. ... She seemed always to have known that , to their father's mind, the world's great work was the business of men, of gentle. serious men well versed in Scripture and eloquent at prayer, or, in any case, ordained in some reasonably respectable denomination. Women were creatures of second rank, however pious. however beloved, however hOllored ... none of this mattered much through all the years of her studies and her teaching. but now, in the middle of any night, il was part of the loneliness she felt, as if the sense that everything could have been otherwise were a palpable darkness. (20)

At another dark moment, she wishes she "could will herself out of existence, herself and every word she had ever said" (80).

But Glory is not all self-abnegation and self-pity. She is irritated by the endless games of Checkers and Monopoly, fiercel y loyal to Jack (taking his side with regard to both Ames and her imaginings of Della), intermittently angry and impatient throughout the novel at both Jack and her father. She works hard to understand both men and knows she fails often at it. She desperately wants her father and her brother's attention and validation (what she calls the "curse of the lillie sister" [122[). She call be feisty: in one instance, she pointedly asks Jack, "Has it ever, ever occurred to YOli that you are not the only miserable person in this house?" (138) and remarks how she has to bite her tongue "twenty times a day" (67). She knows she is a "good soul:' but she also resists trying to "save" Jack, eventually coming to realize that such a gesture is an "old illusion" (248). She resents (even as she understands) the identification of herself as someone very much like Della: the "vulne rable" church woman, someone who would take Jack on as "a genteel project for a pious lady with time on her hands" (\09). At the same time, her faith \l remains vital and important to her, both in practice (for example, prayer) and in her conception of the world-a conception that contains both darkness and light , love and brokenness:

For her. church was an airy white room with tall windows Jooking out on God's good world, with God's good sunlight pouring in through those windows and falling across the pulpit where her father stood, straight and strong, parsing the broken heart of humankind and praising the loving heart of Chris 1. That was chu rch. (50)


And so, richly complicated and deeply flawed though she is, deeply unhappy and lonely though she finds herself, Glory tries nevertheless to be what her name implies: the real presence of God to her family. Even though she does not have answers for the nature of the soul and cannot stomach debates about predestinat ion, like Martha to Jack's Lazarus, lJ she tries over and again to manifest light and life-as much with food (cookies or chicken and dumplings or enough other food to fatten the neighborhood dogs) as wit h understanding, both equally sacramental. Expressingone of her cent ral tenants of belief, she notes, "You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding" (45). She matches that idea with practical action, even as she struggles to know if it is efficacious or not:

Her father and brother were both laid low by grief, as if it were a sickness, and she had nothing better to offer than chicken and dumplings. But the thought that she could speak to them in their weary sleep with the memory of comfort lifted her spirits a little. (253)

And she prays real prayers throughout, often simply decla ri ng: "Dear God. Dear God in heaven." What more can be said? The solutions are not perfect or permanent: though Jack leaves for a very uncertain future and her father moves toward certain death, the novel very much resembles Robinson's deSCriptions of what family's should be (and do) in an essay in her collection, The Death of Adam:

Imagine that someone failed and disgraced came back to his family, and they grieved with him, and took his sadness upon themsc!ves, and sat down together to ponder the deep mysteries of human life. This is more human and beautiful, I propose, even if it yields no dulling of pain, no patching of injuries. (90)

Robi nson's description here of th e work of family as grace-filled ("they grieved with him"), humble and kenotic ("took his sadness upon them"), but ultimately not sa lvific in and of itself("even ifit yields no dulling of pain, no patching of injuries") is key in assessing the novel's ending. Casey Rath, in Christianity Today, sees the ending largely in negalive terms, argui ng that:

The Boughton household fails to be home the way Robinson defines it. It is not a refuge for the soul for either Glory or Jack; it is too full of memory to be completely restful or forgiving. Glory says it is inhabited

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by a ~palpable darkness." And yet both children claim it, in a sense, as an incredibly meaningful place. Jack gravitates toward the Boughton home even though he feels he does not belong \0 it, while Glory clings to this home even though she can picture no darker future for herself than settling into a life there again. It both is and isn't what Robinson says home should be. And she leaves it at that. Robinson raises similar questions about family. Try as they might, the Boughtons cannot seem to keep from hurting each other. No matter what they do, no matter how many overtures of goodwill they make to each other, the family members are powerless to make anything right among themselves. Glory and Jack manage to grow closer throughout the novel, but complete restoration is beyond them.

In fact, "complete restoration" is not the point. Nor is it possible given Robinson's theological commitments. It is precisely because they cannot solve their own problems that the novel's portrayal of home is st unningly accurate and profoundly Christian, especially in light of Robinson's explanation of predestination-a topic of extended debate in both Gilead and Home:

The irony of the question theologically is that free will implies we can be judged on the basis of what we do, and can at least tentatively judge ourselves and one another, while predestination means that God's view of us is essentially mysteriOUS, Ihat grace is a freedom he reserves 10 himself. In thaI light, free will implies a less fatherly view of us on the part of God than docs predestination, which is always represented as harsh. Very few readers seem to find Jack beyond their compassion. On what grounds do so many of them assume that he would be beyond God's compassion, or his love? (Robinson, ~Further Thoughls~ 489)

On what grounds indeed, I n essence, Robinson'sdescription of predestination is ultimately a call for a reorientation of vision toward "God's view of us": for people to give up "tentatively judg[ing] ourselves and one another" and instead, to embrace God's unfathomable grace, at once deeply mysterious and deeply loving.

Such a reorientation of vision is critical to understanding the final pages of Home. The novel's ending-which despite the impression one would get from many critics' representation does, in fact, ex tend beyond Jack's departure-can thus be read as wondrollsly radiant and full of hope, largely because, importantly, the story is almost exclusively Glory's at the end. As the

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novel begins 10 conclude. Glory sign ificantly begins 10 see things anew. In the case of Jack, her last sight of him is as he leaves for town, "weary, weary" (318). Nevertheless she sees Christ in him, describing him by deliberately invoking the suffering savior: "A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. and as one from whom men hide their face. Ah, Jack" (3 18). This suggests that part of Jack's struggle-to find a welcoming place for his interracial family-is one that is consonant with Christ's kingdom restoration. Like's Ames' blessing of Jack at the end of Gilead, Glory's final vision of him marks him as "a good man:'

Glory, too, embraces a new vision of herself-one thai she has long feared-in fac t, that she describes as a "nightmare": being trapped alone 's in Gilead. But Robinson, in an interview wit h Rebecca M. Painter contends that the absence of loneliness can never be an expectation of faith:

RMP: Would you renect upon the matter of loneliness and personal isolation as it relates to our culture's distancing from religious consciousness ... [f1or the Glorys, for whom religious conviction does little to assuage their loneliness? MR: I am not sure religion is meant to assuage loneliness. Who was ever lonelier than Jesus? "Can you not watch with me one hour?" I think loneliness is the encounter with oneself-who can be great or terrible company, but who does ask all the essential questions. There is a tendency to think of loneliness as a symptom, a sign that life has gone wrong. But it is never only that. I sometimes th ink it is the one great prerequisite for depth, and for truthfulness. (Robinson, Further Thoughts" 492)

Thus, unlike Ruth, who flees her home at the conclusion of HOllsekeeping, Glory does exac tly the opposite, ultimately embraCing her chi ldhood home and abandoning man)' of her fOrlner dreams: of a home, a husband, children.

She had dreamed of a real home for herself and the babies, and the fiance, a home very different from this good and blessed and fustian and oppressive tabernacle of Boughton probity and kind intent. She knew, she had known for years, that she would never open a door on thai home, never cross that threshold, never scoop up a pretty child and set it on her hip and feel it lean into her breast and eye the world from her arms with the complacency of utter trust. Ah well. (Home 102)


Interestingly. the home she imagines is one remarkably similar 10 her description of church (discussed above), clean and bright:

Glory had always thought home would be a house less cluttered and ungainly than this one, in a town larger than Gilead or a City, where someo ne would be her intimate fr iend and the father of her children, of whom she would have no more than three. Then she could learn what her own tastes were, within the limits of their means, of course. She \\'Quld nOI take a stick of furniture from her father's hOllse, since none of it would be comprehensible in those spare, sunlit roomS. (102)

But of course, she ends up taking not only the furniture but the whole house. She will return to teaching and live out her days, learning to live in the house she has inherited. Isn't this a terrible waste or at least a muted lowering of expectations? In an interview in SojollnJers, Robinson was asked a similar question about Ames' choice to remain in Gilead:

He was loyal 10 the life his family had lived in Ihat tOI\'n-even if the rest of his family no longer was. And there isn't any necessary relation between the scope of one's mind and where they Jive. Ames is highly educated. He knows what books to read, he knows what 's going o n in the world, and thus is intellectually sophisticated. A life lived well is never wasted no mailer what the scale of that life is. He lives toward God. And there is no way of measuring that. (Robinson, ~Seeing the Holy" 43)

Thus, though this conclusion might be sad, even disappointing, in another novel, here I think it is necessary and even laudable because Glory's sacrifice (and it is undoubted ly a sacrifice) is built upon a vision of restoration, of justice. For glory accompil1lies theophany: Moses and the burning bush, Ezt'kiel in the temple, the shepherds on the hillside. In this case, the appearance of Della, Jack's wife, and the heretofore unknown reality (atiensl to Glory) of his son, Robert Boughton Miles, brings the flnal transformation in the way Glory sees the world and her purpose within it. Though she could not save Jack's daughter, she now ha~ a second chance wit h his son. Though Della and her family are afraid to remain on the road after dark, Glory an ticipates a dar when young Robert will return lip that same road to the house she has prepared fo r him. In other words, she begins to under~tanJ how she is an essent ial part of the divine work of restoration, to a remedying of the world's brokenness. This, then , is the eschatological hope of glory; as Robinson describes it:


"Woman, Ivhy weepSI Ihou?16 Mary Magdalene could hear this as a question of a kindly stranger, but it means, in fact, There is no more cause for weeping. II means, perhaps, God will wipe away all tears.~ (Adam 242-43)

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And I think it is notable that this work of reconciliation is done not by a parent, but an aunt and sister. I t Robinson's use of Glory as an agent of restoration seems much more in keeping with tbe way tbat Christians are called to sacrificially serve one another as brothers and sisters, and it provides a theological answer to anyone who believes her life is being wasted.

Though some critics read the ending and particularly the final sentence, "The Lord is wonderful;' as ironic, such a reading seems incommensurate with Robinson's notion that "if we came anywhere near respecting the richness of this improbable life-hopes would flourish and blossom as they have never done before" (Robinson, "Further Thoughts" 490). As Glory gives young Robert the picture of the river (note, incidentally, that Ames' wife Lila also gives her young son, Robert Boughton Ames, a mental picture oflhat same river in anticipation of their own departure), it is so he can begin to imagine the home that is she is preparing for him, just across that river. The book seems to suggest that someday, through Glory's efforts in the old, odd house with its cumbersome furniture (a metaphor for all we inherit), both young Robert Boughtons, Robert Boughton Miles and Robert Boughton Ames, black and white, may return together to take up habituation in this land of their fathers. IS

And Glory, haVing waited faithfully at home, will stretch out her arms like the Prodigal's father of old and welcome them.

In a recent artidetitlcd "Onward , Liberal Christians" Robinson describes Christians' ulti mate calling:

"We ought to embrace the whole human race without exception in a single feeling of love; here there is no distinction between barbarian and Greek, worthy and unworthy, friend and enemy, since all should be contemplated in God, not in themselves. When we turn aside from such contemplation, it is no wonder we become entangled in many errors." This is John Calvin, describing in two sentences a mystical I ethical engagement with the world that fuses truth and love and opens experience on a light so bright it expunges every mean distinctioll. There is no doctrine here, no setting of conditions, no drawing of lines. On the contrary, what he describes is a posture of grace, generosity, liberality. (52)


That sounds like glory to me. And Robinson's work gives us the courage to see it indeed.

NOTES

JAil biblical quotations are from the King James Version. l ] transcribed this quote from a video dip viewed on YouTube and then edited

fo r readability. Emphasis mine. JElsewhere, Robinson notes, "] think cynicism is self-protective. It doses 011

itself. It can't learn. And that kind of self-protection is encouraged in people so persistently that they don't realize that they're doing it. Basically, what you have to do is break Qut of that. I have written non-fiction that is, I guess, acerbic. At least that's how people sometimes respond to it. But as far as my fiction is concerned, I have to love my characters. And I have to, in a way, make the best case for them. So even as a fictional method, I can't include crnicism" (Robinson, "Gilead's Balm").

~Indeed , she has joked on more than one occasion that Housekeeping is her Moby-Jalle.

sJ'm thinking here of kingfishers. Another echo might be with the wounded Fisher King frOIll Grail mythology~Sylvie is certainly wounded and her "kingdom" in disarray.

61n an interview in TIle Atlalltic MomMy. Robinson had the following interchange:

Interviewer: I remember thaI Jacob fled wilh the idols \0 Gilead. And Elijah was from Gilead. Robinson: Yes, and Gilead collles up in Jeremiah 8:22: "Is there no balm in Gilead?" It also comes up in Obadiah. TIle biblical Gilead has a very complex history. It's a town that's criticized for being rich and hard-hearted; it 's lamented because it's been destroyed; and it's also used as a symbol of what can be restored, what can be hoped for. [like the name because it has various histories and meanings. (Robinson , "Gilead's Balm")

' Glory's description of the house in the opening pages of Home is a telling projection of her own psychology. Her father calls the house "a good house ... meaning that it had a gracious heart however awkward its appearance:' By contrast, Glory wonders "[wJhy should this staunch and upright house seem to her so abandoned? So heartbroken?"

' In Gilead, Jack quotes the first part of this verse to Ames (230). 'Thus, when Paul in 2 Cor. 4: 17 speaks of the "weight of glory," he is, in fact ,

rather delightfully combining the Old and New Testament meanings. lO in her Paris Review interview, Robinson is asked if she consider writing the

novel from Jack's point of view. She replied, "Jack is thinking all the time~thinking 100 much~but I would lose lack if I tried to get too close to him as a narrator. He's

TOWA RD AN UNDERSTANDING O F GLORY 299

alienated in a complicated way. Other people don't find him comprehensible and he doesn't find them comprehensible" (Robinson, "Interview: The Art of Fiction").

" Robinson admits to a similar interest in (and sense of barriers to) the ministry. In a June 2006 interview in Sojollrners, she remembers, "If I had lived 15 or 20 years later, I may have considered theology as a field. But at the time the obstacles to women in thaI area were very real. So instead, I've maintained my interest through study and reading" (Robinson, "Seeing the Holy" 38).

'lSomecriticshave wanted to see this faith as "ambiguous." Robinson's response: "[ don't consider Glory's fai th ambiguous. It is complicated by the fact that her father is so strongly intertwined with it that she has a little trouble telling one from the other. But the questions of spirituality and faith you find in the book are aspects of her thinking, and in fac t govern the way she thinks and acts" (Robinson, MGoing Back 'Home''').

IlThough Jack refers to himself as Lazarus several times in the book, this pairing is most evident after his attempted suicide when Glory weeps over him (taking the part of Christ in the biblical story) and then, Martha-like, bathing him and wrapping him in a "a winding sheet" (Home 245).

'4At the end of Gilead, Ames sees Glory and understands what she is facing: ~When [ left [ saw Glory standing in the hallway, looking in on all the quiet talk there as in the parlor, her brothers and sisters and their wives and husbands and their children, grown and half grown. Trad ing news and talking politics and playing hearts. There were more of them in the kitchen and more upstairs. As I was leaving I met five or six who had been out for a walk. It shames me that I had not thought till then how hard it must have been for her to have Jack gone, and to have been left alone in that orderly turbulence of fruitfulness and contentment, left alone to tolerate all thaI tactful and heartfelt kindness, with no one there even to smile with her al the sheer endlessness ofil. And no one there fo r her to defend- which is the worst kind of abandonment. Only the Lord Himself can comfort that" (245).

'5Interestingly, this section of the novel begins with a "sudden change in weather;' signaling a new season (318).

lOAn appropriate question given Glory's propensity \0 tears. I~This is true in HO!l5ekeeping as well where SylVie is the means of escape into

a different world. And Ames, as Jack's godfather, also works in ways alternative to conventional types.

" After all, the picture belongs to Jack, and it is his prayers that his son's return would answer, accordi ng to the penultimate line of the novel.

WORKS CITED

Alter, Robert, and Marilynne Robinson. "The Psalms: Reading and Conversation at the 92"~ Street V:' Video dip on YouTube.com. 17 December 2007. Web. 22 June 2009.

300 CHRISTIANITY AND L ITE RATURE

Calvin, John. IllS/illites of the Chris/inti Religion. Vol. t. Ed. John T. McNeill. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960.

Eliot, George. Adam Bede. 1859. London: Penguin, 1980. Freydkin. Donn3. "Marilynne Robinson's 'Home' Feels Uncomfortably Familiar:'

USA Today 1 October 2008. Web. 15 April 2009. Gioia, Ted. Rev. of Home by Marilynne Robinson. Be: Blogcritics Magazine. 2

September 2008. Web. 15 April 2009. Oates, Joyce Carol. hA Woman's ''''ark: Questions for Joyce Carol Oales.~ By

Deborah Solomon. New York Times. 12 Apr 2009. Web. 13 April 2009. Rath, Casey. "No Sweet 'Home.'" CllrislilllJily Today. 17 November 2008. Web. 5

May 2009. Richardson, Alan. A 711e%giml Word Book oflhe Bible. New York: Collier, 1950. Robinson, Marilynne. "Comment is Free: Marilynne Robinson, God and Calvin.~

Interview by Andrew Brown. GlIardia/1. 4 june 2009. 'Neb. _. "Confronting Reality.~ Brick 55 (October 1996): 41-45. Reprinted as "Facing

Reality." Tile Dealh of Adam. 76-86. _' 711e Dealh of Adam, 1998. New York: Picador, 2005, _. "Further Thoughts on a Prodigal Son Who Cannot Come Home, on

Loneliness and Grace: An Interview with Marilynne Robinson." By Rebecca M. Painter. Christial/ity alld Literature 58.3 (Spring 2009): 484-93.

_' Gilead. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004. _' "Gilead's Balm.~ Interview by jennie Rothenberg Gritz. Alltllllic MOlllhly. 17

November 2004. Web, 15 April 2009. _. "Going Back 'Home~' Interview by Adam De jong. 2 September 2008. Web. 4

June 2009, _' Home. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008. _' HOllsekeeping. 1980. New York: Bantam, 1982. _' "An Interview with Marilynne Robinson:' By Thomas Schaub. COIltemporary

Lileratlire 35.2 (Summer 1994): 231-51. _' "Interview: The Art o{Fiction No, 198.~ By Sarah Fa)'. Paris Review 186 (Fall

2008). Web. 15 April 2009. 15 April 2009. _. "Onward, Christian liberals." Americall Scholar 75.2 (Spring 2006): 42-52. _. "Seeing the Holy:' Interview by Tom Montgomery-Fate. Sojourners 35.6 (June

2006): 38-39, 41-43. _. "A World of Beautiful Souls: An Interview with Marilynne Robinson:' By

Scott Hoezee. Perspectives: A lOIiT/wl of Reformed 7hollglz/. May 2005. Web. 15 April 2009.

Verbrugge, Verlyn D. New I"tematiollal Dictiol/tlry of New Tes/tlme/lt 7heology. Grand Rapids, MI : Zondervan, 2000.

Vickers, Salley. ~Home. by Marilynne Robinson: America's Slowest Family Chronicle Continues." 711e f/1depel1dwl 12 October 2008. Web. 15 April 2009.

Wilson, Frank. ~Robinson's latest is lyrical, yet static.~ Pittsburgh Post-Gtlzette. 7 September 2008. Web.

Wood, james. "The Homecoming." 711e New Yorker," 8 September 2008. Web. 17 May 2009.

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"The Courage to See It": Toward an Understanding of Glory

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Glory in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and Home