Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, St. Paul, and the Transfiguration of Mortality
Adapted from a presentation given March 6 at St. John the Divine Episcopal Church, Houston.
I remember picking up Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead sometime late in seminary or early in my ordained ministry in Dallas. The book, written as a series of letters from John Ames, an Iowa Congregationalist preacher in his final years, to his seven-year-old son, first struck me as slow and impenetrable. When I picked it up again after experiencing the joys and challenges of founding St. Augustine’s in Dallas, a small neighborhood church with a large number of young and elderly parishioners (but not too many in between), this brilliant novel came to life for me. As a reflection on ministry, life, mortality, and the Scriptures, I found it life-changing. As Lent gives way to Eastertide, I want to bring some quotes from John Ames in Gilead into conversation with St. Paul to show how they highlight the finitude and fragile beauty of mortal life and ways that God chooses to transcend and transform that fragility. As Marilynne Robinson’s nonfiction Reading Genesis arrives, I also recall some of her meditations on Genesis from Gilead.
John Ames says to his seven-year-old son:
I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve. (162)
As a parent of three lovely girls, nine, seven, and 15 months, I have my camera out a lot, and my wife likes to ask me, “When do you think we’re going to sit down and watch all these videos and photos you’re taking?” I long to hold on to these moments, and the management of all of those ones and zeros has become a bit of an issue, one that tech companies have made into a big business. They jog my memory and bring back otherwise momentary feelings.
As a new parent I often heard, “The days go slowly, but the years fly by,” and I feel this deeply, both as a middle-aged dad of a young child and with my oldest on the horizon of being 10, then a teenager, and then poof. When I put a phone between my eyes and the moment, I am reaching out to make these moments a little less “slight,” to use Robinson’s words. I don’t know where my pictures will go when I die, but I, like Ames, want these moments to “abide.” I want a “gracious reprieve” from time’s swift passage.
Unlike photos, memories cannot be printed into a book and passed down. They live in our minds until they don’t. Anyone who has watched someone’s memory die long before the body goes knows that the passage of memories carries its own grief. Marilynn Robinson captures this but also hints at the possibility that memories may persist beyond the neurons that hold them: “memory is not strictly mortal in its nature.” Life may have “its own mortal loveliness,” but our time-limited human lives also touch eternity at points, as they say of the dead in the Christian East: “May their memory be eternal.”
John Ames, St. Paul, and Human Limitation
I went into ministry right after graduating from university because I wanted my life to make an eternal difference in people’s lives. Twenty-odd years later, now teaching the Bible to future church leaders, I do it with the same eternal aspiration.
However, my experience of pastoral ministry and parenthood alike is one of a growing, ever more profound sense of my limitation as a human. There is only so much I can do. I pray, I teach, I serve, I love, but people choose their own way. For parishioners struggling with addiction, depression, identity crises, a divorce, or self-harm, I have no argument, no Bible verse that can magically stop the pain.
I feel this even more intensely as a parent. Our youngest came to us with a host of health issues that we are learning to manage, but there is no more helpless feeling than to hold a sick or distressed child going through something you can’t fix, while she cries out for help. This experience with our youngest has reminded me of similar moments with our older two. Nothing has made me more aware of my limitations than parenthood.
Reflecting on the story of Abraham sending Hagar and Ishmael away in Genesis 21, John Ames put it this way:
Any father, particularly an old father, must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God. It seems almost a cruelty for one generation to beget another when parents can secure so little for their children, so little safety, even in the best circumstances. Great faith is required to give the child up, trusting God to honor the parents’ love for him by assuring that there will indeed be angels in that wilderness. (129)
My first child was born a few days before I planted St. Augustine’s in Dallas. In their early days, it was as though they grew up together, the juxtaposition showing me how similar pastoral ministry and parenthood can be. Seven years ago, I turned the church over to capable leadership so I could do doctoral work, but that act of setting free and turning over of one child of sorts was only an anticipation of the work I have yet to do with the children in my home.
St. Paul addresses this in his own way earlier in 1 Corinthians, chapter 3, talking about his ministry to the Corinthian church and its legacy after him.
According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building on it. Each builder must choose with care how to build on it. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw— the work of each builder will become visible, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each has done. If what has been built on the foundation survives, the builder will receive a reward. If the work is burned up, the builder will suffer loss; the builder will be saved, but in this way as through fire. (1Cor. 3:10-15 NRSV, adapted)
This gestures toward the purpose of our mortal, perishable lives. We try, in whatever way we can, to lay enduring works at the feet of our Lord in service to him. In our work, our parenting, our devotional lives of prayer and worship, we strive, as Paul says, to “choose with care how we build.” We serve God to invest in things that will last for eternity: human souls, God’s glory, small acts of kindness offered in Jesus’ name to those who can never repay. Somehow, in God’s building, in God’s economy, these transcend the great destruction of death and the final, purifying fire of God’s great goodness. But this striving for eternity has its dark side.
Two Narratives of Transcendence
All around us, we have voices enticing us to delay the onset of our mortality. Be it longevity coaches trying to help you lower your mitochondrial age through diet and exercise, wealth advisors helping you preserve your legacy against estate taxes and economic downturns, or aesthetic enticements to nip, tuck, and fill those parts of us that show the unstoppable march of time, we are tempted throughout to halt the perishing of our flesh. Is this the point? How much work does it take to lower my mitochondrial age? Is it worthwhile?
There is a similar way of talking in the church. We often think about the Christian message as an escape from death, a get-out-of-jail-free card we hold for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. This appears everywhere from evangelical gospel tracts to the way we bury our dead. Funeral services that used to mourn death and claim resurrection hope over the body of the dead are giving way to celebrations of life imbued with photos of the deceased in happier, healthier times, often to upbeat, hopeful music. In a similar way, prosperity gospel preachers promise a triumphant life now without the threat of disease, poverty, or death.
Whether within the church or without, we are trying to stop bodily or spiritual entropy through direct intervention. Opposition. Firm, steady pressure directed against the perishability of life, which is really the onset of death. St. Paul would point us in the other way.
“But someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’” (1 Cor. 15:35 NRSV). The Corinthian doubters dismissed Paul by pointing out the corruption of our bodies: Paul preached resurrection, and they imagined The Walking Dead. Paul responds, “Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies” (1 Cor. 15:36 NRSV). Paul sees things ordered in such a way that true glory, true imperishability, comes only through death. After all, the fullness of divinity was manifest in human flesh in the life of Jesus, who resolutely marched from the manger to the cross, misunderstood, despised, beaten, disfigured, and ultimately given over to inglorious death. Yet, even if his body was killed, it was not perishable. Jesus rose imperishable, glorious, almost unrecognizable to his disciples at first. Paul writes:
So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. (1 Cor. 15:42-44 NRSV)
As it happened to Jesus, so will it happen to those of us baptized into Christ. What does Paul mean by being raised a spiritual body? Listen to what he says about our baptism in Romans 8:15–17:
We have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry Abba! Father! His own Spirit testifies with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children then heirs, heirs of God, and co-heirs with Christ, provided that we co-suffer with him, in order that we may be co-glorified with him. (My translation)
When we receive the Spirit in baptism, Paul says, we receive the Spirit who not only raised Jesus from the dead, but also drove Jesus to the cross. Paul sees us transfigured by dying and rising with Christ, transformed into the image of the imperishable, glorious, risen Savior, after we have been conformed to the image of Jesus’ humble earthly suffering.
Lent and Holy Week are a brief moment to practice that humility. We look at our perishability without illusion: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” But it is a preparation for glory that as Paul says, “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven” (1 Cor. 15:49).
Through embracing our limitations, we can release the death grip with which we clutch youth and earthly glory and reach out toward the promise of glory that comes through the cross. As Ames puts it near the end of Robinson’s Gilead:
There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world’s mortal insufficiency to us. (245)
In the face of this mortal insufficiency, Paul offers the gospel as the opposite of an escape from death. It is a transformation, of perishability into imperishability:
Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled:
“Death has been swallowed up in victory.”
“Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?”
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Cor. 15:51–57, NRSV)
This is no denial of death, as though Paul said, “Where is death?” He says, “Death, where is your sting?” Sin is the sting, a corruption that makes us perishable, weak, mortal. And this inheritance that we poor, banished children of Adam and Eve receive is not a problem a doctor can forestall forever. No surgery, no pill, no exercise or diet regime will stop the perishing. No longevity coach can hack your mitochondrial DNA enough to change the fact that bodies just fall apart. As a man in my 40s, I feel it every time I go for a jog. It doesn’t mean I stop jogging, but I can’t keep hoping that adding another mile to my routine is going to make me live forever. My body is perishing, and I doubt God is in the interest of stopping it on this side of the resurrection. Nevertheless, there is a hope in the future, and even now, St. Paul and John Ames might remind us, for the glory we anticipate.
It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance—for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light. That is what I said in the Pentecost sermon. I have reflected on that sermon, and there is some truth in it. But the Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than it seems to imply. 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? (245)
