Noah, Marilynne Robinson, and Drowing Mothers

I gave a talk yesterday, at the invitation of the Bethel University art and English departments, on Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping. I called her, for me, a “wow” writer, meaning that I find myself frequently pausing after reading a passage and saying, sometimes out loud, “wow.” Here is an example:

“In the newness of the world God had perhaps not Himself realized the ramifications of certain of His laws, for example, that shock will expend itself in waves . . . . Cain became his children and their children and theirs, through a thousand generations, and all of them transients, and wherever they went everyone remembered that there had been a second creation, that the earth ran with blood and sang with sorrow. And let God purge this wicked sadness away with a flood, and let the waters recede to pools and ponds and ditches, and let every one of them mirror heaven. Still, they taste a bit of blood and hair. One cannot cup one’s hand and drink for the rim of any lake without remembering that mothers have drowned in it, lifting their children toward the air . . . .” [p. 193]

Think of this passage the next time you see one of those cute, kiddie versions of Noah and the ark—mothers holding their babies over their heads as they both drown. This amazing passage speaks to the tragedy of the human condition. The novel is, in part, an elegy to the fact that things, and people, fall apart.

But Housekeeping also testifies to shalom in the creation. Things (and shalom) fall apart, but they are also constantly being remade. We see it in nature (watch it happening in the coming weeks) and we see it in our lives.

Both are part of what Niebuhr called Christian realism. You won’t understand this world if you don’t see the bentness of things, especially of human beings. But you also won’t understand if you don’t see that God is constantly repairing us and the creation.