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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,
283
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284 C H RIST IANI T Y AND L ITERAT U RE
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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TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING OF GLORY
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
285
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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286 CH RISTIANITY AND LITERATURE
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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TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING OF GLORY 287
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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288 CHRISTIANITY AND L ITERATURE
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
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TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING OF GLORY 289
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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290 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE
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:
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TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING OF GLORY
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)
291
"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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292 CHR ISTIANITY AND LITERATURE
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)
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TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING OF GLORY 293
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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294 CH RISTIANITY AND LITERATURE
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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TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING O F GLORY 295
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)
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296 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE
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:
-
TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING OF GLORY
"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)
297
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)
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298 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE
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
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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.
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300 CHRISTIANITY AND L ITE RATURE
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