I told you that I had an opportunity to hear Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer-prize winning author of Gilead, speak here in Houston at a conference on Christians and the arts sponsored by Houston Bapist University. Last Thursday I made the trek to HBU and spent the day there. It was an enlightening experience.
My first impression of the conference, called Credo, was that it was under-attended. I had the obviously mistaken idea that a Pulitzer-prize winning author would bring out the literati from their hiding places to fill the joint to capacity. Ms. Robinson first spoke at the Thursday morning meeting that the university calls “convocation.” There were lots of students and professors there, maybe a couple of hundred, but I got the distinct impression that most of them were there because they get “points” for attending sessions of this sort. Not that the students were impolite or unattentive, but I got this impression because the reading that Ms. Robinson gave at noon was much more poorly attended, less than fifty people total. It was a sad commentary on the priorities of the citizens of my fair city, but nice for me. I was able to sit front and center, get my copy of Gilead autographed by the author, and I could have asked her questions if I could have thought of anything intelligent to ask. If I had known the opportunity would be there, I would have come prepared.
Anyway her first speech, which she read, was called On Reverence. Maybe she doesn’t think any faster than I do since she read the speech, but she certainly does think deeply. I would like to read the address she gave because to be completely honest, I was having trouble following her at times. It was dense, not deliberately opaque or esoteric, just full of stuff that made wish she would slow down and let me catch up. I wrote down a few quaotations, which was a mistake because when I take notes I miss whatever is being said while I’m writing. These are loosely transcribed, maybe not her exact words:
“There is somethng about certainty that renders Christianity unchristian. Therefore I have cultivated a certain uncertainty. We inhabit a reality far greater than our certainties.”
“Both the doctrine of predestination and the doctrine of free will have a tendency to make God into a tyrant.” She said that she tends to come down, lightly, on the side of predestination since leaving things in God’s hands is a more comforting and merciful option than believing that ultimate reality depends on human decisions.
“I don’t know what to make of hell, but certainly it means that our human acts and choices have an eternal significance.” Again Ms. Robinson recognizes the tension that exists between God’s sovereignty and human freedom and chooses, for the most part, to live inside that tension.
“As a Christian I read about quantum physics or string theory assuming that I am learning about God’s creation.
“It a daily miracle that we are privileged to live among these beings whom God loves.”
She doesn’t like Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, but I’m afraid I didn’t follow the reasoning that caused her to call it “a bad little book.” I did ask her, as she was signing my book, if she was working on another novel, and she said that she was.
The reading she gave at noon was a passage from Gilead that told about the main character’s, John Ames’s, memory of how he and his father made a long trip on foot to visit the gravesite of his grandfather in Kansas. She read beautifully, and I followed along in my copy of the book. Then, she answered some questions from the audience and told us, among other things, that she doesn’t revise her work; she simply drops and adds things as she writes. She said that she began writing Gilead with a picture in her mind of an old man in a rocking chair who was telling a young boy about his life. She said before that she had assumed that her next book after Housekeeping would be told from a woman’s point of view, but after she saw that picture in her mind she began writing about that elderly man. She mentioned the difficulty of writing a book while knowing that your narrator was going to die at the end of the story. Who would narrate the ending?
I really enjoyed hearing Ms. Robinson speak. Again, I wish I had a transcript of her talk. Nevertheless, I recommend you be one of the few if you ever have the opportunity to hear her.
Another account of the first day of the Credo conference from Jenni at the blog Dreams of Genevieve.
