Hi All,
I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving and have many fun things to look forward to over the next month. One of my favorite traditions is spending a day in Princeton between Christmas and New Year’s with my boys. One of our annual stops is Labyrinth Books on Nassau Street. Almost two years ago, while browsing about, I picked up Reading Genesis[1] by Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and essayist, Marilynne Robinson (1943-). Knowing her reputation as a person of faith, I was eager to read her lifelong reflections on such a seminal book. Also, every time I pick it up, I’m inspired as she completed it when she was 80!
Reading Genesis is one of those books you have to savor, reading a bit here and there, and then letting it stew. Having finally finished it this week, I wanted to share some of my favorite highlights, as well as a few bonus insights from one of her interviews:
“I know of no other literature except certain late plays of Shakespeare that elevates grace as this book does.” (228)
“We are disastrously erring and rebellious, and irreducibly sacred. And God is mindful of us.” (64-65)
“The book of Genesis is framed by two stories of remarkable forgiveness, of Cain by the Lord, and of his ten brothers by Joseph. Cain was the father of saintly Enoch and the ancestor of Noah., from whom all humankind is descended. Nothing in Scripture suggests that human beings are interchangeable, so providence would act through the life of Cain to arrive at Noah, Cain’s crime notwithstanding. Cain’s descendants, through vengeful Lamech, also included Jubal, ‘the father of all such as handle the harp and organ.’ Considering the importance of music in the Hebrew Bible, this is no small thing. Psalm 150, the concluding hymn in the great book of worship, says ‘Praise [the LORD] with stringed instruments and organs. Praise him upon the loud symbols: Praise him upon the high-sounding cymbals.’ It would be wonderful to have been there. Jubal’s brother, Jabal, ‘was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle,’ like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Providence can be see working its way through very mingled human history, blessing it with music and drifting pastoralists and their herds, sometimes, unpredictably, transmuting evil into good. Measured revenge, justice as it is understood among mortals, is rigorously queried in Scripture, challenged in the text by a higher awareness, a knowledge of what could be lost if small earthly dramas of action and reaction foreclosed whatever might come in the fullness of time… These primordial tales tell us of the origins of the world we know: Jubal gave us musical instruments, Noah was the first vintner” (winemaker). (211-212)
“The book of Genesis begins with the emergence of Being in a burst of light and ends with the death and burial of a bitter, homesick old man. If there is any truth to modern physics, this brings us to the present moment. Disgruntled and bewildered, knowing that we derive from an inconceivably powerful and brilliant first moment, we are at a loss to find anything of it in ourselves. God loved Jacob and was loyal to him, no less for the fact that Jacob felt the days of his life, providential as they were, as deep hardship.” (220-221)
“Mercy is nearer than justice to Godliness.” (59)
“We assign worth to persons, consciously or not, and then to prestige and property and ease, all the things that compete so successfully with the claims of justice and righteousness, kindness, and respect, which would follow from a true belief that anyone we encounter is an image of God.” (197)
“Doing justice and loving mercy in practice might mean, among other things, the forgiving of debts. In the nature of things we cannot possibly pay God Himself what we owe Him. We do not deal in the same coin. Our debts must be forgiven by our Creator, by His grace.” (167)
If you’d like to learn more about Robinson, you might enjoy this written interview and/or this 45-minute video interview, and here are a few great bonus quotes from the former:
- “Theology, which for so many centuries was the epitome of thought and learning, has been forgotten, or remembered only to be looted for charms and relics and curiosities.”
- “It is only prudent to make a very high estimate of human nature, first of all in order to contain the worst impulses of human nature, and then to liberate its best impulses.”
- “Religion – like everything else in human experience that is grounded in conscience, reflection, compassion, decision, and in traditions of culture and learning and of art – is an anomaly if and when the complexity and value of the individual mind is denied.”
- Cultivating a sense of God’s presence: “Perception is at the center of Calvin’s theology… the great energy that rips galaxies apart also animates our slightest thoughts, and it is for us to struggle endlessly between centering on this vision of God in the living of our lives, or giving in to self-centeredness.”
[1] Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2024).