Settled Things Strange

I experience religious dread whenever I find myself thinking that I know the limits of God’s grace, since I am utterly certain it exceeds any imagination a human being might have of it. God does, after all, so love the world.

— Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books

This is fantastic.

Benjamin Bagby performs Beowulf in the original Old English.

Great theology is always a kind of giant and intricate poetry, like epic or saga. It is written for those who know the tale already, the urgent messages and the dying words, and who attend to its retelling with a special alertness, because the story has a claim on them and they on it. Theology is also close to the spoken voice. It evokes sermon, sacrament, and liturgy, and of course, Scripture itself, with all its echoes of song and legend and prayer. It earns its authority by winning assent and recognition, in the manner of poetry but with the difference that the assent seems to be to ultimate truth, however oblique or fragmentary the suggestion of it. Theology is written for the small community of those who would think of reading it.

— Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam, page 117

INTERVIEWER: Do you think of yourself as a religious writer?

MARILYNNE ROBINSON: I don’t like categories like religious and not religious. As soon as religion draws a line around itself it becomes falsified. It seems to me that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively probably satisfies every definition of religious whether a writer intends it to be religious or not.

— Paris Review interview

The flourishing of these ideas, of neo-Darwinism in general, would not be possible except in the absence of vigorous and critical study of the humanities. Its “proofs” are proof of nothing except the failure of education, in the schools and also in the churches. If I were inclined to use the metaphors of contagion they so often employ, I would say our immunity to nonsense has been killed out, the flora of historical and cultural knowledge that education should sustain in us, and this has opened opportunity for notions that could not otherwise take hold. But I prefer a loftier metaphor, better suited to its subject. The meteoric passage of humankind through cosmic history has left a brilliant trail. Call it history, call it culture. We came from somewhere and we are tending somewhere, and the spectacle is glorious and portentous. The study of our trajectory would yield insight into human nature, and into the nature of being itself.

— Marilynne Robinson,When I Was a Child I Read Books

Maimondes’s comments about time are typical of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance thought in that they make of every life a great drama. The old pagan gods of the Mediterranean and the ancient Near East were fickle and violent, easy to offend and hard to placate, but they weren’t dull. And the fact that people attempted interaction with them means they thought of themselves in relation to their own creators and the creators of the universe. The exclusion of a religious understanding of being had been simultaneous with a radical narrowing of the field of reality that we think of as pertaining to us. This seems on its face not to have been inevitable. We are right were we have always been, in time, in the cosmos, experiencing mind, which may well be an especially subtle and fluent quantum phenomenon. Our sense of what is at stake in any individual life has contracted as well, another consequence that seems less than inevitable. We have not escaped, nor have we in any sense diminished, the mystery of our existence. We have only rejected any language that would seem to acknowledge it.

— Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books

Unsaid

So much of what we live goes on inside–-
The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
Of unacknowledged love are no less real
For having passed unsaid. What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.

—Dana Gioia

I pray that you consider long and hard what you have heard today. If you are considering a life in the arts, have you truly received such a summons? If not, do not pursue it. Flee. Find a safe profession where you can live a safe, normal life. Do not take magic upon yourself that is not meant for you. If, on the other hand, you have received a summons, a call, to the arts, well then: prepare to be burned, to be scarred. You will not live a normal, safe life. Yours will be an existence of triumph and heartache, and often you will not be able to tell them apart. Create, create with all your heart, create as if there is no tomorrow. For, as you now know, there is no tomorrow for one called to the vocation of art. There is only today.

— Peter Van Lorn, “Flying Through the Flame of Creativity”

Those are the golden sessions… . when our slippers are on, our feet spread out towards the blaze and our drinks at our elbows; when the whole world, and something beyond the world, opens itself to our minds as we talk; and no one has any claim on or any responsibility for another, but all are freemen and equals as if we had first met an hour ago, while at the same time an Affection mellowed by the years enfolds us. Life—natural life—has no better gift to give. Who could have deserved it?

— C.S. Lewis, from “Friendship,” The Four Loves

And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days…

— James Russell Lowell, from “The Vision of Sir Launfal”