Reading Marilynne Robinson

Reading Marilynne Robinson’s book of essays When I Was a Child I Read Books, I’m met by someone who is thinking deeply about society and attempting to bridge the chasm between society/science/materialism and faith.  She is not pushing ideologies that must be believed, but is rather creating pathways into conversation, raising questions that people aren’t asking, and populating a renewed community.Here are some tidbits of her writing. Enjoy.

• We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small. (7)

• There is at present a dearth of humane imagination for the integrity and mystery of other lives. (45)

• I think of the acts of comfort offered and received within a household as precisely sacramental. (93)

• In these two narratives (Christmas, Easter) narrative fractures the continuity of history. . . . At the same time they have created a profound continuity. (127)

• There is . . . the urge, driven by righteousness and indignation, to conform reality to theory. (152)

• . . . we should cease and desist from reductionist, in effect invidious, characterizations of humankind. (158)

• . . . moment by moment, every one of us experiences, along with the whole of the cosmos this great mystery of being, this great unfolding of ineluctable, irreversible time. (185)