Marilynne Robinson, one of my favorite novelists, is also a thoughtful and articulate essayist. Last week,
The Christian Century posted a piece by her titled, "Sacred Inwardness: Why 'Secularism' Has No Meaning." What follows is a brief excerpt. If this grabs your interest, I hope you will
go to the CC website and read the entire article.
We presume to know more than we can know. In periods and places where
religious doubt is criminalized, unquestioning faith is likely to
appear universal. Where religious faith is treated as naive and
intellectually indefensible, few will confess to it. Where it truly is
naive and intellectually indefensible, those who can’t identify with it
are often treated as having actually rejected faith, and may believe
this of themselves.
So let us call this inability to know the
state of our fellow’s soul a veil dropped down between his or her sacred
inwardness and the coercive intrusions to which the religious and the
anti-religious are equally tempted. If the fate of souls is at the
center of the cosmic drama, is it difficult to imagine that it will
unfold, so to speak, in a place set apart, a holy of holies—that is, a
human consciousness? Where better might an encounter with God take
place? If God is attentive to us individually, as Jesus’ saying about
the fall of a sparrow certainly implies, then would his history with us
be the same in every case, articulable and verifiable, manifest in
behaviors that square with expectations? Would it be something we should
be ready to talk about to pollsters or journalists?
Perhaps the
real lack of faith in modern society comes down to a lack of reverence
for humankind, for those around us, about whom we might consider it
providential that we can know nothing—in these great matters that
sometimes involve feigning or concealment, that are beyond ordinary
thought and conventional experience, and that can in any case be
minutely incremental, since God really does have all the time in the
world. Perhaps it is a gross presumption to try to imagine a God’s eye
view of things, but I can only think these encounters, every one unique,
must be extraordinarily beautiful. If it is hard for us to believe that
the God who searches us and knows us also loves us, perhaps we should
learn to be better humanists.
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