Excerpted Inspirations #153Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz KufsNov 11, 20240 min readUpdated: Feb 10
![[David Marchese interviews novelist Marilynne Robinson.] Has what you get out of church changed as you’ve gotten older? People often comment that a lot of older people are in congregations, and I think it’s just partly a fact that the mysteries of existence compound themselves. You always have another question. You mean you’re not getting closer to answers?! [Laughs.] No. That’s what I’m banking on! No, my answer is that questions are beautiful. You just think more about life, the brevity of it, the complexity of it, the incredible richness that enters into it accidentally or intentionally. There’s something about youth that is wonderful: You really do think you’re immortal. Then you find out that there is a shelf life. The date approaches. That shapes your conception of life. It gives it a dramatic arc that is hard to anticipate so long as your body is not telling you that this is true. [...] You referred to moral deficits in the country. At the same time, in our day-to-day lives, we encounter so much goodness. Why does that seem absent from how we think about our social life together? That’s a very profound question. I worry about the country at the same time that I am aware, day to day, of how much I have benefited from kindness and honesty and consideration. You so rarely have a really bad experience, and you hope other people have a good experience of you, but some idea has swept the country that to say people are good is naïve. It’s as if we’re all supposed to be cynical, even though, as you say, many of us have excellent grounds not to be cynical at all. It’s a mannerism; it’s a pose. It’s perhaps more characteristic of privileged people than of people who really might wonder about justice and mercy. It’s terrible to say that a great civilization could collapse from the force of a fad, but sometimes I feel as if that’s what’s happening. That cynicism is not totally unfounded. The distinction has to be made between skepticism and cynicism. Cynicism is a dead end. Skepticism is always justified. [...] Are there still theological questions that you have? Or maybe more simply, what doubt do you have? My theological question is how to reconcile the cruelty of the world with the idea of God’s omnipotence, and I simply assume that’s something I won’t understand in this life. Hearing you say that – I’m embarrassing myself, but it’s going to compel a confession from me. One real motivation for why I wanted to talk to you is there are experiences of transcendence that you write about in your books that connect people to God or the divine. I feel as if I have transcendent experiences: being on my train ride into Midtown Manhattan and seeing an egret in the water of industrial New Jersey; listening to a song and being blown away that people can create that beauty; experiencing the goodness of my family – any number of things. And I was raised with some religious instruction: I had a bar mitzvah; half of my family is Catholic. But for whatever reason, my heart cannot osmosize religious feeling. What am I missing? Maybe nothing. Perhaps when you say the word “God” for yourself, the conception that you have is something that’s foreign to your own higher experience. So trust your experience. There’s a holiness in the fact that people are living in the world in a way that makes them feel that the world is addressed to them, and I think that’s much closer to the divine, much closer to religion, than the idea of trying to bring the idea of God, which has been abused historically, into the frame that your expectations may create for that figure. “Talk” feature by David Marchese and Marilynne Robinson, New York Times Magazine, 2/25/24, pp. 12- 13](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/6feacf_0a866347095449b2ba36b9cfe037f4d7~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_2234,al_c,q_90,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/6feacf_0a866347095449b2ba36b9cfe037f4d7~mv2.jpg)
Just wanted to say that the Excerpted Inspiration #153 was just what I needed to see this week. ANd the art work fit it perfectly. Thank you for giving me a moment of needed reflection and hope this week.