Over the weekend I finished Lila, the third book of four set in Gilead, the first being of the same name, by Marilynne Robinson. Much like it, this book was too deep for me but I loved it still. Lila, of the title, is the wife of the much older pastor we were introduced to in Gilead.
Lila, set in the 20s, begins with the backstory of who she was, how she lived and why she came to be in the small town. Lila's life, having been one of struggle and little money, did, though, have some love and care, by the woman who raised her and the family who, not really family, cared for her as they could.
These passages - of which there were many to choose and perhaps with no understanding to anyone but me since I read the book - come from the end. Lila is trying to make sense of love and heaven in relation to the unbaptized, guilty and forsaken people of this world. What a task!
This no longer believer would love to think Lila (through Robinson) knows more than most.* It is a world of love and care and joy, even as there is heartache, hard times and loss.
It could be our world too; we need to see the moment while having the courage to see past the worst to the possible.
* Doing a quick search on Robinson, thinking I remembered her as religious, I came across an article from New Yorker, 2012, by Mark O'Connell, "The First Church of Marilynne Robinson." Reading through I found my feelings exactly. Robinson "makes an atheist reader like myself capable of identifying with the sense of a fallen world that is filled with pain and sadness but also suffused with divine grace. Robinson is a Calvinist, but her spiritual sensibility is richly inclusive and non-dogmatic. There’s little talk about sin or damnation in her writing, but a lot about forgiveness and tolerance and kindness. Hers is the sort of Christianity, I suppose, that Christ could probably get behind."
