XLII. two extra biscuits

on family (again) and therefore Genesis (again)

Recently I have spent a lot of time with family, in the life-affirming, self-abnegating anarchic pocket of family. When I am home I am most convinced that time is a circle; my twelve-year-old self and I battling for dominance in the upstairs bedroom. I am also slowly making it through Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson. The story of the first family, divinely chosen. Though there are fires and floods, covenants and theophanies, Robinson insists that our exalted progenitors are just like us—inappropriate laughter, unaccountable rage, greed, jealousy, loyalty, love—our strange, shared humanity might just be the whole point. So while I have been baffled by myself several times in this last month, why can’t I just be normal when I go home, reading these accounts I guess the question is, who ever could be. There has always been a favored son, at least I don’t have to put goat skin on my hands to receive my father’s blessing.

There is something we have long connected between future goodness and present obligation, perhaps from these first patriarchs: men who obey their divine mandate even when they see no way of its fulfillment. You may be asked to toil in an unfamiliar land leading an unremarkable life, but your children’s children will number like grains of sand, a barren wife will be the mother of nations. But what of today? Robinson calls our attention to how God does not overlook the current state in which he finds these early adherents. Of poor, tender-eyed Leah she writes:

Unfavored Leah will be the mother of most of Jacob’s children. She will be essential to the emergence of a Hebrew people and the unfolding of the covenant…The Lord has compassion on an unloved wife, and great names enter history—Reuben, Simon, Levi, Judah. This is a beautiful detail, the kind of thing that is to be found in the Hebrew Scriptures. God is not so engrossed in His own will that eponyms of the twelve tribes are not first of all the pride and comfort of a sorrowful woman. The interactions of human circumstance, providence, and grace are pure mystery, but great futurity does not minimize the power of Leah’s sorrows or her hopes by exposing the workings of inevitability.

When I first read this I wondered (and wrote in the margins) “is this enough?” I was focused on the idea of the future twelve tribes and that Leah was left to console herself with only the promise that she, and more essentially her womb, had their place in the grand “unfolding of the covenant.” But rereading, I see that the future unfolding is the present blessing. The pride and joy of twelve living sons about her is both the consolation of her lifetime and the linchpin in the long arm of providence. At first I thought how much easier it would have been to be in this time with God, the actors all knowing their roles, unlike today when it feels like we are left to interpret a whispered sign in a cacophonous room. But that’s not necessarily true. Sticking with Leah as the example, she is not given direct instruction by God. She is the eldest daughter, but when a strong eligible man arrives she watches him toil for the hand of her younger sister for seven years. She, at her father’s behest, tricks that man into marriage only to remain unloved by her now husband and of course newly hated by her sister. She bears a bunch of sons, flees her home, counsels her indifferent husband against her revenge-seeking father…there’s not a lot of external validation in her story. She’s taking it day by day, rolling with the divine punches as we all are.

by David Zahl

In considering a covenant or a promise set down from on high, one has to think about predetermination; surely we (“willful, small-minded, homicidal humankind”) are not able to thwart God’s plan, so to what degree do the particulars matter? In Genesis we face the ultimate paradox: the covenant hinges upon each person and their actions and there is one singular destiny that will be fulfilled; we are free agents bound by the will of an omniscient God. As Robinson writes, “sustaining paradox is the genius of the text.” To demonstrate this, she turns to Jacob’s supplanting of Esau:

This is an instance of the fact that the covenant is not contingent upon human virtue, even human intention. It is sustained by the will of God, which is so strong and steadfast that it can even allow space within providence for people to be who they are, for humanity to be what it is.

This struck me as a tricky little bit of reasoning. On first read I thought this could go one of two ways. 1) Nothing we do matters, God’s will be done. 2) Everything we do matters but only in a Greek tragedy sort of way where our actions in avoiding a predetermined end actually set said end in motion, which kind of brings it back to 1. Then I thought about a sneaky third option that is used all the time in exceptionally good works of fiction: inevitability. The inevitable, just a shade different than the predetermined, both relies on the particulars of the individual and fails if the hand of the author is felt. The author should end where the story begins: it is only that they have dropped these people in this situation just so and then let them run their course. When done well, we don’t notice the trick—a satisfying end is the product of the creation not the creator—but then I look at an author who has, in my opinion, struggled in this area and I can see it more clearly.

In her latest book Intermezzo (dropping Sept. 24) Sally Rooney achieves what I feel she has been tinkering with in her previous three novels. Rooney seems to want to transmit the acutely painful experience of small personal tragedy—of course these people having this kind of sex can’t bear to look at each other and admit their feelings—the problem I kept running into was that I could see her little Rooney hand turning the heads of her characters away from each other like dolls. Why wouldn’t these two attractive, educated white people just say they like each other? Why is this painfully thin and delicate, and by all accounts smart, beautiful, reasonably well-off woman trying to ruin her own life? I couldn’t understand. This is not to say that women like this don’t exist (see: Lily Bart) but I could always see too much of Rooney’s endgame. I imagined her tapping her chin and saying, “what if I make her stare blankly at the wall instead of answering an innocuous question.” Whereas in her latest book I feel like she finally captured what she’s always been trying to do: craft the inevitable.

On Thursday evening, Ivan is waiting for his brother in a dimly lit restaurant. Elsewhere he can see rich people eating expensive meals, and soon his brother will arrive, another rich person basically, and they will eat a meal together also. Why not?

This sets the scene for an explosive (as many Rooney moments are wont to be just when we think we are on the road to redemption) dinner between the two main characters, brothers who look more alike than either of them think they do. As I read, I physically cringed back from the book mentally chanting nonononono because I knew these boys. If you asked me if I knew what was going to happen I would say no, but at the same time it felt as if I could lip read along with the dialogue. All of the tenderness and violence of the scene was exactly how it had to be. It is my favorite feeling when reading; it’s like revelation: past, present, and future somehow collide and expand inside one point.

Perhaps the distinction between predetermined and inevitable is just a difference of feeling. The predetermined feels fixed in the future—whatever twists and turns we’re taking in the present don’t matter because of where we are going. The inevitable feels like the shock of the present—the dominos were always going to fall this way but we only realize it as they tumble. One begets apathy, the other wonder. Back to Robinson, the predetermined marches the inevitable unfolds.

for contrast: a scene from a family no one could have predicted, both more complicated and more rewarding

It is easier, of course, to see the interplay between obligation, predestination, and authorship in a text—be it novel or sacred—because they are created with a story in mind. But when we look back in life we also craft a narrative, anything can be coincidence or divine intervention. In my favorite song from DAMN, Kendrick Lamar tells the story of his father. In the last verse, before the entire album gets played backwards, he says:

Reverse the manifest and good karma, and I’ll tell you why
You take two strangers and put em in random predicaments
Give em a soul so they can make their own choices and live with it
20 years later, them same strangers, you make em meet again
Inside recording studios where they reapin their benefits
Then you start reminding them about that chicken incident
Whoever thought the greatest rapper would be from coincidence?
Because if Anthony killed Ducky, Top Dawg could be servin life
While I grew up without a father and die in a gun fight

When I think of myself at home with the flashes of feelings so otherwise alien to my life, I think of the setting—my pale blue room with all the trappings of childhood from ages 0-13: a giant CareBear, warped spines of the Twilight series, Claire’s jewelry, three American Girl Dolls, a blown up photo of me in the yellow dress I wore until it was indecent—and I think of who I am, a person who loves and is loved, who is paralyzed by thoughts of death, who is grateful and therefore guilty, who is trying to make something new without relinquishing anything old, and I see how things have been laid out just so such that I might have these little frustrations and elations; and somehow all of that doesn’t diminish my sense of agency which is a curse. Give em a soul so they can make their own choices and live with it. This is what I think Robinson wants to emphasize most of all. Humanity is central to the whole project of creation. God has given us souls. His will is in effect and yet every mortal action matters. “One old wandering man and wife, one child, one family, one clan, one people, one promise, one singular destiny—it is all fragile at every point. And individual lives and characters are crucial at every point.”

Obviously all of this is impossible to detangle. None of it makes me feel less annoyed at being yelled at by my grandparents from downstairs or more able to cope with the fact that one day there won’t be grandparents to annoy me. As per usual, the right book is in my hand at the right time. This summer has insisted upon the passage of time and the imminence of death, neither of which I can think about with the limitations of my own comprehension. The only option is to crawl into my twin bed, throw the sheets over my head and look for god.

No one wants to be found among the credulous. Belief itself exists in disturbing proximity to credulity, a fact that has afflicted the church with a species of tepid anguish for generations. I am proposing here that there is a hermeneutics of self-protectiveness that has disabled interpretation and that has generalized into an abandonment of metaphysics as a legitimate mode of thought…It is striking how the scale of thought has contracted with the loss of serious theology.

On that note.

xx

Mia