Article
Advent
Creed
Gaza
8 min read

The bleak midwinter: why tears could be the best thing for us this season

In a world of devastation, you can share honest feelings of hopelessness - yet not be overcome.
In front of a collapsed building, a rescuer carries a new born baby by the arms.
The rescue of Afraa Abu Hadiya, Syria, February 2023.

On February 6th 2023, a heavily pregnant Afraa Abu Hadiya, along with her husband and their four children, was awakened in the dark, early hours of the morning by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake violently shaking their apartment building in Syria. Afraa and her husband gathered their children and made for the building’s exit.  However, just as they were nearing the door, the building collapsed upon them, crushing the entire family.  Afraa, however, seems to have remained conscious for some hours because she did the unthinkable and delivered a baby girl while trapped beneath the rubble.  Then, tragically, she died and her baby was left alone buried beneath a building in the middle of winter. 

This year we have read too many such stories.  In places such as Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, and most recently, Israel and Gaza, thousands of women, men, and children have suffered and died and grieved as a result of natural disasters and armed conflict.     

For those of us who live in relative safety, it is difficult even to begin to comprehend such tragedies.  Yet despite our advantages, many of us are struggling in our own ways. According to the CDC, between 25 and 30 per cent of adults in the US are currently experiencing symptoms of anxiety and/or depression.  And it is no secret that mental distress levels have been steadily climbing for years in the UK as well, especially amongst youth

It can make the joyful, merry, jolly, happy, cheerful, peaceful Christmas spirit encouraged at this time of year strike a discordant note with the actual state of our minds and hearts. All is not well inside many of us, but we sense that Eeyore is an awkward personality to bring into a room, so we tend to conceal the parts of ourselves that are anxious and hurting.   I confess I’ve become pretty adept at keeping parts of myself out of sight. 

I didn’t say that sometimes I feel like everything beautiful and good is always, sooner or later cornered, caught, and hauled away by the destructive forces in the world.

I met up with a couple of friends recently.  We talked about our children and their school and our plans for Christmas.  I said we were going to keep Christmas simple this year.  What I didn’t say was that we’ve been keeping Christmas “simple” for several years now.  I didn’t say that, a few years after my brother died, my parents and my siblings and I agreed that we would no longer see each other at Christmas because the hole my brother left is too acutely obvious when the rest of us are together.  I didn’t say that we don’t keep our Christmas tree up for long because the crystal star we hang near the top is in memory of our son who never saw his first Christmas, and while I love to make him a part of the holiday in this way, I also can’t live with the visual reminder of that pain for long.  I didn’t say that although we make an effort to give our children a happy Christmas, my husband and I are just trying to make it through to the other side of the holidays because we’ve twice in recent years painfully and unexpectedly lost our household income right before Christmas and the season now triggers within us the fear and confusion and hurt of those Christmases.   I didn’t say that sometimes I feel like everything beautiful and good is always, sooner or later cornered, caught, and hauled away by the destructive forces in the world. I just told my friends that we were going to keep Christmas simple.  Maybe you have your own lines you trot out on such occasions. 

If you do, the season of Advent is a welcoming space for such as us.  Advent is observed during the four weeks leading up to Christmas and marks the beginning of the Christian church year.  Traditionally, it is a time when Christians remember how their spiritual ancestors, the ancient nation of Israel, spent roughly 600 years being conquered and enslaved successively by Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and then Rome.  The God of Israel had, however, promised that he would, one day, send them a deliverer, a “messiah”, to rescue them from their bondage.  And so, the Israelite people, in their suffering, waited and looked and prayed for the coming of their deliverer.    

Christians believe that Jesus, whose birth is celebrated at Christmas, was that messiah, and that (spoiler warning) he ended up delivering not only Israel, but the whole world in a very different way than anyone was expecting.  (But that’s the story of Easter, and we’re not there yet.) During Advent, Christians remember the centuries of Israel’s powerless waiting to be rescued, and how, true to his word, God sent them a messiah.

Choosing this hope sometimes feels naïve and even dangerous. I want to have hope, to hold it like a banner against the forces of destruction and pain whirling about in the air. 

However, Advent is not just for looking back.  It is also a space for acknowledging all the myriad ways in which darkness still rules over us today.  How we still suffer and hurt and die.  How we inflict these things on each other.  How it seems like, no matter how we try to make the world better, it’s still always in a tragic mess.  And then, while we’re acknowledging all of that and feeling its great weight, Advent asks us to do something that feels preposterous at times: to believe the promise Jesus made that he will, one day, banish darkness from the earth and make it completely and irreversibly whole and new.  In short, we’re asked to continue to wait hopefully for light to break while we live in the darkness.   

Choosing this hope sometimes feels naïve and even dangerous. I want to have hope, to hold it like a banner against the forces of destruction and pain whirling about in the air.  But, in the face of the anguish of Israel and Gaza, and the wounds I’ve experienced in my own life, do I dare live as if everything will come right in the end?  I would like to, but when hope ends in disappointment it wounds deeply.  I’m not always sure I can afford to risk hope.

If you still weep and mourn for what is wrong in the world, however powerless and wounded you may feel, you are not yet overcome. 

Advent urges me never to stop calling for help, but if calling for help isn’t exactly the same thing as summoning hope, it’s perilously close.  Is it possible to call for help if I don’t believe, if I am afraid to let myself believe any help will arrive?   

Well, apparently it is.  I learned this from Afraa’s tiny daughter buried in rubble.   

After the earthquake, relatives and friends rushed to the ruins of the collapsed apartment building in order to try to rescue those who had been inside.  As they dug through the debris, one of them reported hearing “a voice” from beneath the rubble.  The rescuers followed the sound and eventually uncovered the baby, still attached to her mother by the umbilical cord.  She was pulled from the wreckage of her house and family, and sped to hospital where she miraculously made a recovery and was adopted by her aunt and uncle who gave her her mother’s name.    

She was rescued because someone heard her voice.  The journalist does not specify what kind of noise she was making, but given that she was injured, suffering from hypothermia, and barely breathing it seems it must have been weak crying or whimpering.  And considering that she was surrounded by her dead mother, father, and four siblings, and that the entirety of her short life outside her mother’s body had consisted of the noise, terror, chaos and pain of the building falling upon her, it seems impossible that she was hopefully and consciously calling for help. How could she imagine what help might be?  Her mother had not even had the chance to hold her in her arms. What could she know of a tender face, gentle hands, warm blankets, nourishment in her belly, soft fabric against her skin, the healing of wounds?  She was not waiting or hoping for any of these.  She did not even know they existed.  She was simply weeping for the terror and pain and loneliness of her little life.  But the weeping was enough to save her.    

As I consider tears, it seems to me that they can, in themselves, be reason for hope.  The person who weeps has accepted neither that things are the way they should be (as do those who cooperate with or advance the destructive forces in the world), nor that things are the way they must be (as do those who, however understandably, give up and surrender themselves to being destroyed).  If you still weep and mourn for what is wrong in the world, however powerless and wounded you may feel, you are not yet overcome.  In fact, unless we grasp how grievous our wounds are, how can we begin to seek out the right physician?  How will we choose to make the changes within our power to make?  A world that is lamenting its own brokenness, as Advent encourages it to do, seems to me to be a world for which there is yet hope.    

I have never experienced the trauma of a building collapsing upon me, but I’ve spent plenty of time trapped beneath the twin wreckages of a life I once had and the one I was hoping to build.  Maybe you’re buried in rubble too.  Maybe you’ve survived an earthquake and its aftershocks, but you’re not sure you’re glad you have because you’re bleeding and crushed and in the dark and you can’t imagine how you will rebuild and survive in such a world even if you do eventually emerge.  Maybe you’re not even sure you want to be rescued because it’s all, all broken now – your home, your family, your bones.   

This Advent I am trying to gather the strength to call for help for myself and for the world although my heart and my faith are bruised.  Maybe you will call too.  But if we are too afraid and confused and wounded to do even that, then let us weep, friend, together in this darkness.  For although this is a world in which much breaks and dies, it is also one in which rescue has been known to arrive unlooked and unhoped for.  And if the memory and the promise of Advent hold any truth, sometimes the hand outstretched unexpectedly to deliver turns out to be, beyond all imagining, the hand of God. 

Interview
Belief
Books
Creed
15 min read

Marilynne Robinson: “an ordinary person is as metaphysically amazing as Julius Caesar”

The self-confessed daydreamer and slacker talks with Graham Tomlin

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

An author sits and listens.

Marilynne Robinson is the author of best-selling novels including Housekeeping, the winner of the Hemingway Award, and Gilead, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. She has also written numerous non-fiction works, including her most recent book, of which the New York Times said: ‘Reading Genesis is alive with questions of kindness, community and how to express what we so often struggle to put into words’.  Rowan Williams has described Robinson as "one of the world's most compelling English-speaking novelists". 
 
This interview is an edited transcript of a Seen & Unseen Live event. 
   

Graham  
I've got a number of your books on my table here. I've got my copy of Gilead, Housekeeping. I've got Jack, all the novels. I also have a whole series of other books of essays you've written, like When I Was A Child I Read Books and The Givenness of Things - I love that title. You write a lot of different things, but you're primarily known as a novelist, and I wanted to ask how and why you became a novelist. Did you always want to write stories? Was that always part of your kind of your mind? Was it made up when you were a child growing up? Was storytelling always part of your lif
e?  

Marilynne 
You know I have very vague ideas about that. I was encouraged by teachers, and so on, to feel that I could write well. That if I made a choice I could follow up on it. I took a writing class in college, a workshop. I felt I had come to Brown [University], which is in Rhode Island, from Idaho - which is definitely not in Rhode Island! I listened to people talking about the West, basically where my ancestors had settled, and it reminded me of how differently I experienced it than the way that people talked about it. So, in a way, I wanted to create a West as I felt it as a child. Especially with the importance of women in that culture, which was very great. It gave me an opportunity to just recover the sense of the strange loveliness of a very wild place, and this richness of being there. So that was my first try at fiction. 

Talking about Gilead for a moment, which is the first novel of yours that I read and probably the one I still enjoy the enjoy the most. It's always struck me it's a kind of unlikely novel to become very well known. It's the story of an elderly pastor writing a long letter to his son. It's a book in which, in one sense, not many things happen. It's doesn't have big plot changes. It's not set against seismic events in history like a war or an earthquake, or a disaster. It's small-town America, quite local in many ways. Was it a real surprise to you that it became so popular? Why do you think people resonated with it in quite the way that they did?

You know, those are the kinds of questions that I hesitate to ask myself. I feel as though the ordinary with which I am identified is extremely rich, and it has a very important place in any life. An ordinary moment in its own way is sort of metaphysically unaccountable as the most spectacular moment at least as we perceive these things. An ordinary person is as metaphysically amazing as Julius Caesar. I mean, there's no point pretending that we can make gradations of interest, I think, among people. And, if I have one aesthetic banner that I fly, basically, that's it. That anything that is looked at closely, and with an eye to the fact that the beautiful is sort of the signature of reality, there's everything to be done there. 

There’s a sense that everything matters, even the small things are of real significance if you look at them closely enough. And that's one of the things that comes out of the book.  And rereading it recently, that focus on ordinary things came out for me. Maybe because I was aware of some close friends who died recently, the theme of death also struck me. It's a novel that is kind of anticipating death. It's about an elderly man, 76 years old, who thinks he's probably going to die soon, writing a letter to his son. Did you sense that it was a meditation on death when you were writing it?

Well, I started it simply because I had a voice in my head, and the voice in the head was saying, you know I'm going to die soon. That was the the situation of the voice that was central to the novel for me. And so it necessarily became a meditation on death, whatever death is - the cessation of life in any case. Which is a profound retrospect on things that seem trivial as we pass through them, and are amazing in retrospect, just voices and gestures, and other people. 

One of the lines that stays with me from the book is one from John Ames, the main character. He says something like: ‘I've been trying to think about heaven. But I found it quite difficult to do so. But then again, I wouldn't have been able to describe this world if I hadn't spent the last 70 years walking around on it’. Has writing the book helped you think about death in a different kind of way? As we get older, I suppose it becomes more part of not our experience, but of our anticipation. Do you find you think about these things more?

I think that one of the things that's wonderful about writing novels or poetry is that it makes coherence, it puts things in relation to each other. It lets you explore your mind and understand what you read and what you are attracted to, and all the rest. I think that just the fact of writing has sort of transformed my ideas of both life and death. The need to make them, as it were, palpable or visual in one's own imagination. You have to make choices in terms of what is beautiful or what matters, So, yes, my sense of death is no doubt very much modified by having written that book and also my sense of being alive. 

The other book I wanted to talk about is your latest book, Reading Genesis. It a bit of a departure for you. You've mainly written novels, essays and books of cultural commentary. You suddenly find yourself writing a book about a book of the Bible. What led you to do that?  Why did you focus on Genesis rather than one of the Gospels, or the Psalms, or any other book within the Bible? 

Genesis establishes so much that becomes an assumption for the rest of the Bible. It establishes the basic metaphysical circumstance of humankind in relation to God. You find it echoed everywhere. It's so basic to the whole literature that the fact is that it is very much underread and it's been exposed to centuries of criticism that was very condescending to it, as if it were a primitive literature when, of course, ancient people were capable of extremely sophisticated thinking and perceiving. I thought that in order to clarify anything subsequent to Genesis, you had to clarify Genesis. It seemed to me as if it functioned so beautifully in terms of self-referential qualities, structure, the argument was there to be made. it's not recherché or anything. It's in the text that it is literary and that certain meanings are developed by literary methods through the course of the of the book. 

How did you find coming at it as a as a novelist? Most books I've read on Genesis have been technical commentaries by Biblical scholars who've researched the history of the times, and the texts around it. You come at it as a storyteller, as a novelist. Did that give you an advantage in telling the story of Genesis, looking at again, or a different angle than you'd find in many of the commentaries? 

I have my limitations. I looked at it, of course, in the way that was natural for me to look at it. But I felt as if it was badly treated by critics. I asked a friend of mine, a theologian, if people still used JEDP, the old 'documentary hypothesis'. He did a poll of people that he knew that wrote in the area, and one of them said any self-respecting scholar uses the documentary hypothesis. So, I thought, well, that's not me, you know. I'm not a scholar. The documentary hypothesis is very old at this point and however many ways it's been modified its impact is essentially the same. It makes the text incoherent in its most crucial parts. 

This is the hypothesis that breaks it down into different sources, and tries to identify which part of the book comes from J, or E, or D, or P? 

Yes, exactly, exactly. And they question the reality of Moses, but they believe deeply in J or D. I mean, it's kind of ridiculous, and they proceed as if they were a kind of documentary evidence that really does not exist. So, I thought the fact that scholarship has been manacled to this one theory for 150 years does not oblige me to be shackled to it also. 

If you ask the average person their view of the God of the Old Testament they might imagine a kind of vengeful, capricious, angry character who smites people because he doesn't like them. Yet your depiction of the story seems to say, actually, no it’s God who is faithful and good and patient. It's the humans in the story who are angry and vengeful and capricious. You're turning that on its head. Some people may not be convinced by that, and are still wedded to this idea, that that the God of the Old Testament is this vengeful character. How do you respond to that when you read people who depict God in that way? 

This is a very ancient thing, this making the sharp distinction between the God of the Old Testament, the God of the New Testament, giving Moses horns and all the rest of it. This is dualism, it's a violation of the assumptions of monotheism. which I think are very beautiful and important. I'm very ready to defend monotheism, but in any case, I think that if there's a punitive structure in the narratives of the Old Testament, what they are telling us is that most of the world's evil is created by human beings and there are certain points at which it becomes intolerable under almost all circumstances. The evil that is insupportable is violence against human beings. It is the tendency of human beings who are images of God to act revoltingly badly toward human beings who are images of God. If you think of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, war and famine and plague, and so on, all of these things are humanly created in the vast majority of cases, perhaps every case, and I think it's an evasion of of the fact of human moral competence to say that you know God is to blame for the violence that we do.  

And letting ourselves off the hook by doing that....

Yes, exactly.  

You make quite a contrast between what the Book of Genesis says about humanity, for example, and some of the Babylonian myths of the time, similar creation stories like the Gilgamesh epic or the Enūma Elish. You contrasted them because they seem to give a very different understanding of humanity from what you get in in Genesis. Why does the view of humanity in Genesis have much more nobility and grandeur than these other origin stories?

Well, the idea that human beings are images of God, that is utterly Biblical. There is nothing to compare with it. Human beings are made in the Babylonian myths to do groundwork basically, to spare gods having to do work that would fall to them because they lost the war among gods. A certain number of people are created. They are not named. They are no objects of any god's devotion or anything like that. Brilliant as the Babylonians were, they're not assumed to be a creation of the status of an Adam. ‘What is man, that thou art mindful of him?’ The way that Genesis sets up, so that the beginning is this wonderful explosion of being, and at the end is this human being that reflects it all basically, that is the adequate second presence in this amazing moment. And you find that picked up in the Gospel of John.  That's just very beautiful, and I know of nothing that is comparable to it in any way. Certainly not myths that were current in antiquity. Certainly not in our very declined anthropology since then. 

Genesis probably is one of the most influential books in the whole of Western intellectual history, given that it's given us a whole language for thinking about the way the world is, the way we are, who God is, how we relate to one another as human beings, how human society works. Would you pick out other themes or ideas apart from that anthropology, that you think were revolutionary in the Book of Genesis?  

One of the things that is amazing about it is that the people upon whom God's attention rests are very ordinary people. Abraham is not a king, or a magnate, or anything like that. He's just a wandering herdsman. The idea that the whole of history and meaning can rest on the person of someone who would have seemed quite unexceptional to the people around him as he lived. That means any of us. That's a way of re-understanding the fact that the Adamic figure at the beginning of Genesis is simply humankind. You know the grandeur and the the ordinariness are simultaneous.   

The significance of each individual as a significant moral actor within the world.  

Yes, exactly. 

So, if Abraham has had such a role, then you and I can. And everyone listening to this or reading this conversation can do the same. 

And assume that we do it. One of the things that I think is very clear historically is that people are morally competent, for one thing, and then deeply consequential. When you have an election and you make a very appalling choice, 51% of the individuals in the United States made that choice. They truly did. We can't hide behind the idea that what we do does not matter, that we're minor figures, and so on, that God knows what the ultimate consequences of these kinds of things might be. :  

In writing the book, did you find yourself reflecting on the kind of current situation in America and what was going on in it? You were writing it before the recent election, but did it have any reflections for you on where your nation is right now? 

Well, it necessarily has reflections on history in general, because it is about what human beings are, and how things happen among them. I would not have anticipated anything of our present circumstance, even a re-election of Trump. This is horrifying, astonishing.  

I want to ask one more question. I was reading recently one of your essays, and I think it started with the line ‘I reached the point in my life when I can see what has mattered’. I wondered if you wanted to reflect back on your life as a as a novelist, as a writer, as a thinker, as a Christian? What do you find has mattered more as time has gone on, and what has mattered less? What are the things that really do matter for you now, as you look back and you see what has mattered?  

I have found out how important teaching was to me. No doubt you know things become radiant in memory. I think I enjoyed the interaction of my life, and my mind, and my literary interest in that particular moment more than I've ever done in any other circumstance. One of the most important things to me was my first experience writing Housekeeping when I was in isolation more or less. Trying to remember things that had happened two decades earlier, experiences I had had, and finding out in those circumstances that I remembered them, that I knew what kind of flower bloomed, in what place, at what time, that my memory was much more active and alert than I think my conscious attention was. I found out that from that that I had lived a much broader life, a much more intense life than I realised. I would never have known that if I hadn't made the kind of demand on myself that writing that book made, writing any book makes really, but fiction especially, because you're trying to conjure a sense of reality. Even from the point of view of when I talk to my students, I say, don't imagine that you know your mind. It is much larger. There's it's almost another life beside your life. The finding that out was just incredibly important to me, not just because it helps me write, but also to find out something about what I am as a human being.  

Linking that to the previous point about the the significance of each individual as a moral actor, it also maybe says something about that each of us lives much richer lives than we think we do. 

Absolutely. 

Maybe memory brings those things to the surface in a way that that we don't often recognize?

Exactly, and that we don't normally access. I was in a kind of an extreme situation, trying to remember Idaho while I was living in France - kind of an eccentric project. It's finding the place at which the past is evoked in the mind. Very powerful.

I'm noticing the things that otherwise you might not see which is, again back to the point about the ordinary, the ordinary being significant.  

Yes. 

Are there things that seemed very important to you when you were younger, that now don't seem quite so important? 

You know I think of myself as a sort of a slacker. I think I have friends who could affirm my view of things as a slacker. I've always enjoyed just simply being in my own head. To the extent that it's a distraction for me. I know people who have lives like mine, who are much more productive than I am. Where did my time go? Well, daydreaming, thinking, watching, just being in my head. I was told when I was a student when I was in high school. that I should give myself a mind that I wanted to live in because I would live in it for the rest of my life, and I did that, and I have done that. And you know it's been a great pleasure, finally. Maybe I should have done more! 

Well, the the daydreaming has been a very beneficial thing for the rest of us who've been able to read some of the product of that daydreaming. So, we're very grateful, Marilynne.  Thank you.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free. 
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?
 
Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief