Embracing the Tensions

Marilynne Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead, contends our society has embraced a collective fiction: "that we are ill despite our apparent health, vulnerable despite our apparent safety. We are contemptuous of transient well-being, as if there were any other kind." Unless our experience of good is permanent, we do not appreciate it. "When a good man or woman stumbles, we say, 'I knew it all along,' and when a bad one has a gracious moment, we sneer at the hypocrisy."

In other words, we do not live well with the tensions inherent to human existence. We do not appreciate the fact that we experience simultaneously both faith and doubt, both hope and despair, both what is seen and what is not seen. Robinson suggests we should not only accept such tensions, but enjoy them.

To borrow a question from Jean Genet, what would happen if someone started laughing? What if the next demographically marketed grievance or the next convenience-packaged dread, or the next urgent panacea for the sweet, odd haplessness of the body started a wave of laughter that swept over the continent? What if we understood our vulnerabilities to mean we are human, and so are our friends and our enemies, and so are our cities and books and gardens, our inspirations, our errors. We weep human tears, like Hamlet, like Hecuba. If the universe is only all we have so far seen, we are its great marvel. . . . This being human--people have loved it through plague and famine and siege. And Dante, who knew the world about suffering, had a place in hell for people who were grave when they might have rejoiced.

(Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam)