Update: a reader credited the “reservoir of goodness” phrase to Robinson’s “Grace” speech, but another reader reports that she has transcribed the speech and can’t find it. I will keep hunting for the original as time permits.–PC
As almost anyone reading this site will know by now, the President referenced Marilynne Robinson’s gorgeous “Grace” speech this past weekend in his eulogy for Sen. Clementa Pinckney, a well-loved AME pastor and public servant who was murdered, along with eight others, by a white supremacist terrorist. (Related: Someone keeps setting black churches on fire.) Obama’s citation of our favorite writer was noted by many journalists, though a distressing number of said journalists can’t spell “Marilynne.” (Update: Who am I to judge? Can’t find the original of a simple quote.) A detailed reflection can be found here, and Eugene Wei has written a lovely blog post tying together Obama’s eulogy, Robinson’s reflections on grace, and last weekend’s historic Supreme Court victory for gay marriage. Robinson’s speech on grace, meanwhile, is here.
For my money, the finest response to the President’s use of the novelist’s words come from reader Scott Melamed, who ties both in with Gilead:
The most memorable moment of [Robinson’s] talk, to me at least, is one in which she presents a parable of the moon. “Primordial water mantled a young planet. This is true, though particulars are lacking. The sun that had made the planet was younger than the water it shown on, also true. In its new light, the seas could slide and slap and shine, then somehow, again no particulars, a moon appears, cool and demure, but with pull enough to countervail gravity and lift the sea above the constraints of its own vastnesses.” So the moon relieves the water enough of itself to allow it some rise. And the implication is that this alleviation of Earth’s own gravity, by that moon that encircles us, made life possible. And not mere life, but that life represented in people who rise about their own limitedness by the pull of the relief of this greater force, some other gravity.
The President’s words resonate with this, especially in one of his most moving moments, where he speaks of how the alleged killer could not see through his hatred that he was in fact an instrument of God. At 15:50 or so: “Oh, but God works in mysterious ways… [the killer] didn’t know he was being used by God. Blinded by hatred, the alleged killer could not see the grace surrounding Reverend Pinckney and that bible study group. The light of love that shone as they opened the church doors and invited a stranger to join in their prayer circle.”
This morning, then, it struck me that this use of the moon is present in one of Gilead’s most beautiful passages, just under two pages, and in fact one in which Ames, perhaps more vividly than anywhere, describes what he finds to be the pleasures and meaning of the ministry, something he struggles to describe exactly and has “never before attempted to put into words."
Ames seems to set out to describe to the boy his "own dark time, the time of my loneliness” but he somehow slips quickly into baseball, how he’d love to listen to the games, to imagine the players moving around the bases, “planetary motion.” This recalls to him what it’s been like to be there for his congregation, and how he thinks of his conversations with them in a similar way. I have to quote at length here, since to me it’s one of the most beautiful moments in all of her writing, and its also relevant to Rev. Pinckney, South Carolina, Obama, and grace:
“When people come to speak to me,” he begins, “whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the ‘I’ whose predicate can be 'love’ or 'fear’ or "want,” and whose object can be 'someone’ or 'nothing’ and it won’t really matter, because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around 'I’ like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else… To see this aspect of life is a privilege of the ministry which is seldom mentioned.” Emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else. To Obama, the alleged killer could not see the light of love shining in that prayer circle.
Ames concludes the passage with an image of the moon. He recalls how, listening to baseball once, he saw the moon out his window, and thought how, in fact, it does not just orbit the earth, but moves in a spiral, following the planet as it orbits the sun. This mysterious moment, whose meaning Ames himself may not be able to (or be interested in) articulating, always struck me as moving. And now, by the light of South Carolina, by the light of Pinckney and the President’s words on him, and by Robinson’s description of the moon as the reliever of earth from itself, letting life rise above its own weight, we might understand it, and ourselves otherwise, a little more clearly. –Scott Melamed, scott.melamed@gmail.com
