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Of Starhill And Gilead

  In a characteristically intelligent and searching post, Russell Arben Fox ponders parallels between The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming and Marilynne Robinson’s great novel Gilead. (And by the way, if it’s true that our library in heaven will be made up of all the books we loaned out in life but failed to have […]

 

rod&ruthieIn a characteristically intelligent and searching post, Russell Arben Fox ponders parallels between The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming and Marilynne Robinson’s great novel Gilead. (And by the way, if it’s true that our library in heaven will be made up of all the books we loaned out in life but failed to have returned, I’ll have several copies of Gilead waiting for me.)

Russell focuses on a point I made in a recent blog posting here, saying that when analyzing whether or not one has lived a life of fidelity, one has to judge that not only by whether one has been faithful to the right things, but whether one has been faithful to one’s own nature, rightly understood. To put it more colloquially, have you been faithful to the person God made you to be? In my own case, this was a crucial turning point in my ability to affirm my calling to be a writer, and to be able to leave this place as a younger man, having cast off — though not entirely — the massive burden of guilt I carried for having disappointed my father. Readers of my book will remember that I quit my good job in Washington, DC, to return to Louisiana after my sister had her first child, because I felt a powerful obligation and desire to live around my family. It was only in the returning that I learned that a life spent here, under the weight of my family’s expectations, would crush me. After a couple of months of intense prayer and discernment, I felt that I had to set out from this place to accomplish whatever destiny God had for me. And so I did.

Can it really be the case that some people are, by nature, constituted to be faithful to something other than those specific things (like family, community, and place) which constituted them, and which therefore arguably enabled their faithfulness in the first place? That would seem to be the implication of Dreher’s supposition–namely, that the realization of one’s telos is not limited solely to a re-embrace of one’s particular inheritance–and there are many good philosophical arguments in support of such. (For example, Charles Taylor: “We are now in an age in which…[t]he only way we can explore the order in which we are set, with an aim to defining moral sources, is through…personal resonance”–Sources of the Self, p. 512.) But what does that do to the very idea of valuing such specific things–things like St. Francisville parish [Note: He means West Feliciana Parish; St. Francisville is the county seat of West Feliciana — RD] –on their own terms, as opposed to transposing whatever it is they are and offer to some individualistic or utilitarian metric? As I wrote once before, “isn’t the entire point of embracing stability and putting down roots and learning to live within limits exactly to deny that we our entirely a product of our own preference maximization?” To be sure, insisting on the value of being faithful to one’s own resonance doesn’t mean leaping (or falling) completely into individualism–but that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t be careful, all the same.

Such care should be taken by every person attracted to communitarian and localist thought, as well as by everyone who is critical of it. To put some philosophical meat on the bones of Dreher’s comment, the idea that one’s community or place or family has some virtue to it is often premised on the belief that such forms of attachment constitute in and through ourselves an end, a purpose, a narrative for our own lives–or as Dreher put it, a “calling.”

This is a complex and delicate point. If you believe that the only bound to your trajectory through life is your own desire, then this isn’t a problem for you; there is no gravity holding you down to earth. If you believe that the bound to your trajectory is defined wholly by external duties, then this isn’t a problem either, and you are entirely earthbound. But most of us live somewhere in the middle. The question — and this is what Russell takes up in his post — has to do with how we can know we are on the right path. How much weight should we place on our family’s claim on our loyalty? On a community’s? For religious believers, how can we know whether or not our Creator has made us for something that our family and community do not discern? After all, Jesus Christ himself said in Mark Chapter 10:

“Truly I tell you,” Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first.”

A very hard saying! But one that must guide the Christian’s discernment of his or her own vocation.

I can’t possibly sum up the content of Russell’s wonderful post, so you’ll just have to read it yourself — and take special note of his comparison between the way I handle the question of leaving home, and the way Robinson’s narrator in Gilead does the same with his brother, who left for distant parts. Russell concludes:

In fact, I would suspect that, should Dreher choose this task, he could find in time that those same arguments and changes were present in Ruthie’s world as well. I wonder if there might even be a way for him to someday write his story from Ruthie’s point of view: a story of her relationship with a strange, intellectual, perhaps arrogant, yet worldly wise and accomplished older brother, and both the love and dissatisfaction she felt for him, and how those feelings, in their own unaccountable ways, changed and fit themselves into her place. A place where her students grew up and stayed, or grew up and left, and pastors came and stayed or left, and people were married and given in marriage, and the world and its traditions and all its occasions for fidelity just continued to turn.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, trying to inhabit her mind, and my father’s mind, trying to understand from inside what the world looked like to them, and why they felt so strongly that I had betrayed fundamental loyalties. I think the only way I can fully explore this is within a novel. In Little Way, I deliberately repeated variations of the phrase, “That was the way things were supposed to be” — this, to convey the conceptual and emotional framework through which my sister interpreted the world. She believed in a strong way that the world was constructed in fixed categories that would be discernible to anyone with right reason and right intentions. She could not accept anything that disrupted her vision of The Way Things Are Supposed To Be; that is how things more or less are in my family. I don’t say that as a criticism, but only to be descriptive. I tell the story in Little Way about arguing with my father as a teenager about some political question. He became so angry with me because I disagreed with him. He thought I was calling him a liar. I tried to explain that we had different opinions about the issue, but he plainly couldn’t conceive that I could, in good conscience, reject his opinion. To him, he was not offering an opinion, but the obvious truth.

This inability, or unwillingness, to accept the relativity of their judgments was a central fact of my father’s character, and my sister’s. It’s what has made them both bedrocks of constancy and moral strength. But it is also their blind spot. Contrariwise, I have a much stronger sense of the relativity of many things, but I have spent my life craving the kind of certainty that Ruthie and Paw had — that sense of fundamental harmony between themselves, their beliefs, their place, their purpose. Unable to accept the yoke of family tradition and expectation, I’ve been on a pilgrimage for a substitute to release me from the tension and anxiety of being unmoored. As Russell discerns, I want what Ruthie had, but am unable to have it. This gets back, though, to fidelity to one’s own nature. I couldn’t have stopped questioning and seeking and being curious no matter what; I was made to be that way. Ruthie was constituted to be an abider, a sticker — and part of what helped her to achieve her telos was that she believed what was particular for her was actually universal.

In short, I think that Ruthie’s standpoint was more or less pre-modern, and mine is more or less post-modern. We saw each other across a philosophical chasm. Most people I know couldn’t conceive of the world as Ruthie saw it. But I think Ruthie would have been perfectly understood by most people in history, in most places. Same family, different worlds. The question that occupies my mind is how to resolve this tension. I can see the destruction Ruthie’s unyielding, unempathetic point of view worked in our own relationship, but I also see the good things it accomplished. I can see both the good and the bad in my own approach — the freedom it entailed, but also the relative rootlessness.

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