Rafael, “Ezekiel’s Vision” (note Ezekiel in left hand corner)
Spiritual Sunday
A couple of weeks ago my library reading group discussed Marilynne Robinson’s Lila, the third novel in what one member described as a triptych. I love Robinson’s depiction of the Congregationalist minister John Ames in Gilead, and Lila gives us the backstory of the woman that Ames marries as an old man. (Home, the second novel, takes us into the household of Ames’ best friend, Presbyterian minister Robert Boughton.)
In today’s post I look at how the Bible helps Lila find meaning in her life. Two of the books that sustain her are Ezekiel and The Book of Job, which at first glance don’t come to mind as texts that one would turn to for comfort.
Lila is raised by Doll, an illiterate and scarred migrant worker who kidnaps her to save her from death by neglect. Lila only gets one full year of school—she and Doll are always on the run so a year in a single place is risky—but she is hungry to understand her life. When, as an adult, she stumbles into the little town of Gilead, Iowa, she falls in love with Ames, marries him, and bears him a child.
Lila is amazed to find her life described in the pages of the Bible. For instance, there is this passage from Ezekiel, which also inspires her with its concluding imperative:
And as for thy nativity, in the day thou wast born thy navel was not cut, neither was thou washed in water to cleanse thee; thou wast not salted at all, nor swaddled at all. No eye pitied thee, to do any of these things unto thee, to have compassion upon thee; but thou wast cast out in the open field, for that thy person was abhorred, in the day that thou was born. And when I passed by thee, and saw thee weltering in thy blood, I said unto thee, Though thou art in thy blood, live.
Ames is puzzled by her choice of Ezekiel, which he describes as “a pretty sad book” and “a difficult place to begin.” He’s worried that she will not understand that God loves those go astray, even when he punishes them.
Lila must indeed learn that she can be loved and that there are people she can trust. Before she gets to that stage, however, she first needs stories that acknowledge what she has been through. Not only is the Bible up to the challenge, but it assures her that, insignificant though she believes herself to be, her pain has meaning:
Moreover I will make thee a desolation and a reproach among the nations that are round about thee, in the sight of all that pass by. So it shall be a reproach and a taunt, an instruction and an astonishment, unto the nations that are round about thee, when I shall execute judgments on thee in anger and in wrath, and in wrathful rebukes….
She was mainly just interested in reading that people were a desolation and a reproach. She knew what those words meant without asking. In the sight of all that pass by. She hated those people, the ones that look at you as if they want to say, Why don’t you get your raggedy self out of my sight. Ain’t one thing going right for you. Existence don’t want you.
Given how shrouded in mystery her own origin is, we can understand why Lila would also be drawn to the Book of Genesis:
As soon as there was light enough, she sat at the door with the tablet on her knee and wrote. She copied words, because she wasn’t sure how to spell them, and this was a way to learn. Who would ever know if she spelled them wrong? Nobody ever came around. Still it shamed her to think how ignorant it might look to her if she weren’t too ignorant to know any better. So she wrote, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Waste and void. Darkness was upon the face of the deep. She would like to ask [Ames] about that.
Later on, again understandably, she finds her way to The Book of Job (she pronounces it “job”), leading Ames to observe, “You really do have a way of finding the very hardest parts—for somebody starting out. For anybody.” Job, however, provides her with a number of familiar situations:
Here she was thinking again. Well, this Job was a good man and he had a good life and then he lost it all. And, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead. She’d heard of that happening, plenty of times. A wind could hit a town like Gilead and leave nothing behind but sticks and stumps.
After she recalls her own experience with a cyclone that swept away farms and families (Ezekiel 1:14 mentions “and the living creatures ran and returned as the appearance of a flash of lightning”), she thinks that she had “never expected to find so many things she already knew about written down in a book.”
Along the same lines, the image of Job covered with sores brings back one of Lila’s most traumatic memories, the day that Doll showing up all bloody after the attack that she has been anticipating for years finally occurs.
One more powerful example: Recalling her days in a whorehouse, Lila imagines that she has her entire history written all over her and that she has married
the one man on earth who didn’t see it. Or maybe he saw it the way he did because he had read that parable, or poem, or whatever it was. Ezekiel. The Bible was truer than life for him, so it was natural enough that his thinking would be taken from it.
Meditating upon that, she imagines that she came upon Ames in his cloistered existence as the madam and her whores came upon the St. Louis house where they maintained a brothel. That sudden intrusion, Lila imagines, is like a cyclone hitting a town or like the stormy wind described by Ezekiel:
It could be that the wildest, strangest things in the Bible were the places where it touched earth… These women in St. Louis, they stepped into a place that looked like any old house and there was Mrs. and the damn credenza and the dress-up clothes that smelled like sweat and old perfume. And all you had to do was pierce your ears and rouge your cheeks and pretend not to hate the gentlemen more than they would stand for. It was as if that house had been picked up by a black cloud and turned around and dropped down again in the very same spot. Everything in it was still there, but it was changed, wrong, and from then on everybody in it knew too much about the worst that could possibly happen, even if they couldn’t say what it was. Then it might be that she seemed to him as if she came straight out of the Bible, knowing about all those things that can happen and nobody has the words to tell you. And I looked, and behold, a stormy wind came out of the north, a great cloud, with a fire infolding itself, and a brightness round about it, and out of the midst therefore as it were glowing metal, out of the midst of the fire. It says right there that even fire isn’t hot enough to give you any idea.
Knowing that she will once again be abandoned—her husband is much older than she is and in Gilead he is in fact dying—Lila learns to drop some of her defenses and to open herself to love. There is nothing easy about this process. Fortunately, the Bible’s images acknowledge just how difficult it is.
Lila is not a facile in its handling of the good book. Robinson understands as well as any author today the complex workings of the spirit. But because that Ezekiel has given Lila a powerful way to process her past, she is able to reach a tentative truce with her anxieties:
Lila had borne a child into a world where a wind could rise that would take him from her arms as if there were no strength in them at all. Pity us, yes, but we are brave, she thought, and wild, more life in us than we can bear, the fire infolding itself in us. That peace could only be amazement, too.