Love and Literary Imagination
By Jody C. Benson
When I read the Parable of the Prodigal Son as a child, I struggled with the way it upset my understanding of the scales of justice: obedience and faithfulness should be praised, and disobedience and ingratitude should be punished. Is the disobedient son most loved? Why does he get a feast? While I understood that the story carried a lesson about God’s love, I lacked the experience to grasp the radicalness of this love. Becoming a mother has given me opportunities to learn about radical love, but it wasn’t until I discovered this biblical story again in a novel that I felt driven to understand how God’s radical love reveals our worth.
In Marilynne Robinson’s novel Home, I encountered the parable in the story of Jack Boughton.[1] Jack’s disreputable choices bring wounds and suffering to his family. Reminded of the same Gospel parable that challenged my sense of justice, I wondered how we learn to love like the welcoming father and how we learn to receive that love as a gift.
How can stories like this one lead us to practice Christian love in the real world? How can stories engage us in the human experience and help us to grow in love? The answer is the literary imagination. When literature invites us into the interior lives of others, we as readers begin to imagine the value of those lives. As our literary imagination expands, that same imaginative value placed on these characters sooner or later becomes a capacity we take into our embodied love in the world.
Our concern as a reader has the capacity to become something akin to affective mercy (the emotional expression of mercy). In his Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas defines mercy as “the compassion in our hearts for another person’s misery, a compassion which drives us to do what we can to help him.”[2]
When we resolve not to dismiss or neglect characters like Jack, we discover more than we were ever prepared to receive from them. I am the prodigal son when I seek God in the wrong places. I also am the elder son when my bitterness and anger take hold on my capacity for virtue. My hands are not yet like the father’s, ready to offer a gesture of forgiveness for every slight and prepare a joyful feast in gratitude for all the gifts I’ve been given. Robinson’s Gilead reminds us of the mystery and demands of our Christian vocation to love:
There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?[3]
Robinson recognizes the disconnect between our experience of love and justice and an eternal love and justice, but she redirects us toward the mystery of God. When we notice the mystery of God, our lenses become adjusted, and the light of God clarifies our vision of others and ourselves. When Divine love breaks into our world, it defies our laws and rules and corrects our errant perceptions.
Robinson’s respect for her characters gives them an inwardness that inspires their hunger for conversion and redemption. But she also respects us as readers, pilgrims, and human persons. As Robinson says,
I feel that we ought to value ourselves and one another far more than we do, and I’m speaking theologically here, but also with an awareness that always haunts me, that we are the wonder of the universe, incomparably complex, brilliant, poignant—and perverse, of course. Our own overwhelming problem. But there are good grounds for awe in any human encounter.[4]
That awe might bear the first fruits of our empathy and mercy.
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Jody C. Benson is a freelance writer and editor with a master’s in bioethics and humanities. She is the author of Behold: A Reflection Journal Where Wonder, Creation, and Stewardship Meet. She also writes a newsletter on cultivating the creative life. Learn more about her at jodycbenson.com.
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Notes
Marilynne Robinson, Home, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-11.30.1.
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 238.
“Further Thoughts on A Prodigal Son Who Cannot Come Home, on Loneliness and Grace: An Interview with Marilynne Robinson,” Rebecca M. Painter, Christianity and Literature Vol. 58, No. 3 (Spring 2009), 485-92.
Photo by Patrick Fore