“The world will be made whole”: Love, Loss, and the Sacramental Imagination in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping

Abstract

In this article I suggest that attending to the water imagery in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping can reveal a sophisticated account of the sacraments, one that anticipates by several years important developments in recent Christian theology. I also argue that the novel seems thus to suggest something crucial about the nature of literary representation itself, about writing’s relationship to the reality of love. Briefly put, in Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson not only proposes a novel sacramental theology and anticipates its development in other thinkers, she also suggests a sort of sacramentality inherent to the very act of literary writing.

A Good Laugh Is Hard to Find: From Destructive Satire to Sacramental Humor in Evelyn Waugh’s Helena

“…Critical approaches to either literary possibility, as Matthew Potts puts it, ''sometimes beg the sacramental question while burying their theological lede.'' 22 The first definition of the writer's creative assent to the ontological fact of redeemed reality describes best the deliberate sacramental realism of the mid-century Catholic novels of Waugh, as well the likes of Graham Greene, Franc¸ois Mauriac, or Flannery O'Connor. 23 The sacramental understanding of reality, as Brad S. Gregory describes it, accepts the paradox of revealed mystery: ''Not despite but because God is radically other than his creation, it is claimed, God can and does manifest himself in and through it, as he wills,'' whether ''ordinarily through the regularities of the natural world'' or ''extraordinarily through events that diverge from natural regularities, including not only the Eucharist but also singular miracles.''…”

Marilynne Robinson, Theologian of the Ordinary

“…Thomas Gardner's work (2006) In addition to the specific 'Americanness' of Robinson's work, scholars are increasingly paying close attention to the implications of her theology in an effort to connect her to conversations on the philosophy of religion, Christian theological thinking, and literary theology. In an insightful analysis of sacramental theology in Robinson's fiction, Potts (2017) argues,…”