Tag: grace

Addendum to “Old Parents and Prodigal Children”

After I wrote “Old Parents and Prodigal Children,” I recalled two other great portrayals of prodigal sons and older fathers in recent literature.  The first is the wonderful Atticus, by Ron Hansen.  Atticus, in his sixties, has an older son who is a successful politician.  And then he has Scott – who was recklessly driving the car that took his own mother’s life, who cannot seem to stay stable in body, mind, or place.  Whom Atticus loves deeply.  And who keeps coming home. Hansen parallels the Bible parable with a twentieth century family drama, even making real the phrase from Luke: “It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.”  Scott is indeed thought to be dead, he himself conspires in this cruel deception, and yet Atticus, when he finds out that his son still lives, rejoices and welcomes him back, he “rushes out to greet him.”  Again.  And the reader is fairly sure that this will not be the last time.

The other story of a prodigal son spans all of Marilynne Robinson’s books about Gilead, Iowa (Gilead, Home, Lila and Jack).  Jack is the always disappointing son of the town’s Presbyterian minister, named for and godson of Gilead’s Congregationalist minister, and an enigma and a challenge to all who know him.  As he is dying, Jack’s father tells his son, “So many times, over the years, I’ve tried not to love you so much.  I never got anywhere with it, but I tried…”  And therein lies the problem.  Real love is not easily undone.  There is a nobility in the parents of prodigals, but I just wish it was not so hard on them.

In an interview with the New Yorker in 2020, Marilynne Robinson explains how she sees the parable of the Prodigal Son.  “I believe the parable is about grace, not forgiveness… the father loves the son and embraces him right away, not after any kind of exchange or apology.  I don’t think that is forgiveness – that is grace.” 

And what is grace?  I have seen it defined as the opposite of karma – rather than getting what you deserve, you get an undeserved gift.  But it would seem that, at some point in life, grace might fall on the shoulders of the parent, as well as the child.  But, again, grace is not something we can earn, even though it is something we can bestow.

 

Vollendungsroman, Again and “Olive, Again”

A while back, I wrote about the Vollendungsroman, a term for a novel about the “winding down” of life. It is the counterpoint to the Bildungsroman, a “coming-of-age” story about young people approaching adulthood. There are thousands and thousands of the latter, and as young people, we lapped them up – trying to figure out what life was about, what we were supposed to think, to do. They came in all varieties – from Little Women to Catcher in the Rye. We read them all and we read them for at least two reasons: 1) because we wanted to know how to live our lives, and 2) they made us realize that we were not alone in our human predicament. As we age, those two needs have not gone away.

It is important to me to think consciously about what old age means, how it should be considered, lived. Many of us did not consciously grow into adulthood – we did it messily and often badly; there were repercussions because our dayspring was mishandled. We made the mistakes of youth and sometimes we kept making them even as we left youth behind us. Marriage, parenthood, middle-age often found us too busy to be conscious of anything – our lists were short-term, by psychic necessity. Some of us did plan financially for retirement, but not, perhaps, in any other way. And now we are old. Yes, we are. Call it what you will. I have time now to age consciously. And I look to literature to help me. Philosophy, science, and psychology are good too, but literature about old age allows me peer into the possibilities rather then the probabilities and the logic of it all. And particularly to see how people grapple with their pasts.

For the Bildungsroman is about the life of our origins, of what we were born into – and usually about the process of breaking away. But the novel of old age, the Vollendungsroman, is often about reconciling with our own pasts – the mistakes, the errors, the patterns, that we made along the way. This may include some debris from our family of origin, of course – that business is never over. But mainly it is about the life we have lived, the children we have engendered, the people we have loved, the people we have hurt. Some of it is to be valued, some left behind, some used as a lesson.

I just finished Elizabeth Strout’s wonderful new book Olive, Again. Definitely an example of the Vollendungsroman. The novel reminds me a little of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, but set in the world of the elderly. Olive is the central character, but there is also a wide range of people, of family stories. In Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton, the writer/character says of another writer: “And she said that her job as a writer of fiction was to report on the human condition, to tell us who we are and what we think and what we do.” And this is what Elizabeth Strout does – she writes about the human condition and lets us know that 1) we are not alone, 2) it is never easy, and 3) there can be great dignity in it. And Strout knows that aging with dignity is not about acting as young as possible. In the words of one of Strout’s characters, “our job – maybe even our duty – is to bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.”
Amen to that: with as much grace as we can.

Olive is old when the book begins and very old by the end. We watch her get used to widowhood, struggle with an imperfect relationship with her son and his family, and slide into a second marriage and second widowhood. She finishes in a kind of assisted living center where she is typing on an electric typewriter (her choice and supplied by her son) because her computer and its printer had made her “so frustrated she shook.” (Yes.) Olive is typing up memories, trying to make sense out of the past. In the last chapter, we find Olive marveling at the new buds on a rosebush and contemplating her own impending death; in this juxtaposition “the sense of wonder and trepidation returned to her.” She sits down and writes these two sentences:

I do not have a clue who I have been. Truthfully, I do not understand a thing.

Yes. Not many of us can be that truthful. But we can read about people who are (Olive is often truthful to the point of offensiveness), and consider what it is we really think, what we believe, and how we should act on those beliefs.

Elsewhere, I have provided some lists of readings on old age, including novels, essays, poetry. Today’s story, “Last Things,” is about one woman’s approach to getting old. As might be obvious, I try to figure out how to age not only by reading, but also by writing. In any case, enjoy.