Longing for faith with Marilynne Robinson

My desire for faith is always strongest when I think about death. I imagine this is common; the promises that Christianity makes about death are radical and beautiful and utterly wild. “Why would you believe in something horrible,” asks Fleabag’s Hot Priest—eternal nonbeing, he means—“when you could believe in something beautiful?” It’s among my central sadnesses that despite having been raised in a faith, despite having put myself in the way of faith over and over again, it hasn’t ever quite worked that way for me.

Christianity has a complicated relationship to our life here on earth. The here and now is said to pale in both length and beauty to a life hereafter, an idea expressed well by “Amazing Grace”: “When we’ve been there ten thousand years, / bright shining as the sun.” Too long to contemplate, too bright to look at directly. But earthly life is the place where we secure that later eternity, where all the struggle and heartbreak and work happens.

So much of the work inherent in a Christian life is appealing to me. I am working to build a world where loving my neighbor as I love myself has a concrete, shaped meaning. I try to center the least of these in every decision I make. I try not to lie, covet, or hold anger and resentment in my heart; I try to forgive. I fail at these things all the time, of course, in all the little ways that are so common and in some bigger ways that trouble me. But there is so much of this life that I’m trying to make beautiful and fulfilling that most of the time, not believing in a world hereafter doesn’t feel like much of a loss. Yes, dying scares me, but there’s so much left to do—and seemingly so much time left to do it in—that I don’t pause to think about this aspect of faith very often. And yet.