CREEDE HINSHAW: Gratitude during dark times

Earlier this year, I picked up a volume of essays written by novelist Marilynn Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Gilead.” Robinson is unabashedly religious, humbly Christian in the Reformed tradition, deeply patriotic and absolutely confident that God loves the world.

“When I Was a Child I Read Books” is not easy reading. I’ve had to use my dictionary to understand some of Robinson’s words and I’ve read and re-read some of Robinson’s sentences to make sure I’ve understood the trajectory of her thought. These challenges make the book even more appealing because expanding my puny mental muscles is every bit as important to me as weight training and stretches are for my physical frame.

Robinson’s essay Wondrous Love is appropriate this Thanksgiving week in the aftermath of dreadful events in Beirut, Mali and Paris. Because terrorism always attempts to destabilize hearts and minds, some may question whether we can or should feel thankful this week. Terrorism also brings out the anxious worst in some politicians and leaders who, having a shallow faith, call for the most ridiculous and exaggerated responses.

Here is Robinson: “I don’t think anything is more emotionally stabilizing, more clarifying in every way, than gratitude, especially in dark times. And we have more reasons for gratitude than we could ever count, or even be aware of. … Then why not trust? Why not enjoy the country God has blessed, in all its turbulence and variety, rather than judge and condemn, as if by a standard of righteousness God himself does not see fit to apply? Of course, we have seen bad times, and we will see more of them. I … feel that much of what we suffer and will suffer we could also alleviate and prevent.”

Robinson repeatedly expresses a supreme confidence in the underlying love of God, a love we can know in and through God’s mysterious incarnation in Jesus. That faithful certainty balanced with a winsome humility seems the starting point for Marilynn Robinson’s trust in God’s guidance, her belief in the basic goodness of the people of this nation and her reading of the slow, steady, successful work of American democracy.

This week, most of us will express gratitude for family, friends, spouses, roofs over our heads and, perhaps, a cupboard not completely bare. Robinson’s incisive observations expand my list.

I am grateful for a deposit of faith that runs so deep in this country that it cannot be destroyed by such nonsense as what may or may not be printed on a coffee cup.

I am grateful for the freedom afforded every citizen of this nation from organized, officially sanctioned state religion and its harmful effects.

I am grateful for two centuries of American democracy founded on the principles of the law. I am grateful that government at every level usually attempts to provide for the common good of our people.

I am grateful that God loves this nation and every nation of God’s world.

I am grateful that God’s love and mercy is wider and deeper than our own shallow understanding of the same.

Email columnist Creede Hinshaw at [email protected].