What happens next is the question hanging at the enigmatic ending of the parable of the prodigal son in the fifteenth chapter of Luke’s gospel. The wayward son returns from the far country, where he squandered his long-suffering father’s inheritance, humbled by his desolation and lifted up by his father’s generous, merciful embrace and extravagant homecoming celebration. The older son remains outside the celebration, unable to comprehend such extravagance, nursing disdain for his brother and father. It ends with the father’s invitation.
But what happens next for this family — and all other families like them who know bitter estrangement and tentative welcome — in the sobering morning light of an ordinary day filled with mundane responsibilities? No celebration is quite like a homecoming, but the finest homecoming, like the unexpected return of a wayward prodigal son, eventually gives way to the ordinary. Luke doesn’t tell us how ordinary returned to this family; that is left to our imagination.
Marilynne Robinson, whose imagination inhabits the Biblical universe like few contemporary writers, probes the depths of homecoming with the theological and psychological subtlety that she brought to bear in her previous novels, Housekeeping and Gilead. Her latest novel, Home, also set in the fictional mid-western town of Gilead, is a profound meditation on the anatomy of forgiveness as it is realized, or not, in the often harsh reality of ordinary life. Just what does the prodigal son who scattered his father’s generosity on desolate living say when he looks into the eyes of his aging father and brother — not in the ecstasy of merciful embrace, but days, weeks, and months later?
Robinson takes up the question through the experience of the Boughton family. Their patriarch is the Reverend Robert Boughton, Presbyterian pastor and dearest friend of the Congregational pastor, the Reverend John Ames, both of whom first appeared in Gilead. Jack, named after Ames, has returned to his father’s home utterly downcast, having been absent for twenty years. Glory, his younger sister, whose life has suffered its own unexpected sorrows, has also returned home to take care of their dying father. How these three persons shed their own defenses and confront their brokenness forms the heart of the novel. Alongside are the other relationships, including the presence of Ames who, with Boughton, brings an overbearing, relentless expectation of holiness that haunts Jack, desperately seeking relief from his own sorry self-struggling against the centrifugal force of alcohol.
How does forgiveness occur when the offended ones nurse their wounds with such relish that healing would be as loss to them? Can reconciliation happen if one party insists on maintaining the high ground of moral superiority over the other? With great subtlety and biblically-infused, elegant sentences, Robinson explores the question through the responses of Ames, Boughton, and Glory to the one who has returned.
In one instance, after losing his nerve several times, Jack finally makes his way to a church service, where Ames is preaching. After Ames pointedly uses the sermon to shame him publicly for his moral failures, Jack returns home desolate, saying to Glory, “These boys know how to break bones.” His aging father, faintly resembling the ancient patriarchs, refuses to pronounce a blessing upon Jack, preferring to remind him of the error of his ways. Yet, when Jack presses his father about the moral sins unfolding around them, Boughton fails to acknowledge his own racist responses to the social crisis in America.
While the patriarch pastors might prefer the breaking of bones that shame the sinner into repentance, Glory displays her own response to a fallen brother who is seeking a home for the soul. Choosing grace over punishment, she fills the house with the fragrance of mercy and forgiveness. “How to announce the return of comfort and well-being except by cooking something fragrant. That is what her mother always did. After every calamity of any significance she would fill the atmosphere of the house with the smell of cinnamon rolls or brownies, or with chicken and dumplings, and it would mean, this house has a soul that loves us all no matter what. It would mean peace if they had fought and amnesty if they had been in trouble. It had meant, you can come down to dinner now, and no one will say a thing to bother you, unless you had forgotten to wash your hands.”
Thus one gets a glimpse of what forgiveness might look like as Glory and Jack share their lives while caring for their father, both carrying broken hearts and vanished dreams. Slowly, the layers of misunderstanding begin to fall away and compassion begins to emerge as they both reveal what has really occurred in the past. The emergence of mercy and compassion is never sentimental for Marilynne Robinson. Illuminating how it comes to ordinary people whose lives are bound together by blood and history — covenant — is truly what makes her an astonishing writer, and this an extraordinary novel.
Roy W. Howard is pastor of Saint Mark Church, Rockville, Md.
