Acclaimed Catholic novelist Mary Gordon has a new book out — and the subject strikes very close to home: it’s all about the gospels.
The novelist and literary critic Mary Gordon loves the story of the prodigal son, for she is a Catholic in her bones. The story, from the Gospels, is of a father’s extravagant love for his proud and dissolute boy, a child so moronic that he spends all his money and lives among swine. Finally returning home, he arrives, dirty and broke, and his father throws him a party. The standard Christian interpretation is that the love of God is like the love of this father for this son: excessive and unconditional.
Gordon has been thinking about something else: the plight of the prodigal son’s brother, the one who stayed home with his father and did his job, day after day, dutifully and without reward. “And what has he earned for his good behavior?” writes Gordon in her new book, “Reading Jesus.” “Not even a goat. Certainly not a party. His father has betrayed him, and he responds to the father with what is usually the child’s first ethical statement, ‘It’s not fair.’ “
Gordon’s publisher, Random House, calls “Reading Jesus” a religion book, and it is: a series of meditations on the Gospels by an American Catholic who is progressive and intellectual. But really, it’s a book about writing. What Gordon loves about the Gospels is not the pat lessons of Sunday school. She loves what a writer loves: paradoxes and inconsistencies, moments of high drama and plot twists. She especially loves the character of Jesus: ascetic, radical, perfectionist–the childish, arrogant, demanding boy. (The magical healer curses a fig tree to death because he’s hungry and it has no fruit.) The story of the prodigal son is a parable about the bounty of God’s love. But it’s also a story that has the message of much great fiction: life is not fair.
Continue at the link to find out what drove Gordon to write this book. It sounds like a fascinating read.
posted October 28, 2009 at 11:18 pm
Well, it sounds interesting, but also predictable. Gordon is writing for an audience like herself, “progressive, disatisfied” with the church, and the fact that she sees the “spoiled boy” in the story of the hungry Jesus and the fig tree tells me she’ll spend more time entertaining notions of the “dark” Jesus than I am interested in reading. I’ve spent enough time around “progressive” Catholics who can’t see compassion and challenge in Jesus (as, for instance, when he meets with the woman at the well) but can only see “darkness.” This is the horizontal, “we” obsessed side of modern Catholicism that is stagnating the church. I think I’ll pass. Or maybe I’ll write a response volume. I’ll call it, “grow up, finally, boomers!”
posted October 29, 2009 at 12:41 am
I don’t know a lot about Mary Gordon, but I, too, spent a lot of time in my youth with progressive, social justice Catholics. I was happy to talk the talk and walk the walk with them on so many issues. What eventually got to me was the regular demonstrations of disrespect for any Catholic authority (other than what they claimed for themselves) and their unwillingness to compromise their principles on any issue, except abortion. Abortion was the one issue they were always willing to sacrifice.
Has Gordon changed her mind on abortion from when she was a proud supporter of Catholics for a Free Choice?
posted October 29, 2009 at 11:25 am
I agree with Mary Gordon’s concern that fundamentalism is a growing problem that is restricting the way in which we read and interpret the Gospel. For me, the Jesus Seminar really changed the way I see the Gospels and I think that Gordon is coming to the same sort of realization about how we should look at the great parables.
Like her, I also think it is better to read the Gospels straight through in a single reading, instead of hearing it in piecemeal fashion. Then you can understand it for yourself and see the many ‘hard’ sayings of Jesus unvarnished.
posted October 29, 2009 at 3:17 pm
I do not like to be boxed in by being called either left or right, progressive or conservative – we are Catholic, after all, meaning universal, I don’t like to box others in either.
Having said that, I am also saddened by the cynicism that seems to infect both left and right so that each is dissatisfied with the other and predicts the worst.
Where is there room for Jesus in that? In that case we are all indeed the other brother. I just wrote a paper about this parable, there are many ways to read it, to hear it and to live it. Jesus challenges each one of us in equal measure.
posted October 29, 2009 at 5:15 pm
I agree that boxing others in is uncharitable. I also dismiss the left/right, progressive/conservative paradigm for members of the Body of Christ that has been pushed on the Church largely by those outside the Church who insist on seeing everything in political terms. I am Catholic. That’s all. Not left or right, not progressive or conservative. Just Catholic.
Let’s remember, though, that the father welcomed the younger brother when the brother recognized his transgressions and came back to the father. Even though the younger brother’s motives weren’t yet the most pure of motives, they still motivated him to come back to the father. It was then that he was welcomed as the dead who was now alive again.
Just so, it’s no mercy to welcome “back” those who remain in the trough, eating with the pigs. When our fellow Catholics fall into error, the merciful thing is to point out the error, encourage them to correct the error, and come back to the family where they will be welcomed with open arms. Catholics used to call this a spiritual work of mercy. Now we call it intolerance, and we expect the Church to change or water down her teachings in order to accommodate the brother or sister who took their inheritance and left. Ms. Gordon has not physically left the Church, thanks be to God. But, if she’s still today where she was years ago, she certainly takes the Church on her terms.
Consider another parable, the parable of the buried treasure. As Catholics, we don’t sneak in at night, dig up the treasure and steal away with it. We buy the field.