Deranged by Hope

One of my favorite American authors, Marilynne Robinson, has just published a new novel entitled Home. It features two of the same characters from her Pulitzer-prize winning novel from a few years back, Gilead. Jack is Glory's brother who has returned to his small town home place in Iowa after an inexplicable twenty-year absence. Their aging pastor-father is dying. As the story unfolds, the reader discovers that Jack is searching for forgiveness, grace, redemption, and restoration. Unfortunately, he is unable to surrender to God his two besetting sins: alcohol and lack of true belief. On his search Jack, at one point in the novel, says to Glory that he is "deranged by hope." Robinson as author offers no solutions to Jack's problems but lets him freely explore the world of Gilead for answers.

I think Jack in many ways represents every man and every woman. We have all left the comfort and protection of home to explore a wider world; we have made mistakes; we have returned--sometimes after years of wandering--to home. Robinson acknowledges this search-- that God lets us wander--so that we will know what it feels like to return home. Upon return to home as a prodigal, God lets us do what we can to repair human relationships and to clear the weeds in our lives and replant beautiful, productive flowers. Though we can never regain the Garden of Eden, we can seek to partially bring it back. We too should keep on being "deranged by hope."