Faith as Pilgrimage

Marilynne Robinson is a genius, her writing calling us to a deeper, more courageous, and perhaps quieter sense of faith. The dying narrator of her Pulitzer Prize winning 2004 novel Gilead leaves his young son with these words at novel’s end: “....the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?"

Come read and talk about Robinson’s Gilead this fall. In the spring we’ll read her newer novel, Home, recounting the same events as Gilead only through others’ perspectives. The fall and spring book conversations can stand alone or be experienced as two parts of a greater whole. In all of the reading and conversation, we will be asking what Robinson can teach us about the life of faith as a life of pilgrimage.

Bill McDonough will lead our book study and conversation. He proposes the following words from Italian Catholic theologian Bruno Forte as a lens through which to appreciate and be challenged by Robinson’s writing: “Life appears either as a pilgrimage or as a mere waiting for death. There is no other choice. Life is either a passion, a searching and therefore a restlessness, or it is a dying every day a little, evading, escaping in all the many drugs with which our society is afflicted, and which only serve to dull our senses and are incapable of posing authentic questions. We need to become pilgrims once again, to overcome the frustration which at times grips us, especially when we see no results, no fruits.”

“Perhaps now more than ever the real difference is not between believers and non-believers, but between those who think and those who do not; between, on the one hand, men and women who have the courage to face life’s pain, to go on trying to believe, hope, and love, and, on the other, men and women who have given up the struggle, who seem to content themselves with the present horizon, and no longer know how to burn with desire and yearning at the thought of our last horizon and last home.” (Forte, Religion and Freedom: Searching for the Infinitely Loving Father-Mother, 2007)

Read Bill's letter to those who will be participating in this class.

Essay by Bruno Forte. Bill asks that class participants read this 5-page essay before the first class.

PRESENTER: Bill McDonough is associate professor of theology at St. Catherine University in St. Paul. He has taught moral theology for 20 years and serves on the Wisdom Ways advisory committee. McDonough has authored many scholarly papers especially in the area of virtue ethics. With Bishop Raymond Lucker, he edited Revelation and the Church: Vatican II in the Twenty-First Century (Orbis Press, 2003).