“When people come and speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the ‘I’ whose predicate can be ‘love’ or ‘fear’ or ‘want’, and whose object can be ‘someone’ or ‘nothing’ and it won’t really matter, because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around ‘I’ like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else. But quick, avid, and resourceful. To see this aspect of life is a privilege of the ministry which is seldom mentioned.

“…I realize there is nothing more astonishing than a human face.

[…] It has something to do with incarnation. You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest of the face of an infant. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any.”

~ Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)

—-

Image Credit:

Featured: Marilynne Robinson at the 2012 Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College, Wikipedia [Public Domain]

—-