I am re-reading Marilynne Robinson's essay on Psalm Eight in her book THE DEATH OF ADAM (Essays on Modern Thought).
"One Easter I went with my grandfather to a small Presbyterian church in northern Idaho, where I heard a sermon on the discrepancies in the gospel accounts of the resurrection. I was a young child with neither the habit nor the expectation of understanding, as the word is normally used, most of what went on around me. Yet I remember that sermon, and I believe in some degree I took its meaning.
As an older child in another church and town, on no specific occasion, I heard the Eighth Psalm read, and kept for myself a few words from it, because they heartened certain intuitions of mine - 'When I consider thy heavens, the work of they fingers, the moon and the stars...What is man, that thou art mindful of him? the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou has made him a little lower than the angels..." I quote the King James Version because those were the words I heard and remembered. The thought never entered my mind that the language could be taken to exclude me, perhaps because my experience of it was the religious one, of words in some exceptional sense addressed precisely to me."
Who is to know what is going on in a child's mind as she sits swinging her legs in church on a Sunday morning. These two accounts describe...what do they describe? I am cautious to use 'religious language' here because as I read these two accounts of her memories as a child, I am struck by the great mystery of the words in Psalm 8..."What is man that thou art mindful of him?..."
Have you read GILEAD and HOME by Marilynne Robinson? Wonderful books.
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