Website - Jacob Have I Loved - an Atheistic Reading
Website - Jacob Have I Loved - an Atheistic Reading
By Michael Olson
Started 2007-10-02
1st draft finished 2008-02-10
Even when I still used to believe in gods, I enjoyed Katherine Paterson's book Jacob Have I Loved, and have a fond remembrance of it. I decided to give it another reading now that I have become an atheist, and I found it to be not only as enjoyable it was in the first read, but also insightful.
Before I begin this work, I think it important to reflect on the context of its creation. Paterson, the author, is of the Presbyterian denomination. The primary branch of this denomination, PC(USA), made a positional statement1 in 1969 asserting that the bible and evolution are non-contradictory, even to the point of acknowledging four previous resolutions on the topic to be in error.
The author has some useful quotes on her website2 which help to shed light on her intentions with respect to the presence or absence of religious overtones and focus in the book.
Self-consciously Christian (or Jewish or Muslim) writing will be sectarian and tend to propaganda and therefore have very little to say to persons outside that particular faith community. The challenge for those of us who care about our faith and about a hurting world is to tell stories which will carry the words of grace and hope in their bones and sinews and not wear them like fancy dress.
In other words, she seems to believe that an author's supernatural beliefs should not be flaunted in their work. Extrapolating. even the virtues that may or may not result from such beliefs should be presented in such a way that a (perceived) secular world can relate to them. Further, her willingness to be inclusive about those who have other supernatural beliefs in making this statement is somewhat reassuring.
Quoting further from the author's website:
Well, of course, I want children to read more. I am not of the throw the TV and computers on the dump school. I just feel that a life in balance is better than one that goes off the deep end in any direction. My admittedly limited experience on the internet and with computer "information," has revealed that this is a rather shallow sort of knowledge and impersonal sort of human connection. I think great books and real live human beings do a better job of making us wise, compassionate people.
Her statement about "balance" seems to reinforce that she has no intention of propagating religious ideas by means of her work in general, so I feel fairly certain that she was not trying to actively promote atheism. With the completion of this disclaimer, I may now focus on presenting an atheistic reading that I took from the work.
Rass Island, the home of the main characters, is a predominantly Methodist island in the Chesapeake Bay. The story is delivered in first-person by a girl named Sara Louise. She begins the story as a 13-year old Methodist, like the rest of her family, and ends as a mid-twenties non-religionist. Her twin sister Caroline, who is not identical to her, had difficulties when she was born, and seems to receive the most attention from her parents. Sara Louise's father's mother also lives with them, and is a somewhat embittered, senile, yet devoutly Methodist woman. The story primarily focuses on how Sara Louise relates to the people around her, and the insights she feels about love, life, relation, and religion as she grows older.
Sara Louise's grandmother starts out as simply a nagging force of justice. Later, she becomes more of a prudish and senile wretch. The grandmother at one point feels that Sara Louise's mother has stolen the affections of her son, and calls her a "whore" by reading select bible verses at her for weeks on end. We get this profound image of the grandmother becoming angry, winding up like a clock spring, and then gradually releasing her poison after skimming back and forth through the pages of her bible, searching for venomous verses, dictating them as the voice of this bible's god.
One of her grandmother's bible verses is a dagger in Sara Louise's heart: the mention of Jacob and Esau in the new testament of her grandmother's bible. Her grandmother whispers the verse in her ear, "Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated." Sara Louse immediately knows what the old woman is trying to say, since she recognizes that symbolically, she is Esau and her sister Caroline is Jacob — she is somewhat loved by her father, misunderstood by her mother, and second to her sister in all things despite being born first. In Chapter 15, she looks up the context of the verse, and finds that her grandmother's god is the one who is alleged to utter this truism. She is absolutely devastated by this, concluding logically from the verses surrounding that deadly one, that the only higher power in her universe had chosen to hate her, and to purposefully "harden" her heart. When she tells her mother to leave her room after a discussion, she gives herself a slight chance to disbelieve this saying of god and instead believe that he loves her, but god flubs the chance. She immediately stops the habit of praying, and eventually stops attending church.
She experiences her time of deepest contentment when she spends a winter helping her father harvest oysters. Her father is hard-working, not a talkative man, and is described as "quiet [and] unassuming" in Chapter 15. Despite being shy, he occasionally stands up for his daughter against the ravings of his mother. He sings hymns to the oysters, nominally to attract them to his boat, which makes a great impression on Sara Louise.
A few loose threads are tied up before Sara Louise leaves the island. Her old friend comes back from World War 2 in the Pacific theatre and marries her sister, which devastates Sara Louise. She manages to get back at her grandmother by reading "It is better to live in a corner of a housetop than in a house with a contentious woman." The surprising and humorous result of that choice reading was that she was whacked on the side of the head by her grandmother, wielding her bible.
Sara Louise finds the courage to leave the island, after a tearful conversation with her mother. The result is that her mother says that both her mother and father will miss her, even more than Caroline. It is in hearing the word "more" that she finally feels able to leave the island, and to truly find herself by separating herself from the accomplishments of Caroline.
In Chapter 19, she leaves the island, goes to medical school, and travels to a town named Truitt (coincidentally sharing the same name as her father) in the Appalachians to serve as a nurse-midwife. There, she encounters a Catholic man named Joseph. She is initially very irritated by the gentle man's insinuation that god must have "been raising [her] for this valley from the day [she was] born," until he smiled and "looked like the kind of man who would sing to the oysters." Despite his god-belief, she falls in love with him, because this smile reminds her of her father. Even after marrying him in Chapter 20, she will not "turn Catholic or even religious," in spite of the worries of Joseph's priest.
The final epiphany of the story occurs when Sara Louise helps a young mother and father deliver twins. The younger twin girl is cold and weak, so she puts it in an open oven to help warm her up. in lieu of an incubator. After doing this for some hours, she realizes that she has forgotten about the first twin boy, much like her parents and doctor forgot about her when she was born. She then exhorts the father and mother to hold the forgotten twin as much as they can. She breast-feeds the twin girl. The story ends when she walks back to her house and remembers a haunting, lonely melody that her sister once performed at church.
Sara Louise's experience of god may be compared to her experience with her father. We get the feeling that Sara Louise's world would be absolutely perfect if god was in fact like her father, though she knows that this cannot be so, since the god depicted by her grandmother's bible is so irreconcilably different. Her father is able to keep god at bay both by replacing him with hard work. He also stands up to her grandmother when the woman rails at her for not attending church.
God seems to prefer the sister Caroline. She is the one who had the miraculous recovery at birth. She is the one who has been showered with talents, and who has been able to put her talents to use. Her mother and father dote on her. She gets the better of Sara Louise in every conflict and seems to take the pious way of life.
Sara Louise's "atheism" is more of a reaction against the attention lavished on Caroline by her parents, then a consideration of general evidence against the existence of a deity. Her reason for being an atheist is not necessarily a bad one. She has experienced first-hand the fact that people who believe in God when acting on their convictions can do wrong by a child.
Her grandmother in particular is a foci for Sara Louise's antagonism toward attending church. In the year before Sara Louise leaves the island, she learns that her grandmother experienced unrequited love at a young age, and thinks that she begins to understand why the grandmother turned out the way she has. It may seem surprising that the grandmother would prefer to wound Sara Louise with the purported words of god than to help her. It is as if the grandmother profoundly dislikes her former self, which is embodied by Sara Louise, to the point of wanting to hurt her in order to banish the painful memories. She would rather bank on the cold comfort of a shallow promise of everlasting life than to reach compassionately to those around her. In this we see a grave danger and a grave harm that results from taking religion too seriously.
It is significant that Sara Louise wants to be a doctor, and that she later becomes a nurse. It would seem that she wants to be doing tangible and measurable physical good to as many people as possible. What a contrast this is to the attitude of her grandmother — it is as if she picked the profession that would be the most diametrically opposed to her grandmother's evil way of life.
When Sara Louise meets her husband, who seems to have religion in his very sinews and bones, her reaction is telling. She dislikes the way that he tries to reinterpret her life as a religious hero story that ends with her coming to his house. She falls in love with him, however, because he reminds her of her father. We get the impression that she would prefer to concentrate on work and not concern herself with thoughts about the existence of any higher beings, due to the way she does not bring up the topic after marriage. She resists the attempts of the priest to proselytize her and bring her into the fold. It is as if the forces of religion beg for Sara Louise to join some sort of religious organization and to forget her past, but she will have none of it.
Perhaps this is because she sees religion as incapable of making a positive difference in people's lives. She is surrounded by dysfunctional families with wife-beating hard-drinking fathers, both Protestant and Catholic. The Protestants say that is a Catholic problem, and vice-versa, but the problem is not unique to a specific sect.
Sara Louise confronts her past vicariously by assisting the birth of a pair of twins. She tells the new mother to care not only for the twin who had birth problems, but also for the twin that had no problems. In this way, she tries to prevent the normal twin from feeling as unloved as she felt. She also makes amends with her dislike of Caroline by nursing the twin most like her. On the way home she remembers a haunting religious melody that Caroline once sang, and the book ends.
This speaks with silent words the nature of religion. Metaphorically, it is a parasite which attaches itself to the host by means of things which provide this experience, such as music, oratory, and solitude. It tends to claim exclusive rights to the inspirational experience. Further, its agents may strenuously persecute those things which can yield or facilitate similar experiences, in desperate fear of being made irrelevant. It is even antagonistic to human love and affection, as in the case of the grandmother.
1. http://www.pcusa.org/theologyandworship/science/evolution.htm
2. http://www.terabithia.com/questions.html
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