Holding Our Transcendence
I recently finished reading Anne Michael’s novel Held, which was nominated for the 2024 Booker Prize.
The novel covers a vast expanse of time and place, from the fields of the First World War to present day Scandinavia. The lives of the protagonists that feature in the novel are disparate, having little connection with one another. Only the march of the generations joins these biographical threads.
What the reader senses from reading about these lives is one of sheer contingency, characters that seem like islands among themselves. The lack of connection between the characters provides the initial grounding for this impression, but is emphasised further by each of the protagonists being lost in their own thought.
Strangely, it is precisely within these darkrooms of thought that the connections across the waters and generations come to light. These are thoughts on love, on what joins and separates them from those they love, and also the precarious ambiguous capacity of trauma and tragedy to either sunder one from another, or fuse them into an insoluble unity.
Amidst these reflections, one action seems to give them body. This is the action of holding, hands, bodies, memories. At once, Michaels gives this most ephemeral of connections an eternal quality that outlast the march of time, transcends borders, and immortalises flesh.
What Michaels brings out in her novel is the paradoxical nature of contingency. On the one hand, contingency is what makes you realise that there are limits that put the brakes on your desire’s reach. On the other hand, it is precisely in setting these limits that one becomes aware that one desires something that transcends those limits. In Michaels’ own words in the novel, “limit is proof of the beyond”.
As Christians, we are called to consider the higher, transcendent things. All to often, we take this injunction as an excuse to ignore the lower, contingent things of this world. We are told to treat these as obstacles to the higher things. However, the Church’s language of sacramentality provide a vocabulary to hold these polarities together in a truer way than Michaels’ prose can effect. For the sacraments make invisible and heavenly grace present precisely in the visible, the contingent and the material.
More to the point, the sacraments teach us to see contingency in a new light. Rather than denigrate these passing things as barriers to our transcendence, their very limit may become contact points to that very transcendence. All this animated by the bond of divine love and mediated by each fleeting act of holding that which might otherwise fade away.
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