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Morning Meditation
March 31, 2026
An excerpt from Maryliynne Robinson’s book Reading Genesis:
In terms of narrative, the covenant people will pass through their centuries in Egypt, a highly ordered and refined civilization. They will emerge with a leader and lawgiver who has been schooled in the ways of Egyptian governance, an example he sometimes emulates and broadly rejects. Once they are on a terrain that they consider their own, they sink into violence and disorder until finally they decide they must have a king. This proves a mixed experience. Over time law will come to have its central place in their individual and collective lives. The intense valorization of law, or instruction, is the obverse of the chaos into which human beings fall in its absence. It is law, not patriarchy or monarchy, that is the essential structuring force in what will be Israel. Kings and prophets come and go, but the law, like the covenant, does not pass away.
Meditation-Rebecca Northington
I recently picked this book up again and have found the text and Robinson’s poignant observations to be most compelling. This section on the "valorization" of law reminds me of our founding fathers and the effort that they went to, the agonizing hours they spent chewing on every scenario, and every possible corruption of the law, in the hope that they could build something bulletproof enough to withstand the self-serving egos and agendas that would inevitably come. Often, I believe authors are their own kind of prophets, warning us through lenses that seem to look simultaneously backwards and forwards, telling us who we have been and who we might be again. It is the law, Robinson reminds us, that is the “obverse of the chaos into which human beings fall in its absence”. A chaos Jesus also warned against.
My first job outside of undergraduate school was working at a large law firm in Charlotte, North Carolina. In wonderful irony I was placed in the Corporate Finance department as a paralegal, with the promise that I could move to Family Law at some point. In the meantime on the side, I was trained as a Guardian Ad Litem and partnered with a lawyer doing pro bono work all over the city, representing families that could not afford advocacy beyond the most limited afforded by the state. In my off hours, I witnessed heartbreaking stuff, and at 22 years old I was woefully unprepared emotionally to see just how broken families could be. But the lawyer I worked with was nothing short of miraculous. A family man himself, he spent countless hours outside of his own life and family, to serve those in need, utilizing the law as the tool he had to make their lives better. That chapter of my life truly shaped many of the chapters to follow and ironically steered me away from a life of law. But what I believe it did teach me, was that no amount of law can shape a heart; and a heart oriented towards love and goodness is even more powerful than the law.
Holy week is a heavy week. Once again we look back and see who we all have been: those who would abandon and persecute love. Those who resent what they don’t understand. Those who demand that God be one way, and who reject God when he is not what we would have him be. But it is also a week that looks towards ultimate love. No matter what we do, or how we break the laws, God will not only forgive us, but will offer his love anyway. Jesus operates outside of the rules, and asks us to transform our hearts so that we can too. Life is not about winning. The laws may keep us from chaos, but in truth, I believe God’s hope for us is that we can become a people who strive for and with one another, bound by love and hope and a new covenant. If we can achieve this, the law will be redundant.
Prayer attributed to St. Clare:
What you hold may you always hold.
What you do, may you always do and never abandon.
But with swift pace, light step and unswerving feet...
Go forward, the spirit of our God has called you
Amen
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