Real Absence

In Housekeeping , Marilynne Robinson observes through he narrator Ruth that absence is actually a more intense form of presence. As long as friends and family are physically empirically here, they are localized and circumscribed. Absent, memory finds them in every nook and cranny – a dead and beloved wife is always in the kitchen and the bedroom and curling up in her favorite chair all at once and all the time.

But of course Robinson says it better: “Sylvie [Ruth’s aunt] did not want to lose me. She did not want me to grow gigantic and multiple, so that I seemed to fill the whole house, and she did not wish me to turn subtle and miscible, so that I could pass through the membranes that separate dream and dream. She did not wish to remember me. She much preferred my simple, ordinary presence, silent and ungainly thought I might be . . . if she lost me, I would become extraordinary by my vanishing.”

Of course, there is more to Christ’s real absence/real presence than this, but there is at least this. And this suggests one reason why it is good for Him to go away, and how His going away enables Him to fill all things.